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3kqu2i | how exactly do you use tumblr | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3kqu2i/eli5_how_exactly_do_you_use_tumblr/ | {
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" > we all seen those tumblr posts with funny replies in layers\n\nThose are from the old site layout, they no longer exist. The replies are now in a standard list form.\n\n----\n\nWith Tumblr, you create a user account. Each user can create multiple *blogs* -- although it's most common to just have one blog. For example, you would have _URL_2_.\n\nWhen you're logged into Tumblr, the main page (_URL_1_) will be your 'dashboard'. The dashboard displays seven big buttons at the top, which you use to make your posts. Posts can be text, photos (one or multiple), links, videos, or audio.\n\nPeople will see your posts when they go to _URL_2_. \n\nAnyone who goes to your blog and is signed in will see the \"Follow\" button. Following is like subscribing. On the main dashboard page, below the big post buttons, you will see a list of all posts made by the people you follow, most recent posts first.\n\nAt the bottom of each of those posts, you will see a few button. The heart is 'like'. This just lets the poster know that you liked their post; optionally, people can see a list of all posts you like at _URL_0_.\n\nThe speechbubble is 'reply'. This is a new, optional, feature; not all people have enabled replies on their posts. A reply is basically a Reddit or Facebook comment on a post.\n\nThe two arrows are 'reblog'. Reblogging a post means that it gets copied onto your own blog -- all your followers will see it, but they'll also see who you reblogged it from, they won't think it's something you created. If you've used Twitter, it's basically a retweet.\n\nWhen you reblog a post, you have the option to add your own caption at the bottom. This is what you used to see with those reply-chain things, people reblogging things and adding their own captions.\n\nEach post has a number of 'notes' visible at the bottom. Notes are simply likes + reblogs combined. "
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5ng6er | alimony in the us | As an Australian this a very backwards system. Why does an ex have to keep paying for them until they get remarried, can't they get a job themselves? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ng6er/eli5_alimony_in_the_us/ | {
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"Alimony laws *very much* vary from place to place, state to state. Long-term alimony is largely a historical artifact now, apart from celebrity cases. \n\nThe reason behind alimony was that in more traditional marriages, one spouse (usually the woman) often ended up sacrificing their career for the betterment of the relationship. That might mean staying home to be the primary caregiver for children or being a trailing spouse to a primary caregiver who moved to optimize their career. \n\nThis meant that if that couple split, one person had a better career track record and was better able to support themselves than the other; even if the lesser-earning spouse gets a job post-divorce, they are unlikely to earn anywhere near what their spouse can because they don't have a track record of that kind of earning. \n\nAlimony was intended to even up that imbalance, given that it came about *as a result of mutual choices the couple made during the marriage*. \n\nToday, alimony is likely to be much more temporary in nature, lasting only a short amount of time while the lesser-earning spouse finds that job which will support them. Many divorces don't include alimony at all, in fact.\n"
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1ha1zw | college and university in the usa. | What's the difference between College and University? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ha1zw/eli5_college_and_university_in_the_usa/ | {
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"They can be used either way in most contexts nowadays. Essentially it comes down to prestige. University sounds more formal, usually denotes more programs, more opportunities, and a more full school environment. College may give off the idea of fewer study programs, smaller numbers of courses available, and just gives off less of a formal air.\n\ntl;dr - Not much of a difference really, just implied differences. \n\nFor a smarter explanation:\n_URL_0_",
"None whatsoever. Most schools will call themselves a college if they're one-purpose (so, a liberal arts-only school will call themselves Schoolname College) while universities typically contain multiple programs. For instance, the uni I attended was formed when a bunch of colleges (a music school, an engineering school, and a liberal arts school) came together to form one unified school. However, a single-purpose school can call itself a university, if it wants to, and a multi-purpose school can continue to call itself a college.\n\nThey can all give out the same types of degrees, all require the same level of prior education, etc.",
"A university is a large institution where the different departments function somewhat independently, and call themselves colleges. You usually have to apply and be accepted to a specific college within a university to major in that subject. At a college, there's more of a sense of diversifying your education, and anyone can take classes in any department. \n\nThat's the norm, but there are exceptions. Sometimes the difference is basically meaningless. ",
"All of these answers are completely wrong. There is a definite difference between a college and a university. A university has graduate degree programs, a college does not. "
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9fzlps | what causes enclaves and exclaves to form? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9fzlps/eli5_what_causes_enclaves_and_exclaves_to_form/ | {
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" Enclaves may have been created for a variety of historical, political or geographical reasons. Some areas have been left as enclaves by changes in the course of a river.\n\n \nIn the feudal system, the ownership of feudal domains was often transferred or partitioned, either through purchase and sale or through inheritance, and often such domains were or came to be surrounded by other domains.\n\nIn particular, this state of affairs persisted until the 19th century in the Holy Roman Empire, and these domains (principalities etc.) came to have many of the characteristics of sovereign states. ",
"For other readers: enclaves and exclaves are when a part of one country is separated from it, and completely surrounded by a different country. \n\nUsually there's an underlying social or micro-political boundary that the enclave respects. There are as many different stories as there are enclaves, but usually it's because a new border is drawn, and individual towns, lords, or citizens are given the right to decide which side of the border they want their land to be on. Some may decide they've got better social ties to the people across the river than they do to their neighbors.\n\nIt's crazy and complicated, but at least it respects the cultural ties of the people \"on the ground\". If you don't respect cultural demographics, and just draw straight-line borders because they look pretty, you get disasters like the [Sykes-Picot agreement](_URL_0_), which is the cause of a lot of the conflicts in the Middle East today.",
"Do you mean like political exclaves and enclaves of one country in another?\n\nIt's the same reason any other border or boundary forms, and it's different in each case. For example:\n\n- the town of Baarle-Nassau has loads of enclaves and exclaves between Belgium and Holland. That's because those countries in that area formed around the holdings of various dukes. The town contained lots of properties owned by the Duke of Breda and Duke of Brabant. Breda's stuff ended up as Holland and Brabant's stuff as Belgium. \n- Büsingen is an enclave because what is now Switzerland used to be a lose confederation of microstates and city states. Some of these joined Germany (or its predecessors) or Austria and some banded together over time as Switzerland. Schaffhausen and Büsingen both originally joined then-Germany (the Holy Roman Empire) but Schaffhausen was then able to get free and later joined Switzerland. Büsingen wasn't and ended up trapped surrounded by Switzerland by Schaffhausen. Then later when they voted to join Switzerland Germany said no because Switzerland didn't have anything to offer them in compensation.\n- Nakhchivan is an enclave if Azerbaijan between Iran and Armenia. It's the result of Soviet policy and ethnic reasons. The whole area had a mix of Azeris and Armenians separated in part by ethnicity and in part by religion. The Soviet Union had a policy of giving each ethnicity its own country while making them all part of the Soviet Union in order, they hoped, to reduce tension. They neatened up the borders and lumped together all the areas that were \"mostly\" one ethnicity even if the split was often 60-40 or what have you. That resulted in three countries: Armenian SSR, Azerbaijani SSR and Nakhchivan SSR. Then at independence the two bits with an Azeri majority (Nakhchivan and Azerbaijan) joined together. \n- Nahwa is a double enclave, part of the UAE surrounded by Oman surrounded by the UAE. Basically around 70 years ago the tribes of the area, who didn't really have any affiliation with any country, were sounded out to ask if they'd like to join the UAE or Oman. Most of the tribes joined the UAE, but one Omani ambassador was particularly persuasive and persuaded tribes in one small area to join Oman. But then there was one village in the middle of that area where the chiefs had family ties to the UAE and so they went the other way.\n- Kaliningrad used to be a city state Königsberg founded by Teutonic (german) knights who founded a number of trading ports around the Baltic They all became part of Germany as did Poland. After world war 1 the bits in between Königsberg and the rest of Germany were ceded to the new independent state of Poland to give Poland a coastline but Germany got to keep Königsberg as a historically teutonic town. Then after world war 2 the Soviets invaded Königsberg chucked all the Germans out and then asked if they could be allowed to keep it as they wanted a Baltic port and this one was going spare. At the Potsdam treaty the world said yes\n- Campione is a bit of Italy surrounded by Switzerland. When the surrounding area of Ticino voted to leave Italy and join Switzerland this village said \"nah we're good\" and so wasn't included.",
"Under feudalism, a minor noble would swear loyalty to an intermediate one, who would swear loyalty to a major one who would swear loyalty to a royal. Due to conflict or politics, who swore loyalty to whom would change frequently, and two neighboring lords might belong to different barons or even different kings. As feudal kingdoms evolved into nation-states, these often patchwork borders became permanent, resulting in enclaves and exclaves. Many European enclaves were created this way.\n\nIn more modern times, as part of the resolution of a conflict, provinces are given self-determination and are allowed to choose which country to belong to. If you chose one country while your neighbors chose the other, you became an enclave. Many of the enclaves between Indian and Bangladesh resulted from this."
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4r9qn8 | how does the body deal with 9,600 calories, 1,260 grams of fat & 54,600 milligrams of sodium at one time? (hot dog contest) | [Link](_URL_0_)
Joey Chestnut just ate 70 hot dogs in 10 minutes. Not just the physical part of it, but how would does the body deal with that much food and the nutritionals involved? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4r9qn8/eli5how_does_the_body_deal_with_9600_calories/ | {
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"Most likely he pukes much of that back up. If you watch an eating competition, they all run to the port o potty's right after. So you are really getting in say 60 to 100 fl oz (volume measure) of hotdogs which is considerably less. \n\nThe sodium will be dealt with by a hormone cascade coming from the kidneys and I think duodenum if not stomach. The intake of the sodium will be limited. Likewise the protein and carbohydrates can only be digested and broken down for absorption so fast, all else just continues on out the back the next day. \n\nI suggest Joey Chestpain drink lots of water and some miralax to help everything along. RIP his toilet. ",
"This was asked on /r/askscience aswell. [Answer here](_URL_0_)",
"they build up their tolerance beforehand, via supplements or training. they also puke most of it up afterwards, and they usually take long breaks between contests, to let the body regenerate and work through all the nutrients and sodium."
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cpa0j6 | at what speed does your eyes move when you look somewhere else. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cpa0j6/eli5_at_what_speed_does_your_eyes_move_when_you/ | {
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"It depends on where you're looking. More specifically, how far your eye has to move to go from one thing to the other.\n\nThe top angular speed attainable by the eye is about 900 degrees per second--so to look from as far to one side to the other, a distance of about 150 degrees, would take 167 milliseconds. This top speed is attained for movements of 60 degrees or greater. \n\nFor movements of fewer than 60 degrees, top speed is not attained; for example, a 10-degree movement is associated with an angular speed of 300 deg/s, and a 30-degree movement is associated with 500 deg/s.\n\nI know degrees per second isn't really intuitive, but if you were expecting an answer in a 'normal' metric like meters per second or feet per second...that's not really practical, since the eye rotates in place, so the angular metric is more appropriate. 900 deg/s is equal to 150 revolutions per minute (RPM).\n\nEDIT: I don't mean to sound defensive; I just want to explain a little further. I know I could assume the eyeball is a perfect sphere (it isn't), do some rough math, etc. and get a number in units we're more used to, like m/s. But that simply isn't an appropriate metric for this situation, which is why I didn't bother to do so. Similarly, if someone asked me how fast a plane propeller is spinning, I would give my answer in RPM, not m/s, which would make no sense.",
"There's a funny thing, where when your eyes move too quickly. Your brain stops processing the blurry information and just fills in it with a static image.\n\nI forget what it's called. But you can test it by flicking your eyes off and onto a ticking clock. The second hand will seem to take longer than a second to tick. Because your brain replaces the super blurry stuff with the next stable thing it looks at.\n\nIt's really trippy once you get the hang of it"
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dp98rb | how do cats purr? i know why they do it, but for the life of my i can't figure out how my cat makes her entire body vibrate when she's happy. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dp98rb/eli5_how_do_cats_purr_i_know_why_they_do_it_but/ | {
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"Basically, when they feel content, happy, scared, or any of the feelings that can cause purring, their brain sends signals to their laryngeal muscles, also known as the Voice Box, and make the muscles vibrate rapidly. Then when the cat breathes in and out, the vibrating muscles make that rhythmic kind of rumbling we hear. And because the lungs take up significant space in the body, and because the air is being vibrated on the way in AND on the way out as the cat inhales and exhales, that vibration kind of echoes through the whole body. \n\n\nLike if you've ever seen slow-motion videos of speakers with paint on them. You see the speaker disk bouncing up and down as it vibrates with sound, and so the paint vibrates and jumps all over the place. The vibrating air passing through the cat's laryngeal muscles kind of has the same effect, except instead of paint vibrating along with the air pulses, it's the cat's body tissues vibrating. Like, not as violently as the paint, but the vibration still passes through the cats body just like it passing through the air. If that makes sense."
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bory6j | how come you can power a radio exclusively via radio waves and we still have to charge our cell phones? | When I was a boy I built a crystal radio that fit into a tic tac box. This thing had no battery and ran a tiny little earpiece. Plans for these are available all over the net, I genuinely want to know why we aren’t using cell phone antennas to passively harness RF and rectify and recycle.
If it’s possible to listen to broadcast radio without batteries why can’t that (even if it’s microvolts) be harnessed? How does the front end of the cell receiver circuit dissipate the unwanted frequencies? ELI5 reddit, and thanks! | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bory6j/eli5_how_come_you_can_power_a_radio_exclusively/ | {
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"To do it at the power draw a cell phone requires your antenna would be impractically large. Remember that your phone is both a transmitter and a receiver.",
"Its a matter of scale.\n\nYour radio was able to function on just milliwatts of power, your phone has an ~11 Watt hour battery pack so if it lasts just 11 hours that means you're using about a watt of constant power. There just isn't enough random radio waves bouncing around to absorb to turn into a watt of power.\n\nYou'd need to capture 100-1000x as much power as your little radio was catching and that power just isn't available out there.",
"A crystal radio only take fractions of a Watt (measured in the thousandths) to move a *very tiny* speaker. A cell phone can easily draw 5-10W when you're using it.\n\nWe're talking about a ten thousandfold difference in the amount of power we need."
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34qmfs | why are "simple fix" patches for games always something like 30 megabytes? | Shouldn't they be very few, due to them not adding anything? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/34qmfs/eli5_why_are_simple_fix_patches_for_games_always/ | {
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"I'm guessing that it's because they're edited bits of code and instead of editing it on your system, they just replace it. There might also need to be an installer downloaded or something like that",
"well they could be adding something or replacing a section of code or changing assets in some way. There's no universal answer it all depends on how the game was programmed, how it handles updates / patches and what exactly is being changed / fixed / added. 30 MB's is actually pretty small as far as today's games go. They contain so much code and so much high quality assets that small tweaks can add up to big patches very quickly.\n\nAnother important thing to note is that games on a code level have all of their parts interacting with each other in very specific ways so a small change to one part can actually require changes to a bunch of other parts and so forth so what may seem like a simple fix may not actually be so simple.",
"Fixing one line of code may require recompiling a large portion of object files. These object files in turn get linked together into a binary executable. The executable is what is shipped instead of object files or precompiled code.",
"A lot of the time, when code is changed, the size also changes. If the size is constant (such as changing a single variable, e.g. `gravity = 8.91` becoming `gravity = 9.81`, which simply overwrites the `8.91` with `9.81`) then the patch may be tiny, since only a few bytes are overwritten. But changing a function (what it is doing) will generally change the size because you will be adding or removing an instruction instead of just updating a value.\n\nUsually, functions are grouped together and compiled into a single binary containing the whole group, to save having < 10-byte files for every tiny function. But the code must know the position of each function in this binary so it knows where to look when it runs the function. If the function grows, then every function after that will have its position moved too.\n\nIf you're writing a neat piece of work with mistakes\n\n This is a very nice sentence that all sits on one line, but acentically contains a mistake or tow.\n ^ ^\n\nthen you could overwrite the `tow` with `tow`, and have a very small patch (`line 1, after position 95, overwrite with \"wo\"`), but you can't insert letters so easily - you can't do the old school trick of writing the fix\n\n ccident \n`but ac`\\^~~entic~~`ally contains a mistake or t`~~ow~~`wo`.\n\nabove your sentence, because programs don't normally contain margins. It also means that the letter at position 85 isn't a 't' anymore, but is now an 's', so any other references to the letters that have moved position have also need to be rewritten to prevent bugs. The same needs to happen when characters are removed - a bad reference may even point beyond the end of the line (which is very bad for security - it may be a secret word from the next page). So, to prevent these issues, instead of using a clever patching system that says `line 1, move everything to the right (easy), update all existing references manually (very hard), insert new text (easy)`, it's quicker and simpler in today's era of cheap memory to just say `line 1, overwrite everything with working new version (easy)`.",
"It's doable to make them much smaller than they are.\n\nDoable but surprisingly complicated and barely standardizable. There is little incentive in spending money on an effort to make the fixes smaller than 100 megabytes.\n\nInstead they send back the entirety of all files that are involved in the fix. It's fast, easy, it works and it is really not error-prone."
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41047z | how does the martian surface have pebbles? | [picture](_URL_0_)
[post of this picture](_URL_2_)
This is a picture of under Curiosity and you can see a bunch of small pebbles and rocks. However, with no water and [weak winds](_URL_1_), how do these small rocks break off from the bigger rocks? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/41047z/eli5_how_does_the_martian_surface_have_pebbles/ | {
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"Weathering still takes place on Mars, it just does so much more slowly than it does on Earth. That said, water is believed to have been active fairly recently (in geological terms) in Gale Crater (Curiosity's site), and those pebbles may very well be water-deposited (some are believed to have been, though I don't know if these particular pebbles were)."
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"https://farm1.staticflickr.com/574/20662221345_f608a92f83_o.jpg",
"http://mars.nasa.gov/news/whatsnew/index.cfm?FuseAction=ShowNews&NewsID=1854",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/40y190/under_curiosity/"
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2dfttv | if smoke is bad for you and contains carcinogens, how is it safe to eat meat that has been smoked for 6 hours? | I don't understand this. Yes, I get that the lungs and stomach are different, but either something contains carcinogens or it doesn't. If I take a slab of brisket and smother it in smoke for half a day, doesn't the meat absorb said carcinogens? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2dfttv/eli5_if_smoke_is_bad_for_you_and_contains/ | {
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"Tobacco isn't used to smoke food and cigarettes aren't made from wood. A lot of things we use and consume may contain carcinogens. But they are all used and or consumed in different ways. \n\nIt doesn't matter of its smoked. salty, spicy and sugary foods can be carcinogenic too.",
"Smoked meat is in fact pretty bad for you! Generally a piece of smoked meat has been salt rubbed and or salt cured to develop flavor and a crust. High sodium foods can lead to heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Furthermore, smoking meats can result in high levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (the same process as when fat from meats drip onto a flame and flare up when you're grilling). These PAH's are in fact highly carcinogenic and can lead to pancreatic, colorectal and prostate cancers, amongst other forms of the disease. To make matters worse, when these PAH's chemically interact with nitrogen, you get a super carcinogen called NPAH (nitrated polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. These NPAH's are significantly more mutagenic than a base PAH. Bottom line. Smoked meat is bad for you. But it tastes oh so good!"
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4fhphm | why is it that the gas prices change at the pump, when the tanks underground were filled at a different price? why does the price of oil affect us at the pump so quickly? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4fhphm/eli5_why_is_it_that_the_gas_prices_change_at_the/ | {
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"Sellers of commodities, like gas station owners and refineries, price their product based not on what it costs to produce it, but on what it costs to replace it. ",
"the short answer is the information age. the profit on gasoline is tiny, on the order of pennies per gallon, so any retailer that wants to make money has to be constantly monitoring the price of his next shipment and factoring that into his sale price. the supplier that he buys from is also doing the same thing, and all the way back to the refinery. because the internet makes all this price research so easy and fast, we see the fluctuations at the pump every time some refiner or large trader gets twitchy.",
"If you bought some gold for $10, and then the price went up to $20, would you sell it for $10 because that's what you paid for it? No, you'd sell it for the current market price."
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1kcvr2 | why do i have to wait an hour to install a game for my pc when i use a disk, but when i use a disk for my console, it takes minutes | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1kcvr2/eli5_why_do_i_have_to_wait_an_hour_to_install_a/ | {
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" Installing games to pc takes longer because all of the games data loads onto the hard drive and runs from that instead of the disc. whereas console games run off the discs and only install essential files to any built in hard drives. Some console games allow you the option to fully install a games content to your hard drive and it takes just as much time as a standard pc. The reasoning for this is because read time is faster from a hard drive than from a cd drive resulting in much smoother gameplay.\n\nEdit.\nAnother factor to consider in your 1 hour load time (which to me is unheard of in modern computing unless you have a really old machine.) is pc hardware being used. Not all disc drives are alike. Some read faster than others. cpu processing power available to process the data to your hard drive from the disc. "
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6kwm87 | what does an inverted cross symbolize? where did it come from? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6kwm87/eli5_what_does_an_inverted_cross_symbolize_where/ | {
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"The inverted cross is the Cross of Saint Peter, and relates to Christian mythology due to the story (The Matyrdom of Peter) of Saint Peter being crucified upside down.\nLately it's been used as an anti-Christian symbol by directors and musicians to depict an anti-authoritarian or defiant message.",
"It comes from a legend about St. Peter's martyrdom. Allegedly, he was going to be crucified, but he felt that he didn't deserve to be killed in the same way Jesus was, so he asked to be hung upside-down instead. It's used now in the Catholic Church (along with keys) as a symbol of the papacy, because Peter was \"the rock upon which Jesus built his church,\" i.e. the first pope.\n\nIt's also sometimes used in anti-Christian circles as an inversion of the classic symbol (like how an upside-down American flag has the connotation of protesting America), usually by people who don't get that the inverted cross is *also* a Christian symbol."
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14vszw | what being in love feels/is like | I did not find this asked before when I searched, if there is one, please link me and I'll mark this as answered.
If not, how do I know if I am in love with another person? What's the difference between really caring about someone and being in love? If I know I love someone (with romantic parts to the relationship), what is the difference between loving that person and being IN love? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/14vszw/eli5_what_being_in_love_feelsis_like/ | {
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"Love is what is left when the honeymoon phase is gone. It is like having a puppy. The first day you bring him home it is the greatest thing in the world. You are so excited that they can do no wrong. Then 6 months later that same puppy has just chewed your remote control and shit on your bed. If you love them you will work through it. You will make compromises and teach them what you need while also meeting their needs. If you were just in lust with them you will send them to the pound. \n\nLove is growing with someone and making sure that you grow next to them not away from them. ",
"For me it is that person being your best friend. You can talk about anything and even if you disagree, it's an intelligent, enjoyable conversation. You care so deeply and passionately that you would risk your life for them either in the blink of an eye or over a long well-contemplated time line. You want to protect them, and you are inherently trustful of them. You don't feel the need to prove your love to anyone, wether on Facebook, with PDAs (public display of affection), or otherwise. However some days that person makes you want to scream how much they complete you from the top of Everest and then proceed to smother them in love and kisses and adoration. All your friends get along, at least the important ones, and even if they don't, they see how happy you are and try to get along. Life with someone you love just flows... Problems and difficult decisions and circumstances just smooth over. When you work together you can conquer anything. Even if your in a terrible mood you try to not act like a pouting 5 year old because you know it's not productive and you can talk through anything. It simply feels natural. Most importantly you treat each other right because you each deserve the best and you can always be yourself. \n"
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1nrk0y | robitussin and other over the counter cold medicine, how does it work? | Is it a mixture of chemicals that serve to alleviate symptoms? Does it help the immune system fight in some way?
Does it actually help your recovery time, or does ot just make you feel more comfortable while your immune system takes exactly as long as it would have anyway to defeat an ailment? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1nrk0y/robitussin_and_other_over_the_counter_cold/ | {
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" > Is it a mixture of chemicals that serve to alleviate symptoms?\n\nYep.\n\n > Does it help the immune system fight in some way?\n\nNope.\n\n > Does it actually help your recovery time, or does ot just make you feel more comfortable while your immune system takes exactly as long as it would have anyway to defeat an ailment?\n\nIt's just for comfort. Suppressing coughs and clearing mucous mainly."
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3fap3m | what's the reasoning behind the idea that money is free speech and (even small) contributions are not bribes? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3fap3m/eli5_whats_the_reasoning_behind_the_idea_that/ | {
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"It is because money is often used to promote speech - getting it to as many ears as possible.\n\nIf I were to shout on a street corner, this is easily considered free speech.\n\nIf I were to buy a printing press and print up fliers for an issue, this is easily considered free speech (or a free press, to get technical).\n\nIf I give money to someone who already has a printing press to print up fliers for an issue, this is easily considered free speech.\n\nIf I give money to an organization that is already printing up fliers for an issue, its easily considered free speech.\n\nIf I give money to an organization that supports a candidate that supports a particular issue, and that organization uses the money to help get the candidate elected so they can legislate the issue, its not a far leap to see how that would be free speech as well."
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1z03pk | why don't we just bomb north korea's leaders with drones? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1z03pk/eli5_why_dont_we_just_bomb_north_koreas_leaders/ | {
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"Because China would get mad.",
"Logistically, even with drones, how would we do this?\n\nNK has had more than enough time to build its military infrastructure in such a way to handle more than the largest bomb a drone could drop. \n\nFurthermore, guys like Kim and his ilk don't hold all of the military power - there are tons of other guys in the wings who are just as capable of coordinating the NK military.\n\nThere are bunkers that no one knows about built in places that you can't see, built to take a pounding and still send launch codes to missile silos hidden all over the place.\n\nShort of turning the entire landmass into glass in an instant, the methodology of taking out the 'leaders' wouldn't do much. And they absolutely would retaliate - any external attack would likely trigger NK into firing onto at minimum South Korea.",
"I'm sure there are many nuanced explanations but the way I understand it, there is too much risk to the stability in the region. There are several really bad scenarios that could unfold - someone with some authority ordering a bum rush south, someone with a finger on a nuke deciding to end it all etc. Also - the idea of 'you break it, you own it' - no country really wants to own NK. ",
"I feel like that would be a bad idea because the US would be the ones breaking the treaty that ended the fighting of the current war in Korea.",
"Because your post isn't asking a simplified conceptual explanation, but rather for an answer, its been removed. \n\nYou should try /r/answers, /r/askreddit or even one of the more specialized answers subreddits like /r/askhistorians, /r/askscience or others too numerous and varied to mention. \n\nRest assured this doesn't make your question *bad*, it just makes it more appropriate for another subreddit. Good luck! "
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3deeai | if vanilla extract is a brownish color, why is vanilla ice cream white? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3deeai/eli5_if_vanilla_extract_is_a_brownish_color_why/ | {
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"You need very little vanilla to achieve enough taste. Also more often than not its artificially colored. For instance when making chocolate chip cookies or edible cookie dough you'll find the same thing. Usually the recipe, which is crafted to serve at least several people only calls for 2-3 tsp of vanilla extract. If you ever want to test out the strength just put some on the tip of your finger and taste it. It's pretty damn strong! Haha",
"Vanilla ice cream is mostly sugar, ice, and milk or cream. Adding a teaspoon or 2 of vanilla extract barely changes the color. Also they do make clear vanilla extract for those who need pure colored food items"
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3c9pvo | why is the concept of social darwinism / eugenics so morally reprehensible? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3c9pvo/eli5_why_is_the_concept_of_social_darwinism/ | {
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"One thing I can tell you is that social Darwinism is used as an argument, sometimes, to justify the poor being poor and the rich, rich, etc. \n\nWhich is ridiculous. And for that, it's frowned upon. But that's all I know.\n\nEdit: Reason number 2 for social Darwinism being bad: social Darwinism = weaker people \"naturally\" GTFO. The problem is, for that to work, you'd have to consider that nature's way is fair. Which would be very controversial (ex.: is Cancer \"fair\"? What would fair mean?)\n\n",
"In the case of social Darwinism, it devalues our basic humanity by saying that we should ignore and avoid any moral feeling for other people and let \"nature\" have its own way.\n\nEugenics arrives at more or less the same place, but by denying the basic humanity of individuals in making their own choices in favor of putting one person/group's definition of what is \"human\" over everyone.\n\nIn the end, they both deny the dignity and worth of the human individual.",
"Because it violates a persons natural rights. I understand why one would be inclined to see eugenics as noteworthy but unfortunately you can't just go around steralizing undesirable blood lines without being a tyrant. Basically white supremacist groups are eugenics groups, at least the ones that promote racial purity.",
"The core problem with Social Darwinism is that it completely ignores and denies the many external factors that influence a person's success in society -education access, social support, discrimination, parent's wealth, etc. It then allows the wealthy upper classes to justify their privileges and exploitation of the 'lesser' working poor. ",
"It's funny that a few questions down someone is asking:\n\n > ELI5: Why hasn't 'natural selection' weeded out all the animals that think it's safe to cross the road?\n\nThe basic answer being, evolution isn't fast enough and precise enough to achieve something like that yet. It might not ever in some species, if the advantage of successfully crossing the road isn't big enough relative to other factors.\n\nSo one half of the reason is pragmatic: eugenicists *vastly* underestimate how hard it would be to deliberately breed humans, and how much current humans have evolved in ways we can understand as \"breeds\". Time and again they just plain get it wrong, and use it as a rorschach to project their own prejudices onto, both racist and classist prejudices especially.\n\nThe other half of the answer is in principle: they violate what people understand to be their fundamental human rights. Some people might say \"so what\" but in your question you asked about it being considered \"morally reprehensible\", and for many people violating human rights is the very definition of immoral.\n\nThere are things that have more support from people (though not everyone) that could be considered eugenics, like genetic counseling for parents with a high risk of passing on genetic diseases to their children."
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3up4ax | why is everything so cold? why is absolute zero only -459.67f (-273.15c) but things can be trillions of degrees? in relation wouldn't it mean that life and everything we know as good for us, is ridiculously ridiculously cold? | Why is this? I looked up absolute hot as hell and its 1.416785(71)×10(to the 32 power). I cant even take this number seriously, its so hot. But then absolute zero, isn't really that much colder, than an earth winter. I guess my question is, why does life as we know it only exist in such extreme cold? And why is it so easy to get things very hot, let's say in the hadron collider. But we still cant reach the relatively close temp of absolute zero?
Edit: Wow. Okay. Didnt really expect this much interest. Thanks for all the replies! My first semi front page achievement! Ive been cheesing all day. Basically vibrators. Faster the vibrator, the hotter it gets. No vibrators no heat. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3up4ax/eli5_why_is_everything_so_cold_why_is_absolute/ | {
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"The more atoms vibrate the hotter the temperature. The slower they vibrate the lower the temperature. They can vibrate as fast as they want but once they stop vibrating the temperature doesn't go any lower.\n\nIn other words, the lowest temperature means they are standing still. But they can always vibrate even faster no matter how fast they are vibrating right now.",
"Temperature is the average movement of atoms on a microscopic scale. \n\nAs such, there is a lower bound, when movement stops completely. There is no higher bound, as you can always move faster, though you begin seeing weird things once you reach a few billion kelvin, due to lightspeed and that.\n\nAnd while life occurs at very low temperatures, that is with good reason. All this movement tears molecules apart, making it impossible for things to properly exist at higher temperatures. Above 3600 Kelvin, everything is molten, for example.",
"The problem is sort of that the temperature scale has an absolute bottom but is close to being open ended at the top. (There might or might not be a theoretical 'absolute hot', but it would be far past any sort of context where talking about temperature makes sense. For practical purposes the scale might as well be open ended.)\n\nIn such a scale any sort of value always appears to be close to the bottom because there is always more room above than below.\n\nThe scale alone says nothing about what temperatures should be expected. The average temperature of the universe after all is only a few degrees above absolute zero. But that includes all sort of matter. One may look at the average or median surface temperature of planets and moons and come to completely different conclusions.\n\nLife on earth is based on chemical reactions in general and certain chemical reactions in particular. You don't get much chemistry when you heat things up too much. When you heat things up the energies all around you are greater than energies holding molecules together and letting them react with one another.\n\nChemistry starts happening close to absolute zero, but it stops happening if things get to hot.\n\nOur sort of chemistry happens at the sort of temperature we have on earth right now. The sort where liquid water exists.\n\nLife based on other chemical reactions that happen at much colder or slightly hotter temperatures are theoretical possible. Even life that is not based on chemistry at all and able to exists at completely different temperature ranges is perhaps possible, but we have never really seen any life other than that related to our own and have no idea what might or might not be out there.\n\nPerhaps we are alone. Perhaps life across the universe is usually found around the same temperature range that we are comfortable with. Perhaps we are an extreme outlier and most life exists at much higher or lower temperatures.\n\nWe can only guess.\n\nIf we look at our own solar system we have two planets mercury and Venus that are hotter than ours and the rest of the moons and planets that at least on their surface are colder than Earth. Based on that alone one might think that we are unusually warm.\n\nThe truth is we have no idea what should be considered normal, based on our extremely limited experience.",
"To answer part of your question, yes, the universe as we observe it is very cold.\n\nThe key word is observe.\n\nFor us to observe, we must be able to observe.\n\nTo be able to observe we have to exist.\n\nFor humans to exist, atoms must be in a stable state.\n\nFor atoms to be in a stable state, the temperature must be in a similar to what we observe.\n\nAt one point the universe was very hot, almost infinitely hot. Over 13 billion years, the universe has cooled significantly.",
"You can theoretically put as much energy into something, but is limited in what you can take out.",
"I always understood that we live on the extreme cold side of existance, mainly because it's the most stable.",
"Imagine you have a rocket with infinite performance and fuel. \n\nWhen you get in you are stopped. It's not possible to go slower. However once you start moving there is theoretically no limit to how fast you can move. ",
"This is because at higher temps chemistry is not possible. Once the heat/energies reach a certain level all the electrons are stripped away. We can't reach absolute zero because of thermal conduction. There is no such thing as a perfect thermal insulator so there is always some heat getting in and the lower the temp the harder it is to get it out.",
"Things can go very very fast, like a jet plane, but most 5 year old I know rarely move faster then a couple miles per hour. Even though toddlers rarely leave the very slow speeds it's almost impossible get get a live toddler to be absolutely still because the slightest distraction in the form of other movement will cause them to move in reaction. \n\nAtoms are like toddlers and temperature is like movement, it's hard to get all of it out of the system so things are absolutely still because where we live (and are doing the experiment also has energy). ",
"You could say life only exists in extreme cold because it's evolved to adapt to the extreme cold that's on our planet and it's the only life we know. \n\nBut on the other hand, the temperature life exists as we know of is an ideal temperature for carbon based lifeforms. Think about how carbon based lifeform works. It works by creating chains of amino acids that fold up to form biomolecular machines. 20 amino acids folding in nearly infinitely many combinations can form countless biomolecular machines, each with specific functions. \nThis structure is stable at the temperature as we know it. If it gets any hotter, the protein denatures. If it gets colder, the reactions are too slow. \n\nFurthermore, as you know, water is a very important for life. It's a nearly universal solvent, it's very viscous and thus provides easy transport, and it helps with reactions. Water has a very narrow temperature range where it's a liquid, between 0-100C. So it happens that life thrives at temperatures between those two ranges. ",
"I see a lot of answers here about how ludicrously high temperatures exist simply because molecules can always vibrate faster, but I feel like that doesn't really address your question - you even mentioned \"absolute hot\", which is effectively an upper bound just as 0K is a lower bound on temperature.\n\nThe fact is, the universe *did* exist at much higher temperatures in the past. Immediately after the big bang, the universe was near the Planck temperature (10^32 K). But space expanded, and as a result the universe cooled very fast.\n\nAt these temperatures, physics and chemistry are very different. For example, 10^32 K is hot enough to basically \"melt\" a proton; the particle that is in many ways the foundation for all of chemistry, is just a hot mess of quarks and gluons at very high temperatures. In fact, the temperature at which protons and similar particles can form is about 10^13 K - you can already see that we've made a lot of progress down from 10^32. And, the universe cooled to this temperature around 1 millisecond after the big bang.\n\nTo get more complicated things like heavy elements, stars, planets, galaxies... the universe needed to cool further. That's why the temperature we observe today is so much lower than many of the temperatures that are possible. But they did exist, for a short time, and basically even the most fundamental building blocks of chemistry couldn't exist until it cooled down some. ",
"Its because of water. Life as we know it more or less evolved to utilize liquid water. Liquid water happens between 0 and 100* Celsius so life as we know it fits nicely between 0 and 100*C.\n\nNow water is an awesome molecule. The molecular weight is tiny so in \"should\" be a gas at room temperature. Thanks to H2O's very strong polar nature it likes to stick together and pack itself down tight so it behaves like a much heavier molecule and is liquid at room temperature (along with a host of other awesome traits). This is also why water takes up less space as a liquid than a solid, unlike most other compounds its crystal form is larger (less dense) than its liquid form, so ice floats.\n\nIf water was less polar it would have a lower condensation point and we'd all live at a colder temperature naturally. \n\nChemistry just works real well at this temperature, particularly around the liquid phase of water. Its not too hot to cause complex compounds to burn and break down, its not too cold to cause our most abundant solvent (water) to turn solid. So chemistry at this temperature is very energy fluid (to say).",
"Celsius is based on water. Water freezes at zero degrees Celsius and boils at 100 degrees Celsius. Kelvin is based on absolute zero, which is zero molecular vibrations. Fahrenheit is a flawed scale based on human body temp (supposed to be 100 degrees Fahrenheit but he borked it up and yet we still run with it). Temperature is based on a measure of the average kinetic energy in a system.",
"You could look at a pot of water.\n\nThink of the water. Ignoring the fridge, it doesn't get much colder than room temperature-- that's about as low as it goes. \n\nIf I add some heat, it starts to boil! I don't have to add much for it to be useful for all sorts of awesome recipes-- making soup stock, boiling pasta, making potatoes. You name it, there's food that could use the kind of energy present in a pot of boiling water to do really great stuff!\n\nBut I can add a lot MORE energy... almost endlessly. Eventually that water moves on from a rolling boil to just steam blasting everywhere. It's not useful for cooking anymore because it's getting way too messy to force back into a confined space to be used. Worse sill, the more energy I put into it, the messier it gets, and the further away from dinner I am.\n\nSo the point is, only so much heat is needed to get past the stagnation of sitting still in order to start doing all the interesting stuff. Too much heat and all the interesting stuff becomes impossible because everything just flies apart.",
"Think of temperature as people walking. The slowest anyone can walk is 0km/hr. Our normal walking speed is arnd 7km/hr. In the grand scheme of things, that is pretty little considering things can go up to many thousands of km/hr",
"So to be clear, your asking why everything is so much closer to Absolute Zero then Absolute Hot?\n",
"Temperature is basically movement of small parts of the object (not sure if atoms or molecules, but that doesnt really matter). If you're at absolute zero, that means they don't move at all. If you reach really high temperatures (thousands of degrees) that means a lot of movement. \nBut by bumping into other objects, the surrounding objects will heat up just like if a ball bumps into a stationary ball, it will cause the stationary ball to move, the amount the moving ball slows down and the stationary ball speeds up depends on the relative mass of those balls, just like how much the temperature difference between a cold and a hot substance depends on their properties (i forgot the proper name for it, but every substance takes a certain amount of energy to heat up to a specific point). \nSo, it's hard to reach and maintain high temperatures, because you'd have to heat up everything even remotely close to you as to not rapidly lose all your energy to your cold surrounding (the bigger the temperature difference, the faster you lose the energy). \nTemperatures of millions of degrees are usually only observed at really small scales and for really short times. \nOn top of this, most of our materials just can't handle the stress of that much movement at the molecular level and would just tear themselves apart, turning into gas eventually and if sufficiently heated after that they would even turn into other forms of matter such as plasma and all kinds of things will happen because there is just a lot of energy in there.",
"Even if our chemistry or some type of order was possible at 1,000,000 degrees C, you could still ask the same question. The cold extreme will always have a minimum where matter doesn't vibrate, but the hot extreme is infinite. ",
"Your concept of what \"cold\" is would be the reason for your confusion. It's human nature to want to characterize \"cold\" as the opposite of \"hot,\" as if it had an entity of its own, a force, a mass, a side of things to be on. You want to give cold a presence.\n\nTemperature is merely how we perceive the level of energy of any bit of mass we can perceive. What we think of as \"cold\" is our brain's interpretation, the physical sensation we get, when we're in contact with something (air, water, metal, porcelain, your partners' feet in bed, etc.) with perceptible mass that has a level of energy that is low by our evolutionary standards.\n\nWe perceive something to be \"hot\" when the level of energy is high compared to our evolutionary standards. The fact that some objects are in existence that are energetic enough to be measured very high on arbitrary, human-created units of measurement is meaningless: cold is not the opposite of heat. All there *IS* is heat, or no heat.\n\nThink of it in terms of light and dark ... we tend to do the same thing with darkness, give it a characterization of its own, but all it really means is that there's an absence of perceptible light. Darkness has no presence of its own, and neither does coldness.\n\nAnother way to think of it is the emptiness in a half-full glass. You wouldn't assign that emptiness a value; it's simply the volume of space in which the fluid in the glass is not there. \"Cold\" is emptiness of molecular energy.",
"Temperature is roughly a measure of how much energy is in something. If you take away all the energy, you get absolute zero. If you put all the energy in the universe in one spot, you'd get the highest possible temperature.\n\nSo why is Earth so close to absolute zero? Simply because there is a *lot* of energy in the universe, and we don't need very much of it to survive. And if we had too much, we'd catch fire (plus, it's hard to keep energy in one place, so excess energy tends to escape). So Earth has a relatively small amount of energy because that's all it needs, and any extra just dissipates into space. (Unless pollution prevents it - this is the greenhouse effect.)\n\nCould life exist at much higher temperatures? Maybe, but it would take a lot more energy to maintain those temperatures, so it would be harder to survive. Also, most materials melt or burn or fall apart at high temperature, so it'd be difficult for the complex structures of life - such as DNA, proteins, brain cells - to exist. They'd all have to be made of chemicals with extremely high melting points, which are rare and like to explode when in contact with eachother.",
" > \"And why is it so easy to get things very hot ... [b]ut we still can't reach the relatively close temp of absolute zero\"\n\nIt is much easier to speed particles up than to slow them down. Adding energy is simpler than removing it.\n\nAlso, your question is one I've had before many times (along with relative size of objects in the universe). It is also what made me laugh when in The Flash they said Heat Wave's gun (Absolute Hot) canceled out Captain Cold's gun (Absolute Zero).",
"Dunno about \"everything\" being so cold... a lot of matter is in stars, and stars are pretty hot. As to the rest, mostly loose gas and a tiny amount in planets and planetoids, why wouldn't it be cold? To make something be not cold takes a source(s) of energy; absent proximity to an energy source, the natural trend of non-star matter is toward a state very near to absolute zero, I would guess.",
"It's just the way we measure it. Don't think of -273°C as a negative number- think of it as 0 K, which is what it is. 0 K means the atoms aren't moving at all. Higher temperatures means that the atoms are moving at higher speeds, and there isn't really an upper limit on speed. \n\n\nThink of it this way: We spend most of our life (relative to the Earth) moving at either 5km/h (walking) or between 50 and 110 km/h (driving). When you consider how fast light moves in a vacuum, you might ask \"Why is everything so slow?\" And the answer is that when you have a system of measurement that goes from zero to infinity, most of your stuff is going to be closer to zero.",
"Think of it this way: heat is movement. Molecules can speed up all they like, changing form like ice to water to steam, so an increased heat is alqays possible. You can always go faster (until the speed of light). But slowing down isn't infinite. You can't go slower than 0mph for example (negative velocity is still positive speed). So the absolute zero, 0k Is when all molecules freeze completely. To this day we have not been able to find something that cold of to make something that cold. We've gotten astoundingly close, but never reached it. \n\nNow the *reason* 'everything' is closer to the cold limit than to the hot as due to a thing called Entropy or chaos. A quick background of entropy, in physics and chemistry, is that things like to be in a state of as little entropy as possible. If you'll imagine a cube of ice, it's only one cube. One thing to keep track of. If it shattered, thered be more to 'keep track of' as all the shards are independent. This is a higher level of Entropy. Also, if you heated the ice up, it would become water, which flows and splashes and cligns to things and such. This is an even higher Entropy level. If it were a gas, it would be higher and higher etc. Basically, the more molecules move around, the more chaotic things get. \n\nThink of being a gym teacher in a large room full of kindergartners. If those kids were all running randomly in every direction, you can imagine the chaos you would be dealing with. Higher level of Entropy. If they were calmer, maybe walking in a line, they would be easier to deal with and less chaotic. \n\nAs I said before, things like to be at a lower level of Entropy, which means getting colder. Thats why most of everything we deal with is extremely closer to the cold barrier than to the heat barrier.",
"Imagine atom is this little Timmy. Well, Timmy could go as slow as standing still. Can he go slower than that? No. So this is where we established the absolute zero where Timmy stands in one place without moving. But can he go faster? Sure, he will walk. Faster? Yeah, he runs? Faster? Well, he travels in a car. Not enough? Put him in a plane. Timmy still wanna go faster? Well, tell that fucker to shut up and stop being a lil' bitch somebody is about to slap the shit outa him. This is how Timmy could possibly go faster and faster without limitation. But life is a bitch and so at a certain point, Timmy's parents will lose their shit and ground the lil' kid and possibly kill him to make another smarter one. so there is a limit in which Timmy couldn't ask for more. In order to stay stable, organism need a stable environment, anything that's too hot or too cold will kill them, just like animal getting burned alive or such.",
"I'm pretty sure it's because cold is just a lack of heat. You can't \"add\" cold, you can just take away heat. \n\nWhat's the lowest heat you can have? Zero. What's the highest heat you can have? Infinity.",
"After reading the first few top posts, I didn't read a satisfying response. \n\nAs simple as I can put it, there is no source for cold, only a source for heat. You can make things cold by taking away heat. Not vice versa. ",
"Temperature is a measure of the amount of kinetic energy particles that make up something has. Kinetic energy is \"the energy of motion.\" So on a basic level, if all the particles stop, they have no movement, therefore no kinetic energy and the lowest temperature possible, this is zero on the Kelvin scale (or -459.67 F or -273.15 C depending on which scale you use.) As for the highest temperatures, particles can always move faster (not taking in Einstein and relativity) so the temperatures can always go up.",
"Don't think of 'hot' and 'cold' as two seperate variables, but rather that 'cold' is what's achieved with the absence of heat. Heat is the variable, and absolute zero is the complete absence of heat.",
"Temperature is based upon the movement of subatomic particles; the slower they're moving, the \"colder\" we perceive things as being. \n\nYou can't get slower than \"no movement,\" so that's absolute zero. We monitor things by bouncing other things off of them, so we can't get all the way to absolute zero because the act of monitoring the temperature is enough to elevate it. We've come within something like one sixteen-millionth of a degree, though.\n\nAbsolute high temperatures are theoretical. We don't really know a lot about them because the kinds of temperatures that were present around the formation of the universe don't exist anymore. \n\nAlso, they may or may not reflect actual \"maximum\" temperatures, meaning that the laws of physics might conceivably *allow* for higher temperatures (say, if there was more mass in the universe).\n\nWe are only familiar with life on Earth. Life on Earth evolved to require liquid water. Liquid water requires a certain temperature range, so we require that temperature range. \n\nIt is conceivably possible that life exists in wildly variant forms. There could be energy-beings inside of stars, for all we know. There could be giant space amoebas. Until we find something living, and recognize it as such, all we've got to go on is what's here.",
"I think that's kind of like saying everything in our world is really, really quiet because there is no maximum for sound and the minimum is 0db. ",
"\"I guess my question is, why does life as we know it only exist in such extreme cold?\"\n\nWe currently only know of life on one extremely small and isolated area of the universe. When considering all the possible environments where different forms of life could evolve, we just haven't tested a large enough sample area to actually conclude that no other forms of like are out there.",
"Temperature is proportional to the average velocity (squared) of the atoms/molecules you are measuring.\n\nAbsolute zero is literally the temperature it takes for the atoms/molecules to stop moving in any way (that includes rotation and vibration).\n\nA better way to understand this is that temperature is proportional to the average kinetic energy (energy related to the motion of matter) of whatever matter you're measuring.\n\nPlanets (where life exists) are surrounded by a vacuum and thus is closer to that absolute zero than it is to the absolute hot.\n\nIf it was too hot, then the atoms and molecules would be too unstable due to its energy being too high and the molecules will be split into its constituent atoms and the atoms themselves will be ionized (their electrons will be shredded off).\n\nSince life can only exist with stable molecules (meaning that they don't fall apart), you need a temperature that will keep them together (but not too cold so that nothing happens). Remember, at a 100 C water is vaporized. With no liquid water, there's no life (at least Terran life).",
"Absolute zero is zero energy. That is the point where all energy in the molecules and atoms of matter is gone. Zero. Which is impossible. You can come close to having zero energy in a sample of matter, but can't quite remove every bit of energy. \n\nOn the other hand, there is no upper limit on the amount of energy in matter, thus there are stars with temperatures of millions of degrees in the core. ",
"\"why does life as we know it only exist in such extreme cold?\"\n\nDid anyone answer this?",
" > wouldn't it mean that life and everything we know as good for us, is ridiculously ridiculously cold?\n\nThis concept is only difficult to come to terms with if a person believes the universe was created for humans.",
"Entropy. Cold isn't an energy, it's a lack of it. Energy, like water, tends to move from areas of high concentration to lower concentration. In other words heat something up, and that heat gets radiated and absorbed by everything around it until it's the same temperature as everything else. \n\nIt's akin to saying why does fast only have a limit of the speed of light, but slow can only lead to stop. You can't stop any stoppier than you can when you're stopped. But if you're going fast you can always go faster, until you become relativistic. \n\n**edit**Entropy in this instance having to do with the second law of thermodynamics",
"Exciting things are hot. Placid things are cool. Some parts of the universe are exceptionally hot and exciting. Imagine living life as a plasma demon on Sol. ",
"ok so ill give a non scientific answer. Humans created the term \"temperature\" and it's scale. We scaled it to our human needs.",
"It depends how you think about temperature.\n\nI'm gunna share a crazy thought, hopefully it will explain my above point. Recently I've been thinking: what if temperature was backwards (it makes some chemistry easier, and wikipedia says some physics make more sense if we do this). So if instead of measuring temperature we measured 'inverse temperature'. \n\nIf we did that and still had 100 degrees between freezing and boiling (I'm gunna call it °P), then it would be the other way round:\n\n100 °P is freezing, 0 °P is boiling. Your fridge might be 93 °P, your freezer at 130 °P, your oven -50 °P, a 25 °C day would be 69 °P. The coldest temperature ever reached is 1×10^14 °P, while infinite temperature is just -273 °P. The temperature of space (CMBR) would be 337 °P. So from this perspective life exists as middling 'inverse temperatures', about halfway between space and the temperature of the sun (which is very close to -273 °P). We can get things *very cold*, but not very hot: we've never reached 'absolute zero inverse temperature' (this is infinite temperature), let alone managed to get down to negative temperatures (which are theoretically possible in some systems).\n \nSo with a change of perspectives you end up asking the opposite question.\n\nDoesn't answer your question, but I hope it is interesting (and makes sense. I'm not always very good at making sense).\n\nEdit: got hot and cold the wrong way around, also clarity.",
"Because the points are made up and the games don't matter.\n\nWhat I mean by this is the Celsius scale, for example, was based off of freezing and boiling points of water. If another substance had been chosen then the scale would be completely different. Therefore, from a theoretical aspect, the numbers are completely arbitrary. \n\nWe are only on the 'cold' side because h2o is on the cold side. If Hydrogen had been used as the base the we would be further up the 'hot' side.",
"The average temperature of the universe is around 2.7 K, and we live at temperatures of > 100 times that, so why do we live in such an extremely hot environment?\n\nDescribing our temperatures as extremely cold or extremely hot is extremely arbitrary, it all depends on your point of view.",
"O kelvin is just the temperature at witch atom movement stops. Our zero points in our systems were set to benchmarks such as the freezing point of water ( Celsius ). Temperature is the intensity of atomic movement, as far as I understand. There is no maximum to movement. If you get to ridiculous levels of temperature, it gets kinda wacky with plasma. Atoms basically start to fall apart.",
"Think of it like a car. A car can't get slower than not moving. It can't stand still even more. \n\nBut it can accelerate. Cars can go pretty fast. Even 200 mph. But all cars have a stopping point of 0 mph.\n\nThe average speed limit of a road in the U.S. is 45 mph. Say that's earth's surface temperature that we experience. Now say (not to scale) the surface of the sun is 250mph. We can build cars that go that fast. We could strap a jet to a car to make it go even faster. \n\nBut we can't make a car go slower than 0 mph",
"Technically from a thermodynamics point of view cold doesnt exist. Only the absence of heat. Im sure someone will rip me apart for this however. Oh well. ",
"There is no cold, only heat and the absence of it.\n\nMuch like how there is only light and the absence of it.",
"The question has been answered but I'd just like to add,\n\nWe do live quite close to absolute zero, but when you're upper limit is in the trillions, the difference between 100 degrees and 10000 degrees is relatively minuscule. So even if we were accustomed to a much higher range of temperatures, you could still pose this question. I guess my point is, very large numbers can still be relatively small because numbers go on forever.",
"Think of thermal energy as puddles of a liquid on the giant bathroom floor that is our universe. Think of the depth of a puddle as a rough analog of temperature. Given that there isn't a lot of liquid (i.e. most of the bathroom floor is empty), you'd expect mostly shallow puddles, rarely a few deep gobs of liquid, and a general tendency for the liquid to spread out until you have a shallow film of liquid all over your floor.\n\nThis is a crude analogy for the principle of entropy, and explains why most things are fairly cold.",
"No we are perfectly in the middle. As the 4 times Reddit gold awarded post stated: we can't reach the absolute 0. We can just go as near as possible maybe 10^-5 apart from 0 Kelvin. Next step is 10^-6. What's the difference between those numbers? Basically nothing. Now take a look at the hot side. Maybe the sun is 10^5 and maybe more inside it is 10^6. what's the difference? 10 times this freaking hot number. This makes you think hotness scales much more. But we are living at approximately 10^2 which is in the middle the further you go in both sides. \nTldr think logarithmic "
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2tqoio | how come the third rail on subway systems doesn't short circuit when it gets wet? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2tqoio/eli5_how_come_the_third_rail_on_subway_systems/ | {
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"1. Water on the rail itself doesn't short circuit, as the rail is more conductive than the water.\n\n2. The water doesn't bridge between the third rail and a suitable ground. It might drip off, but it won't form a continuous path like a wire very easily.\n\n3. Water is an awful conductor, so outside of very high voltages such as lightning strikes, it doesn't tend to carry a charge very far.",
"Short circuiting is when water connects two parts of a circuit that aren't supposed to be connected. The water would have to form an unbroken path between the third rail and another part of the same circuit with a different voltage "
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54l883 | if an ambulance is called to a casualty, but then sees one happen in front of it or is close by another, which one do they go to? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/54l883/eli5_if_an_ambulance_is_called_to_a_casualty_but/ | {
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"The ambulance drivers and paramedics don't make that decision. A dispatcher tells them where to go. If another emergency needs attention, dispatch will send another emergency response vehicle to attend to it.",
"EMT here. If there are multiple patients on one scene we will triage and attend to the most critical patient first. Of course in that scenario dispatch will likely already know there are multiple injuries, so another truck should be on the way. If not we let dispatch know. \n \nIf you mean what happens if we see a car accident on the way to a different call then the best answer is it depends. \n \nDuring a blizzard in 2009 we got dispatched to a car accident. On the way to that accident we noticed another. After quickly making sure there were no injuries there, we continued to the original accident. There was only one person with injuries. As we're transporting him, we see another crash happen, and let dispatch know they need an ambulance. Then a multi car pile up at the intersection outside the ER. No injuries there either. 4 car accidents in 30 minutes. \n \nI've stopped to evaluate a vehicle crash while I had a patient. Before you get the pitchforks, my patient didn't need an ambulance, but refusing to transport even a BS patient is considered abandonment in the state I worked in. I stayed with the \"spider bite\" patient while my partner evaluated the accident we found. ",
"Laws vary by location. They will generally dispatch another truck if the patient they are currently transporting is critical. It also depends on the skill mix of the providers on board and ETA of other truck. Most services have restrictions on how many and what type of patients one truck can transport. There are also restrictions on how many patients one provider can care for. \n\nIn general, if a provider makes patient contact and the patient doesn't refuse transport, the provider is obligated to care for that patient until they turn over to a higher level of care (RN, NP, MD, etc...). ",
"If an ambulance is assigned to a call they are required by law to respond to it. This is called \"Duty of Care\", and is covered in chapter one of every first responder, EMT, AEMT or Paramedic course in the US. Outside the US I have no idea. \n\nThere is no choice. Doing anything else is at least a tort (civil liability), and in some cases would be a criminal act. At the very least they would lose their job, their license and their national registration.\n\nIf they see something on the way they will call it in.",
"I recently was a bystander in such an event. I was cycling along a bicycle lane and in front of me another cyclist crashes into a woman. Anyway the woman was inimitably standing but the cyclist had hurt his leg and his shoulder and was unable to continue cycling and walking was painful. He also hurt his shoulder. Anyway we call in a ambulance and it took a 90 minutes to arrive. So when the ambulance arrived they explained that this call had been assigned low-medium priority due to in all likelihood a non broken leg and a dislocated shoulder not being as high a priority and the first dispatched ambulance seeing a accident which they decided to act on first. "
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2ict3r | why does binge gaming make me feel like an angry zombie irl? | I've noticed over years of gaming that I cannot let myself binge over a weekend playing anything too intense because it has noticeable effects on my real life. After these long gaming sessions i am:
* unable to concentrate on pretty much anything
* easily annoyed and grumpy
* completely lacking interest in anything.
Once I start playing again, all of these negative effects seemingly go away and I'm able to play at a high level unhindered.
If I have been gaming and notice these feelings, I know that I have become an angry zombie for the rest of the day.
What's causing these feelings and why is it easily reversed when I start playing again?
| explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ict3r/eli5_why_does_binge_gaming_make_me_feel_like_an/ | {
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"I hate to say this, but you're a gaming addict. If you take small, regular \"hits\", you're ok, but if you take too big of a hit, and then try to jump off you go into withdrawal symptoms, and what fixes those? Another hit."
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2or2ef | why can't the interest rate set by the boe remain low indefinitely? | I keep hearing from pundits that it must be raised eventually. I don't understand why. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2or2ef/eli5_why_cant_the_interest_rate_set_by_the_boe/ | {
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"Low interest rates can cause the economy to \"overheat\". People will take too many risks with the cheap loans. In bad times people are trying to protect what they have so we need them a bit more risk taking. In good times we want people to be more cautious.\n\nThe economic problems of the last decade were caused by companies and individuals taking too many risks because the good times made them think they were invincible. ",
"When interest rates are low people (and companies) tend to spend more money or invest in capital because the opportunity cost **which is basically the cost of the next best option** (of saving their money to earn interest from a bank instead of trying to create income from business expansion/ventures) is much lower.\n\nWhen interest is at 1% for a company, they are barely even making any REAL money because inflation could be much higher, but if you open a new store you could make an 8% return on your money.\n\nSimilarly for people, when interest rates are at 1% but inflation is at 2%, whats the point in saving your money with the bank when it's real value is decreasing year after year because inflation is eating it away . You might as well go on holiday or buy a new TV / pair of shoes since your money is worth less every day in the bank anyways.\n\nThis causes the economy to spend spend spend and it can \"overheat\", you see too much consumption in the economy and when the total level of consumption exceeds the total level of supply (and there are time-lags between increases in consumption and increases in supply), you find that companies realise they can charge EXTRA money for the same good and people will still purchase it because you have excess demand for these goods (12 people trying to purchase 10 items).\n\nThis raising of prices is called \"Inflation\", this kind is more specifically, \"Demand pull inflation\".\n\nNow when the government raises interest rates, suddenly saving your money looks much more attractive to both individuals and businesses because why risk creating a new plant or factory to make a MAYBE 8% return on your money, when you can just leave it in the bank and it will generate 3.5% return on its own.\n\nIt requires no effort to do, and theres no chance of your \"bank interest gathering business\" failing.\n\nSimilarly, consumers see that their money, when kept safe in the bank is churning out 4% of its total value in *extra * money every single month so why would they go and purchase a new car or TV when their money is growing in size from doing nothing.\n\nHowever when interest is high, saving tends to be high and therefore total consumption in the economy *decreases*, (when people are saving, the demand for new clothes from Hollister decreases) and therefore people lose their jobs etc, companies close down stores and then the government has to give all of these people unemployment benefits and the government is bringing in *less* tax money because people aren't employed.\n\nFor these reasons the government, needs to carefully juggle the level of interest in an economy because they don't want to have a recession or a super-boom period.\n\nIf I've missed anything or you have any questions just give tell me and i'll be happy to attempt to answer it.\n\n"
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7z82pl | how do companies like that popular company selling evs or that other popular ridesharing company lose billions of dollars each quarter and yet manage to avoid bankruptcy? not only that they are viewed as companies which have a bright future in front of them? | Pretty much that, had to avoid mentioning the names of those 2 companies because it got taken down by Automoderator the first time around .
So I sort of understand how corporate bonds work, but those companies have been around since the early 00s and surely time to pay back their initial bond sale came and went, how could they do that if they managed to lose money every single quarter? Did they just sell more bonds to raise money to pay bonds which matured?
Also how is that possible that constant optimism (I'd say optimism is an understatement) , more like "destined to succeed" attitude surrounds those companies? Investors and the general population seem to think their dominance is inevitable! Am I missing something? Please don't use strictly financial terms or ELI5 | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7z82pl/eli5_how_do_companies_like_that_popular_company/ | {
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"They spend money provided by investors, who buy a piece of the business hoping to cash in on *future* profits.",
"They’re not profitable yet due to expansion or growth. But they do make some money. So they generally have a large cash reserve or find new investors when they need more money. Once they run out of money then they’re basically finished unless they turn profitable. ",
"First off, they don’t use corporate bonds. They take on investment from venture capital firms in return for equity, or ownership stakes in the company. They take on investment at various times based on current valuations and financial needs. Additionally, Tesla has gone public and sold stock to the public.\n\nThis money is invested in growing the business today to a scale such that it will be profitable in the future. It take time and money to design cars, build factories, etc. so when they build a few cars and spend a lot on building a giant battery factory, they lose lots of money. But one day, the factory will be complete, and they will be able to make 100x the number of vehicles annually and they will become profitable.\n\nSimilarly, Uber spends lots of money on regulatory and legal fees to be allowed to operate in various cities, as well as money on bonuses for new drivers and discounts for new riders to build up a large enough network of each so that riders can get rides when they need and drivers can make money by driving. Once this system matures, the spending goes way down while ridership continues to grow and profits become feasible.\n\n"
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256mt2 | how do they launch space ships from the moon back to earth? | On earth they have all this fancy equipment, huge crews, etc. On the moon they don't. Plus don't they drop a bunch of engines or something on their way? So how does it work? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/256mt2/eli5_how_do_they_launch_space_ships_from_the_moon/ | {
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"The moon's gravity is much weaker than the earth's, and there's no atmosphere to offer up any resistance, so they didn't need as much thrust to escape the moon's gravity well. Considering that, the lunar lander was designed to launch from the moon using its landing gear as its platform. once it was in orbit, the lunar lander rendevoused with the command module which remained in orbit, the command module had another rocket attached to it to bring the crew back to earth.",
"Three guys on the mission. The part that gets as far as the moon has a Command Module and a Lunar Excursion Module. This assembly gets into lunar orbit. Two guys get into LEM which separates from the CM and go to the surface. One guy stays in CM in lunar orbit. After a few days golfing on the surface, the LEM guys do a burn to blast back out to lunar orbit and dock the LEM. They crawl back into the CM. IIRC the LEM is dumped prior to the burn to leave lunar orbit and the ride back to Earth.",
"I don't mean to piggy back your question but how, once in space, does any thrust from a rocket result in motion or acceleration if that rocket is in a vacume."
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2u6n07 | what do presidents do after their term(s) is/are done? | Do they just chill around for the rest of their lives, or do they go back to regular work? If so, what work?
What if there was a really young president? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2u6n07/eli5_what_do_presidents_do_after_their_terms/ | {
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"They collect money for the rest of their lives from the government and the intelligent ones make even more giving speeches. "
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7f2jhw | why is there a minimum age limit to vote but no maximum age limit? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7f2jhw/eli5_why_is_there_a_minimum_age_limit_to_vote_but/ | {
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"Growing up is a more predictable process than ageing (even though it is not 100% predictable). Some 12 year old children are smarter than others, but they all have some degree of immaturity. Maturity takes time. Some elderly people remain quite smart even into their 90's, while other don't. Some people become senile as they age, and some don't. There is no way to set a maximum age for voting that is not going to disenfranchise a lot of very well qualified voters."
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evkysu | why aren't there really big predators about the same size of possible prey? and sometimes there are big predators without big prey? | Disclaimer: read the edit at the end
I was wondering why there aren't predators about the same size of the biggest herbivors (or filter feeders) in a certain time.
For example, why isn't there some elephant size carnivorous species? Why the biggest sea predator (white shark, orca or sperm whale) doesn't reach the size of the blue whale? And even if it comes close to it (sperm whale) it isn't a direct predator of the blue whale itself. This goes also in prehistory where even the biggest theropods couldn't rival titanosaurs and sauropods.
The only exception i can see are prehistoric seas where basilosaurs, shonisaurs, mosasaurs etc.. (different ages ofc) where the biggest living creature (that we know) and also were predators. But even then they were predators of smaller prey, nothing really compared to their size.
**So in short why is it than in nature we either have bigger herbivours like beings (except blue whale that isn't herbivorous, but feels the niche i'm talking about).. let's call them preylike for the sake of this discussion, with no predators of the same size or we have big predators with no prey of the same size?**
With medium and small size there are many "matches" like wolves and deers, bears and seals, lions and zebras, allosaurus and stegosaurus, fox and rabbit and so on.. The only real exception i can think of is sperm whale and giant squid, but even then, blue whale is unmatched. Sorry if i used unappropriate terminology.
Thankyou
Edit: i do apreciate all the answers coming. And i had my question partially answered. This said i believe i expressed myself badly, so let me reformulate: why is it so that in any given point in time the biggest living creature was either a predator or a prey, but prey and predator of the same size never happened to live together? (if we are talking of maximum dimensions) | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/evkysu/eli5_why_arent_there_really_big_predators_about/ | {
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"I'm no biologist but from what I understand it's kind of just pointless. If you wanted to be large enough to eat a blue whale then you would need a ton of food to sustain yourself. Since you would need so much food the only really good meal for you is now whales. It's much more efficient to be smaller and just devour schools of fish instead. The same is true for land animals. It's much easier to be the size of a wolf and fill yourself up on 4 rabbits than it is to enlarge than a cow and need 30 rabbits to be full.\n\nTL:DR predators grow to the optimal size to consume their target prey as efficiently as possible.",
"In fact, all the largest animals in the ocean are predatory. I'm not exactly sure what the largest oceanic herbivore is, but my bet is that it's a manatee or dugog (RIP stellar's sea cow). Most aquatic predators prey on things substantially smaller than themselves (blue whales eat 2 inch long krill, for example, but even sharks usually eat smaller animals and killer whales usually eat smaller prey even if they do on occasion take larger whales). And as you note, the great filter-feeders of the modern ocean are a bit unusual. In the past the largest marine animals were mostly carnivorous.\n\nOn land the situation is a bit different, the largest herbivores are essentially always bigger than the largest predators. Even on land though, predators _usually_ prey on smaller or similar sized prey. Wolves take deer (as a pack, usually) but they often still focus on smaller fauns and eat a surprising amount of rodents and other small mammals. The really big mammals rarely suffer predator attacks. \n\nWhy? Well, it's complicated. Fundamentally, each step of the food chain you go up means there's less energy going around. Herbivores get about a tenth of the energy plants produce, carnivores get about a tenth of the energy herbivores eat, etc. An elephant-sized lion would need an _immense_ amount of herbivores to sustain itself. A whole population would need an immense amount of space (this is one reason things are bigger in the ocean...there's just more room and more food). Herbivores (and filter feeders) can get really huge compared to top predators in part because there's massively more food energy available to them because they eat lower on the food chain (note, even sperm whales _mostly_ eat much smaller squid that are much lower on the food chain than giant squid). Or to put it another way, think about how much food and territory an elephant needs. Now think about a predator the size of an elephant that eats an adult elephant every other day or so. How many elephants would it need each year? How much space would each of those elephants need? You begin to see the issue. \n\nSo why are there really big herbivores on land while most herbivores in the ocean are pretty tiny (most are actually miniscule copepods, even small-medium fish herbivores are fairly rare). On land, plants grow large and are filled with cellulose to support themselves. An efficient way to digest this is to carry around a big fermentation chamber in your belly, and the bigger it is the more efficient it is. So you get lots of big animals that carry around big guts to digest plants (note, though, that there are a ton of tiny herbivorous insects too, which eat a huge amount of plants). In the ocean, however, most \"plants\" are tiny single celled algae, and the most efficient way to eat them is to be an only-slightly-less tiny planktonic filter feeder"
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4zs074 | japanese fascination with hello kitty | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4zs074/eli5_japanese_fascination_with_hello_kitty/ | {
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"Mickey Mouse is an iconic character in American pop culture for families. You grow up with him because you've been exposed to him all your life either through your parents or just having him shoved in your face through anything Disney. \n\nBasically Hello Kitty is the Mickey Mouse of Japan. "
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4uvh75 | the power of the potus. under what circumstances could a president give an order? what's to stop a president from giving an order to launch icbms at antarctica for no reason? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4uvh75/eli5_the_power_of_the_potus_under_what/ | {
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"As far as ICBMs go, the contract you sign to enter the military stipulates that you are not required to follow unlawful orders, or orders that you believe shouldn't be followed (which of course is up to the interpretation of the courts when you get booted). If the president orders the nukes launched, it then has to go through military leadership to actually get to the people at the bunkers, and that leadership can refuse. Then it goes to the bunker commanders, who can refuse. Then it goes to the techs who actually \"press the button\", who can refuse. So the president can scream to launch the nukes until he's blue, but that won't necessarily lead to the nukes being launched. All of that is on purpose, by the way. No one ever thought one person should have absolute control over the nuclear arsenal. That's true even in Russia, where one commander more or less single handedly prevented the apocalypse by refusing to launch nukes when ordered to during the Cold War, because he suspected the incoming missile radar that went off was malfunctioning (it was).\n\nEdit: other comments are overestimating the president's authority and underestimating the willingness of people to disobey that authority. If the president ordered a nuclear strike on Antarctica he would have to have a damn good justification, the soldiers who man the silos aren't going to launch just because the president told them to. They know what's at stake. Sure, Antarctica isn't exactly teeming with life, but it would still violate a huge number of treaties and might lead to nuclear war just because by other counties reacting and launching retaliatory strikes before they know Antarctica is the target (and likely wouldn't believe us if we tried to tell them \"we're totally not shooting at you guys for real don't shoot back\"). Again, I want to emphasize that *this has already happened*. A launch was ordered, during the Cold War when there was way more tension and way more reason to believe a launch was necessary, and no missiles were launched.\n\nThe only way missiles would get launched is if there were already missiles in the air pointed at us, or a major invasion landing on US soil.",
"POTUS doesn't have the authority to start a war. Without an imminent threat the military would ask the president for the authorization from Congress for offensive actions.\n\nAdditionally there is a lot of leeway between executing an order and refusing an order. A nonsensical order like nuking Antarctica would involve multiple verifications at every level of command. This would cause significant delays for Congress or the cabinet to oppose the action.\n\nThink about it as if you are in the position of a middle manager in that communication chain. You would ask, repeatedly, if this was a joke or typo and ensure that what you think you're hearing is what was actually said.\n\nTechnical legal authority is a long way from actual ability to get something done. Example: every lieutenant that tried to order around a sergeant major."
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2alejx | if distilled water is just evaporated and then re-condensed, why isn't rain pure water? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2alejx/eli5_if_distilled_water_is_just_evaporated_and/ | {
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"Because distilled water is theoretically distilled in a controlled environment. There is dust and pollen and smoke and shit in the air and clouds which contaminate rain. ",
"Because there's stuff other than water in the clouds, some air bourne bacteria can float around in clouds and there is a lot of dust up there too. Basically if it can float in the air it can get into rainwater but mostly it's safe to drink but there are far fewer beneficial chemicals like fluorides in rainwater so you'd be better off drinking tap water.",
"Simply, have you heard of acid rain? Gasses and dust and smoke in the air rinse into the earth by being a part of each drop of rain or flake of snow. "
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fklt3h | how does inhaled asthma medications weaken your immune system? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fklt3h/elif_how_does_inhaled_asthma_medications_weaken/ | {
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"asthma medications are generally a sympathetic stimulant and a corticosteroid. \n\nThe sympathetic stimulant does the same thing that your body does during fight-or-flight. Both cause your lungs to \"open up\" so you can take in air better because asthma causes your lungs to 'close up'\n\nCorticosteroids are immunosuppresants because asthma is an inflammatory condition (which is driven by the immune sysem) and triggered by allergens. Immunosuppressants tone town the response to these allergens and reduces the inflammation in asthma.\n\nSome of those immunosuppresants will make it into your blood, even though it only need to act at the lungs. And it can affect your immune system throughout your whole body due to it."
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3og0b6 | why is is customary in rap/hip-hop to use a different name? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3og0b6/eli5_why_is_is_customary_in_raphiphop_to_use_a/ | {
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"It's often a part of culture. Especially in the African American community, nicknames are what people are most known by. ",
"Its just a convention of hip hop. \n\nProbably influenced by very early NY hiphop being closely linked with graffitti, where you'd make up a tag, coz writing your government name on the side of a train isn't smart. The common hiphop thing of using lots of numbers and letters was also big in early NY tags (eg T-kid, futura 2000)\n\nSome other music genres have similar conventions. In punk bands its also common to give yourself a silly name (eg Poly Styrene, Rat Scabies, Chuck Wagon, etc). Bluesmen had nicknames too (Howlin Wolf, Muddy waters, Blind Lemon Jefferson)\n\nSome stuff just becomes \"how it is\" in genre. "
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b3g84n | is there any scientific basis for horoscopes? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b3g84n/eli5_is_there_any_scientific_basis_for_horoscopes/ | {
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"Only in the sense that there are constellations in the sky. Those exist, although they're more folklore than science.\n\nThe actual horoscopes themselves are not based in science.",
"The horoscopes are based on constellations (star patterns) that were recorded over 2000 years ago.\n\nSince then the earth has shifted, making all current horoscopes based on those recordings incorrect by over 1 month.\n\nSo even if horoscopes were real (which they're not), then you wouldn't be the sign you think you are anyway. ",
"What other people said, with the only addition that as it corresponds to a birth month, there's the POTENTIAL for shared environmental factors as a result of birth month. In a modern society where our diets are fairly standard year-round it's less prevalent, however it's possible that in the past things such as the availability of fresh fruits and vegetables only during certain times of the year may have had unknown impacts on children based on prenatal nutrition. In the modern day United States, most states have grade cutoffs for kindergarten based on being age 5 in either august, September, or October, so children born in November may be 11 months older than some of their peers, which may have various developmental side effects related to a child's education and social environment.\n\nThat being said, that's less to say that any of this would have any of the specific attributes associated with various birth signs. I was mostly pointing out the actual ways in which different signs/birth months MAY alter a person and MAY provide for some POSSIBLY statistically significant differences between those born in different months.\n\nEdit: Typo"
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2wqrc2 | why do some cigarette smokers end up with huge health complications (artificial larynx, tracheotomy, etc.) while other heavy smokers seem to have been smoking for years with minimal complications? | I fell like this is gonna get down voted to hell, but I'm honestly curious as to why some people die from lung cancer, or end up having to have tracheotomies due to heavy smoking, (like in those anti smoking commercials where all those people talk about how hard it is living with a stoma in their neck) but other heavy smokers (that smoke multiple packs a day) seem to just have a raspy voice or an occasional heavy cough. Is it just sheer luck as to who gets horrible side effects and who doesn't? Or were the people with artificial larynx just smoking a lot more cigarettes, over a much longer period of time? Any information would be appreciated. Thanks!
| explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2wqrc2/eli5_why_do_some_cigarette_smokers_end_up_with/ | {
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"Two possibilities:\n\n1) There is just a random \"chance factor\" involved\n\n2) There are one or more factors that we have not yet discovered or do not yet fully understand\n\n-------------------\n\nI have had about 40 cats in my lifetime. None of them smoked, drank alcohol, or ate anything other than a veterinarian approved diet. Still, 3 of them died of cancer.\n\nWhy? I don't know.\n\n-------------------\n\nGeorge Burns drank and smoked for most of his life...\n\nWhen asked, after he was 90 Years Old, what his Doctor thought about his Smoking and Drinking, he replied...\n\n\"My Doctor is Dead.\"\n\n-----------------\n\nHowever, it does increase your RISK of certain diseases and conditions if you engage in certain activities.",
"Statistics. Smoking does not guarantee health complications, it only increases your risk of them.\n\nWho ends up with health complications is a matter of environmental factors and genetics. A light smoker might end up with lung cancer while a heavy smoker has only a light cough. But make no mistake - on a global level, the heavy smoker is, on average, much worse off than the light smoker. But there will always be exceptions.\n\nBut we don't know all that much about how genetics and environmental factors affect this. So to modern healthcare, it basically is luck that determines who ends up with complications and who doesn't. With statistics though, we can see that smokers are on average worse off than those who don't smoke, and heavy smokers versus light smokers.\n\nYou should also be aware of perception biases - the heavy smoker who stays healthy is a surprise, so you're going to hear stories about them - it's newsworthy and interesting, and you're more likely to remember that tidbit of information. But you don't hear about the 100 other smokers that died of lung cancer, because that isn't news, it's what's expected, and you're also less likely to remember that information because it isn't that interesting.",
"One point that is not well understood...\n\nI learned this when my Grandfather was dying of Lung Cancer...\n\nLung Cancer is a HUGE BIG DEAL in the \"Cancer World.\" Lung Cancer blasts Breast Cancer and Colon Cancer out of the water, when it comes to the amount of lives claimed.\n\nOne doctor has even made a famous quote... When asked, \"Who is at Risk of Lung Cancer?\" The doctor replied, \"Anyone with Lungs!\"\n\nWhile smoking does greatly increase your risk of developing Lung Cancer... LOTS of people who DO NOT smoke die every year from Lung Cancer.\n\n",
"My grandpa, god bless his soul, smoked up until his death. He lived to be 96, and to \"combat\" the smoking issue, he would drink a tiny cup of olive oil a day. I don't know why, but he though that would make him live longer, seems like it worked. "
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2p2j8u | why do indians bobble their heads when speaking? (no racism intended | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2p2j8u/eli5why_do_indians_bobble_their_heads_when/ | {
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"It's simply a gesture that's become culturally common in India.\n\nHere's a [video which explains the meanings](_URL_0_).",
"They don't bobble there head when speaking, they bobble their head as a sign of agreeing or saying yes to something. More common with South Indians. ",
"Sometimes it's used to denote the feeling of \"yes, but no.\" ",
"Indian here, I didn't even realize the head bobble was unique to us till it was emphasized on Outsourced. \n\n\nI've always thought it was for signifying uncertainty ( at least that's what I use it for) . Like when my manager wants me to do something but doesn't explain the specifics, that's when I do the head bobble and accompanying that I'll say \" Ok, sir.\" and inside I'm just thinking that yeah this is going to be a little tough and irksome to figure out, but I can do it.\n\nMy take is that the bobble is rooted in the fact that as a society we're quite non-confrontational, respect hierarchy ( office, familial or otherwise) and we're taught to respect people older to us ( Indians take respecting elders very very seriously). So the bobble is a polite way to let the other person know, that you're not too sure about what's going on.\n\n\nSo next time an Indian bobbles his head and says he agrees with you, you'll know better.",
"Also Indian here. I've heard the respectful, non-confrontational reasoning before, not sure how much I buy that. That may have been the origin of these gestures. Doesn't apply as much now, but you learn what you see.\n\nYou may have also observed that Indians gesticulate (with their arms) a lot less than Caucasians do. I guess body gestures are fundamental to communication and if you don't do them one way, you do them another. Although head-bobbing is mostly on the part of the listener in a conversation, rather than the talker.\n\nAs an aside, there's by no means a universal head-bobbing language within India. The same bob may mean exact opposite things depending on where in India you're from.",
"It took me a while to understand that the team from Bangalore I was working with would shake their head (as if to say no) when they were agreeing with me and nod when saying no. A bit strange at first but not a problem once we all understood what was going on (they had been confused by my head gestures as well). "
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ftu9n3 | what is the difference between insurance and a provider? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ftu9n3/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_insurance_and/ | {
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"Medi-Cal is a state of California program to insure people who need insurance. There are many Medi-Cal providers, and it seems you got assigned to Molina. So, Molina is your insurance company. This is not the same as a medical provider. You'll need a Doctor to treat you, and you'll need one that accepts payments from Molina. That's probably listed on the Molina website someplace, as insurance companies are all about making sure that you go to medical providers that they have fixed-price contracts with."
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rbqyc | how do snakes and other poisonous animals/insects produce their venom? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/rbqyc/eli5_how_do_snakes_and_other_poisonous/ | {
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"Snakes have [special venom glands in their heads](_URL_0_). Spiders may just use digestive juices.",
"Some animals, such as nudibranchs, consume poisonous prey and, rather than breaking down or being affected by the poison, store it in their bodies to become poisonous themselves. "
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4slrft | what exactly is google's tensorflow? | I recently came across TensorFlow, which from what I've read seems to be a pretty big deal in the A.I. community. But as a person with no computer science background, nor any real knowledge in AI, I still don't understand it!! What even is it? and what is it used for? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4slrft/eli5_what_exactly_is_googles_tensorflow/ | {
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"After dooing some quick research (2 google searches). The new google Tenserflow is a deep learning ai. You can use the code to set up ais like the AI created by google to detect cat photos. This is a step up from their old ai system because this code is twice as fast and also really smart.\n\nNot only that but its open source!\n\nEven though all the advancements are cool and all. If your wondering why this is super important. Tenser flow is the same software running in many of your products today. So knowing that it will get smarter and faster is a step up.\n\n\nI just looked at the date. Tenserflow was released a year ago. So I did some more digging. recently Tenserflow has gotten supercharged with more efficient code, and the ability to work on multiple machines. Before Tenserflow can only be ran on one computer at a time. That was pretty deficient before, but now it's faster.\n\nAll in all. Tenserflow is a newer faster system that is way better than what some companies have now. And not only that, but the technology can be used by anyone, free of charge\n\nI have to Goto bed, hope this helped.\n\nEdit: a few words",
"If you have no compsci background, we need some introduction. When a developer is writing software, they are _rarely_ thinking about explicitly pushing around 0's and 1's around on a some chip. That's because pushing around 0's and 1's is usually boring and needs to happen a few billions times per second. There are layers and layers of programs between a software developer and the binary shit that makes a computer go at the circuit level (usually). This is called 'abstraction', or 'making stuff easier to think about'. When programmers write an application, they often use collections of code called 'libraries' that make complicated shit easier to avoid reinventing the wheel. TensorFlow is an open-source library that makes machine-learning shit easier to program. Open source means Google posted the code that makes it go on the internet where anyone can read it (and spot flaws). It's important primarily because _Google_ released it. What that means is that people expect Google to _maintain and improve_ TensorFlow. Most people do not have the time or resources to make a large and quality software library, as well as fix all the shit wrong with it that users find. Google has resources and people with huge expertise in lots of necessary fields (machine learning, AI, software development). That means people who start projects can leverage the expertise of the folks at Google, and trust that the library will be supported (patched, improved, extended) for some time to come.",
"It's a library. Think of it as a pre-made tool for working on something (in this case AI). Just like when you want to repair something you don't start by creating your own screwdrivers, hammers, etc. You use the ones available. (Tenserflow represents the tools in this example).\n\nAs for AI. It's just a subset of CS that uses graphs, statistics and probability to get some results. It \"learns\" by getting examples of right results. (Let's say you want computer to \"learn\" to predict which team wins a certain match. You start by giving it previous matches, info about them and the result - > who won. After giving it info about any match it will be able to predict who won based on what it \"learned\" from your examples).\n\nSome exaples of where AI is used are: self driving cars, recommendations, figuring out what is on image, voice recognition, translation, autocomplete keyboards, playing games, coloring colorless images, spam filtering...\n\n"
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15yzq8 | how is adblock plus able to remove the ads that stream before youtube videos? | Also I believe it removes ads that are overlayed on top of the video. How does it do that? How hard would it be for youtube to detect and prevent this? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/15yzq8/how_is_adblock_plus_able_to_remove_the_ads_that/ | {
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" > How does it do that? How hard would it be for youtube to detect and prevent this?\n\nAdblock programs work by reading the instructions to build the webpage, and telling the browser not to follow certain ones.\n\nTo prevent that, YouTube would need to make the ads indistinguishable from other content, to the browser.",
"All ads are shown in pretty much the same way, they send a request out to a server and the server sends back the ad. Adblock is just a list of servers it refuses content from if seen. Sometimes the Adblock will try and find the block on the page that the ad *should* have been shown in and remove that too, so you don't even see a blank space.\n\nThey can't really prevent it. Everything has to come from a specific place and be shown in a specific place. Find either of those and you can get rid of it.",
"So how does the fan boy list and other lists work? "
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1mkhb7 | why is there no color on magnified images. (i.e. images of bacteria) | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1mkhb7/eli5_why_is_there_no_color_on_magnified_images_ie/ | {
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"It all depends on which type of method you use for magnification. If you use an ordinary optical microscope you will actually see colors. Optical microscopes are however limited in how small things they are able to see. Therefore different kinds of electron microscopes are used to see smaller things. Because \"color\" is a property of light it will not be visible in an electron microscope. ",
"I'm a microscopist! I do a combination of transmission electron microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, and focused-ion beam work. The specifics of each instrument don't matter, but I wanted to give you a quick idea on the scope (hehe) of my work.\n\nThe reason your images are black and white is probably because they were taken in an electron microscope! Electrons can behave as both a particle and a wave. When we consider their wave-like nature, they can have a super tiny wavelength on the order of single nanometers, which is 10^-6 millimeters! That's a great deal smaller than light, which is hundreds of nanometers! This means that our electron scope's resolution, which is the minimum distance between two points that makes it so we can see TWO points and not just one blob, is waaaay smaller!\n\nElectron images are black and white because we are looking at *contrast*. If we shoot a beam of electrons at a bacteria, some of the electrons are absorbed and others can do all sorts of fancy things like scatter, reflect... it's actually a really long list! Furthermore, the specimen also emits signals like x-rays and additional electrons due to interaction with our electron beam. When we pick up on these different things with a detector, it gives us a signal! If we're getting a picture, this signal can be bright or dark from different places, giving us the contrast that you see.\n\nColor can be LATER introduced into the image based on artistic ideas or if we know information on the composition or structure of the sample and want to communicate it clearly. This *false, often arbitrary color* can be really misleading to the untrained eye, but very useful and pretty for magazines or quickly conveying information!\nI hope that was sufficiently ELI5... I'll be back on later if you want to ama! \n\nTL;DR Electron microscopes give contrast, not color! "
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1jien5 | is being vegetarian healthy and is it feasible at the population level? | I've heard conflicting views on the healthiness of being vegetarian. As an individual, does it have the potential to be healthier than eating meat or will there always be deficiencies?
Also is it possible for the whole population to live without meat or would this negatively affect the ecosystem somehow? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1jien5/eli5is_being_vegetarian_healthy_and_is_it/ | {
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"1) Vegetarianism is healthy but you usually have to be a little more aware of your diet. People need things like protein and iron which are extremely prevalent in meat but can substitute different fruits/vegetables or even vitamins to make sure they get what their bodies need.\n\n2) This is more theoretical/difficult to say but it's likely possible as we could eliminate livestock populations, freeing up much more food for human consumption. It's unlikely to ever happen but if it did it may be better for our environment as fruits and vegetables usually don't require as much energy to produce as meat (imagine how much corn you need feed a cow for 1 lb of edible beef compared to just eating 1 lb of the corn instead). The fertilizer run-off/water balance could present issues though.",
"There is no doubt that replacing meat with vegies would be better for the environment. It takes a hella lot more energy to produce beef rather than, say soybeans or peanuts. Less farm animals means less carbon dioxide and methane in the air that would boost global warming. Another problem with livestock is that grazing destroys the soil leading to desertification which is a big fancy word for creating deserts or land that is infertile. \n As for healthier for humans, it depends. Since livestock (generally cattle) is fed antibiotics to kill off bacteria which would stunt growth, bacteria that are immune to the antibiotics evolve, which can wreak havoc if it reaches people. Many meats also contain fats which are bad for people as well. This is all well and good; however, what people replace this stuff with can be just as bad. Many packaged foods also contain harmful ingredients and we would no doubt eat more of those if we couldn't eat meat. Being vegetarian also means making sure we still somehow get the protein we need which, while not impossible, may be hard for some people. \n I have seen some vegetarians pull it off well and others who clearly didn't plan it through. Maybe I'm missing some things, but that is the just of it.",
"Being vegetarian *can* be healthy if you pay attention to what you eat & have a balanced diet. If you just suddenly stop eating meat and think things will work, you're going to have problems. There are religions and societies (large groups of Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and Seventh Day Adventists have been doing it for a long time) that do it so it can work for large populations."
]
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14btfr | why some condiments are labeled as fancy | For example ketchup sometimes has the word "fancy" on it. Also, my packet of jam has "Grade A Fancy" in very small print written on it. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/14btfr/eli5_why_some_condiments_are_labeled_as_fancy/ | {
"a_id": [
"c7bnj34"
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"text": [
"It is used mainly as a marketing term and as a designation of quality\n\n\n\"According to Heinz, “fancy” is simply a USDA designation that producers are allowed to use for marketing if their product meets the standards of US Grade A/US Fancy tomato ketchup, which possesses a better color, consistency and flavor, and has fewer specks and particles and less separation of the liquid/solid contents than US Grade B/US Extra Standard Ketchup and US Grade C/US Standard Ketchup.\"\n\n\nSource: _URL_0_"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/107311"
]
] |
|
9qyivz | why is the sun so bright and hard to look at when at noon but becomes dim enough at dusk that we can clearly make out its perfect circular shape | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9qyivz/eli5why_is_the_sun_so_bright_and_hard_to_look_at/ | {
"a_id": [
"e8cocqx"
],
"score": [
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"text": [
"The distance the light travels through the atmosphere. When it's directly over you it doesn't have to travel a long distance, but when it's close at the horizon it has a lot of atmosphere to travel through which dims the light and the refraction of particles in the atmosphere also cause the sky to light up in different colors during that. "
]
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[]
] |
||
bfu7du | why do banks use apple/google pay for contactless payments instead of their own apps? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bfu7du/eli5_why_do_banks_use_applegoogle_pay_for/ | {
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"text": [
"In short, why spend a lot to compete against the leading players in the market to offer the same service when you can just join them.",
"Because much more people use google or Apple Pay instead of the banking organisations one allowing the aforementioned to be much more polished and user friendly",
"The big money here is in the card transaction fees, not in what Google and Apple get. Particularly in the US, those card fees are high and they go to the banks, credit card companies and the processing companies. Because each bank would need its own app, it’s easier and cheaper for them to get Apple and Google to handle that part while they make the big money with the card fees. \n\nAnd before the credit card shills land on my comment with their disinformation bullshit (they always do), Stripe charges 2.9% in the US and 1.4% in Europe. There is both competition and pricing regulation in Europe with credit cards, both of which are essentially nonexistent in the US.",
"Liability.\nIf their App has a catastrophic security bug, and you money gets pulled out of your phone by someone via an NFC vulnerability. They are 100% liable (even though they will blame the user, especially in the case of a Debit Card).\nIf there is a bug in ApplePay or GooglePay, the liability would be spread between the bank, Card Vendor and Apple/Google.\n\nWhen Australian banks didn’t want to sign up to ApplePay, they (and Visa/MasterCard) started pushing NFC bracelets to compete with AppleWatch and Amex. The problem was that there was no Authentication so someone could walk past one of these bracelets with a Square reader and pull out some money.There were a lot of fraudulent transactions before they recalled them.",
"The built-in system apps are a better user experience. On Apple devices, Apple Pay is the *only* way to do it, but there’s still a compelling reason to choose Google Pay too. I’ve got cards from half a dozen different banks and I actively switch between them to pick the right one I want for any transaction. This is super easy with Apple Pay. If some bank’s cards were siloed off in their own app, but others were available in Apple Pay, guess which ones will be used more? Banks desperately want to be your default card in Apple Pay or Google Pay."
]
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[],
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||
7cbbje | what is "brainfreeze"? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7cbbje/eli5what_is_brainfreeze/ | {
"a_id": [
"dpoldlk"
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"text": [
"Your brain uses the temperature sensing nerves at the back of your throat to judge extreme cold. Those nerves are relatively deep in the body while still exposed to the outside. If they're cold, your environment is likely *very* cold. Your body raises its internal temperature to compensate. Specifically, it increases your brain temperature. It's a fever, but instead of helping the body kill germs, it's protecting your brain from extreme cold.\n\nIce cream and smoothies and other frozen treats are very new on a biological time scale. When you eat too much of it too fast, your body responds like it would in extreme cold.\n\nThis is why pressing your tongue against the back of your throat helps. Tongues are warm and full of blood, and they help return those nerves to normal."
]
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[]
] |
||
7stpg1 | how can russians who swim in cold water keep their toes and fingers? | I have a big winter coat, winter gloves, winter hat, winter boots, scarf, am walking at a fast pace, and sometimes I STILL feel my fingers and toes are numb due to cold temperature. How is it possible that I could take off all my clothes, jump in cold water, stay for a few minutes and not lose my extremities? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7stpg1/eli5_how_can_russians_who_swim_in_cold_water_keep/ | {
"a_id": [
"dt7f8yl",
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"text": [
"Vodka.\n\nNo but for real, us Slavs just naturally feel warm. Most of us get sweaty and irritated at normal temperatures. We take cold showers because we're used to it and that helps with the cold too.",
"The reason you lose your fingers, toes, and other extremities in the cold is due to frostbite, which occurs when your extremities freeze. Your body has shunted blood to your core to keep it warm and functioning, and allowed the temperature in your extremities to drop. If this happens when the air temperature is below freezing, then your extremities can potentially go below freezing, too, and literally freeze. This can cause tremendous damage to the extremities as the icing up of your cells bursts cell walls, plus your cells are deprived of fresh blood long enough to cause them to die.\n\nIn contrast, if you're in an environment that is not below freezing, your extremities won't freeze. They'll get really cold as the body shunts blood away from them, but by definition, they can't freeze since they're not in a below freezing situation. Russians swimming in cold water typically are not swimming in water that is below freezing. And they're not in the water for long. Even if they go swim in salt water, which can dip below freezing (i.e. 32 fahrenheit or zero celsius) since salt water freezes at a colder temperature than fresh water, they're not in the water long enough for their extremities to freeze or to be deprived of blood flow long enough to sustain serious damage. They would die of cold a lot sooner than it would take to get frostbite."
]
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[],
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38odvk | why do white people have such unusual names ie. tagg, scooter, buck, apple, skylar? where do they come from? or do their parents just make them up? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/38odvk/eli5_why_do_white_people_have_such_unusual_names/ | {
"a_id": [
"crwi3nt",
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"text": [
"Every ethnicity has unusual names, it's not something specific to white people. Some are made up, others are passed down generation to generation. Beyonce named her kid Blue -- that's also unusual.",
"How on earth is Skylar unusual? The other ones are usually nicknames. "
]
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[],
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] |
||
azexkc | why does cheese stick to the spoon when you put it into hot soup? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/azexkc/eli5_why_does_cheese_stick_to_the_spoon_when_you/ | {
"a_id": [
"ei7l2nm"
],
"score": [
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"text": [
"The spoon is colder than the soup, so when the melted cheese touches it it partially solidifies and grabs onto the spoon. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
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||
12v177 | why do i get sharp pains in my head. | On occasion I get sharp piercing pains on the left side of my head. They instantly go away and there is so residing pain afterwards. I don't see anything that is consistent in what I'm doing at the time of the pain. The pain is enough to make me cringe and close
my eyes. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/12v177/eli5_why_do_i_get_sharp_pains_in_my_head/ | {
"a_id": [
"c6ybxmb",
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"score": [
3,
2
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"text": [
"You should probably ask a doctor.",
"I sometimes, though rarely, get random pains in the head or other places too. Does it happen irregularly for you as well?\n\nIt's not so serious or often to me, but if it is to you it might be something you should take seriously.\n\nJust now I found online that these sharp pains in the head in smaller part of the head, lasting from seconds to minutes, are innocent despite being annoying. "
]
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[],
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|
5yh3rv | why was prohibition less successful than the war on drugs? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5yh3rv/eli5_why_was_prohibition_less_successful_than_the/ | {
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"text": [
"The war on drugs was a failure in the exact same way that prohibition of alcohol was. We just keep doing it anyway.",
"The percentage of people who use alcohol is higher than the amount that use drugs. The more people that flaunt the law, the harder it is to enforce.",
"It depends on how you define success. Context is super important. People often have different definitions, especially the ones who support or oppose it. \n\n[Here's a great chart on how the spending on enforcing the war on drugs has ballooned, yet we still have the same number of people addicted to drugs.](_URL_3_)\n\nIt always baffles me how a handful of people try to control the decisions of legal adults - especially because using drugs is a victimless crime. One things for certain - we now have several gigantic industries who are utterly dependent on ILLEGAL drugs to keep profits up.\n\n- Prison industry. 30 million people have been incarcerated on drug-related crimes. In the mid 2000's as much as 50% (well over a million people) of the prison population was in for drugs. One must also ask themselves... how successful are people at getting jobs after they get out of prison with a felony drug charge? [The private prison industry made $3.3 Billion in 2015](_URL_0_). In addition, [Of the 1,488,707 arrests for drug law violations in 2015, 83.9% (1,249,025) were for possession of a controlled substance. Only 16.1% (239,682) were for the sale or manufacturing of a drug.](_URL_1_)\n\n- Police Forces. [Between 2002-2012, over 1 million police hours were spent in New York City alone for simple marijuana possession.](_URL_2_) That's 50 full-time police officers for 10 years. Doing some simple math, about 1/40 people live in NYC - 50x40 = 2,000 officers over 10 years in the United States. That's just VERY SIMPLE marijuana charges. Add in crack, cocaine, heroine, etc and you can see where this goes.\n\nI stopped doing work to research this so I'm just going to summarize some other stuff...\n\n- Weapons manufacturers. The police force has been militarized / DEA.\n\n- Alcohol industry. Stands to lose A TON from legal marijuana if marijuana/alcohol are replacements.\n\n- Sheer number of probation officers and corrections officers.",
"Alcohol use had broad, mainstream support, especially among middle class whites.\n\nWith other drugs, it was easier to marginalize users as poor and criminal, especially if they were not white.\n\nThat said, by any reasonable assessment, the war on drugs has been an abject failure."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[
"https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/28/how-for-profit-prisons-have-become-the-biggest-lobby-no-one-is-talking-about/?utm_term=.b20f23d627f0",
"http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/Crime#sthash.H1lG7UCG.dpuf",
"http://www.drugpolicy.org/sites/default/files/One_Million_Police_Hours.pdf",
"https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/chart-says-war-drugs-isnt-working/322592/"
],
[]
] |
||
p3xei | elim5 why eating 5-6 smaller meals a day is better then 2-3? | Been in the workout and diet routine for a month now and this advice is always inconsistent. What gives? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/p3xei/elim5_why_eating_56_smaller_meals_a_day_is_better/ | {
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"text": [
"Nothing is \"better\" except whatever makes you the most comfortable. I like to eat less, but more often, because I feel better when I do. But I know this isn't true of everyone.\n",
"It's inconsistent because the science backing this claim up is pretty shaky at best. You lose weight if your body burns calories in excess of what it takes in, plain and simple. Diets act to comfortably facilitate this. If I am trying to cut weight, I find it easier to pig out once a day rather than eat smaller meals intermittently.",
"Supposedly, it's because it psychologically makes it easier to control portions. Nutrition is unaffected, and evidence even for the psychological effect is sketchy at best.",
"Its a myth from what I've heard. Some people think it will keep your metabolism running at peak performance for longer periods of time, but I remember reading studies a while back that said that that actually isn't the case. ",
"It isn't necessarily better. What matters is your overall caloric intake, be that in one meal daily or ten.\n\nThe idea behind eating more meals is that you never really get that hungry, so you don't overeat.\n\n\n"
]
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|
9kp7op | if the voyager 1, the furthest man made object from earth, is roughly 18.8b km away, how do we know about cosmic webs, 100 billion lightyears away, and other extremely far structures of the universe? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9kp7op/eli5_if_the_voyager_1_the_furthest_man_made/ | {
"a_id": [
"e70pzel",
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3
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"text": [
"We... look. \n\nWith telescopes. \n\nAnd mathematical calculations using the redshift of distant objects and the parallax of less distant objects as Earth orbits the Sun allow us to convert the 2D images produced by telescopes into 3D maps of the structure of the universe, lots of complexity to dive into there, but mostly we just use the fact that light has had nearly 14 billion years to get here from distant parts of the universe and... look at it. \n\nEdit: I should mention that we're quite uniquely lucky to be able to do this. A hundred billion years from now, only the faintest stars will still remain and the light from them will have been redshifted into near undetectability as the expansion of the universe accelerates, and ten billion years ago not enough light had reached a single point to get a good idea about the shape of the universe. \n\nEdit2: we don't know about *anything* more than 45 billion lightyears away. That's the furthest any information can have travelled relative to the object it came from since the Big Bang, even with expansion helping it. For all we know, pi is 4 50 billion lightyears from here. ",
"We know about them because they emit electromagnetic radiation or they absorb/bend radiation from other objects. That being said, because nothing travels faster than light, we only have information about the state they were in at the time they radiated. So if you're seeing objects that are a milion lightyears away, you see them as they were a milion years ago. So some of the stars that are shining on your night sky might not even exist now."
]
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[],
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||
3gxh48 | why is it that when people film phone video in portrait mode common websites or apps like youtube, liveleak etc. don't allow play back automatically in portrait full screen mode? | These sites always shrink the video down into landscape view and thus its very tiny. If it was originally filmed full screen on a phone why can't I watch it back full screen on mine!?! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3gxh48/eli5_why_is_it_that_when_people_film_phone_video/ | {
"a_id": [
"cu2fhr0"
],
"score": [
3
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"text": [
"First off, you should never, ever, ever, record video in portrait. The only exception is with Intsagram and Vine, where they are 1:1, so it doesn't matter.\n \nIt's not filmed in \"full screen\" you filmed it sideways and the video player automatically rotates it for easy viewing, making it 9x16. YouTube cannot detect if a video should be displayed in portrait, because where would you draw the line? Letterboxed 4:3 should be horizontal for instance. \n \nWhat YouTube could do is, just like the browser's media player, allow all videos to be played in portrait and landscape, as for why they don't, no real reason other than that you shouldn't record video that way, the YouTube Capture app doesn't even allow portrait video to be recorded."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
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|
4cm2rq | why does burping through the nose not smell as bad as through the mouth? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4cm2rq/eli5_why_does_burping_through_the_nose_not_smell/ | {
"a_id": [
"d1je5ot"
],
"score": [
2
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"text": [
"Air going out of the mouth will include any of the smells that cause bad breath caused by bacteria living in your mouth (which are rather happy after you've just eaten). When air goes out through the nose, it doesn't pick these smells up."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
550c9n | when cooking, why do we mix specific ingredients at a time | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/550c9n/eli5when_cooking_why_do_we_mix_specific/ | {
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"text": [
"Various reasons. It's easier to mix all the liquids together and all the dry and then mix the two mixes, or there needs to be a specific reaction that takes place between two ingredients, etc. ",
"Like the other guy said, various reasons. For instance, when I prepare my base gravy, I make it a point to not add the main vegetable before the base gravy is fully prepared because I don't want the main vegetable to blend in with the rest of the gravy. I want it standing out so that the gravy serves as a \"sidekick\" to add that extra spicy taste.\n\nTL;DR everything has its own role to play.",
"Cooking is chemistry. When you add things causes different reactions to happen. In some cases it is more for a better mixing. "
]
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||
4z29ub | why do we find roller coasters and similar rides enjoyable? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4z29ub/eli5_why_do_we_find_roller_coasters_and_similar/ | {
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"text": [
"\"Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.\" - Winston Churchill\n\nDangerous stimuli, such as great heights and fast speeds - both of which are features of rollercoasters, trigger the sympathetic nervous response, which increases heart rate, blood pressure, and parts of the brain associated with an excitatory state. The role of the sympathetic nervous response is to prepare our bodies to fight off or flee from danger. \n\nCoincidentally, the parts of the brain that are activated are similar to ones activated while in a state of mania, which is characterized by happiness, restlessness, and energy. The sympathetic response may also cause the release of pain-killing endorphins from structures in the brain in anticipation of injury. Endorphins are known to have euphoric (happy) effects as well, which suggests that they might have a role into why we find cheating death to be enjoyable.",
"\"We\"? \nDon't include me in this "
]
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[],
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||
tcpc1 | how we know what everything in space does, and how its formed without actually being there, or witnessing it. | IDK, lol I'm not an astronomer, I don't even know how to word the question right. But how is it that we somehow know what, for example, a black hole is, how it got there, and what it does without actually witnessing any of it happen. or did we? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/tcpc1/eli5_how_we_know_what_everything_in_space_does/ | {
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"text": [
"We can witness a lot of it through telescopes. We know about planets around other stars, for example, by the 'wobble' of the star that we can observe when watching it. The mass of something affects everything else in the universe, so whilst a star holds a planet in its orbit, the mass of the planet also moves the star, just to a much lesser extent.\n\nFirst we make a prediction, and to continue with this example, we assume there might be other planets because our star has planets. Then we try and make an observation that confirms it.\n\nBut there are also things that are inferred through our current understanding of physics. A black hole is implied by modelling mathematically how ultra massive objects might behave, and we predicted blackholes before we ever actually had evidence of them.\n\nThe big bang was later backed up by background radiation that fit the predictions we made when we observed the red shift in galaxies (the red shift is caused by the fact that light is stretched to a different wavelength by something accelerating away, like a doppler effect but with light) and so on. So even things we can't physically see, we can infer and that at least gives us a starting point about where we should start looking.\n\nAll of these are massively over-simplified but you get the idea.",
" > without actually being there, or witnessing it\n\nIf a nuclear bomb went off many miles away, but you were on top of a mountain and saw the cloud, you still witnessed it. Now, if you were farther away and saw it through binoculars, you still witnessed it.\n\nSimilarly, we totally witness things in space via telescopes and other instruments.",
"You're standing in the mountains. Green trees, rocky hill tops, bear crap, the whole nine yards. \n\nSuddenly, you hear a crashing noise off in the distance, You look that direction and you see a large boulder rolling and tumbling down the side of a mountain, as it's going, it's knocking loose other rocks and dirt, and by the end, you see a good chunk of the mountain has slumped down in a rock slide. It's made an interesting hollow shape in the otherwise smooth sided mountain. You look at the mountain next to it, and you can see a similiar depression in its side, but the edges are a little smoother, and the pile of rocks at the bottom is mostly worn away and grown over with shrubs and grass. You look on the other side, and you notice that there is nothing like that on THAT mountain, but you notice a huge boulder precariously balanced up at the top. NOW imagine that instead of seeing that rockslide happen in real time, the whole process of that big rock falling from the top ending in a big pile of rocks and dirt at the bottom was going in super slow mo, and it actually took an hour for that big rock to roll forward an inch.\n\nSo by seeing ONE thing, you can now look around and see where the similiar event has happened before, and where a similiar event will happen again. When we look at our solar system and go \"Our planets formed from accretion discs of material coelescing around a newly formed star, eventually combining into planetoid shapes.\" All we are really saying is \"There's a big pile of crap over there that's forming a new star. And right there, there's two new stars with all this crap still circling around it. Then there's that thing over there that's a star with planets starting to form around it from all that crap....This seems to be a common theme in the universe....hmmm..\"\n\nHas anyone ever WITNESSED a solar system forming together? no. That process takes billions of years and we've only been *really* looking for a few hundred. But we can see BILLIONS of examples of what it looks like immediately after, and some a LONG time after it happened...and some just before it happened, etc. Same thing with black holes. We can't watch a real-time video of a black hole eating a star. But you can take a collage of pictures of people eating a steak dinner, and eventually you can make them into this weird little flip book of this amorphous blob of humanity picking up a fork and a knife, cutting into the steak, and putting that first bite into his/her mouth. "
]
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3u4f6a | if a company is hacked and user name and passwords are compromised, why doesn't the company immediately disable all of the accounts and require a new password upon next log on? | Saw a post that Amazon was hacked. Wouldn't it be easier to lock out the entirety of usernames and passwords and require a new password upon next log in? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3u4f6a/eli5_if_a_company_is_hacked_and_user_name_and/ | {
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"text": [
"If it is a very serious breach they will require users to get a new password at some point. Most data breaches are not very severe though, as even if you can access password data it is usually hashed and salted and sometimes even encrypted, which means hackers have close to 0% chance to actually find out passwords of users.",
"Well that only stops one of the problems. Most people reuse their login information across many services. So even if Amazon makes you change your password, the hacker could use the information they got to get into other sites."
]
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[],
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|
8y64nt | how do women who have been on birth control pills their whole life have menopause? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8y64nt/eli5_how_do_women_who_have_been_on_birth_control/ | {
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"Menopause has more to do with active hormone cycles than the actual egg. The endocrine system has more say of when menopause begins rather than actual fertility. \n\nThe pill only introduces 1-3 hormones which control ovulation. However there are a slew of other hormones that drive reproductive function. The decrease of naturally produced estrogens and increase of testosterones is a more sure sign of menopause, rather than \"how many eggs are left\".",
"Sure, but in the womb, a female fetus has millions of eggs, by birth there are about a million or two. By puberty at age 12 it’s half a million. At menopause there are still a couple thousand left. \n\nThey eggs saved are nothing compared to those a female starts with vs ends with. The eggs lost to a period is nothing. That’s like 500-1000 for 30 years of menstruation. ",
"Egg reserves deplete due to the natural aging process, the lack of ovulation while taking birth control does not protect the eggs from aging.\n\nBirth control can mask menopause for women who continue to take it into their 50’s because they contain synthetic estrogen and progesterone which the ovaries stop producing with age as well, this doesn’t mean that they can get pregnant though because the egg reserves have aged too much. As soon as they stop taking birth control they will experience all the symptoms of menopause. ",
"Women start out with tons of potential eggs, however every cycle a batch of them develop, but only one becomes a fully fledged egg. During the follicular phase of the menstrual cycle, the baby egg cells develop but only the biggest cell gets ovulated, the rest atrophy away. Ovulation requires specific hormones to happen, otherwise the egg cell will just sit there and eventually atrophy like the smaller cells did. Most hormonal birth control effectively blocks the production of the hormone required to induce ovulation, thus causing the egg to atrophy, and thus using up your egg reserves.\nSome forms of birth control affect the uterine environment to make the implantation of an ovulated egg unlikely (eg.copper IUD), which doesn't stop you from producing eggs but just stops the fertilized egg from implanting into the uterus and developping.\nMost forms of birth control have some effect on both of these."
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22k9wx | the difference between 100s and short cigarettes | Aside from them being different length, what makes them different... Why would there not be a difference in price if there is more or less contained in the cigarettes? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22k9wx/eli5_the_difference_between_100s_and_short/ | {
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"The 100s contain more filter, same amount of tobacco I believe. ",
"This appears to be summed up quite well at _URL_0_"
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3e0q2b | how has donald trump gained such front-running status so quickly? | How has he had such a blitz in poll numbers? Do people know nothing about him or are these poll numbers skewed or should I just lose hope in humanity? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3e0q2b/eli5_how_has_donald_trump_gained_such/ | {
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"Keep in mind he is only polling at 15%, and that is just among Republicans. He is going off name recognition mostly. That and the fact that nobody likes any of the candidates that are running. ",
"Have you ever heard of the phrase \"there's no such thing as bad publicity\"? He's pretty much took that and ran with it. The news loves reporting about him because he's always doing something interesting, even if it is pants on head retarded, so the viewers hear about him more than anybody else and so he's in the front of their minds more often. It's an interesting phenomena for sure."
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aen7ws | how does a vickrey auction work? | _URL_0_
It says that the highest bidder wins, but they pays the amount bid by the second-highest bidder. Am I interpreting this wrong? Why can't you just bid a billion dollars, because you never pay your bidded amount? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aen7ws/eli5_how_does_a_vickrey_auction_work/ | {
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"Because it’s a sealed bid auction, you don’t know what other people have bid. \n\nYou could put a ridiculous bid, but so could someone else, forcing you or them to actually pay it. \n\nThe idea behind them is to make you bid what you believe it’s actually worth. ",
"I think what you’re missing is the purpose of auch auctions. The purpose of this auction as a buyer is to buy a product of unknown price for about as much as it is worth to you. \nYou don’t bid in an auction to win (usually) but to buy a product of limited availability for the price you are willing to pay. The problem is, that you as a bidder don’t know, what everyone else is bidding. You might be willing to pay 1000$ for it, but when the second highest bidder just wants to pay 10$ you effectively wasted 990$. \nSo you guess, that other people are just willing to pay around 10$ for it, so you bid 20$. But let’s now say your guess was wrong, and someone else bid actually 21$. You lost, despite the fact, that you were willing to pay 50 times as much, if it were necessary.\n \nThis kind of auction fixes this. Now you can actually bid your 1000$ you are willing to pay, full knowing, that you won’t waste any unnecessary dollars. \n \nTo answer your question: you don’t simply bid 1 billion $, because it’s not about winning, but it’s about buying a product for a reasonable price. \nAnd if you’re not willing to pay more than 500$ you shouldn’t be sad if anyone else wins paying 750$, because you wouldn’t want it for that much anyways."
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7csgz6 | what happens to profits after a company becomes closed or defunct? | Such as buying a game after the developer goes defunct, a song after the record company closes, etc. Does money always make it's way to someone involved, or does the publisher/retailer keep the profit from that point? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7csgz6/eli5_what_happens_to_profits_after_a_company/ | {
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"When a store gets a physical good, such as a game or a CD, they pay for it. At that point, the company that produced it has made their profit. It doesn't matter if the product sells tomorrow or 5 years from now or gets thrown in the trash - profits have been made.\n\nFurthermore, few businesses ever simply shut their doors & walk away from everything. They generally sell all their assets - including intellectual property rights - to some other company so they can pay off outstanding debts or let the owners cash out of the business. Whoever buys these rights then has the ability to produce new copies & profit from them.\n\nSometimes, with creative works like books & music, the rights revert to the band/author and they're able to find a new publisher and start selling new copies.",
"For intellectual property, the assets will be liquidated, and another company or an investor will likely buy the rights to those properties, and any royalties or additional profits will go back to them."
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4k3brc | what is the purpose of information technology infrastructure library(itil)? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4k3brc/eli5what_is_the_purpose_of_information_technology/ | {
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"At its most basic level, ITIL is really a set of best practices for IT Service Management - without a methodical approach, Service Management can be something that's done on a fairly ad-hoc basis without any specific direction to it.\n\nAlthough ITIL doesn't seek to specifically set in stone how things should be done, as a framework it provides a useful toolset to build a company's IT Service Management organisation and practices on.",
"Just one example of ITIL practices is the concept of a \"Help Desk\". With a Help Desk, any consumer of technology calls a single number no matter what the issue is. This Help Desk then routes the issue to the appropriate team to perform the fix.\n\nWithout a Help Desk, the technology consumer would need to have a huge list of numbers to call the specific group that handles the specific issue they are having. Or, they'd get re-routed multiple times in order to get in touch with the correct group."
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8wa9f9 | why is the book of mormon in so many hotel rooms even though it isn’t a major religion? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8wa9f9/eli5_why_is_the_book_of_mormon_in_so_many_hotel/ | {
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"The founder of Marriott was a Mormon. All their hotels (Fairfield Inn, Marriott, Courtyard, Renaissance etc) will have the Book of Mormon. They just bought Starwood hotels (Sheraton, W, Westin, etc) so likely their hotels will soon have them as well. I don't know if LDS donates the books like Gideons though."
]
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||
23krq0 | why is primary and secondary education free and considered essential for everyone but not university? | All children must enroll at primary school because that is considered basic education and that isn't enough either so they have to go to high school. But then the line is drawn at college and universitiy around the age of 17,18 where they are highly selective and expensive.
Is it because our society has simply not developed to the point where everyone can go to university or because it is an admission that not everyone has the academic ability or "brain power" to learn in college?
I knew a student in high school who was taking university courses at 16. I asked him whether it's free because education for minors under 18 should be free. He said no, he has to pay full tuition because it is a university, it doesn't matter how old the child is. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/23krq0/eli5_why_is_primary_and_secondary_education_free/ | {
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"It is free in Denmark.\n\nI guess the reason is that everyone need some basic education but many jobs do not require a university degree. And it is of course a political decision so not a surprise that it isn't free in a country where people don't like to pay tax",
"Typically, university education are also significantly more expensive. I'm not just talking the fraction that the student sees at public universities and colleges, those costs are subsidized, but they still exist.\n\nThanks to the internets though, a huge portion of the university education is available free online to those who seek it.",
"Kids need to be occupied somehow during the day. You can't have a bunch of non-citizens just roaming the streets unsupervised, inflicting havoc on the community. School is a nice compromise between providing education and locking them up. \n\nAfter high school, they can work full hours or be punished as an adult. There's less incentive to spend additional funding on teaching them. Besides, you have to draw the line somewhere. ",
"The basic idea is that primary education prepares you for the basics, then secondary education prepares you for work. You only need university for more specialised forms of work - otherwise you're already prepared except for specific job training. If there's an argument to be made about the development of our society, it's that we've not yet gotten to the stage where 95% of jobs require advanced education in order for them to be done. \n\nMaybe in 100 years time none of our familiar systems will be left, like the replacement of mechanics knowing about the physical workings of car engines with engineers who must understand the computerised parts too. Perhaps most non-creative pursuits will go the same way. In that case we'll need everyone university educated to look after the robots that are doing everything for us...\n\nFor now, most jobs require experience, not university education.",
"When I went to unversity (this was in the UK), I was one of the last to get a grant, before student loans were introduced, and long before students had to pay tuition fees. Essentially, it was free. And yet fewer people went to university. Now, more and more people are going to university, and are being encouraged to do so, even though it's costing them huge amounts of money. The result has been a massive increase in student debt, and also a kind of academic inflation: a BA used to be worth something, but now everyone seems to be getting a bachelor's degree which just means they have to study even longer if they want a degree employers will take any notice of.\n\nBut here's my take on it: We really don't want a nation of brainboxes. When you say this:\n\n > our society has simply not developed to the point where everyone can go to university or because it is an admission that not everyone has the academic ability or \"brain power\" to learn in college\n\nyou're assuming that academic qualifications are somehow better or more desireable than vocational qualifications. And I think this attitude is causing great damage to our society.\n\nThe assumption is that a bricklayer is somehow worth less than an art historian. Oh really? Says who? Train everyone to stare at petri dishes or write sentences in the Proto-Indo-European language, and who's going to fix the plumbing? What possible use is a nation of deskbound office workers?\n\nAcademic excellence is not the only measure of a person's worth. And there's actually a lot of skill and brain power involved in laying the foundations for a house so that the house will stand. We really need to get away from the idea that these vocational skills are worthless or that by failing to get everybody reading Proust we are somehow failing in our duty to provide them with an education. Instead, we should be recognising these jobs as demanding and valuable professions, and the people in those jobs should be respected as the skilled professionals they are. We should be paying them properly, making sure they have access to proper health care and ensuring that we don't look down on them as second-class citizens.",
"It´s easy.\nThe primary school and highschool are considered the minimum education to be productive. After that point (18s) society wants you to be economically profitable, doesn´t matter the way. I mean, by working or paying more studies. ",
"Imagine if you had neither, or only primary. You'd only know how to read and write at a basic level. What are your job prospects? Next to none, as every job nowadays requires you to use a computer or write reports or calculate things, which you can't do unless you've done 12 years of compulsory schooling. So, it is in the government's interest to make sure you can get a job somewhere, otherwise they'll end up paying for your unemployment benefits. Why not tertiary education? Because you can still earn a reasonable wage without having gone to university. ",
"It's not free. It's paid for by taxation.",
"Because taxpayers cover the cost of primary school because it makes for a smarter voting population, lowers crime, and improves the areas tax basis. But college is considered a luxury and therefore the cost is covered by the person attending and not by taxes. ",
"Every society need's a bottom rung. Basic education will (hopefully) make you a functioning enough member of society to pump gas or stock shelves at the supermarket by the time you get through high school. If that's all you want in life, sweet as, but if you want more you have to work for it. And if you're willing to put in the effort and are smart enough it will pay off in the long run. At the very least it will weed out the ones that don't really want to put the effort in. Not everyone can be a doctor or a lawyer, someone has to do the more unpleasant jobs as well.",
"Public primary/secondary isn't free we pay it in the form of taxes and then somtimes school fees"
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ediohf | why do handbrakes/e-brakes and footbrakes work differently? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ediohf/eli5_why_do_handbrakesebrakes_and_footbrakes_work/ | {
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"Foot brakes are usually a hydraulic system. You step on the pedal, fluid moves and a caliper compresses the brake shoes. There are many parts here: hydraulic fluid, accumulators, pistons... lots of things that can leak or break.\n\nHand brakes are usually just cables, directly connected to a caliper. You pull the brake, the cable tugs on the caliper and the brake shoes make contact.\n\nHydraulic brakes make it easy to apply a lot of braking quickly, as well as offering you a smooth continuum of incremental braking ability.\n\nHand brakes offer you a robust system with few parts that can break.",
"For safety and because they have radically different intended uses, they are built and behave differently.\n\nThe handbrake is simpler and separate from the footbrake, and generally not intended to take such significant loads. Holding a stopped car stopped takes less pressure than stopping a moving car which is its main purpose, but can still be used in an emergency where the the hydraulic brakes have failed for whatever reason. To this end it often has a much longer throw with less overall pressure, is often cable-connected rather than hydraulic, and has a ratchet system to keep it engaged even when you leave. Of course this varies by car.\n\nThe foot-brake is hydraulically powered with assist from the engine. If the engine shuts down it will not withstand being pressed repeatedly before you lose the assist and you will have to put major pressure on the pedal to get any useful stopping power. However with the asst they usually have more stopping power than the engine can overcome, and flooring the brake will WILL lock up the wheels easily (assuming no ABS)."
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1ymdql | when the army is called in to handle violent protests, etc why do these men agree to shoot upon their own fellow citizens? what happens if you refuse? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ymdql/eli5_when_the_army_is_called_in_to_handle_violent/ | {
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"Because most of the time, the army isn't called to stop a protest unless it has become a full fledged riot. And rioters are not exerting their right to protest anymore, they have just become a danger to themselves and others and to private and public property, and must be dealt with as such. \n\nIn the case of peaceful protests being attacked by the military. The reasoning (although flawed) is more or less the same: These people are a danger to the country and must be dealt with accordingly. \n\nIf you refuse, you get charged with desertion and will probably face court-martial. "
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2qw7jp | before electronic currency, how did central banks, e.g the fed, pay for the production of legal tender (bills/coins)? | It costs money to print money. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2qw7jp/eli5_before_electronic_currency_how_did_central/ | {
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"Electronic bookkeeping was not the first time balances were written down rather than represented with physical objects. Did you think that when I deposited $50 in a bank in 1950, that exact $50 bill was kept in the vault until I asked for it back? No, they took the bill, added it to their stash, and added 50 to the number next to my name. Did you think that, to give my son money for college in 1970, I would have to literally drive across the country with $1000 in a suitcase and hand it to the Bursar? You do know that checks predate electronics, right?\n\nAll the Fed had to do back in the day was take the materials that were to be used to print the money, and pay for them with a debit on their account, and a credit on their supplier's account. Same with the laborers. Tim Berners-Lee did a lot of great things, but he didn't invent writing down numbers. "
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3q11ss | what happens to a company when it's stock reaches zero? | Does the company go bankrupt? I know the stock market is largely based on faith in a company, but can't a company run without people having faith in it? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3q11ss/eli5_what_happens_to_a_company_when_its_stock/ | {
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"The company won't go bankrupt just because its stock price has collapsed, but the stock price probably collapsed because of other problems which are about to lead to the company going bankrupt.\n\nLet's assume that the company is in fact trading quite happily but the stock market has just lost all faith in it for some reason. Perhaps they appear to be in serious trouble but actually have a great new contract or invention on the way which they can't announce yet. The main problem with the stock price being very low would then be the risk of a hostile takeover. If the stock price is pennies and a competitor wants to buy the company, the directors will struggle to convince the shareholders not to sell.",
"The question is how a stock price would reach actual 0 - sure, it may get to the point where someone would be willing to unload a billion shares for a decent sandwich, but actual $0.000000000 means that someone would rather give away the company rather than hold on to it. \n\nThe way a corporation works is that the shareholder has almost no risk, other than the money they have spent on shares. If I buy Coca Cola shares, and the CEO is revealed to have been murdering children as part of their business strategy, and they're sued for a trillion dollars and they lose... the only thing a shareholder can lose is the total value of the shares. \n\nSo now Coca Cola's shares drop to $0.000001 each. Someone could buy the whole company for a few grand, which may be risky depending on how bad the real damage is. But why would they drop to $0? Someone could literally take it over with no risk at all, not a penny (outside of administrative fees to actually do so). Someone else may say \"well this is worth $100 to me!\" And thus, the share price isn't $0. \n\nAgain though - why would someone sell at that point? If I bought $10 000 in shares, and they dropped to $0.000001 in value, why would I sell? It's not worth me calling someone to make the trade happen. Everyone would just sit on them, and hope the price rises again. "
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1c5xw9 | what is wall street | Explain (like I'm 5) what is walstreet? And what is occupy walstreet? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1c5xw9/eli5_what_is_wall_street/ | {
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"Wall Street is a place where people buy and sell shares of companies. ",
"Wall Street is a famous street in New York with many Banks and trading places. The trading places don't sell goods, they sell shares in big companies and shares in big deals, like oil.\n\nThis is important to pay for big things, like whole ships full of oil to keep our cars going, and new businesses to create new jobs.\n\nSometimes, things don't work out - shares in a company get sold and then the company goes down, and the people who bought the shares loose their money and are very unhappy.\n\nOr someone borrows money from the bank where many people saved it, and looses it with a bad deal. The bank gets in trouble and needs to ask the government for money so people don't loose their savings. But the people still have to pay, because they pay the taxes to help the bank, while the people who profited from the bad deals get to keep the money.\n\nOccupy Wall Street is a group of some people, who feel they have to do something against this, so they protest against and sometimes disturb banking and trading of this kind.\n\nThey often think there are better solutions than allowing traders to do such deals, and they usually believe the government has to do more to control things, so that nothing bad happens.\n\nMany even want very big changes in the way money is handled, which puts them in conflict with governments and traders who say that the trading is necessary to keep things going well for us.\n\nSo sometimes, they clash with police who try to keep them from disturbing the banks and trading places too much.",
"Many hundreds of years ago Wall St was where the northern wall of the Dutch Colony of New Amsterdam stood. The name apparently stuck over time and at some point banks and other financial firms started calling that street and the streets around it home. The term Wall Street has come to mean the entire banking/finance industry in the US."
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1kdgir | what's the deal with the holy trinity? why is it still monotheistic? | I understand the concept of God and Jesus, but what is the Holy Spirit? And how does Christianity remain monotheistic? I'm asking this with a respectful curiosity. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1kdgir/eli5_whats_the_deal_with_the_holy_trinity_why_is/ | {
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"The idea is that even though there are three parts they are the same thing.\n\nBelievers might describe it as parts of the body. While your arm is obviously different from your head, it's all you.",
"The Trinity distinguishes between persons and beings, or in layman terms one what and three who's.\n\nGod is one what (being) with three who's (persons). Each person is 100% God, co-equal (of equal power) and co-eternal (having existed forever). One person is not 1/3 of God because God is infinite and it is impossible to divide infinity into 3.\n\nThe three persons are the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Father is unseen in heaven, the Son is the image of the Father, and the Holy Spirit works among believers.\n\nThere is no appropriate analogy because God is unique and thus there is nothing in creation which can accurately describe him.\n\n",
"[Here's a good visual on the Trinity](_URL_0_). I haven't seen any better than this and it has no obvious errors as far as I can tell.",
"Jesus is God\n\nThe Father is God\n\nThe Holy Spirit is God\n\nJesus is not the Father or the Spirit\n\nThe Father is not Jesus or the Spirit\n\nThe Spirit is not Jesus or the Father\n\n\nAll three the same singular God. Existing at the same time, through all time, above time, in perfect unity. ",
"[1 John 5:7](_URL_0_): \"For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.\"\n\nGod the Father is God seated in heaven, God the Word is Jesus Christ (God manifested in the flesh) and God the Holy Ghost is God manifested in spirit within the believer (the true church).\n\nThese are three aspects of the same God, therefore the trinity is monotheistic."
]
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5dd2s9 | how do compression stockings help to prevent blood clots? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5dd2s9/eli5_how_do_compression_stockings_help_to_prevent/ | {
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"Blood clots tend to form when blood is sitting stagnant. The compression increases blood pressure in the area and pushes blood out of the area, back into circulation."
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2w9q94 | how is it that software can crash, but restarting and trying a second time doesn't always yield the same results? | I mean, I've always thought computers are so logical, they are literally repeating the same steps and routines. This is strange because sometimes a program can do something wrong and crash, but if you reopen and do the same thing, it'll work the second time around. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2w9q94/eli5_how_is_it_that_software_can_crash_but/ | {
"a_id": [
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"A lot of programs are doing a number of things simultaneously. It could easily be something \"under the covers\" that causes the crash. The actions you're found may only cause a problem if a number of other things were done first. Or, even tougher to find and fix, the problem may only occur when a few things under the covers conflict, and nothing you do may have caused the failure."
]
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430n3i | einstein podolsky rosen paradox | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/430n3i/eli5_einstein_podolsky_rosen_paradox/ | {
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"This is actually not terribly hard to do.\n\nHeisenberg's Uncertainty Principle states that certain properties of quantum mechanical systems can't be precisely known simultaneously (why this is the case doesn't matter too much for an ELI5-level understanding of the EPR argument). Among such properties are position and momentum: the more precisely you know one, the less certain you can be about the other. Quantum mechanics also (usually) purports to be a \"complete\" theory of quantum systems: it tells you everything there is to know about the system, with nothing left out. EPR tried to show that these two assumptions are incompatible with one another, generating a paradox. \n\nHere's the original setup. Suppose, EPR said, we have two particles A and B that are allowed to become entangled with one another so that their positions and momentums are correlated, then the particles are separated. We can imagine this as something like allowing two billiard balls to roll down a track toward each other, strike together, and then bounce off in opposite directions along the track. We let the particles drift apart for a while without disturbing them until they're separated by a substantial distance.\n\nNow, Heisenberg states that we can't know both the position and momentum of either particle with perfect precision. But suppose, EPR said, we do the following. We first measure the position of Particle A. Since we know how particle A is correlated with Particle B, this lets us deduce the position of Particle B as well. But we could equally well have chosen to measure the *momentum* of Particle A. Again, because we know how the two are correlated, this would have let us deduce the momentum of Particle B. Since Particles A and B are far apart from one another, there's no way for Particle A to \"tell\" Particle B whether we've chosen to measure position or momentum, and since we could make either a measurement that would let us know Particle B's position or Particle B's momentum with certainty, Particle B must have had both a particular position and particular momentum all along. This violates Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, generating a paradox. EPR concludes, then, that the starting assumption that quantum mechanics was complete must be false. There must be properties about Particle B that have real values, but which quantum mechanics doesn't cover. Einstein suggested that this paradox was best resolved by positing what's called \"local hidden variables:\" features of quantum mechanical systems that are concrete, real, and spatially localized but which are inaccessible to measurement.\n\nOf course, there are a number of problematic assumptions in their setup that eventually turned out to be false. Most significantly, they assumed that given sufficient spatial separation, Particle A and Particle B could be prevented from interacting with one another, despite being part of an entangled pair. They justified this assumption by pointing out that otherwise, Particle A would have to exert an influence on Particle B instantaneously, which seems to violate Special Relativity's prohibition on faster-than-light information exchange. This was what Einstein called \"spooky action at a distance.\" If you assume that Particle A and B can interact even when spatially separated, the EPR argument falls apart.\n\nEventually (in 1964), John Bell [proved](_URL_0_) that the experimentally observed statistical behavior of entangled particles *could not* be explained by such local hidden variables; the numbers just failed to add up. His result, Bell's Theorem, is a proof (in the strongest possible sense) that any theory of quantum mechanics that reproduces the observed behavior of quantum systems *has to be* non-local in at least some sense (either by permitting action at a distance *or* by positing *global* hidden variables that aren't unique to individual particles). The EPR paradox was thus resolved by showing that one of their assumptions--locality--was false."
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1yjok6 | can somebody please help me to understand the political structure in india and how this influences the citizens? | This is something I've been trying to wrap my head around recently and I cannot seem to find a simple answer. From what I understand so far is that they employ both a president and prime minister and that they have different purposes, but I'm not entirely sure how it all works. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1yjok6/eli5_can_somebody_please_help_me_to_understand/ | {
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"Okay, I'll bite since I'm Indian.\n\nIndia does have both a president and a prime minister. The real power though rests with the Prime Minister (Dr. Manmohan Singh) while the President (Pranab Mukherjee) is only a ceremonial head. India inherited this system from the UK and the President essentially fulfills the role of the monarch. \n\n**Who elects the PM?** Technically, the PM isn't elected, but chosen by the party/coalition that has a simple majority in the lower house of the Parliament. The lower house (Lok Sabha) has Members of Parliament (MPs) who represent as many as 543 constituencies covering the whole country. The MPs in the Lok Sabha are elected by the people in a General Election that takes place once every five years. \n\n**Who elects the President?** The President is elected by the MPs of both the lower and upper house (Rajya Sabha) as well as the Members of the Legislative Assemblies (MLAs) of the different states of the country. A Legislative Assembly is the state equivalent of the Lok Sabha. The President is almost always somebody who enjoys good support from whichever party is in the majority at the time of the election, making them nothing more than puppets. \n\n**Who elects the Rajya Sabha MPs?** They're not elected, rather nominated by state legislative assemblies. On paper, they are supposed to be experts from different fields, but only rarely does this happen. A Rajya Sabha MP's term lasts for six years. The incumbent PM is a member of the Rajya Sabha.\n\nQuestions?"
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26p2bj | the purpose of developing self driving cars. | I'm wondering why so much research effort and finance is going into developing self driving cars.
Edit: Another reason I'm asking this is because I'm thinking of that Henry Ford quote ("If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."). Maybe it's not a driverless car that we need - maybe it's something else that none of us have imagined or innovated yet. I.e. What will be the "motorcar" of the 21st century? (Maybe that's a question for another post). | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/26p2bj/eli5the_purpose_of_developing_self_driving_cars/ | {
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"Because nearly every traffic accident is caused by driver error AND nearly every traffic jam is caused by driver over-reaction. If we eliminate those two issues, our roads become exponentially safer and more efficient.\n\nFactor in all the fuel savings by removing the driver, and we're heading into a sunny future.",
"Many people spend a significant amount of time driving, especially their daily commute due to their job. Many people spend well over an hour driving to and from work. \n\nI would pay a significant premium on a vehicle if it were capable of driving itself, which would free up that hour each day for me to just sit back and read, or play games, or just take a nap. I sleep about 8 hours per day, I work about 8 hours per day, that leaves me only 8 hours for all the other stuff I'd like to get done. If a self driving car would free up one of those scarce hours, sign me up. \n\nThere's also a zillion other more business oriented reasons. How much would Walmart save in costs if their trucks drove themselves, and they didn't have to hire thousands of drivers to ship products across the country?\n\n",
"Here's 3 reasons, there are plenty more too.\n\nSafety - human drivers are prone to errors. When you make an error while driving a car, it often doesn't end well.\n\n\nEfficiency - human drivers have to be cautious so they don't crash, this causes traffic build ups. Self driving cars could drive faster and closer to one another, and at constant speeds, reducing travel time and fuel costs.\n\n\nComfort - you can have a nap, read a book etc while traveling, instead of having to focus on the road. And you don't have to use public transport, which is often not ideal, for various reasons.\n\n",
"A self driving car will result in significant cost reductions across industries and will grant greater freedom and comfort to the passengers in the car.\n\nSelf driving cars never speed, and traffic violations will be reduced to only cars that are manually operated. Traffic enforcement departments will evaporate as a dedicated workforce will become outmodded. Local police can pick up the slack, which will be minimal. That's an entire branch of your local law enforcement that doesn't need to be financially maintained. That money can be diverted to anything else more important.\n\nTraffic congestion will be greatly reduced, as most congestion occurs because of human piloting of vehicles. Intersections become more efficient as cars can negotiate traversal order. Traffic lights become outmodded. Did you know crosswalk buttons are placebos? Almost none in the US are wired up to actually do anything. Now, with traffic signals no longer necessary, the only signaling in an intersection will be to disrupt traffic so pedestrians can cross.\n\nThe cars can drive under extremely tight margins, bumper to bumper, for more efficient use of space. They can drive in groups to maximize aerodynamic efficiency, they can brake in unison, should they need.\n\nCars will communicate with each other in local, ad-hoc style mesh networks with whoever else is in range. They can coordinate speeds, passing, braking, lane changes, group configurations, and intersections faster and more efficiently than humans can. All this comes down to better use of road space, greater fuel economy, reduced travel time, and increased safety.\n\nSpeeds can increase as automated cars are safer.\n\nAnd automated cars never speed, and never drive aggressively, or drunk, and they don't do stupid risky things. Insurance on an automated car will be down through the floor, as insurance becomes a factor of the car and not the driver.\n\nAutomated cars can operate like taxis, they can show up when and where you need them and take you where you want to go. In fact, if the whole US fleet were automated, it seems unnecessary to even own a personal car. Perhaps a subscription model or an optional pay-per-use would be more effective. Cars would always be out and about so you could hail one and get a quick response, or schedule ahead of time and know it will be there and for you, and others can't snatch your ride.\n\nIf this is how cars operate, then your children can utilize cars themselves. Damn kids want to go to the mall? Don't want to take them? They can get themselves there.\n\nNow that no one has to manually operate the vehicle, you don't have to worry about drunks, or the fatigued falling asleep behind the wheel. No more driver distractions. You can arrange the seats to face inward and converse with your neighbors, do homework, get work done, take a nap, or have a cocktail.",
"Can't believe no one touched on this. The reason GOOGLE is developing self driving cars is to free up the one individual that, in their current state, cannot pump their main revenue engine (advertising) - the driver. 96% of Google's revenue is derived from advertising and since their advertising platform is basically ubiquitous across the internet, the basic fact is, the more time you spend on the internet, the more money they stand to make. I don't have the calculations on hand, however I've worked out what freeing up all driving hours in the US could generate in advertising revenue and it is significant. "
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3xwrip | why does comcast charge me *less* to provide tv internet than internet alone? | I was paying $80/month for Internet alone. Called up, they offered me the same Internet service plus basic TV for $60/month with a one-year contract. How is this a better deal for them?
When I lived another place, the local provider there did the same thing, so it's not just Comcast either. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3xwrip/eli5_why_does_comcast_charge_me_less_to_provide/ | {
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"This is likely some promotional rate, which will increase in 12-24 months above what you were paying for a single service.",
"They bundle it up. The thing is though after your promo is over it will be a lot higher and they will hope u don't go back to just Internet. ",
"They are not charging less for tv+internet. They are charge more for only internet. If they charged less for internet - lets say 40$ - you would use that. A logical person would think charging twice the reasonable price for internet would make them lose customers but in reality they just \"force\" you to buy the TV subscribtion too by making it seem like you are paying less. A further question can be \"then why do they have an internet option?\". First, if someone somehow gets the internet only option the company earns more money. Second, if there wasn't an internet only option you would question it and demand to get a discount by not getting the tv of tv+internet and they would either lose money or look bad publically. ",
"i work in telecom so this is what the marketing folks actually want from consumer.\n\nthey want the user to signed up to their services.\n\neven with 60/mth, they are earning quite a bit from you. the analogy is that when you have service with them, there is a chance that you will upgrade your services or continue to spend on their services rather then not having any of their service.\n\nmeaning to say, you might 1 day be jolly and subscribe a new channel from the paid tv section and to them, it is an opportunity. \n\ni hope this clarify your doubt.\n\nto be honest, if you think that no one would add services that is totally not true, there are many people in this world would pay for nothing. the data of profit shows exactly my sentiment because many people would just be like \"oh it is just a 1.99 only\".\n\n"
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4dek74 | when you read news articles about global warming such as "the hottest year on record in 80 years!", why was it so hot 80 years ago? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4dek74/eli5_when_you_read_news_articles_about_global/ | {
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"This year being really hot isn't necessarily indicative of global warming, an article with that title is being sensationalist. If the running average temperature over the last 10 years was getting continuously warmer, that would be a better indication of a trend.\n\nTemperature is affected by a lot of different things so their are years that are extra hot and years that are extra cold. It becomes a (potential) problem when their are a lot more hot years than cold years in a 10, or 50, or 100 year period.\n\n"
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2py6qi | what exactly happens when an officer gives me a warning instead of a ticket? | I just got pulled over for the first time, I was polite and courteous to the officer and he let me off with a warning, I was just curious as to what happens when he goes to his car and looks up my information? Does it get saved that he looked it up, does he mark it as a warning, or speak to a higher up to ask if it should be a warning or ticket? Does it show up on my record? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2py6qi/eli5_what_exactly_happens_when_an_officer_gives/ | {
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" > I was just curious as to what happens when he goes to his car and looks up my information?\n\nHe is checking to see if the registration is still current on your car, checking your drivers license to ensure it is still valid, and checking to see if there are any warrants out for your arrest. \n\n > Does it get saved that he looked it up, does he mark it as a warning,\n\nIt depends. If you got a written warning than there is a record of it in that officer's department. Other police departments usually cannot see other departments warnings. If it was just a verbal warning than there is no record of it. \n\n > or speak to a higher up to ask if it should be a warning or ticket?\n\nNo, the cop has full authority to make the decision on a ticket or warning. ",
"It depends on the state, but there is usually a log that states that your information was run and the reason why. It won't show up on background checks or anything like that, but it can show up when you get pulled over again so the next officer will know that, for example, your window tint was too dark and you were told to take it off but refused to listen so they will issue a ticket. Replace window tint with busted light, speeding, etc.\n\nUsually they won't talk to a super to be told to give a warning. It is more along the lines of your record came back clear, or you seem to be a reasonable person, or you are cute or just that the cop is in a good mood. In most cases it will be a combination of the first two."
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6ywxkv | what is the difference between all types of soap. i.e. shampoo, hand wash. body wash, bar soap, dish soap, detergent etc... | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6ywxkv/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_all_types_of/ | {
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"Actually, soap isn't soap. Kinda.\n\nDepending on what sort of saponificator you use, you get two very different types of soap. Lye will produce a hard soap, like what you get in bars. Potash produces a liquid soap.\n\nThe type of fat you use also matters. Lard make a very, very hard and dry bar of soap, while olive oil makes a very soft soap. Other fats have all sorts of other things that can be added. Then, you add different scents and colors and stuff.\n\nSo, soap for your hands will be made with lye and will generally be less \"harsh\" than powdered laundry soap, which doesn't have to worry about potentially drying your skin out. Shampoo is potash soap with lots of water and fragrances and magical chemicals that companies say repair damage. Liquid detergent is a potash soap that's designed to be \"tougher\" on grease.\n\nSoap for the body tends to have more fat in it compared to soap for other things. This is why \"dish hands\" used to be a thing. A high-quality body soap will leave fat on your skin, which is why it feels soft and smooth afterwards. Yes, that's either plant or animal fat that's covering your skin. Enjoy!",
"Great answers so far about soap. Detergent differs from soap by actually destroying and killing bacteria. Essentially it rips them apart whereas soap carts it away. Detergent is quite harsh to use on your skin for this reason, which is why we tend to use soaps to clean ourselves. ",
"Most modern liquid \"soaps\" are not technically soaps at all, which is to say they're not produced from mixing vegetable or animal fats with a strongly alkaline solution such as lye or potash. Instead they're a blend of (usually) petroleum-derived surfactants such as sodium lauryl sulfate with other chemicals to produce a detergent that matches the desired use. \n\nShampoo is designed to be gentle on the keratin which forms hair, have strong foaming properties to be more easily worked through the fine strands, remove common hairstyling products, and - especially for those of us with more than a couple inches of hair - have specific effects on the texture of the hair. It has a fairly low concentration of surfactants so that it rinses out quickly and you're not in the shower forever trying to get it all out of your hair.\n\nHand and body wash is usually formulated with a mild surfactant to avoid skin irritation, plus various ingredients that can moisturize the skin, add scent, improve lather, etc. Lathering agents are generally surfactants as well, so there's a careful balance here between getting a nice lather and not drying out skin. Hand washes are usually less foamy since they don't need to cover much surface area and are used frequently throughout the day, while body washes tend towards more foam since they need to cover a lot more surface area and are used less frequently. They're both a bit more concentrated than shampoo, since it's easier to rinse soap off of skin than hair, and in the case of body wash, most consumers pour it onto a sponge/pouf/washcloth/etc. before applying it to the skin, which spreads it out thinner than applying it directly. Face washes are their own magical category and can include all sorts of fun chemistry like ceramides and multivesicular emulsions, alpha hydroxy acids, benzoyl peroxide or salicylic acid, etc. - and as an acne sufferer, it _definitely_ makes a difference. \n\nBar soaps are one area where true soaps are still relatively common. Moisturizing ingredients can also be added, and the naturally occurring glycerine is also somewhat moisturizing. However, traditional soaps also have a lot of limitations. They have a fairly narrow range of environments in which they're effective, needing hot water with a low mineral content to function, and must be rinsed a second time with clean water to avoid deposits. \n\nLaundry detergents are commonly formulated these days with specific surfactants designed to work well with cold and hard water, both of which decrease the effectiveness of traditional soaps. They're also highly concentrated, since they're going to be diluted by the large volume of wash-water, which is why just a few drops of liquid detergent on your hands will take much longer to rinse off than an equal amount of hand soap. This is also why ideally you should fill the washer with soap and water so they can mix, then add the clothes.\n\nDishwasher detergents aren't worried about gentleness, since they don't come in contact with skin or organic fibers, so they can use harsher detergents and often include abrasives, but do rely on hot water to be effective. For similar reasons to laundry detergents, they're highly concentrated, but they use surfactants that are more effective on metal and ceramic. \n\nDish detergents meant for hand-washing dishes have to balance removing grease, starches, sugars, etc. from food with not completely stripping the natural oils from skin, which is a bit tricky - the oils that keep your skin nice and pliable aren't any different from the oils of any other animal, chemically speaking. They're also pretty highly concentrated for that \"grease-fighting\" effect, and so that your washcloth/sponge/etc. doesn't need more soap on it after every dish you wash.\n\nEdit: Added some information on surfactant concentration that I forgot to include when I typed this up last night.",
"My question is can a bar of soap get dirty?",
"About handmade/homemade soaps... Sodium hydroxide lye is used for making solid soap bars, while potassium hydroxide lye is be used for making liquid soaps which usually need additives to prevent mold growth. Detergent for laundry is generally a blend of washing soda (works better in cold water), Borax (works better in hot water), and grated soap with a higher lye content.",
"shaving soap specifically has high amounts of stearic acid in it. It's what makes the lather stable",
"If we are talking about traditional soap, than the differance between a hard bar of soap and liquid soap would simply be the type of oils/fats used and the type of lye used. Sodium Hydroxide or Potassium Hydroxide for example.\n\nThe differance between liquid soap and foam soap depends on the dispensing device itself and how watered down the liquid is.\n\nBrands like Zest, Dove, Lever 2000, etc, aren't actually soap. They are a detergent bar. \n\nShampoo is just a liquid soap with a lye discount and differant oils used to protect and nourish your hair and scalp. Like tea tree oil and argan oil.\n\nDish soap is just liquid soap with added chemicals to help further degrease the food grime.\n\nEdit: I don't think a great many people realise this industry is heavily regulated, atleast in Canada. Everything from the ingrediants used to the size and font used on the packaging. In order for a product to be considered soap, fairtrade, vegen, etc, it has to meet the criteria. Anything else could land the Soaper into a lot of trouble. \n\nAnother thing most people don't understand is that these products fall under the Weights and Measures Act of Canada and these products have to be sold by weight in order to be considered legal. A lot of Soapers selling their products at fixed values at craft shows are breaking federal laws.",
"There was an amazing AMA about this a while back. One of the best Ive read in a while. \n\n_URL_0_",
"It's all marketing fluff, plain and simple.\n\n\nThe \"beard cleanser\" which I've received as a gift is the same crap that you'd otherwise see in body wash containers 2x the size, except that this \"specially formulated\" beard soap probably has 10x the markup on it. Same with all these other soaps.",
"So what about those 3 in 1 shampoo + conditioner + body wash things?",
"What's the difference between conditioner and shampoo?",
"How different is toothpaste? It performs a similar *function,* but I'm sure is vastly different *chemically.* ",
"No wonder my scalp and body itch so much! All the surfactants and chemical compounds reek havoc on my skin regardless of where on my body. So I have to use shampoos without SLS and alcohol of any kind. Otherwise, I will claw and scratch til I bleed. It's not fun. Most shampoo and conditioner I can use are without these ingredients and don't exactly smell like \"GEE YOUR HAIR SMELLS TERRIFIC\". Kudos to all those who gave such detailed response as it was very helpful for me. Thank you OP for the post. ",
"There are some pretty good answers here so I'll keep it short:\n\nFirstly, Soaps are made from animal or vegitable fat while detergents are manufactured synthetically using petroleum products.\n\nBoth clean using molecules called surfactants which have a water loving loving (hydrophilic) and a water repelling part (hydrophobic).\n\nDetergents became popular after Germany manufacturered them during world War 2 as they had issues with trading soap and precursors to soap production.\n\nBasically, more or less all liquid Soaps, detergents, shampoos, dish washing liquid etc nowadays are detergents based on SLS (sodium laurel sulfate) but people are finding alternatives as this is bad for the environment (see eutrification).\n\nBack in the day the trouble was that detergent was harsh on the hands (so is soap btw but not as much) so companies added ingredients to mitigate these effects. This is why gloves were so much more important while washing dishes back in the day. Industrial detergent is still harsh on the hands and skin. \n\nTo answer your question, fundamentally all of the detergent based cleaners are the same. The difference is the additives to make it more suitable for application. Eg. Shampoo additives have chemicals that make it less harsh on hair and skin. Similarly dishwahsers will enzymes to break down tough greases and stains. But at the detergent level, it's all the same.\n\nFun fact: frothing agents are added to make lather and foam when washing, especially in shampoos. This is just for show and has nothing to do with the cleaning abilities of the shampoo, body wash etc. ",
"All of these products have a simple formula: two parts linked together, one for sticking to grease (and everything grease-like) and one for sticking into water. The former glues onto what you want to wash off, and the latter takes the former into what you wash with (water). \n\nThe two halves can be tweaked like say with a car: you might want a Toyota with a bigger engine to haul things, or you might want a regular Toyota but with a differently looking bumper. The reason for this is that if you have soaps, you want something that doesn't degrade the skin too much, but if you want a detergent, you don't have to worry about skin. With shampoo you want to worry about skin and hair at the same time. For some of these you add another substance besides the one intended to do the washing, to \"condition\" the skin or the hair.",
"Major variations are changes in the types of oils used and the other additives added such as chelating agents and moisturizers. Changes in oil can make a big difference on weather a soap will work well with very oily substances..."
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64n8io | how/why do names become considered "old fashioned"? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/64n8io/eli5_howwhy_do_names_become_considered_old/ | {
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"The how: over time things get older such as clothes, Home-goods, vehicles, tools, etc. People then give those items a time frame in which it was used. ex: hand saw, is very \"old fashioned\" by today's standards since we have electric saws that make jobs easier now. \n\nThe why: since new things are constantly being made when something \"goes out of date\" the populous will eventually get said new thing and refer to the old thing as \"classic, old fashioned, etc\" when it reaches a certain point in time. such as a 1950s ford, 1970s washing machine, or even a 1990 cell phone. \n\nThis is my take on it so please don't crucify me for not being super smarticles. I kinda am mentally 5 lol.. ",
"I read that the usual trend in baby names is that first a new name is used by the rich. Then the middle class copy them because it's seen as a bit of an aspirational name, then the poor copy the middle class. Then the rich and middle class stop using it because it's become a poor people name. Then the poor stop using it and it becomes old-fashioned. Then at some point the rich pick it up again and the cycle repeats."
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2zqvd1 | why do corporations have to defend their trademarks even if the allegation that a competitor is infringing is extremely weak. | There are plenty of lawsuits wherein one party sues another for trademark infringement when it's pretty clear to almost everyone that both products are sufficiently distinct. Often times it seems the plaintiffs themselves don't even feel threatened by the competitor. As I understand it there is some legal reason why a trademark holder has to defend their trademarks even if they don't feel threatened by competing products or that there is any confusion at all. Is this true? If so, why? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2zqvd1/eli5_why_do_corporations_have_to_defend_their/ | {
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"If you don't enforce the trademark it can be argued that it's no longer distinctive enough to merit that status. So you have to enforce to avoid the risk of losing it. ",
"Because not defending in one case may (a) encourage other, more egregious infringers and (b) be used as a defense by future infringers.",
"If enough incidences of failure to enforce become known, then when they do go after someone who risks both confusing and/or diluting the trademark, the infringer could defend themselves by citing the common use and claim that it's become a generic term.\n\nSo part of having and keeping a trademark is a duty to enforce."
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2letje | if i use my credit card for all my monthly expenses and then pay my balance in full, why would my cc company value me as a customer if they don't make any interest off me and i just rack up free points? | I missed a payment on my CC (oops) and I called them up to see if I could get it waived. Except for this month, I've always paid my balance on time and in full. I also used the card to pay about $12k in 6 months.
If they never make any money off me in interest and I get money from them in cash back points, why would they waive the late fee (i.e. the only money they really got from me) and why would I be a valued customer? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2letje/eli5_if_i_use_my_credit_card_for_all_my_monthly/ | {
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"Everytime you use your credit card, the merchant (store, person, whoever) has to pay a fee. Generally, it's around 1.5%.",
"The credit card company still charges the store for the transaction processing, so they still get something.",
"Plus, for many people, it just takes a small financial downturn and you can't pay the whole thing off. Even a small balance month-to-month makes them some juicy interest.",
"The hundreds of thousands of people with maxed out cards make up any shortfall I would imagine...\n\n",
"As said by others, every time you use your credit card the credit card company charges a percentage of the transaction amount to the merchant (company you're paying). As an interesting side note, one reason that sometimes companies will only take visa/mastercard and won't take amex and/or discover is that amex and discover charge higher percentages than visa/mastercard. Discover charges the highest. They are able to give you points/cashback/miles/whatever because they make the money off of those fees.",
"Amex charges up to 5% to the merchants. My boss used to refuse discounts to anyone paying with Amex. ",
"The banks actually appreciate people that pay on time for multiple reasons. First, people that are in financial difficulties can default, and their accounts charge off as a loss. That's not a good thing, which is why a bank's collections department will try and work with customers to set up a payment plan- or a settlement- prior to a charge off. Secondly, the bank makes money off the merchant for each charge via processing fees. That's why, besides fees, rewards cards can actually exist. So, yes, the banks do appreciate a good customer. Most are going to look past a one time late and waive a fee.\n\nOne thing I would do is remember not to let a card go 6 or more months without use. A lot of banks will shut down an account after 6 to 12 months of inactivity. At that point, the closure is automatic and it doesn't matter how good of a customer you've been in the past.",
"Because there's a good chance that at some point in your life you'll be temporarily unemployed...and hey they've got your back right? There's also a decent chance it might take a while to find work again. That's cool though, you've got $20k credit because you've been a customer of theirs for a while.\n\nJust got a job? Cool, we'll keep your payments low so you can get back on your feet again...don't worry about the fact that we've set it up so that it'll take you 80 years to pay off that loan, and that $20k will end up being a million.",
"Because people are irrational and make stupid decisions all the time",
"Banks make money off credit card holders who aren't incurring finance charges. Here are just a few ways...\n\n- Transaction fees charged to merchants for purchases you make\n- \"Sharing\" (selling) your data with their \"partners\" (companies who buy the data). Read the privacy policy, I'd bet it allows this.\n- Cross-selling other products... have they tried to get you to open a checking account? Fed you an ad for a home or car loan? Many do this.\n- Ever gotten a \"bonus\" on certain spending? Like double points for shopping at Best Buy, etc. The merchant is paying your bank for that bonus. AmEx's offers area falls under this category, too... all those coupons are paid placement.\n\nIt's also worth keeping you around in case you do incur fees/interest later.\n\nAnd ultimately, it's a numbers game... for every customer like you, there's a guy they'll make four figures a year in interest off of. No sense throwing out the baby with the bath water.",
"I'm confused by the other responses because there's something that nobody addressed: the bank who issues you credit vs. the credit card company. For the big four, Visa and MasterCard usually partner with banks and other lenders where the latter gives the customer a line of credit. Here, Visa and MasterCard act as the party who handle the transaction but the banks/lenders are the ones who give the customer a line of credit.\n\nTo my knowledge, when you use your credit card, Visa/MasterCard get the transaction fee, not the bank/lender. The bank/lender makes money off of the interests of the late payments.",
"Well if you do a lot of transactions, they get a cut of that from the interchange fees, which adds up.",
"Banker here.\n\nThe issuing bank gets a flat fee per credit card sold, right around $2 at time of purchase. Even of you pay it in full thus avoiding the interest VISA/MC is going to get paid by the merchant. This is called interchange and is usually a percentage of the purchase or a flat fee depending on their plan.\n\nAs usual the business will bear the brunt of the fees. This is why they charge a fee sometimes if it is under a certain amount to offset that cost.",
"It's hidden. Remember, if you get anything for free you're the product.\n\n1. As others have said, they get a cut of each transaction. This is often not visible for you since many businesses will simply roll it into the price of the product/service.\n2. They get a LOT of data on your spending habits. Data mined from this is very valuable to some companies. This spans from general market trends to your own spending habits.\n\nThey do make a ton of money off of interest from those that don't pay on time. But they're not terribly bothered by it if you keep paying consistently.",
"Technical term for a person who pay off his entire balance every month is: transactor.",
"This is how they get you. Nearly everyone starts off with this mentality. Stay responsible.",
"They also make money off the businesses you do business with. The high interest rates are just gravy.",
"In the industry, apparently they call people who pay on time \"deadbeats\" as they incur no fees or revenue for the businesses.\n\nRobert Hammer, an industry consultant, said the legislation might have the broad effect of encouraging card issuers to become ever more reliant on fees from marginal customers as well as creditworthy cardholders — “deadbeats” in industry parlance, because they generate scant fee revenue.\n\n_URL_0_",
"I have worked in the credit card industry for many years.\n\nBanks love cardholders who pay off their balance every month. They are a very important part of the credit card ecosystem.\n\n1) Yes, they make more money from people who carry a balance and pay interest, but those people are a credit risk. Remember that all the debt on a credit card is \"unsecured,\" that is, there are no assets the bank can repossess if you can't pay them back, and therefore extremely high risk.\n\nBanks DO NOT want you to be in debt forever. The risk that you'll default is too high. They would rather you carry some balance, but act responsibly and pay them back over time.\n\n2) The bank's outstanding loans are judged (from a Wall Street sense) based on its cardholders average FICO score (credit score). If you carry a your card's max balance and pay only the minimum, your FICO score goes down. If everyone carried a huge balance and had a low FICO score, the bank's credit card assets would be worth very little, because to an outside investor, it would look like a huge risk that people will default en masse if the economy turns south.\n\n3) Issuing banks make money from each transaction. People who pay off their balances each month oftentimes spend more than a person carrying a balance, so the fees are greater.\n\nLet's take a $100 purchase example. You pay $100 for something at a store. The store has to pay on average a 2.5% fee ($2.50) to its bank for accepting your credit card. The merchant's bank gets to keep about 25 cents for its service. The merchant's bank then passes the transaction to Visa, who figures out which bank you use, and sends the transaction to them. Visa takes another 25 cents for its service. Your bank processes the transaction, and sends the merchant's bank its $98.00, keeping the remaining $2.00 for itself. With that $2.00, it gives you 1% cash back ($1.00), and pockets the leftover $1.00 for itself.\n\nIf you spend $20,000 per year on your credit card and pay it all back each month, your bank makes $200 in profit from you. Multiply that by a few million cardholders, and you've got yourself a business.\n\n4) If you still don't believe that a bank likes people who pay back their balance each month, consider how cards are marketed. Some cards offer 0% balance transfers and low teaser interest rates. These cards are for people who carry a balance. Other cards feature big rewards points, or additional points for spend at common locations, like supermarkets and gas stations. These cards are more for people who will be paying off each month, and therefore the point is to try to entice people to spend more on that particular card. This concept is called \"share of wallet\" - if you're paying off each month, the bank's primary goal is to get you to use their card for all your purchases, in order to generate that 1% profit from your spend.\n\nObviously a significant amount of marketing thought goes into cards for both people who carry a balance, and those who don't. Both are profitable, and in fact banks absolutely need both to maintain a financially healthy portfolio of cardholders."
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4qntmw | what is the ideology of the larouche movement? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4qntmw/eli5_what_is_the_ideology_of_the_larouche_movement/ | {
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"Oof. That's a lot to bite off. I've got a bunch of family that's been all up in their business for ages, so I'll do my best.\n\nBasically their central idea is that intellectuals should run the government, and we should just accept that they know what's best.\n\nEconomic themes are a huge part of their cult (er... political party?). Our lack of manufacturing is going to lead to a lasting depression. Any day know the economy will collapse because we don't actually make things. \n\nThey love their conspiracy theories too. The UK Monarchs have been behind every major assassination in American history. \n\nThey do really love arts and science. They love fission. We'd totally all be driving fission powered cars were Big Oil not so powerful. \n\nI do appreciate their love of art and music though. They love Schopenhauer, who's pretty meh to me, but as long as it's older than say late 1800s they're good with it.\n\nObviously I've got a bit of bias here. I grew up around these guys a lot, and watched as too many sacrificed too much (shoot, my uncle went to jail for them...). Lots of really well meaning people, but IMO they lack respect for individual freedom, and of course are way too quick to buy into crazy conspiracy theories. Lyndon himself is a good speaker, and very charismatic. Plus I do very much believe his intentions are honestly good, which itself seems notable.\n\nThey have a monthly magazine they publish if you're interested. It does always include some good non-political writing, so there's that.\n\nI know this is super rambly and vague. You may get a better answer from someone who hasn't lived through it."
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1eabtv | what someone should know about a getting and having a mortgage. | I'm in the process of buying a house and I really honestly don't understand a lot of the terminology. Like what the hell is Escrow? How is the interest calculated? What in Gods name are points and why should I buy them? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1eabtv/eli5_what_someone_should_know_about_a_getting_and/ | {
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"* Escrow - A bank account jointly held by two parties, that can only be accessed if both agree. It is kind of like a deposit. You use it show you are able to prepay taxes, insurance and other thrid party costs, without handing that money over to the lender.\n* Interest - It is usually calculated on a monthly basis...if you have a 4% rate, the amount you owe will increase by 0.33% each month. You payments are calculated so they pay off all of the interest and some of the principal each month.\n* Point - You can pay extra to reduce the interest rate...each percent reduction is a \"point\". It really only makes sense if you plan on keeping the home and not refinancing for the entire duration of the loan.",
"Escrow is money held on your behalf to pay a third party. For a mortgage, that's typically property taxes: the bank wants to make sure the taxes get paid because if they don't, the county will put a lien on the property. The bank collects property taxes monthly as part of the payment, and then sends that payment to the county.\n\nInterest is typically calculated monthly, so it's 1/12 of the quoted rate (some mortgages use 'simple interest', which is calculated daily). There will also be an \"APR\" which is the *effective* interest rate, taking into fees (like points). There are many 'mortgage calculators' online that will show you the amortization schedule - how much money is going to interest and principle each month, and the resulting loan balance, for the life of the loan.\n\nPoints is really just an up-front fee that you pay. It's called points because it's a percentage of the loan value, so '1 point' means you pay a fee of 1% of the mortgage value. This is a cash payment at closing. The more points you pay (the higher the fee), the lower interest rate you should get. Banks like points because mortgages are often paid off early, and the points are a way to ensure the loan is profitable. \n\nThe way interest works is, you pay 1/12 of the annual rate on the remaining loan balance. Day one, that's the full amount you are borrowing, so the interest payment is very high. As a result, there's not much money left to pay down principle, so the loan balance goes down very slowly. As a result, a 30-year mortgage will eventually cost about double the amount you borrowed. You can save a lot of money in the long run by getting a 15-year mortgage, but the monthly payments will be much higher for the same loan value. That's because you still have to make the same interest payment (a bit less, because you'll get a better rate), but you also need to pay down principle faster.\n\nMake sure there's no prepayment penalty (very rarely is, but you need to be careful), and be aware that a low down payment will require PMI. That's mortgage insurance *for the bank*, to pay them if you don't. You pay the premiums for PMI and it's expensive and does nothing for you. Try to negotiate a loan that does not require PMI. You'll also be required to have homeowners insurance at all times. ",
"Are you keeping the house for 5 or more years? If yes GET A FIXED RATE!!!!! If not then get whatever but I still recommend a fixed rate. Also FHA has changed it's rules. It will no longer Allow you to drop the principal mortgage insurance once you have reached 5 years into your loan and have a loan to value of 80% or less. Basically what that means is they are charging you for all the people that default and now even after you prove yourself worthy you still have to pay for other people's mess. Try and get a conventional loan and out down 20% if possible. "
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9r0c4h | how is 'explosive mail' detected but the person not harmed? | The recent news about Obama and Clinton having explosive mail intercepted makes me wonder how it's possible (I know they have a staff to deal with this) to do this. More importantly, what do they do in order to not trigger the device and hurt themselves?
I'm assuming for risks just as with a harmful substance (like anthrax) there is a scanner for explosive materials. But I'm sure it's more involved because now there's a device added to the mix. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9r0c4h/eli5_how_is_explosive_mail_detected_but_the/ | {
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"Hillary Clinton 's and Obama's mail is screened, by actual people, before ever being delivered. This is why Soros 's mailbomb was found in his mail but Clinton's was found by screening personel, under the authority of the federal government. Because there are literally people who's job it is is to examine every piece of mail these federally important / formerly federally important people would recieve, beyond normal mail system sorting and detection.",
"Plenty of ways to screen mail without opening it. Most high explosives are organic chemicals with nitrate groups, they can be detected by sniffer devices and dogs. Metal detectors and x-ray shows timers, wiring etc. There are other techniques like neutron activation that can tell the chemical type or the suspected explosive.\n\nNowadays, many manufacturers add tag chemicals to explosives to make them more detectable. Semtex and other explosives often has small amounts of dimetnyldinitrobutane added, dogs are very sensitive to this.\n\n_URL_0_",
"Most explosive devices are not defused like on TV/movies. Bomb squad uses robots and portable xray or backscatter machines, evaluates the bomb trigger if it's safe to move, moves it into a sealed pressure tank and intentionally detonates it. If not safe to move, they move people out of area, then remotely detonate it."
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6k2gr2 | when a person loses memory, what exactly do they forget? | I mean if they have amnesia, do they forget about the things they've learned at schools like basic math stuff and all? For example, a person can't remember even their parents but can remember a book they read once. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6k2gr2/eli5_when_a_person_loses_memory_what_exactly_do/ | {
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"Human memory is a very complex system, and we actually don't fully understand it. Truth be told, we barely understand it at all.\n\nHowever, there are different kinds of memories. Things like language, math and other learned skills are stored differently than memories like when you ate a hot dog last Memorial Day. Memories are stored in ways we're still sorting out, but it's believed that when you remember something you're not actually remembering it- you're remembering the last time you remembered it. The actual underlying mechanisms are still a subject of much research.\n\nWhen someone has amnesia the cause is important to consider; was it physical damage or some kind of mental disorder? In the case of the former, it might be that the brain simply cannot activate the proper equipment (so to speak) to fetch memories that may still exist- like a computer unable to access its hard drive, even if it's still functional.\n\nIn the case of the latter, it's more likely that for some reason the person's mental processes are short-circuiting the attempt for any of a number of reasons.\n\nAmnesia is also not typically what you see in movies- it's not like a total blank slate before waking up, at least in almost all cases. It's more common for certain memories within a time frame to be unavailable, or for the person to have problems with specific things like remembering what they see instead of what they hear, etc.\n",
"There are two primary types of amnesia, retrograde and anterograde. A retrograde patient is someone who has lost all memory. An anterograde patient is someone who has all memories in tact, but cannot form new ones. \n \nA classic case is Patient HM, who had undergone brain surgery to cure his seizures. He had suffered severe damage to his hippocampus, which is the major brain component responsible for memory. After the surgery, he developed severe anterograde and limited retrograde amnesia. He could remember certain parts of his life, but not others. Most critically, however, was his complete inability to form new memories. Indeed, this meant that patient HM would wake up every morning, in the hospital, unaware of his own situation. As the years went by, this also meant that the news of his loved ones passing would be a daily, novel ritual. \n \nTo answer your question more directly, patient HM was used as a case study for experimentation. One thing they did was test whether or not they could teach him how to play the piano. Although he claimed that he had no recollection of ever playing, he eventually learned how to play with competence. As he was instructed to play, his ability surprised him. \n \nHM was instrumental in the development of neurological memory theories. The discoveries contributed to many ideas, such as memory being separately localized and distributed as long-term episodic, procedural, short-term and motor skill. Additionally, distinctions were made regarding encoding and retrieval. In this example, his encoding was severely impaired, while his retrieval was less so. \n \nIn conclusion, memory is very complicated, and indeed, a person may forget their parents name, but have little issue performing math tasks, as these two tasks are most likely separately localized."
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26vzpl | why you shouldn't put sharp knives in the dishwasher. | It's just water and soap right? What's different about it than washing them by hand? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/26vzpl/eli5_why_you_shouldnt_put_sharp_knives_in_the/ | {
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"I believe it's more to do with the fact that in a dishwasher the knife can be pushed around by the water jets and shoved into shelves and other cutlery, possibly dulling it or damaging it.",
"My knives came with this badass warning: \"These knives will not be hurt by washing them in your dishwasher, but they are so sharp that they may damage your dishwasher.\"",
"I think that this warning is more geared toward higher quality knives. Such knives generally have a high concentration of carbon steel, which has a greater tendency to rust. A dishwasher will leave water on such knives long enough for them to start forming rust spots.",
"Dishwasher detergent isn't just soap and water.\n\nIn addition to detergent, the high heat, high humidity and prolonged exposure means rust and depredation on steel edge. Hand washed knife is only exposed to water for a couple of seconds. Not an hour",
"I had wondered this as well and learned recently that its because dishwasher 'soap' contains chemical abrasives and stronger chemicals in order to have water jets work as well as a scrubbie. So you're basically microscopically sandblasting them into dullness and hurting the handles."
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1n5tth | how is beef jerky safe to eat? | Please explain how drying food preserves it. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1n5tth/eli5how_is_beef_jerky_safe_to_eat/ | {
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"One of the cornerstones for life is water.\n\nWithout water there's very little oppertunity for life, which includes all the kinds that involve decomposition and rot, to take hold.\n\nAdding in large amounts of salt will add to this effect as salt likes to bond with water very much and too much salt in water is toxic for most living things."
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3c8ac2 | when shipwreck drivers/archaeologists find new shipwrecks, are they allowed to keep any treasure found? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3c8ac2/eli5_when_shipwreck_driversarchaeologists_find/ | {
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"If they are found in international waters they are free to be taken if no one else has a claim to it wether it be a nation or a private/corporate intrest. When it is not the caseit depends on local laws and regulations",
"Depends\n\nEach country generally has their own laws but most (all that I am aware of but I'm sure there are some exceptions) are based on the International Convention of Salvage.\n\nIf no-one else has a claim to the salvage (rare) than they can keep what they find\n\nOtherwise they are entitled to a \"fair reward\" for their salvage efforts. Usually this is done by an agreement but they can apply to the relevant court (or the international court if it's in international waters) for a ruling.\n\n\nMore often than not though salvage crews / archaeologists are employed under a contract to find the shipwreck (usually by the owner of the ship or a government with a vested interest in the historical wreck) and the contract determines what their rights are \n\n_URL_0_"
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2r6vpn | how is it legal for businesses to offer discounts to women and not men solely because of their sex? | I ask this in response to getting my car wash and noticing that women get 10% off on Ladies Day (every Tuesday). [Image](_URL_0_) | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2r6vpn/eli5_how_is_it_legal_for_businesses_to_offer/ | {
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"It is illegal in some states. In California car washes have ladies and men's days"
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8cpu71 | why does the milk poured into coffee or tea not spoil if left out/not consumed over many hours, while a glass of milk or cream left out would go bad? | I poured a (large)cup of coffee before leaving the house and only finished about half of it. When I returned over 12 hours later, the coffee with a significant amount of milk poured in was fine. If I had left milk out on the counter for that long (approx. 77° F/25° C room temperature) it would have spoilt. I've seen the same situation with milk or cream in tea.
Why is the milk okay in the coffee/tea but not by itself? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8cpu71/eli5_why_does_the_milk_poured_into_coffee_or_tea/ | {
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"Milk has a complex carbohydrate called lactose (this is the same thing that lactose-intolerant people can't digest/breakdown). Some bacteria can't go through aerobic respiration, i.d. taking in oxygen and glucose to make energy for your cells. So these bacteria go through anaerobic respiration which involves fermentation. The byproducts of anaerobic respiration are lactic acid and ethanol. \n\nSo hungry bacteria see that lactose, go through fermentation, create lactic acid, and turn the milk bitter and curdy. But to do all this, the bacteria need a nice pH balanced environment with adequate temperature. Coffee manages to destroy both of these conditions. Coffee is more acidic, so it lowers the pH, and it is usually hot. When you do this to the milk, the bacteria that was on the milk will either die or have its enzymes denatured so it can't ferment the lactose. Caffeine itself is seen as an anti-microbial (because of its acidity and some other stuff that I don't really know about), so this is why it also works with tea. \n\nSo next time you want to make sure your milk lasts a bit longer, either turn it to coffee or tea, or heat it up and cover it so no more nasty bacteria will feed on your hard earned lactose. ",
"Milk does not spoil if left out for a few hours. It doesn't taste great at room temperature, and it'll shorten the shelf life, but milk left out for a few hours is totally fine to drink. "
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6pf2s1 | why can we not achieve efficient and relativity low energy flight the same as birds through the design of a similar winged style flying machine? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6pf2s1/eli5_why_can_we_not_achieve_efficient_and/ | {
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"The short answer is weight. Humans are immensely dense relative to birds, so it is not feasible to attach huge wings to us that can then move quick enough to generate and maintain lift.",
"Short answer is we do! We make gliders in a similar way to large marine birds but:\n\nWhen you say birds wings are efficient they are for a bird is doing but aircraft wings are more efficient for what an aircraft is doing and per kg.\n\nLook at an example of probably the best long distance most efficient birds going the Wandering Albatross and it's huge 3.5m wing span and weighing in at 12kg. It can travel 10'000 miles in a single trip and without flapping it's wings much if at all, truly amazing efficient bird! It does this at low altitude using dynamic soaring and averages a speed of..... 35mph.\n\nOk so that's great and really efficient but do you really want to spend 5 or 6 days to get from New York to London? You can sail it in that time!\n\nNow look at an aircraft say A350. It can fly 300+ people totalling about 120ton 10000km in about 11 hours. Cross the Atlantic in 8 hours.\n\nAn aircraft flies fast and high to gain efficiency if it tried to dynamic soar it wouldn't get very far or very quickly. We do make aircraft like that. Gliders. Very light with large broad wings to gain as much lift as possible. We don't make airliners like that as they wouldn't gain from it. \n\nEdit spelling",
"The [square-cube law](_URL_0_) strikes again, the answer to pretty much any question about why we can't do something that tiny animals can.\n\nSpecifically, if you simply scale up the body plan of a bird, it stops working, because at twice the size, its wings will create four times as much lift - but it will weigh *eight times* as much, so its weight-to-lift ratio is actually only half as much. And the same goes for the strength of the bones. \n\nThe only we we can make big flying engines at all is by using far stronger materials and far more powerful sources of energy than nature does."
]
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[],
[],
[
"https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square%E2%80%93cube_law"
]
] |
||
1xnvwa | why do we have to sign things? what gives cursive handwriting more authority than just print? | Some forms even require that you sign your name and then print your name. It just seems so trivial. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1xnvwa/why_do_we_have_to_sign_things_what_gives_cursive/ | {
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"text": [
"You can tell a lot from a signature. A flick of the letters and the presentation can show what kind of person you are. It's somewhat similar to the Rorschach test where the image can reflect upon your personality. \n\nAlso, most people cannot read cursive writing so they stick to block letters for legibility. And most people can forge a block letter signature when it's harder to forge a signature made of cursive elements.\n\nHope it helps :-) \n",
"Legally, contracts can only require you to 'affix your mark and seal' and that could be a simple X if you are illiterate. \n\nYour name is printed because your signature could be illegible, or it could just be a mark like an X if you can't write. You don't have to print the name yourself - it could be printed by your agent or guardian.\n\nYou do have to write the signature or make the mark yourself."
]
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[],
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|
41ml3s | if you are convicted of a crime and new evidence later surfaces in your favor, why are you allowed a new trial, while someone who was initially found not guilty can't be tried again if new evidence surfaces against them? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/41ml3s/eli5_if_you_are_convicted_of_a_crime_and_new/ | {
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"text": [
"Because the justice system is more concerned with (and wants to avoid) punishing the innocent than it is with letting the guilty go free. ",
"They don't want someone innocent to be tried repeatedly until they're convicted. There's not much reason to worry about it the other way, since if the government *doesn't* want someone convicted, they can just not bother to press charges. Or they can pardon them.",
"If you are in the United States, you are protected from double-jeopardy in the Bill of Rights. This doesn't entirely protect a person from never being tried a second time, but the exceptions are few and far between.\n\nIt requires that the prosecutor be thorough and complete, and that if a reasonable body of evidence and information fails to convict you the first time, that you can not be charged twice for the same crime. It does not protect a suspect from being charged later after being initially cleared prior to a trial. The cases that result in a conviction after an initial \"not guilty\" charge are almost non-existent; if the prosecutor doesn't think they can convict, or that more evidence will come up later, they will usually delay pressing charges rather than botch the trial or may not press charges at all.\n\nIn other countries, the laws differ.",
"In the US we have a thing called \"double jeopardy\" which basically means that once you've been declared innocent of a crime in court you are free. This is because when we were a colony under the British, it wasn't uncommon for the British to keep arresting and prosecuting people for the same crime until they got the guilty verdict they wanted. So because of this the courts have to be vigilant and make sure they're making their best case on their first attempt. Otherwise someone could spend their whole lives repeatedly defending the same case, spending time in jail, spending money on lawyers etc. ",
"It's supposed to safeguard innocents from being tried over and over again with only slightly varying evidence. That said, if a substantial and compelling, entirely new body of evidence comes to light it's entirely possible that the person may then be convicted. A lot of this probably occurred with the advent of fingerprinting and then again with DNA analysis: all those murderers who had previously gotten away with crimes, convicted on the back of the new techniques."
]
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||
608hl8 | equity, mortgages, owning, and selling a home. | I searched on this subreddit and I now understand that equity what the "house is worth minus what you owe on it." However I don't understand the advice older people keep giving me - buy a condo/townhouse when I can so that when I sell it again, I was technically living for free. I mean, it was an investment as opposed to throwing money away by renting. Does this advice make sense? Does this only work if the property value went up?
Say I buy a $250,000 home with $40,000 downpayment. Two years later I decide to sell and:
Home is now worth $200,000 - did I lose money? If so, how, since I haven't finished paying it off? Does that mean I owe $50,000 to the bank? What happens to the loan?
Or home is now worth $300,000 - do I get $50,000 that's all mine? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/608hl8/eli5_equity_mortgages_owning_and_selling_a_home/ | {
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"Property usually increases in value, slowly, over time (a lot of mortgages are 15 or 30 years, that's the time period you're looking at). So you're paying your money to BUY an actual physical thing that will likely keep or increase its value over the years. It's like buying $250k worth of gold, it will likely keep or increase its value over the years.\n\nAs a bonus, you can also live inside the house. You can't live inside the gold, of course.\n\nRenting an apartment, you're paying money to be able to live inside it, and it's like paying giant bills. You're buying, and immediately consuming, a month of shelter at a time (a month of electricity, water, cable TV, etc. cost a lot less than the monthly rent), and after 30 years you'll have your health and your life, but no actual thing that you own or can sell.\n\nYou own the house the moment you sign the sale document that says you'll pay for it. \n\nIf you don't have $250k cash to pay immediately, you have to ask a bank for a loan, and the bank will pay $250k and you sign a contract that says you'll pay back the bank (and they want interest to make a profit, so all in all you'll pay back closer to $350k by the time you're done, 30 years later). \n\nYou're still the owner of the house, but if you don't pay back the bank, the bank can sue you and the judge will transfer ownership of the house from you to the bank.\n\nIf you want to sell the house, buyers will offer you, probably, $250k for it. Since you're the owner, you can decide to sell for that amount, but you must also immediately settle your loan balance with the bank; they'll probably want most of that $250k that you get from the buyer, minus the parts of the loan amount that you've paid already, to settle the balance. \n\nNote that paying back a loan, they put your checks towards the interest first, and only a small amount towards the actual loan amount (the principal), so it's quite possible to pay for several years, say $100k worth of checks, and still owe $200k out of the $250k principal.\n\nBut let's say that you wait your 30 years and sell the house after finishing the mortgage; in that case the buyers will probably still offer you $250k for it, and you paid the bank $350k for the loan, so you've lost $100k over 30 years. It's still better than paying $1000/month rent for 30 years (that's equivalent to \"you 'lose' $360k over 30 years\").\n\nBut if the neighborhood gets better or Trump builds a golf course right next to you, thereby increasing the value of the whole town, then your house may be worth $500k in 30 years, and you end up with a $150k profit when you sell it ($500k - $350k).\n\nSo, to sum it all up, the mortgage is the loan that you've taken to pay for the house. \n\nEquity is the amount that you'd be able to pocket if you sell the house (and settle what's remaining of the loan). Equity would be very small if you sell within 2 years, because the loan amount is still big. As the years pass, however, and the remaining loan gets smaller and smaller, equity increases, and it increases even more if the neighborhood gets better / more popular.\n\nYou're the owner.\n\nAnd selling the home means you must also settle what remains of your mortgage loan with the bank, immediately after the sale."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
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