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3a3ile | why do the middle east and the indian subcontinent have such a high diversity for religions? | I notice that the Middle East and the Indian Subcontinent are home to: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Yazidism, Zoroastrianism, Bahai'ism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism. Why such a huge diversity of religions in this relatively small area, compared to Africa, Europe, East Asia, Oceania, and the New World ? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3a3ile/eli5_why_do_the_middle_east_and_the_indian/ | {
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"A better question is why does Europe and the Americas have a single dominant religion? Christians have been (historically) much less tolerant of minority religions. Up until modern times, the middle east and India were very tolerant of others. Minorities were certainly discriminated against, don't get me wrong, but christians used \"convert or die\" a lot more than any other religion. Essentially, minority religions were exterminated from Christian lands. \n\n(This is speculation now) Most regions consolidated religious and civil authority. The Caliph acted as both religious head and political head. But in Europe the Pope and various kings were always competing for power. Since the pope had no control over non-christians, he would encourage people to convert others so he could control them as well. A Caliph wouldn't give two shits about what religion you were; he can tax you regardless. "
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cjbuqh | how hong kong could leave china? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cjbuqh/eli5_how_hong_kong_could_leave_china/ | {
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"War china will attack if they attempt to leave already stated they haven't ruled out forcing Taiwan to submit by force.",
"Outside of some type of armed conflict, there is little reason to believe China would willingly give Hong Kong independence. There certainly remains a possibility that HK remains in a type of state within a state situation that it is now, past the date its supposed to, but even then, China does not seem interested in continuing that solution past the point it has to.\n\nAs a bit more history. When the British turned HK back over to the Chinese, the reason they did it wasn't that the lease was expiring. The Brits could not give two shits about that. China literally threatened to go to war with the UK over it. The UK wasn't interested in a war with China, so instead the UK negotiated a fairly reasonable to them gradual changeover of HK to Chinese rule. Since then, its been a complicated situation as the changes occur and China is being less than nice with regards to HK and its people's demands.\n\nAs of now, there seems to be no interest from the international community to get involved in the HK-China relationship, as that would be direct rebuff to China and everyone wants to keep peace with China to keep trading.",
" > how can Hong Kong leave china?\n\nSame way the US left the Britain; armed revolution.\n\n > But what about the world? Of course, there are some nations like the USA or the U.K that will stand up for Hong Kong and its people but if they do that's a 100% chance they will have to go to war with China.\n\nThe US and UK will do absolutely nothing. Hong Kong isn't worth the trouble.\n\n > Is there a way that Hong Kong could be its own nation peacefully or will it just end up being a diplomatic nightmare that could end with China doing whatever they want.\n\nNo, because China just doesn't work that way. Geopolitically, it **can't**.\n\nChina, historically, has only two states that it ever exists in; a strong nation with a centrally government that *dictates* control to individual areas, or complete anarchy where China is broken up into pieces. China cannot allow Hong Kong to leave, because then other parts (particularly the other cities in Southern China like Macau) will *also* leave. That region has always, historically, been the first part to secede from China in the event of trouble.\n\nGranted, there *are* things that the outside world can do to push things in a favorable direction, but they would likely lead to the breakup of China as a nation-state. Which would be very chaotic in the interim (particularly bad because China has 400 or so nuclear devices that someone would need to secure)."
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8cn6qy | what happens to a human inside a nuclear explosion? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8cn6qy/eli5_what_happens_to_a_human_inside_a_nuclear/ | {
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"If you are within the blast radius and unsheltered then you vaporize. It is an enormous amount of heat and pressure. To be fair this can happen with any sufficiently strong bomb, the danger of a nuclear explosion (other than size of the bomb) is the radiation that follows it. That is a much slower process.\n\nBut yes if you are within the blast radius and have line of sight with the bomb you will be hit with a massive pressure and heat wave that will likely vaporize you where you stand."
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2kfu4d | is music in film/tv was actually made for it specifically? what process is followed for composing it? | I have a hard time phrasing exactly what I mean here, but let me try a different way.
Take any lyrics-free song from a TV or movie (say, Star Wars theme or Netflix House of Cards intro theme). Did the composer actually make it for that specific project? Does it require that they learn the actual content of that show? Or do they just pull from some pre-written library of "longing-themed melodies" and say "meh, haven't used this one anywhere, try it out"?
What's the actual process for composing for a project like that, and does it require the artist to know anything about it whatsoever? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2kfu4d/eli5_is_music_in_filmtv_was_actually_made_for_it/ | {
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"The answer is: both. Many (maybe even most?) productions have original music composed for them. However, lots of shows/films also license specific pre-existing songs for their work if they want to include them."
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7vj4cz | why do sports video games lag so much more than video games such as gta5 or first person shooters? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7vj4cz/eli5_why_do_sports_video_games_lag_so_much_more/ | {
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"The term \"lag\" has a couple of meanings.\n\n- Network (latency) Lag: This is the original meaning of the phrase. This is caused when it takes a long time for the client (your computer or console) to communicate with the server (the game service or host). Games usually lag here because either the main server is slow (if it connects to a dedicated server); because of an issue in your internet connection (if you live far away from the server it will increase the communication time [your ping] and make the game lag); or because it uses peer-to-peer hosting, where you connect (either directly or through a centralized server) to another player who is hosting the game. This third reason is probably the main reason why you'd experience lag in a modern game when it uses such a system - it will try to connect you to players in the area who have sufficient internet speed, but that is not always the case. Upload speeds (required for the host, who needs to send the game data to the other players) are usually slower than download speeds (required for the other players to get the data from the host), and so if the person has a slower connection, or just slower upload speeds, it will reflect on your latency and cause lag.\n\n- \"Graphical Lag\": This is caused by your system trying to run the game at higher settings than it can support. You'll typically encounter this more on PCs (where you can buy games that are too demanding for what your computer supports) than on consoles (where everyone has a similar configuration and the game is built to support that configuration). This can also be caused by the fact that some games just aren't optimized - ie, they went through a very poor quality control process and have a lot of bugs or inefficiencies in things like how textures load or how graphical settings process, which can cause \"lag\" (performance issues)."
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49teem | how can pulling one smalle piece of skin out from beside the nail hurt for so long? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/49teem/eli5_how_can_pulling_one_smalle_piece_of_skin_out/ | {
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"Think about all of the touching and feeling we do with our fingertips- you can sense hot and cold, pick up a tiny pin or gently touch a baby bird- we have extensive nerve endings in our finger tips. \nThese abundant nerve endings are why injuries in the same area are so painful. \nBe aware that picking at hangnails is not a good idea- an infection in this area is exceedingly close to the bones of your fingers and can get out of hand quickly.",
"To expand on what /u/gooberfaced said about infections, you currently have one in your wound. That is because the area beneath your nails is *filthy*. Of course, if you open a wound connected to that area, the bacteria think \"oh, look, there's food and warmth and shelter, let's to there!\". Those bacteria then hinder wound healing which is why the wound is still open and in pretty much the same (or actually *worse*) state than when you opened it.\n\nSo wash and desinfect it (only do this for small surface wounds) and if you can't keep your hands clean put a bandaid on it for a day."
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wiw4o | obama's fiscal record | I found two deeply contrasting articles ([1](_URL_0_) [2](_URL_1_) but I don't have the necessary background knowledge to sift out which is the unbiased article. Can someone set me straight? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/wiw4o/eli5_obamas_fiscal_record/ | {
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"There isn't an unbiased article. Determining how good Obama's fiscal record is requires determining what counts as a fiscal record and what counts as *his* fiscal record; both of those are political questions with no unbiased answer.",
"The problem is definition. Does everything that happen after January 20 2009 count as Obama no matter when the law was passed? Or does only new spending only count if it was passed by congress after January 20th? Does automatic increases in spending on social programs count as \"expanding government\" or is it simply that a down economy means more people qualify for social assistance programs?\n\nThere is no objective answer like Amarkov said simply because there is no universal definition. If you don't count automatic increases, then yes Obama has grown government at the slowest rate since Eisenhower. If you count everything government does he has had more people on food stamps since the early days of the program. If you look at government nominally, it has grown very little. If you look at government as a percentage of GDP it has grown tremendously (same with the debt). \n\nAnd it's further complicated by the fact that Obama is not really \"in charge\" of the government spending, since Congress has more power in spending then he does. If Obama tried to do what Nixon did and withhold money he would be in violation of the constitution, he must spend every cent Congress tells him he must spend, it's not his choice. Does Obama get penalized for extending the Bush tax cuts without offsetting their cost or is that growth in debt Congress's fault? Budgets must be written and passed by Congress (though the president is required to submit a proposed budget), does that free Obama from responsibility of anything?\n\nWithout clear definitions there are many answers to that one question."
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"http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2012/05/24/who-is-the-smallest-government-spender-since-eisenhower-would-you-believe-its-barack-obama/",
"http://blog.heritage.org/2012/05/24/setting-obamas-great-fiscal-restraint-record-straight/"
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1k9xa7 | fans blowing cold air. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1k9xa7/eli5_fans_blowing_cold_air/ | {
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"This is a pretty common question, though you did a good job phrasing it. Try using the search function first next time. I personally think that the best answers are in [this thread](_URL_0_), just make sure you scroll past my comment because I was being overly simple."
]
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f9iwjx | why is it that drinking ice cold water doesn’t feel like as much of a shock than if you were to pour ice cold water over your head? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f9iwjx/eli5_why_is_it_that_drinking_ice_cold_water/ | {
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"Mouth is inside of your body and more desensitized to temperature extremes. For example, you may be able to drink a hot coffee that would feel too hot to put your hand in. \n\nAlso, your head and feet are responsible for regulating the majority of your body temperature. This is why you can become quickly overheated in a hat and socks+shoes with activity and/or warm weather, and why exposing your feet from underneath a blanket can help you feel cooler at night. \n\nIt’s surely a part of survival instinct, since drinking ice cold water is a fairly modern novelty. If our ancestors heads felt such a freezing cold temperature on their heads, it would be from the weather, then that means their limbs are at risk from the cold temperatures. But drinking cool water is rewarding as in nature it would come from a glacier or spring, and less likely to have nasty bacterial growths like a puddle of warm, stagnant water."
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3rg2cb | why do we think media coverage of mass shootings encourage more mass shootings, but violent movies and video games have no effect or even discourage it? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3rg2cb/eli5_why_do_we_think_media_coverage_of_mass/ | {
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"The theory is that a person would do something terrible, knowing that even though they will die, they will always be remembered, because the news will make them famous.\n\nMovies and video games don't make regular people famous, unless it's a documentary.",
"\"Hey he got his name publicized and everybody found out who he was because he did that. I bet if I do it they'll make me famous too!\" < real life coverage\n\n\"Oh hey an animated video game, movie, song, ect, neat art, and enjoyable.\" < entertainment\n\nVideo games desensitize quickly to anything happening in that world, but it's quick to see that you're not going to fly or have a jet pack or be able to get shot and keep going in real life. Media coverage of mass shootings promotes the idea that the shooter will be come (in)famous.",
"Disclaimer: When you say \"mass shootings\" when put in comparison to violent video games, I assume you are talking about school shootings and crimes done by children.\n\nMy reasoning, it isn't real. \n\nWhen I say that, I don't mean that because kids have a strong understanding of real and fake. I mean it just isn't spoken about the same way.\n\nWhile games are just written off as tasteless or unhealthy; mass shootings are basically glorified as the 'unspeakable tragedy' that it is.\n\nWhat that does is basically tell violent children that they have the option to be remembered in history forever as a killer and get some attention in their probably attention starved life."
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3s7xum | why is heathrow's expansion such a controversial issue? | Heathrow is basically is at its capacity and they want to expand the airport. The plans are for a new runway and terminal. What I'm curious about is why the London or even the British public is so against the idea? I feel like it would only help them economically and being an island nation, there's not many options on how to go inside and out of the country.
We just expanded the airport where I live (new runway and expanded terminal) and there weren't any issues there. So again, why are Londoners so against Heathrow's expansion when they don't have other options? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3s7xum/eli5_why_is_heathrows_expansion_such_a/ | {
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"I think this video series ([part one](_URL_0_) and [part two](_URL_1_)) will answer your question! The guy is entertaining too. He starts with the history of London's airports and goes into potential future plans, including talk about how Heathrow compares to other 'hub' airports around Europe."
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d1jsl2 | what happens to the civilians of a town or city during a foreign invasion? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d1jsl2/eli5_what_happens_to_the_civilians_of_a_town_or/ | {
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"It's illegal under the Geneva Conventions to kill civilians unless they are combatants. Most will seek refuge somewhere else, but the invading army usually tries to make the transfer of power as quickly as possible. The less disruptive the war is to their daily lives the less likely they are to revolt."
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3bnxua | why batteries placed next to each other need to have their ends swapped. | It's a hard thing to write out in a title, but everyone knows what I mean. I'll draw an example as best I can.
___
When you put batteries in something, they always seem to have to go like this:
**-** --------- **+**
**+** -------- **-**
___
As opposed to this:
**-** --------- **+**
**-** --------- **+**
____
I would like to know why that is. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3bnxua/eli5_why_batteries_placed_next_to_each_other_need/ | {
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"When using multiple batteries, you're generally going to use them in series (with the positive terminal of one battery connected to the negative terminal of the next battery), rather than in parallel.\n\nHaving batteries in series adds their voltages together, whereas having them in parallel allows for more current draw at the same voltage as a single battery.\n\nAnyway, since you're connecting the batteries in series, having adjacent batteries flipped just uses less wire.",
"They don't need to have their ends swapped, it's due to something else. \n\nBatteries usually deliver 1.5V and many devices need more, usually 3 or 6. So you need to put the batteries in series, this means stacking them over each other, negative to positive, so this way 4 1.5V batteries create one bit 6V battery. \nThis would mean having a 4-battery long compartment for them, and for many devices it's easier to put them next to each other, to the positive on one battery has to connect to eh negative of the other. It's much easier to put them reversed to the positive and negative are close to each other and then just bridge that small gap. \n\nThink of it as a long battery in series folded in 1/2, 1/3 or 1/4\n"
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dl2duq | serotonin is the hormone what makes us happy, so why aren't we just injecting it into our body/taking it as tablets to get out of misery on command? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dl2duq/eli5_serotonin_is_the_hormone_what_makes_us_happy/ | {
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"Too much serotonin is a very, very bad thing. Serotonin syndrome has a ton of very nasty symptoms, and allowing people to take the stuff whenever they feel a little down would end in massive tragedy.",
"What goes up must come down. It is not healthy or physically sustainable to keep high levels of anything. You would need a constant supply that over comes any tolerance. You are on to a lost battle from the outset. Then if you stop consuming something like serotonin, you would feel a huge loss and probably end up totally depressed and end up chasing the happiness you once felt",
"Your brain is surrounded by a barrier that is very selective about what can pass through it. Serotonin is manufactured by your body inside this barrier. Injecting or ingesting sarotonin won't do anything because it cannot cross that barrier.\n\nHowever, the chemicals from which serotonin is manufactured (such as tryptophan) *can* pass through that barrier and, indeed, you can purchase purified tryptophan for this purpose. But, as with most things, it has side effects.",
"Hormones like serotonin are like ingredients in a recipe. You need them to be in the right balance for a dish to work.\n\nImagine serotonin as sugar, if used sparingly, you would enjoy it as a glaze or sauce in your entrees and finish your meal with a sweeter dessert. If you dumped a container of sugar on every dish of your meal, none of it would be enjoyable. \n\nPeople's bodies, like their tastes, differ as well. Some people like their dishes sweeter while others do not. Therefore a set sweetness for one person would not be enjoyable for others. This is why it is difficult to find the right medicine to treat neurological diseases like depression because every person is different.\n\nThe body also has limited tools to communicate with other organs. Serotonin affects mood in the brain but also appetite and digestion in your digestive system. Some of the side effects from drugs increasing or decreasing one hormone is due to the body reusing the hormone for many functions.\n\nLastly, the body is naturally ~~lazy~~ efficient. If it's getting a hormone from an injection or pill, it is less likely to make it. Therefore, when a person stops taking the injections or pills the body goes into withdrawal because it stopped making that hormone, causing other symptoms. This can cause a dependence on the substance, otherwise known as an addiction.",
"One thing to add that others haven't mentioned yet it's that hormones like seratonin have multiple roles, this is why depression and antidepressant meds have such a wide range of symptoms and side effects. Seratonin is also involved in aggression and hunger as well. Adding extra to or bodies could meet with these other functions just as easily as happiness.",
"First, serotonin doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier, so no matter how much you put into your body, none of it will reach your brain, which is where it needs to be to affect brain processes like mood.\n\nSecond, our bodies are pretty finely tuned machines. They want everything to operate in a pretty narrow window. Having more of something than there's supposed to be completely throws off this balance and would wreak havoc. Too much serotonin can literally kill you. Too much of *anything,* even things we need to live, like oxygen and water, will kill you. Messing around with the chemical balance of our bodies beyond that narrow window is very bad.\n\nThird, and this ties in with the above point, is that serotonin does a bunch of other stuff in the body besides regulating mood. It's involve in sleep, digestion, immune response, tissue regeneration, and more. Messing around with serotonin would not just throw your brain into chaos but the entire rest of your body as well.",
"Most psychedelics fit into serotonin receptors... with the exception of DMT which also fits into dopamine receptors... so we kind of are!",
"My son had a rare neurotransmitter disease where his body didn't make seratonin or dopamine. This affected everything from sleep to his moods and more importantly, his ability to walk or talk. He couldn't even lift his head. Nothing we could give him helped that because there isn't a drug that has been developed that passes the blood brain barrier. He later got gene therapy surgery that greatly improved his quality of life when he started making dopamine on his own. But the blood brain barrier was the main issue with the drugs currently available",
"Because your body is always trying to reach equilibrium and if you start injection serotonin your body will stop making it and possibly reuptake it faster and you'll need more and more.",
"Neither injecting nor swallowing serotonin allows your brain to use it because it won't cross from the blood to the brain. \n\nSome drugs effectively increase the level of serotonin you experience by reducing how much of it your brain clears (eg Prozac) or forcing your brain to dump the serotonin it already has stored (eg MDMA).",
"Long history of various kinds of anti depressants here.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nI've taken sertraline (something to do with serotonin, don't know the details) and during that time, I have never, ever felt worse in my life before or after. I was at an all time low, I was utterly miserable. Maybe it was too much, maybe just a little tipped the scales too far. My opinion of it is that if we're a little 'off-balance', that's just how it is, how we are born. It's not something you can change or rebalance. Note this is just my personal opinion after years of taking the meds, not based on science.",
"The simple reason is that we actually have no fucking idea of what cause us to be happy on a regular basis.\n\nThe neurotrasmitters-imbalance theory of depression is getting smashed a bit more every day.\n\nTake for example serotonin. We cannot simply drink it, because as other said it cannot pass the blood-brain barrier. \nSo we use drugs that *can* pass that barrier, and cause your brain to re-absorb less serotonin. By reabsorbing less of it, you have more serotonin available in your brain.\n\nThe problem is that you won't feel better quickly. You will feel better after months of taking the drug.\n\nBut the drug is acting every single day! You have more serotonine in your brain every single day!\n\nSo why the effect doesn't start on day 1?\n\nWe don't know. We have some hypotesis, but we don't know.\n\nThis is why having a lot of serotonine in your brain will not make you Happy on a bad day.",
"Serotonin is a neurotransmitter; it is one of several messengers in our brains. It does not just carry happy messages. All of the neurotransmitters pull double, triple, quadruple, etc. duty.\n\nWhen we say it's the 'Happy Messenger' we're being very simple to the point of being wrong. It also carries the messages for: rewards, learning, eating, temperature, pooping, and many others. We're still learning more and more about Serotonin.\n\nBecause it does over a dozen different things we do not take Serotonin pills. It would not go to the right place and deliver the right message. It might make you accidentally very hungry or make your temperature very hot.\n\nWe take medicine that targets the sad house in our brain, the house that keeps its doors closed to the happy messenger. With the right medicine the sad house keeps their doors open long enough for the right amount (hopefully) of happy messages to get through.",
"Lots of reasons:\n\n- Serotonin cannot cross the blood-brain barrier. Ingesting or injecting it would have no effect.\n\n- The correct serotonin levels can vary a lot from person to person, and too much can cause some *very* bad effects.\n\n- Presuming you could somehow get serotonin into the brain, your brain would see all this excess serotonin floating around and stop producing it on its own. You then become wholly dependent on the external serotonin.\n\n- Low serotonin levels are not always the cause of depression. Personally, SSRIs (drugs that slow *removal* of serotonin) don't work for me. I have to take drugs which act on *dopamine* (welbutrin)."
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3rgcf7 | why does comcast give out great offers to those who do not use their service/ left them; but does not give benefit to those staying with them? | So recently my family have switched from Comcast to Frontier. Not because of bad experience or anything, we just don't watch that much TV so we switch to frontier to just internet and phone.
and now, Comcast suddenly sends us a great deal for using their service, not that we are going back to Comcast or anything. I say suddenly because in the past couple of years we been using Comcast, they didn't sent anything. And now that we switch from Comcast to Frontier, they are offering deals for us to go back again.
So why does Comcast ignore their current customer base and only hand out offers to those who haven't use or left their service? Isn't it better to just treat current customer nicer, hand out benefit to those who are staying with them so that the word can spread on its own.
And if someone does decide to switch back, they don't have to have people go there again to reinstall w.e has been taken out?
(or is it simply because handing out occasional discount to new comer just saves them more money compare to giving benefit to those who stay with them...?) | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3rgcf7/eli5_why_does_comcast_give_out_great_offers_to/ | {
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"You essentially answered the question. If you are with Comcast, paying Comcast, they have no reason to give you anything. What could they get from it? They instead use resources to try to get new customers and win back old ones, as those represent new sources of income."
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a51azt | can animals be left or right side preferred (or similar)? or due to their frequent and more relied upon mouths or beaks, are they typically ambidextrous? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a51azt/eli5_can_animals_be_left_or_right_side_preferred/ | {
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"“Sidedness has been found in all vertebrate groups in which it’s been studied—horses, cats, rodents, reptiles, different fish species, to name a few—just to different extents,” says Ruth Byrne, a biologist from the University of Vienna, Austria. \n\nBehavioral Lateralization is quite common in nature. Many frogs are right-footed; many parrots are left-clawed; lizards often lean left; many walruses are right-flippered; grey whales and bottlenose dolphins are right-jawed. Humpbacks will feed by skimming the ocean floor with their mouths open and researchers have found abrasions on either their right or left cheeks from the scraping, but never on both cheeks. Even invertebrates display preferences - 90% of common octopi used a particular tentacle when inspecting or handling objects - the tentacle aligned with its preferred eye (90% of octopi studied showed a preference for one eye or the other). "
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17e3no | why is sexism regularly upvoted to the front page, while racism is prohibited and looked down upon? what's the difference? | Obviously racism is a terrible thing, and is a universally huge social faux-pas, as it should be; yet, if you go into any comment page on the front page of Reddit, no matter what the post is about, there is always some kind of blatant misogyny being upvoted and encouraged. Why is one kind of hate speech not okay, but another is totally fine? I'm really having trouble seeing what the difference is.
EDIT - Thanks, everyone! I got some really good objective explanations, and even some of the defensive comments inadvertently answered my question, hah. Apparently this is a much more deep-seated social issue than I thought, eh?
/answered | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/17e3no/eli5_why_is_sexism_regularly_upvoted_to_the_front/ | {
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"There's really no meaningful difference between black people and white people. We have plenty of clear evidence that, if they're put into the same cultural setting, they act basically identically. So racism is wrong just on a factual basis.\n\nThere *are* meaningful differences between women and men. It's hard to say whether a particular difference comes from culture or biology, but the differences still exist either way. So you can't argue against sexism because men and women are not different; you can only argue against it by saying men and women should not be *treated* differently.\n\nProblem is, that's a really nuanced argument. For instance, few people would claim that it's sexist to have women's colleges, and basically nobody would claim that it's sexist to only have sexual interest in men. So there *are* some ways that you can and should treat women differently, making the problem a lot harder to explain.",
"I can safely say the majority of users on this site are men (who find sexist jokes against women funny), hence the jokes being upvoted more often",
"It's not okay, but it mostly just boils down to ignorance, not hate. Reddit has this thing where many people think they are Bill Hicks or George Carlin. They think they are at the forefront of comedy and free speech, and they've gotten this idea in their mind where they claim jokes are \"harmless\" and \"in the name of comedy\" and they're \"free speech activists\". Then they point to women who do mean things to them, or women who agree that they can make those jokes, or comedians that make similar jokes, or the 1st amendment, or anti-male sensitivities such as \"all men are pedophiles\", as a reason they can make these jokes. \"Don't be so sensitive\" or \"don't tell me what's funny\" is a line you'll hear often from these people.\n\nWhat they don't realize is it hurts people. I think they don't realize the structural oppression of women in all cultures and societies even today. They see their mom and their sister and grandma and they don't see the oppression, they don't live through it. And in fact, the women they surround themselves with are likely freer than ever. \n\nI think the jokes reddit should look to eliminate are rape jokes, victim blaming, and \"she's a slut\" jokes. These ways of thinking are seriously harmful. Women in many places still cannot go out alone at night without fear of being hurt. They don't have full autonomy because of men. And so, until rape and sexual oppression are a thing of the past, redditors should attempt to be more sensitive.",
"This is such a terrible question for this subreddit. Do you really want someone to explain this to you like you're five or do you just want to argue about sexism?",
"I hate to say it but casual racism here is accepted.\n\nIt's a bit silly but ageism, sexism, and racism are accepted because the average redditor is a young white male adult. It's pretty obvious why ... You see the world through your lens. It's strange because I'm male, but I'm Chinese. I see the difference in-between the European world and my own. I see the differences and challenges and have to deal with the fact that I'm never seen as an equal racially. However, I rarely see the difficulties women have had to deal with. Up until after I went to university with some really strong women. After I finished and went to the real world. I saw how some women were treated and it made me sick. These are some of my best friends. I would try to bring up a discussion about how I read an article about how women are better at multi-tasking. Then they'd say in a complete dead-pan way: \"maybe in the kitchen.\" I saw their sister in ear-shot and I was like ... do you have any idea how fucking bad that is? I was so pissed off because casual remarks like that can affect people. I know it has for me.\n\nAnyways, I guess it's like Dick Cheney .. he's a conservative on most issues. Up until gay marriage. Why? Because he has a daughter that's gay. I guess some people don't stop and think until it hits them.",
"There are more men here than women. Men (or women) who make racist comments will be confronted by others (men or women).\n\nMen who make sexist comments will rarely be confronted by others because there are far fewer women here. Men will respond, but I imagine it's a number that is quite a bit smaller than those who would jump at racism. \n\nIt's not that one is more okay than the other, it's that the demographics of the site don't allow for treating them in the same manner. I'd even say that non-white men outnumber women of any race or nationality.\n\n",
"Sexism is more socially acceptable, really. Issues pertaining to gender are not seen as legitimate. Racial issues are because men fought for civil liberties for minorities. Gender issues are seen as just a bunch of measly women complaining about unfair treatment because men cannot relate to these issues. ",
"This is not true and you're only trying to look cool and ask for attention.\n\nRacism is everywhere as well here. Or at least, jokes with racial basis. It's only racism once you withhold benefit from the recipient of the judging.",
"Because, generally speaking, African Americans (let's face it, racial discrimination practically _always_ refers to racial discrimination against African Americans) have more politically correct clout than women or other ethnic groups. Sometimes women's rights or gay rights trump African Americans' rights to be free from offensive language but only rarely. For example, when Perez Hilton called Miss California a \"dumb bitch\" no feminist came to her defense. Not because it wasn't offensive but because she was percieved as being \"conservative\" and therefore not worth defending. (Also, Perez Hilton is gay and therefore above critcism). Also, African Americans who are percieved as conservative are not afforded the same level of protection as other African Americans. That's why Clarence Thomas was chastised for being a \"whiner\" and Herman Cain was compared to Aunt Jemima by Jeanne Garofolo.\n\nAs you can see, it's a complex minefield to negotiate, however, keep in mind that if you critisize _anyone_ who is percieved as conservative (regardless of sex or ethnicity) you can count on getting a free pass from the pc police.\n\nI'm sure the overwhelmingly liberal reddit hivemind will vote this post down to oblivion immediately but nobody will bother to actually refute anything I've written because they won't be able to. Let the downboats begin!\n\nEdit: Speeling"
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dhr6bx | what exactly is the process of leather tanning? why is it necessary? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dhr6bx/eli5_what_exactly_is_the_process_of_leather/ | {
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"Tanning is a process that alters the protein structure of the skin using specific acids. It makes the material tougher and less susceptible to decomposing. That’s why we can have leather products without it rotting like regular skin.",
"Tanning involves several steps that include removing all non-skin elements from the hide, and then treating it with an acid to make the skin more durable and less prone to rot. There are a lot of ways of doing this. \n\nThe reason we do this is that if you don't, the skin will probably rot away to nothing. By tanning, you are basically pickling/preserving the leather so it will last a very long time.",
"Tanning skin is often done with tannin, which can be found in many plants. [Acorns](_URL_0_) are one source that can be used for tanning."
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86mob6 | how do you count beats and bars? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/86mob6/eli5_how_do_you_count_beats_and_bars/ | {
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"Think of it as mathematics - the time signature tells you how many of what notes you can have in a bar. For instance, a 4/4 signature means this section or piece of music should have 4 quarter notes in a bar, whereas a 6/8 signature means 6 eighth notes in a bar.\n\nJust in case it wasn't clear, notes have values, so 2 quarter notes count for a half note, 2 eighth notes count for a quarter note etc.. And you can mix these notes in any combination - this means that in 6/8, you could have 2 eighth notes and 2 quarter notes (since a quarter note counts for 2 eighth notes) to make the full 6 eighth notes in a bar. Alternatively, in 4/4, you could have a half note and 2 quarter notes to make the full 4 quarter notes in a bar."
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2fgavx | the coming cavendish banana extinction | I keep hearing that the standard "Cavendish" banana species is infected with a virus that will wipe them all out within the next few years. How is this possible? Pollination spreading the disease? I thought all Cavendish bananas were genetically modified clones...can't scientists just create a new breed that won't fall prey? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2fgavx/eli5_the_coming_cavendish_banana_extinction/ | {
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"Sorry i can't explain it, but this may help \n_URL_0_",
"First: they are not going extinct. That is an embellishment. However, they are in trouble.\n\nIt is called \"Panama Disease,\" and it is caused by a hearty fungus that cannot be treated, spreads rapidly, and can lay dormant in soil. Even soil on a boot can transmit it to a new area. In the 1950's and 1960's it destroyed the economic viability of Gros Michel bananas (the preferred at the time), though it did not cause them to go extinct either.\n\nThe thing is, modern bananas are indeed clones. This means if one example of a type is susceptible, they are all susceptible. The reason it is difficult to make a new strain is because modern bananas do not sexually reproduce. They are reproduced through taking their shoots and replanting them. So, you can't easily cross strains and try to get disease resistance while maintaining flavor, seedlessness, ability to be stored, and other things required for them to be an economically viable banana.\n\nOf course, people are working on it. You aren't going to suddenly see bananas disappear from the shelves. However, you might find that a new breed becomes dominant, and the resulting fruit is a bit different than what we normally have now.",
" > can't scientists just create a new breed that won't fall prey?\n\nIt is that breeding part that is the problem.\n\nThe Cavendish banana, and the Gros Michel before them, are the result of a freak mutation resulting seedlessness. No seeds, no breeding. "
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7k5ahu | how does a pharmaceutical company come up with new drugs? do they just try various chemicals on animals until something shows promise, or is there an approach that's more "targeted" than that? | Like let's say I want to develop a better antidepressant. Where do I start with that, if I'm the R & D department? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7k5ahu/eli5how_does_a_pharmaceutical_company_come_up/ | {
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"Yo ho ho! Yer not alone in askin', and kind strangers have explained:\n\n1. [ELI5: How do pharmaceutical companies create new drugs? ](_URL_7_) ^(_5 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: How are new Pharmaceutical drugs \"designed\"? ](_URL_4_) ^(_2 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: How do pharmaceutical companies develop drugs without knowing the chemicals function on the body? ](_URL_6_) ^(_4 comments_)\n1. [Reddit - explainlikeimfive - ELI5](_URL_5_) ^(_._)\n1. [ELI5: How do we produce and synthesize new drugs? ](_URL_3_) ^(_1 comment_)\n1. [ELI5: How are new drugs synthesized/discovered? ](_URL_2_) ^(_3 comments_)\n1. [ELI5 How do scientists create artificial drugs/chemicals ](_URL_1_) ^(_12 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: How we know what a medicine will do when we create and test it. ](_URL_0_) ^(_8 comments_)\n",
"\nThere are generally 2 main methods of drug discovery. In the first, you figure out a way to test new chemicals in a chemical method (like does compound X kill bacteria at very loe concentrations and not kill human cells at all). There is a large amount of testing done, and then it is moved to an animal model (usually mice). Tons more testing in several different animals and lots of human cell lines. Much later it will be tested on super low doses in humans and follow the rest of the FDA drug approval process. \n\nThe other takes a slightly more informed view. If we know that a disease is caused by some sort of chemical marker or protein in the body, we can use computers to calculate if the chemical will affect that chemistry in the body. If it passes the computer test, it can move on the the chemical tests and then through the rest of the cycle. \n\n\nBasically, yes, we throw a bunch of chemicals at a problem until one looks good, but we do a lot of testing before we ever move to animal studies. A drug discovery person could (theoretically) work their entire life and never have a compound move from chemical tests (assay) to animal model. This is why it is so expensive.....IT IS FREAKING DIFFICULT! ",
"Many drugs start with a known 'skeleton'. Take the classic opioids/opiates as an example (morphine, heroin, codeine, thebaine, etc). They all have a core structure that is the same. \n\nSo you take that structure and 'join things' to it (or maybe remove things). A methyl group here, a hydroxyl group, there (aka - functional groups). Now you have something that is likely to behave in a similar fashion, but you don't know how strong/effective/toxic it may be. So you do a huge amount of testing to find out, well before you ever give it to a human.\n\nThat's a really simplistic explanation, but you get the idea.",
"They know the general receptor structure they're trying to effect, analogues will have varying levels of effectiveness once broken down by the body.\n\nHeroin is converted to morphine for example",
"Another method is to learn from indigenous 'medicine men'/herbalists and take inspiration from plants secondary metabolites. ",
"Fundamental research is very important. New discoveries in how diseases work, such as molecular pathways are the starting point of new drugs. If you understand diseases you have at least some hope of developing effective treatment. Otherwise it s just a blind game of hit and miss",
"Sometimes already made drugs can be found to have more purposes than originally thought, too. An anti-seizure drug being used specifically for the mood stabilizing properties it also has would be an example of this. If you’ve heard the term of a medicine being used “off-label” that’s what it’s referring to. \n\nOr, an already made drug could be found to have somewhat of an unexpected effect, and then research takes place for a way to take advantage of that effect. I’m sure there’s more examples but the one that’s coming to my mind right now is Botox. It works cosmetically by relaxing the muscle which in turn smooths the skin above it. Some patients reported that afterwards, they got fewer migraines. So of course this was studied, and now if you suffer from chronic migraine and fit some certain criteria a treatment option is Botox all over your head and neck, though admittedly at a much higher dose than used cosmetically. Nobody is completely sure how migraines work, but tight muscles apparently play a part. \n\nAnyway sorry, my point is that I thought you may have been interested in how medicine can continue to evolve after they’ve left the pharmacy too. If I have made any mistakes in this comment, someone please correct me. ",
"In true ELI5 mode: some chemicals that occur naturally in the body but are known to be too low in a sick person, can be mimicked with an artificial version created by chemists. An example would insulin for people with diabetes. \nOn the opposite side, some sick people have too much of a chemical and artificial agents can be created which reduce or nullify some of the excess chemical to bring the concentration closer to the range expected in a healthy person. ",
"It's not quite that random. There is much \"basic\" research that goes on at universites well before pharmaceutical companies are involved. That provides a good understanding of which molecular pathways can be targeted and with what kind of results.",
"You're probably asking about computational drug discovery. Though you can concoct umpteen different drugs and throw them at animals and see what sticks, a cheaper and more effective method is to try to narrow the field first.\n\nOne method is protein-ligand docking. You want to find a chemical that will sit nicely in the \"keyhole\" of a particular biological structure. Fitting in this keyhole will either start a chemical reaction that otherwise wasn't working, or block another chemical from fitting in that keyhole and causing problems.\n\nThe trick is to find the shape of the keyhole through something like x-ray crystallography and then once you've got the 3D shape of that, start computationally trying to build chemicals that'll fit that shape. The latter's the hard part. If you can produce software where you can take a 1D protein sequence and predict the 3D structure it folds up into, then the Nobel Prize is in the post, no questions asked.\n\nThe computational part will try to narrow down which chemicals produce something more or less the right shape, but with all the best computation in the world, we still need to actually produce the drugs and test them before we know if they a) work and b) don't also cause side-effects.",
"SO\n\nI KNOW THIS ONE\n\n...SORT OF\n\n\nFirst, you have a disease or condition you are trying to find a drug for. Take.... for example, non-small cell lung carcinoma. After a lot of wet lab analysis and genomic analysis, it's found that certain receptors in a cell that control certain functions (for example, something called epidermal growth factor) has a lot of mutations in it for people who have NSCLC. \n\nSome dudes in a lab will then test to see what kind of compounds will block the receptor for epidermal growth factor, to stop the overproduction of it, because that is what mutations typically do. Either too much stuff is made by these cell receptors or too little is made. In the case of NSCLC, too much is made. So a compound that can lessen the amount of epidermal growth factor being made by the cell is called an inhibitor. \n\n\nSo they run some structures of the part of the epidermal growth factor receptor that controls switching it \"on\" or \"off\" through a database, usually the Protein Database (which also happens to be housed at my alma mater, heyo, go Rutgers University-New Brunswick!), and find compounds that are similar in structure to the receptor, but will turn it \"off.\" Then they try to find analogous structures in drugbank which is another database. \n\nThen they do a lot of in-silico analysis (on the computer) through simulations and programs like Chimera, or Argus Lab, to isolate what kind of compound is needed. It's kind of complicated, so I won't go into all of that. \n\nThen they have to create the drug, and put it through pre-clinical trials, so on mice, typically. So the toxicity is measured in mice, and the efficacy of the drug (does it help turn this receptor thingy off or nah??). After it's safe and effective in mice, we crank it up to phase I clinical trials, so that's usually just testing the half life of the drug and most importantly, the safety of it in humans, but in small doses. Then there's a few more phases to see what the safest-highest dose can be. And then extensive testing in what we call PK/PD or, pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics -how a drug affects an organism, and how an organism affects the drug- (I should add, this is also done in the mice model testing too). And then, if a lot of people can tolerate this drug and benefit from it, it has to go through an FDA approval (lots of paperwork... and time), and then it needs to go through a lot of marketing stuff to get it into the global market. \n\nIt can take up to 12 years for a drug to be taken from discovery all the way to development, and finally to marketing. It's a process. But a necessary one, I guess. ",
"Here is an interesting method that I don't believe has been mentioned yet. Not necessarily related to the manufacture of medicine, but it's something that's usually needed for today's new stuff. Check out X-ray Crystallography Single Crystal Diffraction when you have spare time.\n\nBasically works like this: Is there a specific protein you want to address with a medicine? Well, you should get an atomic model of it to aid in your medicine design. To do that, you crystallize the material (very hard) and fire x-rays at it. The crystal structure allows most x-rays to pass through it except a few. Those few will get diffracted into different directions because of electron impact. What you end up getting as a result is basically a subatomic map of your protein. From there you can construct a model of it and make medicine based on that map. Pretty neat stuff",
"You may find this post interesting regarding how much it costs to research and develop a drug _URL_0_\n\nEdit: copy/paste from /u/MyPenisIsaWMD post in 2016\n\nHi, I make drugs for a living.\n\nDrug development is the most high risk/high reward industry possible. It costs roughly 2 billion USD to take a drug from conception to market. The vast majority of drugs never make it to market. Each of those failures costs some fraction of 2 billion USD. Many of those failures are weeded out only at the end when all of that investment has already been made. For those failures, the company makes back 0 of it's investment. It's not like a phone that doesn't sell as spectacularly well as hoped. It's no product at all. You can't even learn much from those failures. It's years of people lives (sometimes 10 or more) and huge amounts of money that just evaporate. It's crushing.\n\nThis is why the drugs that work have to be expensive. They have to pay the company back and more for all the failures. Interestingly, most companies making drugs aren't huge. Most are quite small:\n\nHere's an anecdote that represents a typical trajectory of a drug in development. It's an entirely true story but the numbers are best approximations:\n\nSmall company starts with idea, raises 10 million from venture capital, hires 5 people. 99 of 100 of those investments go nowhere, so the investors want a HUGE stake to make it worthwhile. At least 51%. You'd be reckless to ask for less. But hey, you now have a company doing innovative science where before you had nothing. So anywho, they lease lab space and equipment and develop the idea and it shows promise. Round 2 of financing comes in, another 50 million at the cost of another 30% stake, they hire 30 more people, lease a larger space and buy more necessary equipment. It's getting to be an expensive company to run and it so far has nothing to sell. It starts to 'burn' money at a rate that means the doors can only stay open for maybe another year. The idea continues to show promise. It works in cells, it works in mice, it works in primates, it's time for clinic. Round 3 of funding comes in with 100 million, and that costs 15% of the remaining stake. Company hires 20 more people, this time mostly bureaucrats to set up a proposal for an 'Investigational New Drug' application. This is what you need to convince the FDA to allow you to start clinical trials on humans. Right now, the original owners retain only 4% of the original stake.\n\nSo, time for clinical trials. Phase 1 begins with 30 healthy adults. This is just to show that the drug is safe. It costs 10 million USD. The company has zero profits so far and has been paying 60 people for years, so it has to pay for this cost by leveraging 3% of the final stake. Eventually, the 'burn' rate means that it has to fire 90% of their scientists as they can't afford salaries anymore. That's OK though, because this startup has succeeded. You see, Phase 1 clinical trial pass (the drug is safe) and it's onto phase 2 (which asks 'is it effective?). This costs 40 million USD more but no more money is left. What to do? Only one option. The investors who now control 99% of the company decide to sell everything to a company like Novartis/Merck/GSK, etc. The company sells for 500 million USD on the expected promise of the new drug. Original founders walk away with 5 million USD due to having a 1% stake. Everyone else is out on their ass looking for a new startup. This is considered a HUGE success in the startup world. It's what everyone hoped for.\n\nNow, Merck or whoever takes over development of drug X. Drug passes Phase 2 but fails in Phase 3 Trials.\n\nAnd that's how you lose 1 billion USD over 10 years with 100s of cumulative years of human work down the drain.\n\nTHIS is why developing drugs is expensive and THIS is why the drugs that work are expensive.\n\nTo anyone saying that Universities should make drugs instead of industry: There are very, very few universities that could afford this. Harvard maybe. Most universities would spend their entire endowment on a 9 to 1 shot. Universities like bonds for a reason. You don't play roulette with your endowment. This is a job for people willing to risk billions. And this, my friends is why drug development is so centralized in the US. Fucking cowboy investors are the best route forward here.\n\nAnd for those who think this is cynical, please recall that for the actual people who founded this company and for the scientists doing the research, they are most often driven by a desire to cure horrific diseases and change the world. The money aspect is a necessary evil that good people need to navigate. Consider that a typical PhD scientist makes about 1/4 as much as a physician and spends a similar amount of time in education (13 years for me from BS to end of postdoc). The people actually researching new drugs are doing it because they are passionate about human health. Not because they are 'shills'.",
"There are many ways but a couple ones\n\n1) Find a protein target and design a compound that'll bind to it at high affinity\n\n2) Use blind approach and throw different compounds in each well with the purified target protein and see what binds to it the best\n\nThis is the most simplest way I can explain",
"A lot of good answers here have addressed how drug developers choose disease targets and develop compounds into approved drugs, perhaps another dimension to the question is \"why don't drug developers just test things on animals (or people) until they work?\" In theory, the best way to determine if a drug works is to give it to people and observe the results. However, chemists can go through thousands of variations on compounds before they find one that is both safe and effective, which would mean you would need tens-of-thousands of people willing to be likely poisoned until a viable candidate was discovered. Not going to happen. So how about animals?\n\nThere are a lot of animal models for human diseases, which researchers use for testing drugs. These models are not always precise, and mouse physiology has obvious differences from humans', so you need to experiment on a lot of animals in order to generate results that you can say are reasonably accurate and predictive of what a compound would do in humans. This takes time and can be quite expensive. The quicker and cheaper option is to experiment on cell lines or even use computational models to predict compound activity.\n\nTypically, a drug program will take years of working through hundreds or thousands of compound variations before they are ever used on a whole living organism. Tests will start with methods that are quick, cheap, yet inaccurate and slowly work up to tests that are more accurate, expensive, and time-consuming. Even with all of this work, most compounds that make it to clinical trials fail because the drug is either too toxic or show any significant benefit.",
"Do people still wander around the jungle after talking to the local shaman for potential cancer drugs like that one movie?"
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"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4d6njh/eli5_how_do_scientists_create_artificial/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6ehqv5/eli5_how_are_new_drugs_synthesizeddiscovered/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1jlneg/eli5_how_do_we_produce_and_synthesize_new_drugs/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7dhmd1/eli5_how_are_new_pharmaceutical_drugs_designed/",
"https://amp.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1j6zih/eli5_how_does_one_invent_a_new_drug/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/146efq/eli5_how_do_pharmaceutical_companies_develop/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/33tmy1/eli5_how_do_pharmaceutical_companies_create_new/"
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8x2h7n | how do they “freeze off fat”? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8x2h7n/eli5_how_do_they_freeze_off_fat/ | {
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"A device is applied directly to the fat deposit and intense cold is used to kill the fat cells. The dead fat cells are processed like other body wastes and pass out through the digestive tract. Note that this is not the same way that fat is processed when you exercise."
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5nz5i5 | how does a law on paper become enforced? | For example, the government regulates certain things like food/consumables, employment, safety, money etc. How can signing a law into effect on a piece of paper actually translate into being enforced on people? In other words, how is the government able to control what people can and can't do based off something a piece of paper says? What is the transition from signing a law to everyone following it? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5nz5i5/eli5_how_does_a_law_on_paper_become_enforced/ | {
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"People are employed to make sure others are complying with relevant laws. These people are known as law enforcement."
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3hep82 | what causes that horrible screeching feedback sound when a microphone gets too close to a speaker? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3hep82/eli5_what_causes_that_horrible_screeching/ | {
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"It's an audio loop. A tiny sound from the microphone comes out of the speaker just a bit louder and gets picked up by the microphone, which sends it back to the speaker. ",
"Feedback loop. Basically the Amp causes it. \nThe noise from the speaker enters the mic, which sends the signal to the amp (or mixer then amp or w/e). The amp increases the signal and sends it to the speaker, which then makes a louder noise, which then enters the mic and so on.... which repeats until /shrug ...\n\nThe mic doesn't have to \"get too close to\" the speaker either, it just has to pick up the sound from the speaker and send it back again... so just having the speaker output too loud (but far from mic) will cause it too. \n\nObviously this isn't a comprehensive answer. I'm sure there are lots of technical aspects I don't know, but I did take A/V class in high school for 3 months and the first time we got to play with mic/amp/speaker I intentionally put the mic close to the speaker because I was curious and it made that noise and I quickly moved it away and looked at the teacher who looked right back at me with eyes that say \"WTF IS WRONG WITH You?!\"...",
"The mic picks up the hum from the amp..then sends it back to the amp..which amplifies it and the mic picks it up again, then sends it to the amp ad inf. \n\nWith each pass it gets louder and the effect is exponential. First it will annoy, then cause pain, then blow the amp. "
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3bfpx1 | how do trees know which way is up? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3bfpx1/eli5how_do_trees_know_which_way_is_up/ | {
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"Is your name Gavin? ",
"I'm pretty sure trees know which way is up because it's the direction the sun is in (to the extent that trees can grow into odd shapes if the ground they're growing on is permanently partially shaded), but now that I come to think about it: how the hell do *seeds* know which way is up?",
"1) Geotropism, They feel the pull of gravity and send shoots the other way while their roots grow towards the pull of gravity.\n\n2) Phototropism, The tree senses sunlight and grows towards it. There's a fascinating system in plants where a specific hormone is produced in the presence of direct sunlight that causes plant cells to grow shorter on the side of a branch/stem that the sunlight is on so that the tip points towards the light source. It's been a year since I studied that so I can't remember all the scientific words."
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5vjdcn | why are house in america built so hollow with drywall and light wood, whereas homes in other countries like india, houses tend to be built with cement and brick? which is stronger? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5vjdcn/eli5_why_are_house_in_america_built_so_hollow/ | {
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"cement and brick is certainly stronger... but also much more expensive, and less user friendly for electric, plumbing, and not very aesthetically pleasing.\n\nWood is plenty strong.",
"Of course a house made of stone and concrete is going to last longer than a house made of wood. Stone houses from over 800 years ago are still standing. But wood and drywall work well enough, and they are less expensive, and most people arent building a house because they want something to span the centuries...its just a house.",
"It also depends on what area. I know down in Florida houses need to withstand hurricane force winds and new constructions are made from cinder block and stucco. ",
"Not really sure as I'm not in construction but I would assume that it's a cost/time of construction issue.\n\nIn India labor is cheap and materials are more expensive, where it's the other way around in the U.S. \n(concrete requires a large number of people to put up the molds, pour, etc.etc.).\n\n\nOne would say concrete and brick would be much stronger... but then, earthquake. Wood and such can be flexible to a certain degree, but concrete will just break.\n\nAll the layers of wood and drywall and insulation help with heating costs in the cold snowy winters in the northern parts of the U.S. and in Canada. It also helps with sound insulation. One would think Concrete would keep a house much cooler in the hot summers in India. \n\nBlah blah blah. Lol. Hope some of those helped!",
"In states like California, the wooden homes can withstand earthquakes (and is cheaper than the other earthquake code approved material, steel reinforced concrete) because they're flexible and can bend a bit.\n\nSo what homes are made of is going to depend on where you are.\n\nAre you on Long Island in New York? The houses will mostly be brick or cinder block with aluminum siding. ",
"1. Cost of raw materials\n2. Cost of labor\n3. Skill of labor\n4. Technology level and organization in using those raw materials\n\nConcrete is labor-intensive, resource-intensive, and requires little technology and little skill to build something sturdy.\n\nBuilding good wood houses out of drywall uses less resources, and less labor -- so why doesn't India do it? Their labor doesn't have the trained skill, and they don't have the technological infrastructure to be producing and distributing drywall and related building systems in an efficient and standardized way that will be sturdy and functional.",
"Cost and adaptability. \n\nImagine you wanted to add an electrical outlet to your kitchen. If the house was made of stone you're going to spend most of the time chipping away at the wall, hoping not to do too much damage. \n\nWhile stone is great for longevity, it really adds to the cost of a house. Framing systems can be bought pre-fabricated from a host of manufacturers and erected in a couple of days. There's a local developer near me that can go from foundations to drywall in about 5 days if they're really trying. That's not including a wholly pre-fabricated house that is just dropped onto a concrete pad by tractor-trailer. \n\nSo it's not a question of \"stronger\" it's \"strong enough\". If the house is rated for a 50 year lifespan, what's the value in shooting for 500? For most, 25 is good enough. ",
"Wood and drywall is more than strong enough to withstand standard weather, those things it will not withstand are storms like hurricanes and tornadoes that will destroy cement and brick nearly as easily as they destroy wood. You have to build a 4 foot thick wall with steel reinforcement that has no windows and only a single steel door to make an above ground tornado bunker. \n\nWood is more vulnerable to fire, but it is far better at withstanding earthquakes. So that is a bit of a toss up. \n\nSo we are down to price. Wood and drywall are much much cheaper than cement and brick. As much as 1/10 the cost of a cement or brick home. \n\nWood homes are also much more user friendly. It is easier to make modifications, put in electric/plumbing/internet/phone etc, and do all kinds of things. ",
"Imagine if everyone in India build wood homes? They'd literally not have a single tree left in the entire country. ",
"First, the foundations for US homes are generally made out of concrete slabs with re bar emerging from the concrete to form the basis of attaching the rest of the frame to the slab. The base of the home is the most critical aspect in terms of stability and durability. Second, in tropical areas, it is much more common to build with cinder block and mortar. Most homes in Hawaii are built out of cinder block (not brick) because termites and the humidity/salt water/rain make wood a poor building material, prone to rotting and being eaten. It is more expensive to build with cinder block, however, because there is more labor involved and in the US labor is expensive. Building with bricks requires even more labor because the progress is slower, so it is fairly uncommon in new construction (most \"brick\" you see in new construction is ornamental and not structural). Most homes in other coastal areas have some sort of cement siding, such as stucco, to add stability and insulation, and to withstand the harsh sea air. As for the standard wood with drywall construction, as long as water, humidity and temperature are controlled (which almost every modern home does through HVAC systems, insulation, and proper drainage/roofing), the wood frame structure can last indefinitely. Many wood framed homes from the 1600s are still standing. Those home used much thicker wood, but they were also less protected/insulated than modern homes. Also, with a wood frame, you can remodel pretty much every part of the home if necessary relatively easily, including the wood framing (if necessary). Just take some scaffolding. ",
"Japan's oldest wood house is the 122ft high pagoda at the Horyu-Ji Temple. It was built in 607AD and has survived 46 earthquakes of 7.0 or more. So wooden buildings can be built to last.\n\nBut also keep in mind that technology, style changes, and most importantly appreciating land value can and does make a house obsolete in a few decades. If you built a $50,000 house on a $25,000 piece of land 50 years ago, and now that plot of land is worth $250,000, then your house is a teardown, not because its falling apart - it may be doing just fine with a little maintenance - but because people aren't going to want to spend that kind of money to live in an older smaller house.\n",
"Cement and brick isn't the greatest in Cali. The rigidity doesn't play well with earth quakes. \n\nDrywall and wood can bend. ",
"I think one part of the answer is certainly that America still has a great deal of forest so wood products are probably significantly cheaper here than in India and some other parts of the world, like the middle east. Our wood products/timber industry has powerful influence in government too and it's in their interest to keep people building houses from wood. Concrete does a good job of staying (relatively) cool and temperature stable in hotter climates which along with cost, adds to its popularity in certain parts of the world. As was mentioned, Americans often do a modifications to their homes, i.e. open up walls to add power outlets or knock down walls and add rooms to a house. A wood framed house makes that much easier to do. Part of it is also tradition. Historically most homes in America have been built from wood. \n\nAs someone who has traveled a fair amount around the world, I definitely see the benefits of concrete construction. If I were to build my own house from the ground up I would prefer it be concrete than wood. "
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b2lzdl | what caused the iconic old dial up internet tone from the 90s? did someone design that sound digitally or is that some sort of analog tone generated from hardware? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b2lzdl/eli5_what_caused_the_iconic_old_dial_up_internet/ | {
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"If you've ever gotten a call from a fax machine, it'll sound familiar. \n\nThat's the actual audio being send through the phone lines, being used to encode the data that on each end, gets turned back into a digital signal. ",
"dial up uses sound to transfer data. that's just the sound of your hardware talking to the server. that sound continues for as long as you're connected, it's just that your modem mutes it after the initial connection. it's the same way touch tone phones can recognize what numbers you input, when you press a number it creates a different tone based on what you pressed. so while someone did design the sound of the various logic values, what happens afterwards just depends on what data is being transfered. ",
"It is not a designed sound, when you are listening to the dial up sound you are literally listening to what the modem sends though the phone line.\n\nIf at the other end some human picked up the phone instead of a computer that is what they would hear.\n\nEarly modems simply worked by turning the signals they were sending into sounds with a speaker that you put a telephone handset ontop of. The modem would send data in the form of beeps via the telephone and listen to the phone making noises with a microphone to turn those into received data. The modulation/demodulation of data into sounds is what the modem is named for.\n\nIn later models the step of turning data into sounds to have those picked up by a regular phone was skipped and instead the modem was connected directly to a phone line and just made the electrical signals that a telephone would make from the noises.\n\nHowever to make it easier for a person to follow along with what was going on the beginning of the whole sequence was still played of the loudspeaker.\n\nWhat was that sequence? Mostly modems talking to each other to figure out each others capabilities. It wouldn't do if one side started sending data at a higher rate than the other side could receive it for example.\n\nAn expert could listen to this exchange and figure out how well it was going. If something went wrong you sometimes could tell at which step things had gone wrong just by the sound of the negotiation alone. That is a useful diagnostic tool.\n\nOf course you could turn of the sound if you knew the right command.\n\nUnfortunately the overlap between those who didn't knew enough to find the audible sound useful and the ones who knew enough to know hoe to turn it of wasn't quite that big, so most people kept it on.\n\nAs more and more people used the internet more and more of them simply assumed that the sound was part of the whole internet experience rather than an incidental, slightly annyoing diagnostic tool.\n\nBy the time different, cheaper types of modem came out that no longer had that sort of speaker output, some of the makers of these winmodems actually made the computer play a soundfile of a generic dial-up event via the computer's speakers, just so people got what they were expecting.\n\nThis was rather like a motorcycle maker deliberately designing their bikes to make really loud and full noise because customers have come to associate that originally unwanted by-product with how a bike is supposed to sound. "
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33knmj | why is it that when you go for a run you don't feel hungry for ages afterwards? even if you were hungry prior to exercise. | I mean, if you go say for a run at 6:30 pm or so it's not that rare at all to literally not feel like eating anything. Even if you were hungry before you went for a run. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/33knmj/eli5_why_is_it_that_when_you_go_for_a_run_you/ | {
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"It is a process your body undergoes called vascular shunting. While you are running, you release adrenaline, which causes your body to 'focus' on its aerobic processes. Digestion is quite energy intensive so blood that would go to digesting food, is diverted to other places of greater need, e.g legs to break down lactic acid. Even when you stop running, it takes a while to get it started again, so the blood still isn't fueling those nerves that were telling you prior that you were hungry"
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9ex942 | all the steps a washing machine uses to wash clothes | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9ex942/eli5_all_the_steps_a_washing_machine_uses_to_wash/ | {
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"Let's not get carried away with the different rotations, even though they are chosen to agitate the clothes depending on their durability and wear profiles.\n\nMost cycles vary the heat applied. This matters. The temperature is usually governed by either drawing already heated water, or cold water that must be heated. In both cases there is an energy cost that tends to be high, and I assume, higher than that of the motor run time. \n\nSo use a detergent that is OK with low or no heat, adjust the cycle profile to turn off using heated water in most of your washes, to both save energy and reduce pollution. Only use heat if the clothes are very dirty, and have an oil/grease component that you think won't be addressed by the enzymes etc. in the powder/liquid.\n\nBeyond this, if it's sunny or dry and you have time, reduce the spin cycle to a slower setting, again, in the interests of conserving energy and reducing pollution.\n\nLastly, water is precious, tap water is commonly processed to be drinkable, so reduce the number of wash/rinse cycles. just push buttons for this, or get a new machine that allows you to do. Refer to the manual to determine how many wash/rinse cycles each different setting has. \n\nOnce you work it all out, simplify it by teaching your family members to select one combination of settings for a normal full load (clothes that are mostly clean, work for < 8 hours by people who don't sweat/work), and a different combination for a very dirty/oily load.\n\nImagine you are on a spaceship... spaceship earth. (research BFI and Mr. Fuller) \n\nWash, without going overboard, as if your spaceship had limited resources, and the true cost was 10x that which you had to pay for.\n\nFinally,\n\n & #x200B;\n\nConsider your poor clothes. If they are smashed against a brick 1000 times, they will last 1/5th the time as if they are smashed against a brick only 200 times. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nI've not made clothes, because I can't, so I respect them. I try not smash them more times than I have to during cleaning, even if it's a machine smashing them and not my mum using a rock in a river. :)"
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yfkpd | schizophrenia | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/yfkpd/eli5_schizophrenia/ | {
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"You're probably better off in anyone of the better suited subs like r/askscience or r/psychology but I can give a general LY5\n\nBasically the brain has a bunch of little messengers called neurotransmitters. These are like the UPS guy only less sexy. In schizophrenia and many other mental disorders, these messengers get lost, find the delivery address is wrong, or just don't go on their routes. This can cause all manner of things to go wrong in the brain including hallucinations (sensing something that isn't really there), trouble regulating emotions, \"word salad\" like the rambling nonsensical chatter you see in tv depictions. \n\nI should also add it's not the same as a split personality or dissociative identity disorder.",
"Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by false perceptions, delusions, inappropriate actions/emotions, disorganized thinking, and auditory/visual hallucinations.\n\nThere are actually five main subcategories of schizophrenia: paranoid, catatonic, undifferentiated, disorganized, and residual. These types are all different, and when somebody says \"schizophrenia\", they are most likely referring to paranoid schizophrenia, which is the classic example of schizophrenia used in the media.\n\nSchizophrenia is mainly caused by an overabundance of the neurotransmitter dopamine, as far as we know. There may be (and there probably are) many other causes.\n\nBy the way, schizophrenia is NOT Dissociative Identity disorder, nor is it Multiple Personality Disorder. They are not the same thing, and are commonly confused.\n\nYou can probably get more information in /r/psychology.",
"r/psychology probably knows better than I do, but here goes:\n\nIn your head, you have chemicals- neurotransmitters- called dopamine, glutamate and serotonin. All three have different effects on your body's nervous system, your thoughts, memory, behavior and function. When someone has schizophrenia, they produce the wrong amount of these chemicals, and that causes things like hallucinations, delusions, hearing voices, or in other cases, catatonic states, trances, or loss of control. Anti-psychotic medicines can be used as treatment because they curb the dopamine, glutamate and serotonin producers in your head to produce the proper amount of each chemical (At least, that's how they're supposed to work, but they aren't perfect). Counseling can also be helpful.",
"The best I can do is a description from my best bud's younger brother who is schizophrenic: \n\n\"You know how when you're dreaming, and stuff seems perfectly normal, but it's actually wacked out shit like whispering doorknobs and smoke that tastes like ink, and strawberry chickens, and all the books want you to read them, but they're full of mirrors and teeth, but then you wake up and think damn, that was a crazy dream? I don't wake up.\"\n",
"This has always been my favorite explanation. \n\n~~www._URL_0_~~\n\n_URL_0_",
"I think this video is really cool. It gives a first-person experience of what it would be like to live a day with schizophrenia. \n_URL_0_",
"Frog Doug lunch aftershave smell nothing weigh. It's picky marry caution not Doug then why is late? Bye. Wow, how very child-sided. Let them dress sexy. It's ruined. ",
"Schizophrenia is the name people have given to a condition where someone is able to see and interact with quantum multiple universes, Since no one else can see them, they assume these people are insane, and therefore fear and hate them and try to drug them into losing their abilities.\n \n See, this explanation would not seem crazy to someone suffering from schizophrenia. Does that help?\n",
"Not useful, but \"schizophrenia\" comes from the old greek \"schizo\" wich means \"to split\", and \"phrein\" which eans \"the spirit\", because something is \"split\" between the reality and what you feel of reality (hallucinations...) ",
"Since I don't really see it being said elsewhere, there are a variation of schizophrenic symptoms. It is not all the same.\n\nSome schizophrenics believe themselves to be someone they are not -- such as a king. This feels exactly as it sounds. You honestly believe you are someone that you are not. A king, the target of a government conspiracy because you know too much, whatever. It's usually someone very important.\n\nSome schizophrenics hear or see things that are not there -- as adequately described by kindredflame.\n\nSome schizophrenics believes weird situations -- like conspiracy theorists or aliens.\n\nTo add a little more to what kindredflame said, it feels horrible. Different types of schizophrenia feel differently, I imagine; but one type is the good/bad voices. It's a surprisingly common type of schizophrenia where there are two or more voices in your head. They are almost always dichotomous in that one is telling you good things (\"You're a great person,\" \"You're going to achieve great things,\" \"You should be proud of yourself.\") and the other is telling you horrible things (\"Life isn't worth living,\" \"You are nothing,\" \"You should just kill yourself,\" \"Nobody loves you.\"). Have you ever been in a room where everyone was talking too loud, and you had to go outside for some quiet? It's like that, except you can't go outside. Ever. Not even at night. You are just constantly in that room. And not only is everyone talking really loudly, they are talking about _you_, and they are talking in extremes. Not realistically. They are talking about how you are either the greatest person on the planet or the worst person on the planet, and they mean it. They aren't joking. This is what they think about you, really loudly, 24/7, and you have to listen to it, and you can't make them stop.\n\nOftentimes, you cannot tell they are fake. You may believe someone is nearby talking, or that they are some sorts of messengers from god. The notion of an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other is almost exactly like this, and I wouldn't be surprised if that meme didn't start from a person with schizophrenia.\n\nYou'll believe an angel and a demon are arguing over you, and ultimately deciding whether you'll go to heaven or hell.\n\nYou'll start believing what they say, which is the worst part, because you can't settle your opinion. \"He's right. I am horrible, and I should kill myself,\" is immediately followed by \"He's right. I am a great person, and I have a lot to live for.\"\n\nThey aren't just words. These are your thoughts, and they are influential, and they are annoying, and they are constant, and they are contradictory, and they are extremes, and they are confusing, and you can't tell if they are you or divine.\n\nHow does it feel? Fucking horrible. ",
"Can you have a 'light' case of Schizophrenia? I don't have any visual hallucinations, but damn going through the list of symptoms I fit in like a thong in a bum. \n\nThen again, maybe I'm just experiencing medical student's disease. Or maybe they're trying to kill me.",
"I am diagnosed with schizophrenia and I feel I'm pretty qualified to describe my version of it. Knowing Reddit I'm sure there will be skeptics so anyones free to believe what they want, this is not an iama so I don't need proof as far as I know. I swear it is real though.\n\nMy experiences are a lot more subtle than the video and other descriptions going around I think. When I was younger (around 17) I had many experiences of thinking I had special powers, and i often thought I was able to make it rain on command. There was an underlying feeling that I was special, that the world was special just for me, that I saw some secret that nobody else did. I supposed in retrospect it was a way to cope with my feeling of hopelessness and my lack of power socially and physically. I had several similar general ideas that were always with me growing up, and I remember feeling very distanced to everyone else, like they had no clue who I was, and they were my enemies. This feeling of distance is very hard to describe, but I was angry at everyone and I had no capacity to put myself in their feelings or minds.\n\nAs I grew into my 20s, my life was starting to fall apart. I was not able to get a job, meet friends or do much in general. I had massive social anxiety and lots of paranoia. As best as I can tell my paranoia manifested in 3 broad ways. One was the social way where I thought others knew what I was thinking and everything I felt and thought. It's a very penetrative feeling where all privacy is lost. I did everything I could to act strange and say strange and out of place things so as to distance the others (who ironically were already distanced). I felt like my family and friends were playing mindfuck games with me like for example that my mother would wash my clothes in such a way that they would become smaller in a way that was annoying to me. I also thought she would spit in my food so I had to watch when she cooked eggs for me, and I always felt bad when eating food she had cooked, to the point where I didn't want to eat it. \n\nI had real trouble showering at my worst as well because I felt I was being watched even when I was alone in a locked room. I didn't know if they had cameras in there or if it was something deeper like the whole world being an illusion or game, and they stood 'outside' in some other dimension type thing, which also spawned many philosophy questions regarding what I could know about reality etc. I also thought people on IRC and MSN (people from other countries who I had never met) knew what I was thinking and would say things that I had just thought about on purpose, to fuck with me. Like if I had just watched 'Independence Day' the movie, someone I knew on MSN would message me a few minutes later asking questions about the movie, and I would wonder how the fuck he would know. I automatically thought he knew I had seen it. This is an example cause I can't remember exact episodes right now.\n\nAt some point I also thought a spider had settled in my ear because when I would move my jaw I would hear crackling sounds, and it fucking terrified me. I also often wondered about my body, like I was convinced I didn't have a normal brain, and maybe even no brain at all so that when I would take an EEG there would be no activity on it. I contemplated many times to put a recording device in my parents kitchen to hear what they were planning when I wasn't there, but then I figured they would already know if I had put it there and pretend when I was recording, so I could never really have proof. \n\nAnother major social problem was I was incapable of understanding situations. I would think people were angry at me, even people who I hadn't seen in years or months, and that most people disliked me. This made it really difficult for me to meet people and I spent years avoiding everyone I could from family and friends I used to have. The general feeling of all of this was a sense of not knowing, and a hollow feeling of being fucked with in secret. I thought if I killed someone I would reveal the secret because they would never allow me to do it, and so a clear sign would show to stop me. But then I thought, if they control everything couldn't they just pretend the person was dead? I would go to jail and whatnot and they would have even more reason to fuck with me. I had an extreme anger and wanted to show power and exert just violence and vengeance over those who oppressed me (basically everyone). I hated that they could just fuck with me like this and get away with it, and every time I thought about hurting them I would feel a sense of urgency and motivation. \n\nNear the latter part of my worst period I would also invent characters and personas who I thought were my friends. Not sure who they were but there was a man, and a girl, and they were the ones I could talk to and feel like they were on my side always. I talked to myself A LOT like it was my main way to deal with everything. I talked to the man and girl (who I had a mental image of but never saw or heard as hallucinations) and to myself. i could sit for hours on end it felt like debating everything I cared about from movies to philosophy to troublesome real life situations to plans for revenge etc.\n\nI was also really afraid of illness so I felt like I thought I had contracted some terminal disease all the time. Basically I had cancer, diabetes and I thought I could become paralyzed forever from sleeping (because I had sleep paralysis once in 2002 and it scared the shit out of me I was afraid it would be permanent) so this fucked up my ability to sleep for a while, no matter how much I read that it wasn't possible. But basically if my brain latched onto an idea of illness, it would terrorize me for a long time until I was able to get over it naturally. \n\nIt took me many years of therapy and mental maturing / work to get over it and I can say today that I am a lot better. The anger is gone, and I have much more sensible view of the world and other people. Ironically I went from a kind of inner totalitarianism to an external nihilism. I realized that we're all people and there's a lot of fucked up stuff happening, but we're capable of a lot of love and caring, and good times. It all became a kind of random physical process with us at the center I guess. Sometimes I still get notions and feelings of paranoia and anxiety but I try my best to control them and usually it passes on its own or when I change my environment or get positive feedback from people. I still find it pretty hard to just be normal in my mind, I can't help but stray onto weird association paths and making decisions is hard, but yeah.",
"Here is a good video that tries to, to the best of its ability, to simulate schizophrenia. It shows how scary it can be for somebody suffering from it, and also makes it pretty clear why somebody would act the way they do... if you were experiencing the same things they were experiencing you probably would act the same way.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\nThe majority of people suffering from schizophrenia suffer from audio hallucinations (I will get into delusions in a little bit). A small percentage suffer from visual hallucinations, and an even smaller percentage suffer from tactile (physically feeling) hallucinations.\n\nEverybody has had a psychotic episode at some point in their life. You ever hear the phone ringing but then when you go to answer it you realize you just thought you heard it? Ever heard somebody you were talking to say something and then when you asked them what they said they said they didn't say anything? Ever thought you saw a friend and then when you looked back over it was somebody else? Those are all examples of normal psychosis that everybody experiences.\n\nNow what is different about those examples and people with schizophrenia is they really can't tell the difference between the two. While you hear the phone ringing for a moment and realize \"oh, it was just a thought\", they hear the phone ringing and can't tell whether it is actually ringing or not.\n\nThe voices that they \"hear\" are also similar to something people do every day, talking inside their head. You ever do something embarrassing and just say to yourself, \"ugh that was stupid of you.\"? Well people with schizophrenia can't differentiate between that self talk and somebody else talking to them. So they say that in their head and suddenly they go, \"what? who said that?!\" followed by, \"I did.\" to which they say, \"what?! who are you?!\" and so on and so forth. So you can imagine how disconcerting it could be to hear your own thoughts like it is from somebody around you. It is also why you will see people with schizophrenia talking to themselves. While to you it looks like the person is just talking back and forth randomly, they are actually having a conversation where they are saying each part like they are hearing somebody else say it.\n\nNow for the delusions... it isn't too much of a leap to understand how if you thought there was somebody responding to your own thoughts would start to make you paranoid, or believe strange things. If suddenly I heard somebody talking to me about my own thoughts, I would get a bit scared too and start coming up with reasons why that is happening.",
"my boss is a bipolar schizophrenic and if she doesn't take her medicine she says she hears voices that tell her she's a terrible person and she's ugly and stuff like that. never anything violent, just mean things that makes her feel bad about herself.",
"My younger brother has the paranoid subtype of schizophrenia. He first displayed symptoms when he was 18, which is the usual age at which the disease manifests.\n\nSimply put, he is paranoid about people trying to poison him and kill him. He believes in bizarre delusions, such as our family sprinkling poison in his food, embedding video cameras into our vents, and implanting voice recorders in our walls. He believes the world is out to get him because of strange voices he hears and things he sees (which aren't really there).\n\nThe strangest fact I learned about the disease is the fact that they cannot \"forget\" things. For instance, when most healthy people are working while construction workers use a jackhammer outside the window, after a while their mind will desensitize itself to the noise of the jackhammer and will ignore the sounds. This allows normal people to continue working and focusing on whatever task they may be doing. Patients with schizophrenia cannot \"ignore\" these stimuli and they get startled everytime they hear a noise or see something strange, because their brain cannot turn off the \"watch out for that!\" option. I think that this has a lot to do with the reason why my brother cannot forget simple mundane acts, and thinks everything is some sort of \"sign from god\" or \"indication\" that people are trying to kill him.",
"This was my experience:\n\nI could still control my own train of thought and internal dialogue, but there were other voices that communicated with me inside head. I could have entire (unpleasant) conversations with entities I logically knew weren't real without opening my mouth. That shit gets old fast.",
"I thought this was an interesting take on it. A Schizophrenia simulation.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nKind of creepy for us sane folk.",
"Schizophrenia runs in my family, i have long feared i would develop it myself. The main people that have it bad is my Dad, sister, and my late uncle. One thing to realize is these \"imaginings\" are as real to them as you reading these words. \n\nDad - Mainly paranoia. He imagines conversations and situations that just doesn't exist. If he see someone taking a picture he will be seriously convinced they are watching him. Random meaningless sentences to him can devolve into you plotting on him. He doesnt have any hallucinations that i have ever heard of. \n\nSister - She recently developed it. Symptoms tend to show in your 20s, she just started last year at 24. I believe it was greatly aggravated by her abusing Meth since she was 17 or so. She imagines people talking to her and giving her advice and trying to convince her to do stuff. Most of these people are dead friends or family. Pretty much only auditory hallucinations. \n\nUncle - His was the worst. He had a combination of the two above along with very overt visual hallucinations. He was also firmly convinced that God did this to him for his troubled youth and that this was the beginning of Armageddon. He was very fire and brimstone religious. One of the most common things i always heard was he couldn't be around any pictures of people, they would always talk to him. Books would open and start reading themselves, pages turning and all. \n\nSo yea, thats my schitzo family. My sister and uncle are on medication and when they took the meds they were ok. However they both said life on the meds just wasnt worth living (no emotions or passion), and both have went off and on episodes multiple times. My sister just got out of the hospital last week actually, she totaled her car on a telephone pole and when the cops got there she was telling them she was just waiting on her (dead) friend to get done tanning. My uncle passed away on Mothers day this year, but it had been quite a few years since he had any episodes. My dad was never on any medication and i havent had anything to do with him since i was 18 so i dont know how he has handled it. ",
"Just a warning to everyone making a comparison between tripping and schizophrenia: they are similar, but different. The warning is that tripping and really any psychoactive drug (including pot) can cause temporary psychosis, or trigger permanent schizophrenia. This happened to me (temporary) and a friend of mine (permanent). It took me 2 years + to find my way back. It took my friend heavy medication that made him a zombie, and then a self-fired bullet through his head to end it.\n\nThere is some value to be gained by tripping and I think most people should do it once or up to three times. Just understand that you're fucking with the chemistry in your brain and things can and do go permanently wrong. Not to scare anyone, most people I know tripped a bunch and are fine, just respect it and realize it is not a recreational drug. It is for mental and spiritual growth. Use it for that purpose. If, after 3 times you still want more, learn to meditate in one of the many ways that can get you to the same place.\n\nDon't take chances with your reality. You don't wanna go where I went. You definetly don't want to end up like my friend.",
"My schizophrenia is not like this. Just audio based delusions for myself, not as bad I suppose, although the difference between real and fake can be hard to determine.",
"This might be the wrong place to ask this but I've not been on reddit for too long. But it seems like this thread has some people that could aswer this question for me. \n\nMy cousin has just been diagnosed as bi polar and schizophrenic. His mother has moved in with him to look after him because he didn't take his meds and is having delusions. I'm one of the only people he trusts and when I talk to him he keeps on telling me that the doctor is trying to poison him and the medications are too strong and he thinks he will accidentally overdose. Is there a good way to explain that he needs to take them to him? He seems to just say Yeah and then I have to have the same conversation a few days later again.\n\n\n\n",
"As an internal medicine physician, I see many schizophrenics in the hospital for other reasons (they tend to have lots of comorbidities). The most impressive sight is an intelligent schizophrenic (they usually are) who has full use of rational thought and reasoning but who gears them towards illusory ends. These are the most confusing and deceiving of patients. You can talk with them for a while at a very high level before they drop a bomb on you...like the Croation Mafia is after them or that they are Angelus Silesius. Crazy shit.",
"I'd suggest watching the movie A Beautiful Mind. It explains paranoid schizophrenia pretty well, plus it's a great movie.",
"IAMA psychologist in charge of mental health services for an agency that serve about 500 individuals with mental health problems in the community. About 10% of my clients have some flavor of psychosis -- including schizophrenia -- and each person manifests symptoms in a different way. One interesting observation is that schizophrenics are most frequently disorganized thinkers, often paranoid and rarely violent. Unlike how media often portrays such persons. ",
"I have been diagnosed Schizoaffective and for me my psychotic/manic/altered states of consciousness were mostly very positive. Felt more like a spiritual awakening. Leading up to my first episode I had a gradual increased feeling of sense of self. I was becoming more comfortable, confident and accepting of who I was. I was challenging myself and consciously trying to work on myself to be a better person. I now identify the start of the manic period as when I was lying in bed one night and started to have racing thoughts. Thoughts about my future rushed into my head and everything became clear and exciting. I wanted to make positive changes like move house, change career etc. Great zest for life. I soon met a girl and fell in love. This increased my manicness/elevated mood I'm sure. \n\nThe first hallucination I had was seeing her aura above her face. Then I saw stars move and collect around me in the night sky. At the time of that occurring my heart was very open and I felt amazing. Like a higher state of consciousness. All the times that I had delusion/hallucination my mind and heart were in a very open and loving place. I don't think anything out of the ordinary would have ever been perceived by me if that were not the case. After seeing the stars things became much more intense. I started noticing synchronicities in music, felt like God was controlling my shuffle. As that week went on I got researching spiritual awakening on the internet and began to get beliefs that the world was soon to change in some way. During this time I was very active and always on the go. I would see my family and perceived my mother as evil in some way. Her mannerisms were often devilish. I felt I had found heaven within and felt all knowing; very emotionally intuitive. \n\nOne morning I woke up and the girl I had fallen in love with texted me to pick her up from somewhere. I said I would be there as fast as I could. I drove to her in quite a dangerous fashion, skipping red lights and driving down the hard shoulder of motorway. At the time I just felt totally capable to do so and felt I was doing so for a higher good: for true love. When I arrived there and spent some time with her I gradually felt like we were destined to be celebrities and were about to go to some initiation event of some kind in Los Angeles. For weeks now the sun had felt the brightest it had ever been in my life. We got in my car and as we drove off I heard the soundtrack to the end of Greece play in my head and sensed the car lifting into the sky and flying off. Anyway, I got her to her destination and she just wanted to be friends etc. She maybe could sense something was a bit odd with me and said I should go see my mum. \n\nBefore going to see my mum I first went to my flat and this is where I really felt my ego totally dissolve. I felt overwhelmed with love and vitality but at the same time felt a bit vulnerable, I felt I would do anything for anyone at that point. I sent the girl a really long dramatic text ending, 'we are too young to die', and then drove to my mum's. There I got the real sensation that the world was about to change in some distinct way and that older people would not survive. My mum was suffering with a form of shizoaffective disorder herself but of the depressive kind at this point. Her eyes seemed dead and void of love to me whilst I was beaming with love from my eyes and crown chakra. I had to leave. I kissed her goodbye thinking it may really be the last time I see her and got in my car. As driving off I got this real sensation that just nothing was real anymore, that I was in a different dimension and nothing really mattered. I just wanted to drive however the hell I wanted. I felt super alert and very capable. I drove down the road like I was invincible, speeding close past cars for a good mile or two until I got to a corner/sliproad to enter the motorway. By this time I was amazed at how I had driven and questioned If I had been respnsible for driving so fast without crashing myself or whether God had my car on stabilisers so to speak. I needed to check if God was protecting me and my car for future reference (if he was then I could use this in the future in this new dimension) I spun the wheel dramatically during the turn and ended up skidding head on into a post. Slammed my head on the airbag but not injured at all. Jumped out of my car feeling even more euphoric. It was like a Near Death Experience and now I almost felt immortal. \n\nA truck driver pulled up beside me immediately and I got in, no questions asked. I later got out as had forgot phone in car. Went to walk back to car but got lost and ended up on a hill where I telepathically spoke to a Spirit/Angel via a spider. I stood there for hours. This was my first experience with thought insertion/telepathy. She asked me to remember some of my past with my mum and then onto my experiences with this girl. The thought insertion eventually went on to talk about unconditional love. I spent that night sleeping in a garden on the hill. Walked back to my mum in the morning where everyone was really worried what had happened to me. I rang the police myself to get my phone back (they had obviously attended the abandoned car that night). They came to take me away for psychological evaluation in hand cuffs. I went with no resistance, felt like a sacrifice. \n\nI explained everything very honestly to the Drs and ended up spending about 6 weeks in hospital under a Section 3. This was my first of 2 hospital sections I have had. The 2nd time occurred a few months later after 7 months of what I would call altered state of conciousness. That time was more about trying to lose my ego again. To get back to a sense of self and it contained visual, auditory and tactile hallucinations but again, all mostly positive, spiritual experiences apart from near the end where I started to sense the devil spitting in my ear like a serpent.\n\nI really identify with and recommend the series of youtube videos by Sean Blackwell 'BipolarOrWakingUp'. Really captures the essence of what I went through and gives you the argument for the spiritual aspect of bipolar/schizo psychotic mania. First video in series [here](_URL_0_)",
"with my sister it swings to either side of rationality and is flavoured by paranoia, for example, she has issues with our dad (who is a bit of a dick, borderline verbal abusive but ONLY verbal) and on her six monthly visits she will either crucify him and say there is no excuse for ANY of his behaviour and that he is beyond reprieve OR she will say she is forgiving him OVER and OVER and that no one has the right to be critical, never can she be anywhere in between and see that yes, he is abrasive,dismissive , ignorant and self absorbed but that it actually stems from his own upbringing.\n\nalso she is worried she isnt covering all bases so basically every statement has a negating counterstatement after it in each email or SMS she writes.\ne.g. \" Its been a hard week, but in many ways it came naturally and was full of gifts.\" \n\nanother thing that is habitual now is peppering conversations with sentences to try to show she is grasping what you are saying but that do the opposite because they are right before the point being made in your sentence and slightly off topic."
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3tj8yc | i get that computers perform calculations in binary using transistors for ones and zeros. but, how does it translate from my keystrokes, to calculations, to visible things on my screen? | Ok so, if you ask anyone how a processor/computer works they say the whole 1s and 0s and how transistors work. I have a loose grasp on how binary arithmetic works. One part (probably many parts) that just blows my mind is some how these 1's and 0's ends up with me playing GTAV, or streaming netflix, or typing a word document. How my keystrokes get calculaed, and then translated to something put on my display.
I am sure this all happens in multiple processes, probably some done in the GPU or.... something. ..
Is there any way for an explanation of where and/or how this all happens? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3tj8yc/eli5_i_get_that_computers_perform_calculations_in/ | {
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"Every key on your keyboard has switch behind it. Your keyboard translates these mechanical signals into a code wich your computer understands. Mostly these are ASCII codes which are used",
"Let's take a first-person shooter game as an example. The program keeps track of the player's position in 3D space inside the game world, which might be something like (2.348762, 7.7146, -3.79465). 60 times a second, the computer calculates a snapshot of what the camera sees, which produces a sequence of images that your eyes can interpret as a moving view of the world. This snapshot of course depends on where the camera is in the game world, as well as the positions of all the things the camera can see. \n\nWhen you press \"W\" to walk forward, the game checks that there is no object to block you from moving forward, then it increases the Z value of your position by a little bit (many games use the Z axis for the forward direction). When your position changes, the camera tied to the head of your character also moves, and the snapshot is made using this new position. There is a lot of math in here to figure out exactly what the world looks like from the camera's perspective, but as you might expect, the computer is good at number crunching problems like this. This is where the GPU comes in, because calculating the color of millions of pixels is best done by thousands of independent processors instead of just one. \n\nThen let's say you press the \"fire\" button. The computer is constantly checking for any new key presses (pressing a key will change the electrical properties of wires in the keyboard, and the computer knows how to check these repeatedly). It sees that you clicked the mouse, and because of that it creates a new set of data to describe the bullet, such as where it starts, and what velocity it moves with. These can be calculated from the player's position and the type of gun they are using, etc. As the game continues to run it can now calculate the motion of the bullet (modifying the (x,y,z) position of the bullet), and check if it enters an enemy or hits a wall. \n\nThe key idea here is that the computer holds data to describe every object that it can show you, and has rules to tell it what to do to those objects when you hit a certain key or move the mouse. It also has rules to tell it how to draw an object on the screen, which usually involves remembering a huge set of triangles that cover the surface of the object and then doing math to move those triangles to where they should be on the screen and filling in the right colors. Each object has a \"texture\" which is a set of data that says what color each part of the triangle should be. [this video series](_URL_0_) describes how this triangle drawing process works. ",
"Okay so your issue is a disconnect between 1/0 on a processor level and high level stuff like videogames and the internet?\n\nI'll try to break down how software in general works, though this is really hard to do in a really easy to understand fashion. I hope I'm given some leeway by the experts for some oversimplification and omissions. Also not quite ELI5\n\n1. **The first step up from the 1s and 0s** is probably assembler. Assembler is a set of instructions that your processor understands intrinsically. A program that a software developer writes ends up in a very similar form. Now the operation a CPU will support are on one side logical and arithmetically but it can also talk to I/O devices (your hard disk, GPU, RAM and so on)\n_URL_0_\nThis picture is an opCode table. See how there are 1s and 0s in the column and row headers? this is how 1s and 0s end up doing things. A regular CPU has things called registers, basically a bunch of slots that those low level operations will operate on.\nSo the ADD instruction will take two registers, add them together and write it back into a register. MOV will allow you loading things from RAM or writing it there, IN and OUT allows us to talk to our IO Devices.\n\n2. **Okay so now our CPU can do things** with data, move it from/to RAM and talk to our IO devices. Now a program is basically nothing but a list of those instructions. In an oversimplified PC we can already draw on the screen. Lets assume our GPU is just a memoryblock with 1920*1080 bit. each bit switches the corresponding pixel on your screen between white and black. So writing from your CPU to your GPU-memory an alternating series of 1s and 0s would result in a chessboard pattern. Obviously you could also display text with the right patterns of 1s and 0s. (In reality a GPU does much more than that but let's omit that for now). But working with such limited instructions is reaaaaaaally bothersome. Even adding 2 values from ram and writing it back is 4 operations. \n\n3. **Enter Higher-level Languages and compilers.** I'll keep this really brief because this is getting fairly long. A compiler takes a much more sophisticated language (allowing for things like a = 3 +2, or draw(\"C:\\picture.png\") ) and breaks it down to the instructions defined by the opCode table (with some more stuff because there is also the OS .... while on the topic)\n\n4. **Putting everyone on equal footing and making differences more managable**. When writing software it would be an incredible pain in the ass to write variations for all the different hardware configurations and variations a PC can have. Also we'd always have to see what other programs would like to run currently and figure out whose turn to use the CPU it is. Which is why we need some sort of common ground. That'd be the OS, it abstracts hardware to a common \"talking language\" with drivers (which is why you need those), allocates resources to programs (memory, CPU time and permissions) and generally makes things more unified and tidy.\n\nOkay now from the other side. So you have your neat game.exe somewhere on your hard drive and would like to play it. So you boot your PC at which point a bunch of code gets loaded from your special boot-sector from your hard disk, that's your OS. \n\nYou navigate to your game.exe and doubleclick it. your OS moves it from the hard drive to ram and gives it some CPU time to run, periodically switching to all your other software you have running (including the OS itself) so you can still watch the youtube clip on your other screen. \n\nYou start playing and your game code is happily talking to all your I/O devices via the OS. Telling your graphics card what to draw, listening to the mouse where you're pointing, putting a savefile on your drive and tons of other things. \n\nYeah running software down to 1s and 0s is kinda involved. And this was pretty much the shortest explanation I could come up with"
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4wub7l | why, in the english language, is it incorrect to say "me, my dad, and my sister" and correct to say "my dad, my sister, and i"? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4wub7l/eli5_why_in_the_english_language_is_it_incorrect/ | {
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"You use \"me\" when you're the object of the sentence.\n\nYou use \"I\" when you're the subject of the sentence.\n\n\"I ran to Bob.\"\n\n\"Bob ran to me.\"\n\nThe subject of the sentence is what's acting. The object is what's having something done to it.",
"Break them apart. You wouldn't say \"Me went to the store.\" You WOULD, however, say \"That happened to me, my dad and my sister.\"",
"It isn't incorrect to say \"me, my dad, and my sister\" when you're all the objects of a sentence.\n\nFor example:\n\n\"This house belongs to me, my dad, and my sister.\" is more correct than \"This house belongs to my dad, my sister, and I\". You wouldn't say \"This house belongs to I\".\n\nHowever, it is even *more* correct to say: \"This house belongs to my dad, my sister, and me.\" It is polite to put yourself last in a list of people.",
"Put it in a sentence and remove the other pronouns except the personal \"I\" or \"me\".\n\nIt makes more sense (in most cases).\n",
"There are a few misconceptions here.\n\nIn standard English, \"I\" is used for the subject of a sentence, and \"me\" as the object, and this remains true when there are multiple people referred to in the subject or object. So it's \"my dad, my sister and I\" if that's the subject (\"My dad, my sister and I went to the park\"), but \"my dad, my sister and me\" if that's the object (\"My aunt came to visit my dad, my sister and me\"). So \"my dad, my sister and me\" is not wrong at all when it's used as the object of a sentence.\n\nNow, note that we're talking about standard English here. In some dialects of English, \"my dad, my sister and me\" can be used as the subject, and that is correct in that dialect.\n\nFinally, it's conventional to put oneself last, as I have done in the examples above. This is a question of style or etiquette, not of grammar. So \"me, my dad and my sister\" is conventionally written as \"my dad, my sister and me\" (or \"...and I\", as appropriate). There is nothing wrong with \"My aunt came to visit me, my dad and my sister\" grammatically, but this is considered bad style.\n\nEDIT: missing brackets"
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qv2cs | the controversy over the ending of mass effect 3 | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/qv2cs/eli5_the_controversy_over_the_ending_of_mass/ | {
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"from a comment thread: \n > _URL_0_\n\nJohn Curtin · Georgetown University\nI didn't understand what the big deal was either. I thought people were just whining about not being given what they wanted.\n\nThen I experienced the ending for myself.\n\nNow, I've been with Mass Effect for 5 years, since the beginning. It took me 40 hours to beat ME3. And I can say, without equivocation, that for the first 39 hours and 50 minutes of ME3, it was the best game I had ever played. Period, bar none. Gaming nirvana.\n\nThe last ten minutes ended all that, and NOT because *spoiler* Shepard dies in nearly every case.\n\nThere was no closure offered. None. All the places and people I had come to care about over my 5 year with the series? Brushed over. What's more, the ending defied the basic pillar of the ME universe: choice. This series was all about CHOOSING. Choosing how you played your game and influenced your world. The endings took all that away.\n\nAnd enough of this about there being 16 different endings. That is total BS. There are 3 endings. And even that's being generous, because each one is really just a sort of variant on the others.\n\nI love Mass Effect. If I didn't this wouldn't be a big deal. I'm NOT asking for the ending that I want. I'm not a spoiled child, I don't need to get my way all the time. But man, we the fans deserved an ending that we could RESPECT.\n\nAnd, frankly, Bioware deserved that too, because other than the last 10 minutes, they had achieved brilliance. And they let it get away.\n",
"This is the main reason why people are upset. **Fair warning thar be spoilers ahead.**\n\n.\n\n.\n\n.\n \nIn a series like Mass Effect, the choices you made in previous installments are emphasized because they affect the outcome of the events in newer games. In Mass Effect 2, characters mention missions and outcomes from Mass Effect 1 and there are branches of dialogue and characters that may or may not appear based on your decisions in the 1st game. In the third game, that is present to an extent, but it's pretty trivial.\n\nFor example, there is a queen of an insect-like race that you can choose to destroy (dooming her race to extinction) or set free in the first game. This queen, or a carbon copy of the queen will appear no matter your choice from the first game. So instead of writing a mission based on the fact that you destroyed the queen, you play the exact same mission with her copy instead even though it was established in the first game that she is the very last queen. She tells you this herself.\n\nThis wouldn't be so offensive to people if the idea that the choices the player made throughout the last two games *really* mattered according to Bioware. Now this example would probably be forgivable if it wasn't for the ending. According to Bioware, there are 16 possible outcomes in the game. These are conditionally based on characters you recruit and missions you complete as well as a part of the game where you search for \"War Assets\" that are supposed to help (in the background) against your enemy.\n\nDuring the final battle, the main enemy from Mass Effect 2, a giant robot spaceship named Harbinger reappears and you're told over the radio that it is on its way. There is no interaction at all between you and it, it just shoots at you. Harbinger was a pain in your ass during the last game and many players expected there to be at least some sort of showdown between you and it **OR** at least give Harbinger some dialogue.\n\nAs a player, you're under the illusion that all these things you've done over the course of playing for 20-30 hours do matter until you get to the last 10-15 minutes of the game. Here you are presented with a choice that comes completely out of left field. You're presented with a *deus ex machina* which is Latin for \"god out of the machine\". Wikipedia defines it best:\n\n > a plot device whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem is suddenly and abruptly solved with the contrived and unexpected intervention of some new event, character, ability, or object.\n\nThroughout the game you are lead to believe that you're helping build a superweapon that will destroy your enemies. In the last act, you are on board the superweapon and it doesn't activate. You pass out because you're mortally wounded and right after you pass out, a platform raises from the floor and takes you to a spot on the weapon that you haven't seen before, which given its size, should have been noticed.\n\nThe *deus ex machina* is the character that appears next. You've never met this character and his omnipotence hasn't been seen in any way during the entirety of the series up until this point. This character is called the Catalyst. The Catalyst is basically a god, who explains that the enemy you're fighting is his solution to the problem where artificially created beings (synthetic life) are destined to destroy their creators. He gives you three choices: One is to destroy all synthetic life in the galaxy, another is to take over your synthetic enemies in order to control them, the final one is to merge all synthetic life with organic life. This, again, wouldn't be an issue except for when there was a mission specifically to solve the problem of synthetic life destroying their organic creators earlier in the game. Your character made peace between a race of organics and a race of synthetics. This is not brought up in the conversation with the Catalyst.\n\nSo then you have to make your decision, Control the enemy, Destroy the enemy (and a race of synthetics that, most likely has been helping you) or create new life by merging synthetics and organics. A cinematic is played that shows a ball of energy coming out of the ship that you're on and spreading throughout the galaxy through the Mass Relays (the main method of long-distance travel throughout the galaxy). The Mass Relays are destroyed after transferring this energy. Some scenes are shown on Earth of soldiers fighting the enemy and winning, then your ship, the Normandy, is shown trying to outrun the energy travelling through the Mass Relay and eventually failing. They're shown later crash landing on a jungle planet with no way off of it because the Normandy has been damaged too badly. \n\nThis all happens **regardless of your choice** after talking to the Catalyst. The only substantial difference between the cinematics is the color of the ball of energy that moves through the galaxy. So all the choice you thought you had up until this point leads to this ending, no matter what.\n\nThen there are plot holes in this cinematic you're shown. First, the Normandy is shown leading the battle above Earth with the combined fleets of everyone you've recruited to help throughout the game. There is no explanation why they are travelling through the Mass Relay which is located along the orbit of Pluto. When the Normandy crash lands, a few of your crew step off of her onto the planet, many people are reporting that the party members that they selected to help them in the final battle on Earth step off of the Normandy. Again, no explanation as to *how* they got back onboard the Normandy and how they got to the Mass Relay in time for all of this to happen; they still use shuttles to travel to and from the surface of a planet and the amount of time between being by yourself and the choice with the Catalyst is far too short.\n\nSome of these crew members *will* starve on the planet, there are different races that require different types of food in Mass Effect and it's impossible for one planet to provide for everyone.\n\nFinally, and this is the biggest problem that I personally have with the ending, the Mass Relays are destroyed no matter what you choose. Now, like I said before, the Mass Relays are the main way that the galaxy travels around in Mass Effect. There is regular old faster than light travel, but it is far too slow for someone to cross the galaxy; most civilizations have developed very close to a Mass Relay. Furthermore, there was DLC for Mass Effect 2 where you have to destroy a relay by smashing an asteroid into it. In that DLC, you're told that the explosion from a Mass Relay is comparable to a supernova; i.e. the star system and its planets will be destroyed. This either doesn't happen or is completely glossed over at the end, so either the writers completely ignored the DLC, which is canon for the series, they didn't explain how this destruction of the Mass Relays was different or there was another *deus ex machina* that conveniently solved obliterating every star system that contained civilized life in the galaxy. Setting aside the solution to that problem, galactic civilization was destroyed anyway (the thing you were fighting the entire game to save) because no one is able to conveniently/safely travel long distances anymore.\n\nTL;DR: Their ending is bad and they should feel bad.",
"The series is quite story and choice driven. The ending of MF3 is pretty much the same cutscene no matter your choices and I've heard the game as a whole lacks climax and closure (ir lots of unresolved threads at the end). ",
"A quick summery:\n\nThe ending provided no closure, did not take into consideration any choices made in all 3 games, and while there where 3 \"final\" options given to you they don't change the ending in any way whatsoever. ",
"ekvq explained the major problems quite well.\n\nHere's some additional information:\n\n-**BioWare is notorious for attention to detail and for inserting extremely minor, trivial dialog/scenes and so on that are plot-relevant.**\n\n-**The Mass Effect series allows you to import save files from the previous games, and the amount of choice provided to the player basically creates a unique gaming experience.**\n\n-**The backstories for most characters are so well-done that by the end of the game, you will probably know more about the character's history, personality, behavior, etc. than you will people in real life.**\n\n**So, here's the issue:**\n\nThe storyline of ME3 is fantastic and well done. Choices you made in ME1/ME2 can and will have damning results in ME3.\n\nExample: (SPOILER ALERT!)\n\nIn the beginning of ME1, you will run across a Quarian by the name of Tali who will join you on your missions through ME1 and ME2. She is a romantic interest in ME2 and ME3. Her backstory is amazing and she's got the damsel in distress element that makes her a lovable character. In ME2, you run across a Geth by the name of Legion. The Geth are a synthetic race created by the Quarians who rebelled and exiled the Quarian people from their homelands. The Quarians now live on a flotilla of thousands of ships and are forced to live inside clean suits to survive. The Geth Legion is Tali's enemy. Depending on your choices throughout ME2, you can choose to assist Tali, Legion, or stay in the middle and keep them from killing each other. The choices you made in ME2 affect a choice you must make in ME3. The Quarians sense a moment of weakness in the Geth and go on a full-out offensive to take back their homeworld. In the process of assisting them, you find Legion and assist him in breaking free of the hold of a Reaper who is assisting the Geth. Depending on your choices, the final mission in this story arc will have the Geth Legion attempting to upload code that will give his people individuality. The Quarians are pushing an offensive. The code has the side effect of making his people much more intelligent and efficient. You must convince the Quarians to withdraw, as they will be utterly obliterated when the code is completely uploaded and are fully committed to the war. Depending on your choices between Tali and Legion throughout the ME2 and ME3 games, you may or may not be able to save the Quarian flotilla. If you do not, Tali commits suicide. Also, Legion dies no matter what. This is an example of a powerful side story that exists in the game and is what makes the game so fantastic.\n\n**So, with that being said, it comes as a shock that in the final minutes of the game, you are only presented with 3 options: Control the Reapers (and remove them from the system); Merge together all organic and synthetic life (to remove the need for the Reapers); or Destroy all Synthetic life (including the Geth). No choice that you have made throughout the entire series matters or affects the decision. That is the primary concern of the whole ending and the source of most of the controversy.**\n\n**The secondary source of the controversy is the lack of epilogue or any indication of what happens to your team, your love, and so on.**\n\n**HOWEVER, here's a popular opinion (that I have come to believe):**\n\n**(SPOILERS!)**\n\nAs ekvq stated, Harbinger attacks you while you are on your way to enter the Citadel. Harbinger is a Reaper. Reapers possess an ability to Indoctrinate those whom they come in contact with. It is an extremely slow process and basically psychologically attacks and torments the person into becoming extremely suggestible, and are then fed information and instructions by the Reaper.\n\nThe leading theory is that throughout the trilogy, the main character and his team are in constant contact with Reaper technology and have slowly become indoctrinated. This is supported by the following evidence:\n\n**-A new crew member (Lt. James Vega) states numerous times that he hears a humming noise coming from the ship. It was stated in ME1 by Tali that the Normandy (your ship) does not make any noise (she has problems sleeping because of it). A humming noise is a symptom of the first levels of indoctrination. Since this crew member is new, he would not be as heavily indoctrinated as the other crew members.**\n\n**-Shadowy figures and random people move through various cutscenes in the background. This is a symptom of long-term indoctrination.**\n\n**-The main character has constant visions/nightmares which involve tormented whispers of the dead or dying and the sight of a little boy dying horribly. This is a symptom of long-term indoctrination.**\n\n**-The main character experiences a moment towards the beginning of the game where he interacts with the little boy who later appears in his nightmares/visions. The little boy refuses to be assisted by him despite the fact that he is a heavily armed military officer and the planet is under attack by alien robots. The other character in this scene does not seem to see or hear the little boy. Furthermore, when the other character gains the attention of the main character over the little boy, a loud metallic humming sound is heard, which is a symptom of indoctrination.**\n\n**-The final three choices of the game represent the following:**\n\n--Control the Reapers (do not destroy them)\n\n--Synthesize synthetic/organic life (do not destroy them)\n\n--Destory the Reapers\n\n**Throughout the trilogy, your single utmost goal is to destroy the Reapers and save the galaxy. Of the three choices, only one choice actually involves you fulfilling your goal and your desires. The other two choices compromise with the Reapers.**\n\n**-There is a secret ending in the game that is only available if you gain enough fleet support AND if you stick by your major goal and actually destroy the Reapers instead of compromising. This ending shows Shepard alive, under rubble that is very similar to the rubble at the location where he was shot with the beam, and does not look similar to the unique rubble that would have been generated from the destruction of a major starbase (the Citadel). It is theorized that because this ending only appears if you destroy the Reapers, that the fact that you overcame the \"suggestion\" to compromise with the Reapers proves that you were indoctrinated and your will to fight the Reapers has allowed you to overcome the indoctrination and break out of the hallucination that is gripping you.**\n\nSo, in a nutshell, the reason that the ending is so controversial is that there are many different ways to interpret the ending and it seems as though the ending was left open intentionally. ME3 is known to be the final chapter of the Shepard and crew story, so fans who have put in hundreds upon hundreds of hours would like clarity and closure for a group of characters that they know and identify with more than actual real-life people.\n\n**TL;DR:**\n\nThe ending was left open to interpretation and did not provide clarity/closure as expected for the end of Shepard and Team's storyline. Fans are upset because they spent hundreds of hours getting to know these consistent, well written characters for the storyline to end without closure.",
"The ending is completely at odds with the rest of the game:\n\n* The first act is about correcting the mistakes of a species who used science to \"play God\" with races not as advanced as them.\n\n* In the second act you negotiate peace between a race of sentient machines and their creators.\n\n* During the whole game you fight two enemies: the reapers, a race of machine/organic hybrids; and Cerberus, a group that wants to control the Reapers.\n\n* The trilogy had set the expectation that Shepard can argue any subject in the game, and that with enough points he can convince people to his way of thinking.\n\nThen in the last 5 minutes of the trilogy, out of nowhere a new character appears and tells you that he created the Reapers to bring order (playing God), that peace between organics and machines is impossible (even though you just achieved that a little while ago), and that your only options are to Destroy all machines, make everyone in the galaxy a Machine/Organic hybrid (like the Reapers), or Control the Reapers (which is what the leader of Cerberus was trying the achieve the whole time). Shepard just accepts this.\n\nThen you die, no one can travel in space anymore, and all of you friends become stranded in a planet in the middle of nowhere, where they starve or die in terrible pain.\n\n\n\n**tl;dr the ending is lame**",
"This [video](_URL_0_) should prove enlightening.\n"
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494qeo | in monopoly why does it feel like people hit certain places more than others? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/494qeo/eli5in_monopoly_why_does_it_feel_like_people_hit/ | {
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"Because that is in fact what's happening. How far you move in Monopoly is determined by rolling dice, and rolling dice do not evenly distribute every possible number. For example, by rolling two die, you cannot ever move 1 space, and there is only one way for you to move 2 spaces, but there are 5 ways for you to move 6 spaces. By nature of the probability of dice outcomes, any game that uses standard die to play will have some squares visited more than others.",
"Because you do. Take for example the number of ways you can go to jail. Roll three doubles, draw a card, land on the 'Go to Jail' square.\nThen remember that the average roll on two die is seven. So seven squares from jail is the most landed on square (theoretically).\nThen there are cards which send you to specific squares, thus bypassing most of the 'bottom' row. So allowing for the 'Go to Jail' square immediately before this row (and the aforementioned ways of getting sent to jail) and the 'Go to x Square' cards, the bottom row is the least landed on.\n\nSo yeah, some places are visited more often.",
"Certain places are more likely to get visited. The best strategy is to buy all the properties between jail and free parking because there's a lot more occurances to be sent to jail, meaning you're more likely to land on a property between jail and free parking. \n \nOn the opposite, it actually better to shy away from the final row between go to jail and Go. Those properties have bank breaking rent but the odds of landing on them are lower. \n \n[Here's a video detailing great general strategies to use](_URL_0_)"
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n866l | vowel sounds | Okay, this may *sound* weird, but really, how do we tell vowel sounds apart? I can say "Ah" and "Ee" on the same pitch and volume, and yet they sound different.
What's going on? I thought that sounds were just waves with amplitude and frequency! How can two vowels sound different and yet the same? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/n866l/eli5_vowel_sounds/ | {
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"Great question! And you chose two great sounds to play with!\n\nWhat I'd like you to do is pay attention to your tongue. Can you feel it in your mouth? How would you describe your tongue while making an \"Ah\" sounds (as in father or palm)? Low? Back? Down? Now try \"eeeee\" (as in fleece) and tell me how you would describe your tongue. Arched? Forward? Go back and forth between the two sounds very slowly, and pay attention to how your tongue feels in each shape.\n\nMost likely, you will feel that your tongue goes from a high frontal place to a low back place.\n\nIn phonetics, we call these sounds \"phonemes\". The vowel sounds are called \"phtongs\". We describe these sounds using the actions of the tongue. An \"eeeee\" sound is a close front unrounded. An \"ah\" sound is an open back unrounded (the terms can be a bit more technical, but that's the gist) Unrounded refers to the lips. Feel how your lips kind of make a circle when you say \"ooooohh\"? And how they don't do that when you say \"eeeeee\"? \n\n(let me interject some cultural bias and assume that I'm talking to an English speaking American).\n\nThe position of your tongue changes the shape of the vocal tract. An ah sound produces a more open tract, and therefore a very different sound than an eee sound.\n\nAll sounds work on this principle, including obstruants (consonants). Notice where your tongue is when you make a \"t\" sound. Now how about a \"d\" sound? Now how about an \"n\" sound? What about \"l\"?\n\nEach of those different shapes produces recognizable patterns in the air that our ears translate into meaning. Ever notice how all high pitches noises (i mean like PAINFULLY high pitched sounds, like dog whistles) sound like an \"eeeee\" sound?\n\nI can explain like you're 25 if you like, but this is my best ELI5 attempt for 12:20 AM.",
"Ah. Sounds are just waves, indeed, but it's not really so simple.\n\nSuppose you have a sine wave, with an amplitude and frequency. If you play that, it will make a very clear, very pure \"oo\" sound. But you know what a sine wave looks like, right?\n\n[Sine wave pictures from Google!](_URL_1_)\n\nWhat if, instead of it being a smooth curve going up and down, it had a more interesting pattern? Maybe a sawtooth pattern, or a square pattern? If you look at the bottom of [this page](_URL_0_), you'll see a bunch of different wave patterns. THAT is what distinguishes different vowel sounds. The pattern is different. If it has a particular pitch, then the pattern will repeat with a particular frequency, and if it has a particular volume, then the pattern will have a particular amplitude. The shape of the wave is what allows us to distinguish between \"aah\" and \"ee\", clarinet and oboe, trumpet and flügelhorn.\n\nNow, what is also important here is that the consonant -- the sound at the very beginning -- is determined by the shape of the wave at the start. While a note with a pitch has a particular frequency, a consonant -- like a percussive sound -- doesn't, really. It's too short. So you have some shape at the beginning, but instead of it repeating over and over like a sung \"aah\" or \"ee\", it's just there once, and it goes by fast. Drums are like this, too. If the pattern doesn't repeat, there's no pitch, and you can't even talk about frequency. So you see, not all waves have a well-defined frequency and amplitude.\n\nWhat makes the patterns happen? This is a little bit more advanced, but the page I linked above has a picture. When you play or sing a note, you don't actually make *just* the frequency of the note. You also make twice the frequency, three times the frequency, four times the frequency, and so on, in whole number multiples. Those combine to form the wave patterns you see with different timbres (that's what you call the different sounds on the same note). If you make a loud fundamental (that's the basic frequency of the note), don't make a sound at twice the frequency, make a soft sound at three times, don't make one at four times, make a softer sound at five times, and so on, you get a fairly pure sound like the clarinet, which has only odd harmonics (that's what you call the sounds at the multiple frequencies). If instead you make a loud fundamental, a softer sound at twice the frequency, slightly softer at three times, slightly softer at four times, and so on, you might make a very rough sound like the oboe.\n\nSo hopefully that explains it... If you have any questions on this, I'd be happy to try to answer!",
"I'm by no means an expert -- just a linguistics undergrad who happens to be procrastinating on writing her acoustic phonetics term paper -- but I'll try. \n\nVowel sounds (in fact, any sounds coming from the vocal tract) don't just have just one frequency. They contain a wide range of frequencies all mixed up, but the energy is concentrated at certain frequencies according to the length and shape of the vocal tract, which we constantly change and modulate during speech. While the source of the sound -- the vibration of the vocal folds, the rate of which determines the pitch or *fundamental frequency* -- stays the same, the shape of the vocal tract during the production of any given vowel changes which frequencies resonate. The frequencies where energy is concentrated during vowel production are called *formant frequencies*. It is the frequencies of the formants in relation to each other that makes vowels sound different from one another.\n\nIn fact, the F1 (or lowest formant frequency) corresponds roughly to the vowel \"height\" (that is, whether it is articulated higher in the mouth like \"ee\" or lower in the mouth like \"ah\") and the F2 corresponds roughly to the vowel \"backness\" (that is, whether it is produced up front like \"ee\" or towards the back like \"ooh\"). This way, you can use the formant frequencies of the vowels you produce to \"map\" where in the mouth you produce your vowels. I did mine for a project: [check it out.](_URL_0_) It's not marked, but the x-axis is F2 and the y-axis is F1.\n\nI realize a 5 year old definitely wouldn't understand this... sorry. Let me know if I can clear anything up.",
"You're right that sounds are just waves with amplitude and frequency. However, it's very rare to hear just a single sound wave with a constant frequency and constant amplitude. An example of this would be a tuning fork.\n\nRather, most sounds that we hear are a complex mix of many many different waves each with their own frequency and amplitude. People who want to study sound waves will use something called a \"Fourier transform\" to help them. The Fourier transform lets them see which frequencies a sound is made up of, and how loud each of them are.\n\nThat's what's going on with vowel sounds: you're creating a whole bunch of different frequencies at the same time. Different vowel sounds have different sets of frequencies. \n\nFor example when you say the 'ee' in 'teeth', most of your sounds are concentrated around the frequencies of 280, 2250, and 2890 (Hz). When you say \"aaaah\", it's 710, 1100, and 2450. [This website](_URL_0_) might be an interesting read for you.",
"Your question can be explained with musical instruments playing the same notes. A violin sounds different than a flute, even if they're playing the same note with the same pitch. You can tell them apart because they have different *timbre*. Timbre is like different colors or flavors of sound, and your ear can pick up on the differences.\n\nEL20: Different vowels have different harmonic profiles. Like the instruments, they have a fundamental frequency that is the strongest. Then you have the harmonic notes which are multiples of the fundamental. By varying the strengths of the harmonics, you get different timbres. Your mouth changes the harmonic mixture when you make different vowels.\n\nEdit: typos.",
"Music physics to the rescue!!\n\nVowels are made up not of one but of multiple different different frequencies, independent of the note/pitch it's spoken on. Check out [this](_URL_0_) graph for more.\n\nSo what that ultimately means is that the shape of your mouth (all the stuff parkervoice said) determines the frequencies of 3 formants, called the first, second, and third formants (logical, eh?). Each vowel is really just different arrangements of those three formants. When we're young, part of making baby sounds is training our ears to hear those particular formants.\n\nSo while people are talking about the harmonic overtone series and other things with musical instrument analogies, vowels themselves are actually a very distinct issue.\n\nGood question! I don't get to bust out my formant knowledge hardly ever.",
"[Here's what I think is exactly what you're looking for.](_URL_0_)",
"OK, first look at [the different vowels arranged on the international phonetic alphabet](_URL_6_). You can hear a sound recording of each vowel. This chart shows you that there are two main ways that vowels can change: up-down on the chart corresponds to [vowel height](_URL_0_), and right-left corresponds to [vowel backness](_URL_3_). I'll explain what height and backness are in a minute.\n\nNow look at the [vowel charts here](_URL_1_). Don't read the text, just notice how those charts bear a very striking resemblance to the chart you saw earlier. These charts reflect actual measurements of vowels in speech. Specifically, they measure the first and second [formants](_URL_9_) of the vowel -- the formants are the dark bands on the charts in that article.\n\nThe formants are caused by [the position of your tongue in the mouth](_URL_5_) - when your tongue is placed high in the mouth, you get high vowels, like eeeee or uuuuuu, compared to low vowels, like aahhh, where the tongue is placed low. Similarly, front and back vowels (eh or o) are made by the top of the tongue being positioned either near the front or near the back. Stick your finger in your mouth while you make these sounds, and you can see! [This chart](_URL_2_) shows how formal vowel space fits in the mouth.\n\nSo a vowel isn't [a single sound frequency](_URL_4_), but neither is [the sound a musical instrument makes](_URL_8_). So why does a musical instrument vary mostly based on pitch, but vowels vary based on height and backness? Musical instruments don't have tongues, so they don't make sounds with distinguishable first and second formants (well sometimes they do, and in those times they sound a little like human voices). But [some human languages](_URL_7_) do distinguish vowels based on pitch! Chinese and Thai are some of the most common languages that do this, but there are plenty of others.\n\nAnother common distinguishing feature among vowels is [roundedness](_URL_10_), which is whether the lips are open or closed.\n\nSo in conclusion, a sound is not just a single wave with amplitude and frequency, it is many such ways mashed together. We can look at which frequencies are loudest and identify some distinguishing characteristics which mark different vowels. \n\n[Proceed to part 2](_URL_11_)",
"Everyone's talking about Phonetics to answer your question, which is awesome (I took linguistics in undergrad too! hooray!), but I don't think they're getting to the root of the issue where you describe amplitude and frequency.\n\nELI10: It's true that sound waves can be described using amplitude and frequency; usually the picture that comes along with that is of a simple sine wave. However, it's rare to find a sound wave in the real world that looks like that. Instead, most sounds are composed of *many* sine waves on top of each other. \n\nWhen 2 sine waves happen at the same time from the same place, they add to each other wherever they're the same, and subtract from each other where they're different. The curve that results is something that looks a little like a sine curve from far away, but it's all bumpy and wiggly close up. Overall, that sound with have a certain amplitude (volume) and frequency (pitch), but those bumps and wiggles cause it to sound different from a similar sound with different bumps and wiggles. These differences are called *timbre*. As noted in other comments, it's the difference between musical instruments playing the same note, or, the different sounds you can make with the position of your tongue.\n\nSo basically, sound really has 3 parts: *Amplitude* (volume), *Frequency* (pitch), and *Timbre* (complexity/quality). As a more advanced aside, you can actually take a complex waveform and figure out what simple sine waves originally combined to form the complex wave. This method is a mathematical process called *Fourier Analysis*.",
"Great question! And you chose two great sounds to play with!\n\nWhat I'd like you to do is pay attention to your tongue. Can you feel it in your mouth? How would you describe your tongue while making an \"Ah\" sounds (as in father or palm)? Low? Back? Down? Now try \"eeeee\" (as in fleece) and tell me how you would describe your tongue. Arched? Forward? Go back and forth between the two sounds very slowly, and pay attention to how your tongue feels in each shape.\n\nMost likely, you will feel that your tongue goes from a high frontal place to a low back place.\n\nIn phonetics, we call these sounds \"phonemes\". The vowel sounds are called \"phtongs\". We describe these sounds using the actions of the tongue. An \"eeeee\" sound is a close front unrounded. An \"ah\" sound is an open back unrounded (the terms can be a bit more technical, but that's the gist) Unrounded refers to the lips. Feel how your lips kind of make a circle when you say \"ooooohh\"? And how they don't do that when you say \"eeeeee\"? \n\n(let me interject some cultural bias and assume that I'm talking to an English speaking American).\n\nThe position of your tongue changes the shape of the vocal tract. An ah sound produces a more open tract, and therefore a very different sound than an eee sound.\n\nAll sounds work on this principle, including obstruants (consonants). Notice where your tongue is when you make a \"t\" sound. Now how about a \"d\" sound? Now how about an \"n\" sound? What about \"l\"?\n\nEach of those different shapes produces recognizable patterns in the air that our ears translate into meaning. Ever notice how all high pitches noises (i mean like PAINFULLY high pitched sounds, like dog whistles) sound like an \"eeeee\" sound?\n\nI can explain like you're 25 if you like, but this is my best ELI5 attempt for 12:20 AM.",
"Ah. Sounds are just waves, indeed, but it's not really so simple.\n\nSuppose you have a sine wave, with an amplitude and frequency. If you play that, it will make a very clear, very pure \"oo\" sound. But you know what a sine wave looks like, right?\n\n[Sine wave pictures from Google!](_URL_1_)\n\nWhat if, instead of it being a smooth curve going up and down, it had a more interesting pattern? Maybe a sawtooth pattern, or a square pattern? If you look at the bottom of [this page](_URL_0_), you'll see a bunch of different wave patterns. THAT is what distinguishes different vowel sounds. The pattern is different. If it has a particular pitch, then the pattern will repeat with a particular frequency, and if it has a particular volume, then the pattern will have a particular amplitude. The shape of the wave is what allows us to distinguish between \"aah\" and \"ee\", clarinet and oboe, trumpet and flügelhorn.\n\nNow, what is also important here is that the consonant -- the sound at the very beginning -- is determined by the shape of the wave at the start. While a note with a pitch has a particular frequency, a consonant -- like a percussive sound -- doesn't, really. It's too short. So you have some shape at the beginning, but instead of it repeating over and over like a sung \"aah\" or \"ee\", it's just there once, and it goes by fast. Drums are like this, too. If the pattern doesn't repeat, there's no pitch, and you can't even talk about frequency. So you see, not all waves have a well-defined frequency and amplitude.\n\nWhat makes the patterns happen? This is a little bit more advanced, but the page I linked above has a picture. When you play or sing a note, you don't actually make *just* the frequency of the note. You also make twice the frequency, three times the frequency, four times the frequency, and so on, in whole number multiples. Those combine to form the wave patterns you see with different timbres (that's what you call the different sounds on the same note). If you make a loud fundamental (that's the basic frequency of the note), don't make a sound at twice the frequency, make a soft sound at three times, don't make one at four times, make a softer sound at five times, and so on, you get a fairly pure sound like the clarinet, which has only odd harmonics (that's what you call the sounds at the multiple frequencies). If instead you make a loud fundamental, a softer sound at twice the frequency, slightly softer at three times, slightly softer at four times, and so on, you might make a very rough sound like the oboe.\n\nSo hopefully that explains it... If you have any questions on this, I'd be happy to try to answer!",
"I'm by no means an expert -- just a linguistics undergrad who happens to be procrastinating on writing her acoustic phonetics term paper -- but I'll try. \n\nVowel sounds (in fact, any sounds coming from the vocal tract) don't just have just one frequency. They contain a wide range of frequencies all mixed up, but the energy is concentrated at certain frequencies according to the length and shape of the vocal tract, which we constantly change and modulate during speech. While the source of the sound -- the vibration of the vocal folds, the rate of which determines the pitch or *fundamental frequency* -- stays the same, the shape of the vocal tract during the production of any given vowel changes which frequencies resonate. The frequencies where energy is concentrated during vowel production are called *formant frequencies*. It is the frequencies of the formants in relation to each other that makes vowels sound different from one another.\n\nIn fact, the F1 (or lowest formant frequency) corresponds roughly to the vowel \"height\" (that is, whether it is articulated higher in the mouth like \"ee\" or lower in the mouth like \"ah\") and the F2 corresponds roughly to the vowel \"backness\" (that is, whether it is produced up front like \"ee\" or towards the back like \"ooh\"). This way, you can use the formant frequencies of the vowels you produce to \"map\" where in the mouth you produce your vowels. I did mine for a project: [check it out.](_URL_0_) It's not marked, but the x-axis is F2 and the y-axis is F1.\n\nI realize a 5 year old definitely wouldn't understand this... sorry. Let me know if I can clear anything up.",
"You're right that sounds are just waves with amplitude and frequency. However, it's very rare to hear just a single sound wave with a constant frequency and constant amplitude. An example of this would be a tuning fork.\n\nRather, most sounds that we hear are a complex mix of many many different waves each with their own frequency and amplitude. People who want to study sound waves will use something called a \"Fourier transform\" to help them. The Fourier transform lets them see which frequencies a sound is made up of, and how loud each of them are.\n\nThat's what's going on with vowel sounds: you're creating a whole bunch of different frequencies at the same time. Different vowel sounds have different sets of frequencies. \n\nFor example when you say the 'ee' in 'teeth', most of your sounds are concentrated around the frequencies of 280, 2250, and 2890 (Hz). When you say \"aaaah\", it's 710, 1100, and 2450. [This website](_URL_0_) might be an interesting read for you.",
"Your question can be explained with musical instruments playing the same notes. A violin sounds different than a flute, even if they're playing the same note with the same pitch. You can tell them apart because they have different *timbre*. Timbre is like different colors or flavors of sound, and your ear can pick up on the differences.\n\nEL20: Different vowels have different harmonic profiles. Like the instruments, they have a fundamental frequency that is the strongest. Then you have the harmonic notes which are multiples of the fundamental. By varying the strengths of the harmonics, you get different timbres. Your mouth changes the harmonic mixture when you make different vowels.\n\nEdit: typos.",
"Music physics to the rescue!!\n\nVowels are made up not of one but of multiple different different frequencies, independent of the note/pitch it's spoken on. Check out [this](_URL_0_) graph for more.\n\nSo what that ultimately means is that the shape of your mouth (all the stuff parkervoice said) determines the frequencies of 3 formants, called the first, second, and third formants (logical, eh?). Each vowel is really just different arrangements of those three formants. When we're young, part of making baby sounds is training our ears to hear those particular formants.\n\nSo while people are talking about the harmonic overtone series and other things with musical instrument analogies, vowels themselves are actually a very distinct issue.\n\nGood question! I don't get to bust out my formant knowledge hardly ever.",
"[Here's what I think is exactly what you're looking for.](_URL_0_)",
"OK, first look at [the different vowels arranged on the international phonetic alphabet](_URL_6_). You can hear a sound recording of each vowel. This chart shows you that there are two main ways that vowels can change: up-down on the chart corresponds to [vowel height](_URL_0_), and right-left corresponds to [vowel backness](_URL_3_). I'll explain what height and backness are in a minute.\n\nNow look at the [vowel charts here](_URL_1_). Don't read the text, just notice how those charts bear a very striking resemblance to the chart you saw earlier. These charts reflect actual measurements of vowels in speech. Specifically, they measure the first and second [formants](_URL_9_) of the vowel -- the formants are the dark bands on the charts in that article.\n\nThe formants are caused by [the position of your tongue in the mouth](_URL_5_) - when your tongue is placed high in the mouth, you get high vowels, like eeeee or uuuuuu, compared to low vowels, like aahhh, where the tongue is placed low. Similarly, front and back vowels (eh or o) are made by the top of the tongue being positioned either near the front or near the back. Stick your finger in your mouth while you make these sounds, and you can see! [This chart](_URL_2_) shows how formal vowel space fits in the mouth.\n\nSo a vowel isn't [a single sound frequency](_URL_4_), but neither is [the sound a musical instrument makes](_URL_8_). So why does a musical instrument vary mostly based on pitch, but vowels vary based on height and backness? Musical instruments don't have tongues, so they don't make sounds with distinguishable first and second formants (well sometimes they do, and in those times they sound a little like human voices). But [some human languages](_URL_7_) do distinguish vowels based on pitch! Chinese and Thai are some of the most common languages that do this, but there are plenty of others.\n\nAnother common distinguishing feature among vowels is [roundedness](_URL_10_), which is whether the lips are open or closed.\n\nSo in conclusion, a sound is not just a single wave with amplitude and frequency, it is many such ways mashed together. We can look at which frequencies are loudest and identify some distinguishing characteristics which mark different vowels. \n\n[Proceed to part 2](_URL_11_)",
"Everyone's talking about Phonetics to answer your question, which is awesome (I took linguistics in undergrad too! hooray!), but I don't think they're getting to the root of the issue where you describe amplitude and frequency.\n\nELI10: It's true that sound waves can be described using amplitude and frequency; usually the picture that comes along with that is of a simple sine wave. However, it's rare to find a sound wave in the real world that looks like that. Instead, most sounds are composed of *many* sine waves on top of each other. \n\nWhen 2 sine waves happen at the same time from the same place, they add to each other wherever they're the same, and subtract from each other where they're different. The curve that results is something that looks a little like a sine curve from far away, but it's all bumpy and wiggly close up. Overall, that sound with have a certain amplitude (volume) and frequency (pitch), but those bumps and wiggles cause it to sound different from a similar sound with different bumps and wiggles. These differences are called *timbre*. As noted in other comments, it's the difference between musical instruments playing the same note, or, the different sounds you can make with the position of your tongue.\n\nSo basically, sound really has 3 parts: *Amplitude* (volume), *Frequency* (pitch), and *Timbre* (complexity/quality). As a more advanced aside, you can actually take a complex waveform and figure out what simple sine waves originally combined to form the complex wave. This method is a mathematical process called *Fourier Analysis*."
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"https://www.google.com/search?q=sine+wave&hl=en&prmd=imvns&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=4zvkTvutLuH00gH-o42DBg&ved=0CEgQsAQ&biw=1398&bih=675"
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"http://i.imgur.com/o2KWF.jpg"
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"https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jmccarty/formant.htm"
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[
"http://www.wimp.com/upnoises/"
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"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_height#Height",
"http://www.helsinki.fi/speechsciences/projects/vowelcharts/",
"http://sail.usc.edu/~lgoldste/General_Phonetics/Vowels/Vowel_Theories.html",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_backness#Backness",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_tone",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cardinal_vowels-Jones_x-ray.jpg",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel#Audio_samples",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonal_languages",
"http://www.drawmusic.com/Transcribing-Music/002-Seeing-Features/",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formant",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundedness",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consonant"
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[],
[],
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"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sawtooth_wave",
"https://www.google.com/search?q=sine+wave&hl=en&prmd=imvns&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=4zvkTvutLuH00gH-o42DBg&ved=0CEgQsAQ&biw=1398&bih=675"
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"http://i.imgur.com/o2KWF.jpg"
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"http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/music/vowel.html"
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[],
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"https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jmccarty/formant.htm"
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[
"http://www.wimp.com/upnoises/"
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"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_height#Height",
"http://www.helsinki.fi/speechsciences/projects/vowelcharts/",
"http://sail.usc.edu/~lgoldste/General_Phonetics/Vowels/Vowel_Theories.html",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_backness#Backness",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_tone",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cardinal_vowels-Jones_x-ray.jpg",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel#Audio_samples",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonal_languages",
"http://www.drawmusic.com/Transcribing-Music/002-Seeing-Features/",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formant",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundedness",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consonant"
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3hzd5v | why do some new books look like the publisher cut the pages with a weed whacker before gluing and binding them, and shipping them out to stores? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3hzd5v/eli5_why_do_some_new_books_look_like_the/ | {
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"I'm not 100% sure if this is the reason, but I always liked this kind of cut sense it made turning pages way easier. None of the pages stick ever.",
"It's an aesthetic choice by the publisher. The cut pages are more pleasant to handle and evoke older printing techniques where we didn't have the ability to precisely cut paper.\n\nIt's just a style thing.\n\n**Edit:** There is some really great info in the replies to my comment which expand on what I said. Very much worth reading.\n",
"A Series of Unfortunate Events anyone? Those pages were as rough as Olaf's smile. ",
"It's called \"deckled pages\" and it's just for style. Some people like them and think it makes the book look good. ",
"Books are made by printing pages in smaller groups called signatures, basically a handful of sheets stacked flat and then folded in half. These signatures are then all stacked on each other and the book is bound along the folded edge. With most books, they'll cut the unbound side of the signatures to give it a clean look but, if not, it'll look ragged like the example, because you're seeing the uneven edge of the stacked signatures. Nice book paper is also thicker and sometimes more fibrous, so it contributes to that appearance. That uneven edge is called a 'deckle' and it gives an old-fashioned feel.",
"The case in point book, is it The Alchemist?",
"Some bookbinders do it for style reasons. Some do it because it make the book cheaper to produce since don't have to trim after binding. All my SciFi book club editions are that way. ",
"Oo I got that book as a gift! How was it??"
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3oenx0 | does math exist in nature like other sciences such as chemistry and biology? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3oenx0/eli5_does_math_exist_in_nature_like_other/ | {
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"Sure. A circle is Pi. There is a difference between 1 sheep, 2 sheep, and 3 sheep. Linear and exponential growth are both commonly seen in nature. ",
"Your question presumes that chemistry and biology \"exist in nature\". They don't. \n\nChemistry and biology and the other sciences are our human method for understanding nature. They are basically just are math applied to a specific area. For example, chemistry is just the shape, charge, etc of molecules, described in numbers and equations.\n\nThere is a curious thing though, which is that mathematicians come up with all kinds of crazy pattern games often without any regard for the \"real world\". And yet, it often turns out that those games almost perfectly describe a real-world phenomena. \n\nSome have hypothesized that the universe IS just the instantiation of all mathematics (or to put it simply, the world is made out of math). However, it is probably more likely that math is our way of describing the universe and - just like your verbal description of a steak dinner is never as good as the dinner itself - math and science are useful tools but not actually reality. ",
"[Here is a good video](_URL_0_)\n\nThis is really a philosophical question... And like pretty much everything in philosophy there isn't one *right* answer, but many differing ways to look at it with varying degrees of correctness-- depending on who you ask. This video breaks it down into three schools of thought, though there are infinatly more these three are just the more generally accepted within the spheres of maths and philosophy.\n\n1. Platonism: numbers are objects, they exist like anything else within the real world. The are abstract objects in the same way that emotions are abstract objects: anger exists even though if it isn't something you can clearly define or interact with like a spoon. \n\n\n2. Nominalism: numbers are placeholders for things that actually exist, they are symbols that represent something that really can exist in time and space. Much like words, what is *dog*, well gee that is just a gutteral noise we create and markings we make to represent something real-- in this case a dog. In a similar vein 1+1=2 exists.. If I have 1 stick and add another stick to it I now have 2 sticks. This starts to breakdown once you get into high level or abstract maths.\n\n3. Fictionalism: pretty straight forward, maths don't really exist they are just constructs of the human condition.. They probably believe we are all just brains in a vat as well, again nit wrong, just not a lot more you can say about it.These people are probably really fun at dinner parties /s\n\nEdit: still learning Reddit sync. Fixed video link. here is another good one with more memes.[ here is another good one with more memes ](_URL_1_)"
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1xzn8d | why do timers tell you to turn past a certain time and then back to the time you want? | It says this on my toaster oven and I was wondering why. It says, "Rotate knob past 20 then set to desired time" | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1xzn8d/eli5_why_do_timers_tell_you_to_turn_past_a/ | {
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"Some dials, especially on older machine are not fully aligned and/or loose, such that you you may not be completely turning the dial to the required time. For instance, turning it to 20 may in fact only put it at 16 if it's loose. (the first bit of the turn would be only tightening the handle back up). By turning further than needed and back you effectively negates this offset. ensuring you get the desired time!"
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28pfry | why do coal, iron and other minerals always form in seams rather than being evenly distributed throughout the rock? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/28pfry/eli5_why_do_coal_iron_and_other_minerals_always/ | {
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"For coal, the explanation is fairly simple: coal is compressed organic matter (wood and ferns, really), and it can only form where, in the past, there were large areas of forest which a) lasted for a long time, b) had the right climate conditions to preserve the wood (this usually means swamps, which are cold and wet and low in oxygen - more oxygen, and the wood would rot away; more heat, and forest fires would destroy the material before it could be transformed) and c) has the right sort of plate tectonics to bury the material and press it. This means that it only forms in a few places, but where it does form, you get thick layers of it.\n\nFor metals like iron and gold, it's a bit more complicated. Plate tectonics play a role, by bring metals up from the molten parts of the earth, and so does the flow of water. The water will dissolve some minerals (like limestone), erode other minerals, and leave the rest in place. This tends to cause them to become concentrated in different places, depending on how far the water carries them. [New Scientist has a cool piece](_URL_0_) about how earthquakes cause seams of gold to form by sucking water into the earth and then rapidly boiling it away.\n\nIt's also worth noting that there are trace amounts of all sorts of elements scattered over the earth (a handful of soil contains quite a bit of iron, aluminium and silicon, for example), but because it's all mixed together, we don't really notice it and it's usually unmineable."
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d8lbja | the suspension of uk parliament my prime minister boris johnson has been ruled unlawful by the supreme court. what’s going to happen now? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d8lbja/eli5_the_suspension_of_uk_parliament_my_prime/ | {
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"According to the Supreme Justice ruling, the advice given to the Queen, and therefore the order that was given based on said advice are null and void, and did not take effect. The Royal Commissioners, when they walked into the houses of Lords and Commons with the orders from the Queen, were effectively carrying blank pieces of paper.\n\nIn effect, NOTHING happened. The members of parliament are able to return to the house of lords/commons and resume the parliament as if nothing happened. The Commons speaker Mr Bercow has already announced that he is in talks with the members of parliament in regards to them returning to sit at the Commons at the first opportunity.\n\nUnless something new happens, it is expected the Commons will resume tomorrow."
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cmibkc | u.s. treasury designates china as a currency manipulator —- what it mean? how does it mean regular americans, or other countries? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cmibkc/eli5_us_treasury_designates_china_as_a_currency/ | {
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"In simple terms - the Chinese are using policies that make their currency \"weaker\" than it should be. This makes their exports cheaper to the outside world while making imports more expensive on a relative scale. In other words, Chinese companies have an easy time selling to the US while US companies find it hard to compete in China.\n\nThis is possible because Chinese tightly controls their currency's exchange rate rather than letting it \"float\" via supply and demand like most currencies including the US dollar. Basically, China is cheating and the US is calling them on it."
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15lvbt | when making security questions for password recovery, why don't they let you write your own question? wouldn't that be significantly safer? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/15lvbt/when_making_security_questions_for_password/ | {
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"Some place do, other places are just lazy. Simple as that.\n\nThere is no reason besides time and storage that prevents them from doing it.\n\nTime, you could spent between 30 seconds and 30 hours figuring out how to set up a way to let you make your own and record them on servers.\n\nStorage, the servers for the website must record each unique question and distribute it accordingly to the correct person. But that would be a < 50 Kilobyte file at most, and today that is not that much. So it is generally the first.\n\n",
"Not really.\n\nImagine your average user - their password is probably \"12345\" or \"password,\" and they probably have the same password everywhere.\n\nNow, imagine if that guy could write his own question. \"What is 123?\" Or \"MY PASSWORD IS PASSWORD?\"\n\nThere is very little the site could do to protect people from simply giving away their password due to sheer stupidity. Not letting the user write the question prevents them from sending themselves a clue.\n\nMy trick is that I have only a few answers. Whether it asks my mother's maiden name, my first pet or the name of the street I live on, the answer is always \"Sasquatch.\" (Not really). ",
"It could be safer...if someone understood the security implications and created an appropriate question.\n\nBut people who don't understand might come up with a stupid question, like \"What is Garfield's favorite food?\".\n\nThese are the people who security experts are most worried about, much better to force everyone to use good questions rather than let them become security holes."
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8s66y9 | what is the difference between a 200 calorie fasting deficit and a 200 calorie burning workout? | When trying to lose weight, what would be the benefits/drawbacks of achieving the deficit using these 2 methods?
In other words,
If my daily maintenance calorie level is 2000, what is the difference between:
1. Only eating 1800 calories of food
2. Eating 2000 calories and burning 200 by working out. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8s66y9/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_a_200_calorie/ | {
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"Working out gives you the cardiovascular benefits as well as raising your metabolism for a couple hours after workout which burns more calories. ",
"Exercise has the additional health benefits, but there are nutritional benefits to calorie burning through working out. \nThe difference between cutting intake down to 1000 kcal, and eating 2000kcal and exercising off 1000 is you get the nutritional benefit from the food, vitamins/minerals/protein/oils. \nThe distinction changes in the difference from junk food. The kind of food is more important in this than how much. Eating 1000 kcal of fast food is probably better for you than 2000kcal of fast food and 1000kcal burnt in exercise.",
"I'd say there are 3 main advantages of exercising instead of just limiting food intake :\n\n1) Calorie burning continues a bit after the duration of the exercise. \n\nIt is possible to evaluate the amount of burnt calories based on heart rate ([link](_URL_0_)).\nSo when doing exercise, as long as your heart rate is over your normal one, you burn more calories than you would not doing exercise.\n\n2) Exercising encourages your body to keep muscle mass.\n\nMuscles consume energy. When you are in calorie deficit, your body needs to find extra energy and tries to balance the metabolism. It can be done through ketosis (burning the fat stock) but it can also be done by breaking down muscles if the body thinks there are more than what it needs.\n\n3) Fasting or eating less can lead to unbalanced diet (especially toward nutrients intake)\n\nIt's important to have a balanced diet with all the nutrients the body needs and sometimes cannot produce. Nutrients do not necessarily account for calorie (e.g. vitamins and minerals) but are very important for the body to function properly."
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d5wegr | where will energy go when the universe goes through proton decay? | From my understanding proton decay will be one of the last stages of the universe that we understand, thereafter atoms will no longer exist. If energy cant be destroyed does it stay in the protons flying around or are they actually gone? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d5wegr/eli5_where_will_energy_go_when_the_universe_goes/ | {
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"It will be converted into forms of energy such as heat and light - and bear in mind that proton decay is only one possible theory. There are many others.",
"Protons decay into lighter subatomic particles. So a large proportion of the energy/mass of the proton would be conserved in the other particles. There will probably be some photons also emitted(light). I expect at some point most stuff would decause leaving just pure photons and maybe other force carriers. Have a look up at the heat death of the universe. Where all the photons would be red shifted to absolute zero. \n\nAlso on cosmological scales energy is NOT conserved. In particular dark energy is believed to be increasing, also the whole expansion of the universe as a result doesn't conserve energy.",
"The energy would still be there, just more diffuse. It would be in the form of smaller packets of energy like muons and various neutrinos. Despite significant experimental effort, proton decay has never been observed.",
"mind my words once we get into interstellar travel a lot of our assumptions of the universe will just be the same horseshit as people thinking the earth is flat a 1000 years ago.",
"Even our brightest minds don't know, and you should be weary of any comment that purports itself as iron-clad.",
"Protons would decay into quarks, heat and photons and those would become more and more spread out. My understanding is that the universe, while a closed system, is also infinite. So I imagine that similar to how .99999 repeating is equal to 1, the low energy spread over an infinite area would be empty.",
"The short answer: it's going somewhere we can't measure.\n\nWe can only measure things that we can measure. The proton decay means all the energy is going and going and suddenly becomes something.\n\nImaging a small room with a cup with some ice inside. The ice will melt, sure, and some of the energy will condensate around the cup and you will find it wet. If you measure all the energy from the inside of the cup plus the condensation and the temperature/humidity of the room you will find it's the same overall energy with probably some 'lost'. Where is that 'lost' energy? Now, how about outside of the room? It's definitely not the scope of your measurement but even the tiniest bit of change can influence to outside.\n\nScience is like that: We can only measure what we can measure. Proton decay it's going somewhere but we don't know what will become of it.",
"Conservation of energy might be violated on cosmological scales. But we don't no enough about it.",
"Ever since the Big Bang, our universe, like all closed systems, has been on an inexorable march toward thermodynamic equilibrium. All the energy peaks currently bound up in stars will eventually be expended, leaving nothing but a cold, dark, ever-expanding cloud of rocks, gas, and dust.\n\nAs for proton decay, that's an unproven theory. But should it be true, the same principal applies. Any potential energy bound up in the proton would simply be released into the universe.",
"The energy isn't \"gone\" but what happens is that all matter is a form of \"concentrated energy\" and things only \"happen\" when there is an energy differential. So the \"heat death\" of the universe is just that the entire universe is simply at the same energy level - no matter exists, nothing \"happens\" anymore. \n\nNothing happens means literally that - light is energy, and any form of contact or cause and effect interaction requires energy transfer which implies energy differential. (this is ELI5 so this isn't entirely accurate at the quantum level but good enough, I hope)",
"Are you asking the Last Question?",
"I actually know this one. So the only element that doesn’t gain electrons is iron. Iron is also the ending product of stars as fusion stops working when iron is all that is left. So the end result of every atom in the universe in going to end up as iron trillions and trillions of years from now. Unless by energy you meant photon, which is different.",
"While this may not answer your question, here is an astonishingly interesting [video of the universe's entire life cycle](_URL_0_). I thought it was really cool to see, and it's also well made!",
"The energy will remain in the form of photons, electromagnetic radiation, traveling forever through the empty universe. The average energy contained in a given volume of the universe will continually decline but never actually reach zero.\n\nUnless the concept of the heat death of the universe is wrong. Everything could end up falling back into a singularity that could explode in a new big bang and all new universe.",
"For anyone who wants to see this in a YT video, this is called Time lapse of the future: a journey to the end of time.\n\n_URL_0_",
"Energy is only conserved in an unchanging system, but the universe isn't unchanging, it's expanding. As it expands, light (and other electromagnetic radiation) gets stretched, and will have a longer wavelength. A longer wavelength means lower energy, and that energy is just lost, not converted and not conserved. [Here’s a video ](_URL_0_)going into this more in depth.",
"By the time the universe goes through proton decay, its safe to assume that perception/awareness no longer exists. And without sonething to witness the universe, it wouldn't be that much of a stretch to say that it no longer exists. In short, matter only \"matters\" because there's someone around for it to \"matter\" to.",
"It will convert to heat, the heat will be distributed equally in the universe, until everything will be the same temperature. Then nothing will happen, and nothing will keep happening, forever. That is, if the theory about dark matter integrity is correct.",
"What we are learning about dark matter and dark energy could be groundbreaking and it defies some logic. It appears that dark matter is somehow being created out of nothing. Obviously we don't know if that's totally true because we just started really studying it but the darks stuff is crazy and recommend reading up on it.",
"As of today, according to the laws of thermodynamics, energy exchanges between places of high energy to places of low energy, and the rate of this energy transfer is tied to the difference of the two energy levels. Example: heat transfers much faster from water at 200°F to ice at 32°F than it does from water at 60°F to the same ice. So the smaller the difference in energy between two interacting systems, the slower heat exchanges between them. So the end of the universe as we know it will occur once every particle in the universe reaches equilibrium and all the energy of the universe is spread uniformly across everything with no heat or energy transfer between them. Logic tells us this will eventually happen, but the thing is that the energy transfer of two basically similar energy levels is so minute that it approaches 0 but never reaches it, meaning that equilibrium will take an infinite amount of time to reach. Meaning it will truly never happen. \n\n\nBut by then who knows, a universe in complete equilibrium may have different rules, and maybe all the energy of the universe will suck itself together and make another big bang. Nobody knows.",
"I’m not sure about proton decay, but here’s an explanation of your question, “where does the energy go?”\n\nThe answer is always that the energy goes wherever it is easiest for it to get to. If I have a glass of ice water, it is very easy for heat to go into it. The glass will soon warm up and the ice will melt. Heat will have moved from the air or the table or your hand into the glass, and the colder the glass is, the faster the heat goes into it.\n\nBut what if there is nothing that is cold or hot anymore? The energy is still there, but it doesn’t move because it doesn’t have a colder thing to move to. This is true for all energy. A ball will roll down a hill, but will stay still on a flat surface. A battery will send electricity around through a circuit from one side of itself to the other, but the electricity stops moving when there is no difference between the + side and the - side.\n\nSo where does the energy go at the end of the universe? It spreads out and fills in all the cold places and low places until everything has the same amount of energy and there is no hot and no cold. And then it goes nowhere.",
"Energy is not a substance. It's a way of quantifying certain physical states. For example when gunpowder explodes you can measure the kinetic, thermal, acoustic, etc energies of the expanding gases. This used to be chemical energy in the gunpowder mixture. The two states of gunpowder are different, but we can draw an equivalency between them with the concept of energy. Energy itself doesn't exist as a physical substance, it's an accounting mechanism like money. A TV that is worth $300 is not actually $300, it's just a way we assign it value. I can give you a couple pieces of paper from my wallet that we agree are also worth $300, but again the paper bills are not themselves $300. We just agree they are worth that much. $300 does not physically exist in this universe, just as 300 joules does not exist. They are both accounting concepts that we have created to measure something.\n\nTo answer your question, since energy is not a physical substance, it doesn't 'go' anywhere. It never has. If proton decay is possible then the physical state of the universe will change, but the quantity of energy will be conserved.",
"I read the first 15 replies and none of them are correct.\n\nProton decay has never been observed, and according to the standard model, isolated protons should never decay (due to color charge conservation, so no, they won't turn into photons).\n\nSomeone near the top mentioned that scientists have been able to put a *lower* bound on the half-life of the proton at 10^(32) years, and that's true, but that doesn't establish that proton decay is actually a thing, just that *if* it is a thing, it would take longer than that on average for any individual proton. The half-life could still be infinite, i.e. protons never decay, as predicted by the standard model.\n\nYou are certainly allowed to assume that the proton has a finite half-life and then see what theoretical consequences such an assumption has on current theories, but your question inherently assumes proton decay is predicted by the standard model, and it isn't.\n\nThe only saving grace is that on large enough time scales, it makes sense to assume that current theories (probably) break down, so just because current theories say the proton doesn't break down doesn't mean *actual* protons won't decay, but then the onus is on you to first find a new dynamics equation that can accurately produce predictions that align with all current measurements, and then we can discuss what this hypothetical new dynamics equation predicts.\n\nEdit: I read every top-level reply and some had kernels of truth but none ever the whole story.",
"It's honestly a non-event that doesn't matter. This is because we only have 3.7 Billion years before we hit the time barrier. After that, we literally run out of time, which is actually a finite resource. (Time being caused by sequential entanglement of particals along the T axis aka small particles strung together like a necklace in the 'time direction' makes time). Effectively, you could think of the existence as a water planet, and our unuverse's time is us, as a bubble, rising to the surface. The universe expands as it travels, but once we reach the surface, there's no more 'up' we can go, and the movement of time just ends.\n\nWell... maybe we can survive if we figure out how to mass produce temporal quantum entanglement ahead of us(extend our necklace of time particals or make our bubble float up into the air above the water's surface), but we'd need to survive to become a Kardeshev type lV status (a universe-spanning super-civilization ) to pull of something like that, at which point we've begun to rewrite the laws of physics and all bets are off.",
"We can't be sure, but in one theoretical model, the proton decays into a positron and two photons. So the mass of the proton largely becomes photons. Maybe.",
"I was under the impression that all energy would consume itself lastly being black holes? Essentially meaning that not even light will be able to penetrate the darkness, not that any light will remain...."
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bvlxal | how did rudy giuliani and michael bloomberg manage to clean up new york city? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bvlxal/eli5_how_did_rudy_giuliani_and_michael_bloomberg/ | {
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"I dont know the full extent to which they tried to clean up nyc but they did go after some members of the mafia. Michael Franzese was one prominent member they went after.",
"There are competing theories, and only some of them involve Giuliani or Bloomberg. Here are a few of them:\n\nEconomics: the economy was improving at the time, so more jobs means fewer people poor and desperate enough to commit crime.\n\nInnovative police work: policing things like broken windows and graffiti lead to more neighborhoods that looked nice. Criminals are more likely to break windows if they *see evidence of other crimes being committed* in that area. Reduction of \"shabbiness\" of neighborhoods lead to a reduction in crime.\n\nLead in the water: some people are convinced that a tiny bit of lead in the water makes people aggressive. As we pushed to get lead out of the water, crime dropped.\n\nLegalized abortions: tons of crime is committed by poor men aged 15-25. Legal abortions after Roe v Wade passed in 1973 means that there was a large reduction in poor, potentially criminal men starting in around 1989, and indeed, the country saw crime drop off at that point, and cities that legalized abortion a few years earlier saw their crime drop a few years earlier.",
"There are two episodes of the podcast Reply All that talk about it. \n\nThe Crime Machine Parts 1 and 2. \n\nBasically the police started tracking crime stats in a very clever way and it allowed then to see patterns of crime and that allowed them to get very good at forcasting where to put resources.",
"Look at increases in real estate prices and rents during their tenures. Poor people left. Rich people commit crimes, of course, but usually not the kind of crimes you’re referring to in terms of “cleaning up the city.”"
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1teoa7 | is there a universal weight unit scientists use? | I was just thinking how something on Earth that weighs 100 lb.s weighs 16.6 on the Moon. Is there a universal weight or density unit that scientists use or do they not have one because weight is relative? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1teoa7/is_there_a_universal_weight_unit_scientists_use/ | {
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"In science, you use mass instead of weight,",
"*Weight* is just another fancy word for *gravitational force*, the downwards pull the Earth does on some object. The proper unit in the SI system of units (which is the \"standard\" among scientists) is therefore the unit for force, a [newton](_URL_0_). A newton is roughly the weight of 0.1 kg on Earth.\n\nIt's technically incorrect to use a unit of mass to measure force. The mass of an object is the same everywhere, so when I for instance say that \"I would weight only 10 kg on the Moon\", what I mean is that \"I would weight as much as 10 kg of mass would weight on Earth\", while I would actually weight around 100 newtons (compared to around 600 newtons on Earth).\n\n**Edit**: Apparently there's such a thing as a pound-force.",
"Yes. \n\nUnits of mass are irrespective of the local gravitational acceleration. \n\nMass measures how much matter exists in an object. \n\nIn the SI system mass is measured with the Kilogram (kg) and in the American Engineering system mass is measured with the Pound Mass (LBM).\n\nIn all cases, the following relationship holds true. \n\nF = M * A or Force = Mass * Acceleration\n\n**Force** (what you think of as weight) is **equal** to the **mass of the object** ( LBM | KG ) **multiplied by** the **acceleration applied to the object** ( in this case the acceleration due to gravitational pull, which is greater for larger objects ). \n\nThe confusion stems from the American Engineering system which is set up so that on planet Earth at sea level the acceleration applied by the gravitational pull of the planet exerts 1 Pound of Force on a 1 Pound Mass object. \n\n"
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8xxx2d | why does alt-tabbing out of some fullscreen apps cause black screens or partial alt-tabbing? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8xxx2d/eli5_why_does_alttabbing_out_of_some_fullscreen/ | {
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"It depends on which fullscreen mode you're using.\n\nIf you use borderless fullscreen. It's basically windowed mode without the border to fill up 100 & #37; of the screen space. In this case, everything on the desktop is kept in memory and you can switch back to it in an instant.\n\nIf you use the real fullscreen mode, which is the case you're asking about. It releases desktop content from memory and let the app take exclusive control of the graphics card. When you alt-tab out of this fullscreen. It will take a second to re-render the desktop before it can be presented to you. That's why there's black screen."
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4bvd07 | how does upping the voltage of a cpu help overclock it? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4bvd07/eli5_how_does_upping_the_voltage_of_a_cpu_help/ | {
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"Imagine a CPU is like an engine in a car and you increased the speed of the engine without giving it more gas. Some of the cylinders would misfire because they didn't have enough fuel and the engine would start to run worse and worse until it died. This is an analogy of what the CPU does with the power it takes to run it. \n\nThe reason you need a steady supply of power is that the CPU has millions of tiny switches and gates inside of it that do the actual computing. They all use power and if the CPU doesn't have enough power to do the work then it will begin failing in ways that corrupt the data moving through the CPU which leads to a system crash. \n\nThe amount of power the CPU requires in order to run in a stable configuration is related to the clock speed of the CPU. The lower the clock speed, the less power it needs and the cooler the chip runs because some of that power is wasted as heat. \n\nAs you over clock the CPU, the logic gates are operating faster and so they require more power and if they don't get it then you get unstable operation or a crash.\n\nSo you increase the CPU speed until it starts to get unstable. Then you increase the voltage until it's stable. Then you repeat this process until it either starts running too hot, or adding additional power doesn't result in more stability. \n\nThe reason you don't just operate it at high power to begin with is because the TDP, or the amount of heat it needs to dissipate would be high and could shorten the life of the CPU and it would draw more power, run hotter, require larger cooling systems and more noise. \n\nIn general the CPU fabs err on the side of caution and you can safely over clock without increasing the voltage at all, but not as much as if you increased the voltage as well. \n\nIn more detail, you also have quantum effects with the electrons moving through the tiny little logic gates. The chip transistors are so small now that you have a lot of them in a very tiny area, and the space between them is so small that electrons can sometimes jump from one lane to another. As you increase the voltage you help stabilize the logic. \n\nWhen CPU's were made with much larger transistors and components there was tons of room for electrons to go bouncing around through the semi conducting circuitry of the chip. Like ball bearings inside of a barrel. But electrons have a fixed size, and as you make the circuits smaller and smaller it starts to look more like sucking BB's through a straw, which makes it harder for the electrons to move through the circuit and they require more of a push or pull to make it through. This potential is the voltage. We are getting close to the point where making the circuits smaller will become harder and harder until it's more like sucking a golf ball through a garden hose. "
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2snp7i | why is oceania the continent of new zealand, but isn't considered one of the 7 continents? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2snp7i/eli5why_is_oceania_the_continent_of_new_zealand/ | {
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"When used in the context of being a continent it includes Australia. Otherwise it just refers to a region of islands and not a continent.",
"It is, well more correctly Australia is. Many schools teach that there are 7 continents.\n\n* North America\n* South America\n* Africa\n* Europe\n* Asia\n* Australia\n* Antarctica\n\nThese the seven major geographic/political continents.\n\nIt's only in recent years that the continent of Australia has been referred to as Oceania, this is because they don't want to confuse the country and the continent and because it's not just the one country, but also includes places like New Zealand.\n\nThe problem with the definition of \"continent\" though is that it just means a large land mass. Hence why Europe and Asia are often called Eurasia, because it's one giant land mass that also connects to Africa, making it the supercontinent Afro-Eurasia.",
"[Obligatory CGPGrey continent video.](_URL_0_)\n\ntl;dw: The definition of \"continent\" is fuzzy to begin with.",
"Because what constitutes a continent has many definitions and there are also many views about what land masses Oceania comprises of.\n\nAlso, if you think about geography and plate tectonics, there are valid grounds for the definition of these continents, e.g. Europe forms one continental tectonic plate, Africa another, Australia another. The Oceanic Islands happen to occur on a oceanic plate and such islands are always difficult for the continental definition, because, well, they are not that, continental.\n\nBut to be honest, the main reason is probably because the region has so little landmass so they are deemed insignificant and are simply disregarded.",
"New Zealand is actually separated on to two continents, the Australasian (or IndoAustralian) plate, and the Pacific plate.\n\nOceania is a collective term for Australia, NZ, and many of the pacific islands. "
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379q44 | how did california get so unlucky when it comes to water shortage? why isn't it affecting oregon and washington? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/379q44/eli5how_did_california_get_so_unlucky_when_it/ | {
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"It is affecting Oregon and Washington. There is almost no snow pack on any of the mountains which means drought. The problem is the population of California is so much more than Oregon and Washington. Also, the western parts of OR snd WA are temperate rainforests. They generally get more rain than California anyway."
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ntrt0 | the little pi thing on the bottom of every page on reddit | My cursor passed over it by chance today, now I'm curious what "Rendered by PID 23270 on app-24 running fd50047" means.
edit: bottom right in case you couldn't figure that out (but I'm sure you did). | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ntrt0/eli5_the_little_pi_thing_on_the_bottom_of_every/ | {
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"This has been asked before but it is hard to search for. \n\nReddit as a whole has a lot of people visiting the website at any given time. That many people would be too much for just one computer, so there's a special computer that moves each visitor to another computer (in a bank of computers) so each individual computer gets less work. \n\nThere are also different versions of reddit, when the developers add features or fix bugs. These are all supposed to go on all the computers taking requests but one might be missed (maybe the admins were drinking beer while they were updating).\n\nThe little mouseover tells you want computer is running the webpage you're looking at, and what version of reddit is running, and some other information, so if something goes wrong, there's an easy way to see what computer is messing up.",
"[It sounded familiar :](_URL_0_) search for Pi\n",
"The real explanation would probably be the processor and computer the particular webpage is running off of so developers/ reddit can tell what went wrong and where. But that is just a guess.",
"If you click on it, it will take you to Mozart's Ghost, which is a program that allows the Praetorians to access secure government files.",
"It is an 'homage' to that movie.. you know\n\nThe Computer. With that girl from The Bus.",
"PID is *Process ID*, the numerical identifier of the linux process that is running the server.\n\napp-24 is an identifier, probably the hostname, of the server that handled your request.\n\nfd50047 is the beginning of a SHA hash that identifies the current commit, or \"version\" of reddit that was served.\n\nTL;DR: which server and what version of reddit.",
"TIL\n\nnever noticed that before, weird",
"When I was in primary school, the Grolier online encyclopedia had this hyperlinked period in the bottom of the page that could bypass the login. It was pretty boss.\n",
"Never saw it before... and now I'll always see it. ",
"This thing < 3 ?? I'm confused ",
"TIL i am oblivious to the small details of my everyday routine ",
"I never make all the way to the bottom of the page.",
"How long has that been there? I never noticed that before.",
"This has been asked before but it is hard to search for. \n\nReddit as a whole has a lot of people visiting the website at any given time. That many people would be too much for just one computer, so there's a special computer that moves each visitor to another computer (in a bank of computers) so each individual computer gets less work. \n\nThere are also different versions of reddit, when the developers add features or fix bugs. These are all supposed to go on all the computers taking requests but one might be missed (maybe the admins were drinking beer while they were updating).\n\nThe little mouseover tells you want computer is running the webpage you're looking at, and what version of reddit is running, and some other information, so if something goes wrong, there's an easy way to see what computer is messing up.",
"[It sounded familiar :](_URL_0_) search for Pi\n",
"The real explanation would probably be the processor and computer the particular webpage is running off of so developers/ reddit can tell what went wrong and where. But that is just a guess.",
"If you click on it, it will take you to Mozart's Ghost, which is a program that allows the Praetorians to access secure government files.",
"It is an 'homage' to that movie.. you know\n\nThe Computer. With that girl from The Bus.",
"PID is *Process ID*, the numerical identifier of the linux process that is running the server.\n\napp-24 is an identifier, probably the hostname, of the server that handled your request.\n\nfd50047 is the beginning of a SHA hash that identifies the current commit, or \"version\" of reddit that was served.\n\nTL;DR: which server and what version of reddit.",
"TIL\n\nnever noticed that before, weird",
"When I was in primary school, the Grolier online encyclopedia had this hyperlinked period in the bottom of the page that could bypass the login. It was pretty boss.\n",
"Never saw it before... and now I'll always see it. ",
"This thing < 3 ?? I'm confused ",
"TIL i am oblivious to the small details of my everyday routine ",
"I never make all the way to the bottom of the page.",
"How long has that been there? I never noticed that before."
]
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208tqk | what causes the brain to short circuit sometimes when staring / thinking about a word that causes it to feel completely alien to you? | For example right now the word "From" has been bothering me and I've been saying it pronounced like "frahm," even though I know the real pronunciation. Is there a term or study for this weird little phenomenon, or is it just a random human quirk? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/208tqk/eli5_what_causes_the_brain_to_short_circuit/ | {
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"_URL_0_\n\nRepeated stimulation tends to cause reactive desensitization, which is useful in other contexts to keep you from feeling the clothes you are wearing rubbing on you constantly, or perpetually tasting your saliva."
]
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[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation"
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|
2w1c1v | if we are not supposed to generalize a group based on the actions of a few members of that group, why are all white people held responsible for slavery? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2w1c1v/eli5_if_we_are_not_supposed_to_generalize_a_group/ | {
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"You're currently generalizing the group consisting of people in general based on the actions of the few people who hold white people responsible.",
"Because black people in general are much more racist than whites, and they know they can use this as an advantage because whites allow it. ",
"Family came from Ireland in 1920s. Been called a slave owning white nigga before",
"Because excuse making lets individuals off the hook for their own failings, and deflects criticism away from the troubled community by assigning blame to an outside group.\n\nIn other words, it's easier to say \"black people are overrepresented in prison because the system is racist\" (it's cultural fallout from a history of slavery) than to say \"there is a problem in the black community with criminal behavior being tolerated and normalized.\" Both statements acknowledge the issue, but in the first one the problem is somebody else's to solve.",
"I don't understand - all white people aren't held responsible for slavery. And held responsible by whom?",
"Can the OP give specific examples for why they feel blamed for slavery? I think the OP might be confusing \"white privilege\" for \"being responsible for slavery\". For more on white privilege, read wikipedia's article on the subject or read this essay: _URL_0_\n",
"They're not. They're just asked to acknowledge and challenge the ways that they unfairly benefit from a systemic historically rooted in inequality that continues to influence society and its members today. "
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28wd5j | why do internal combustion engines produce different torque/power at different rpms? | And why is this different for electric motors? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/28wd5j/eli5_why_do_internal_combustion_engines_produce/ | {
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"explained here:\n_URL_0_",
"If you make air flow faster through a longer path, it will develop turbulence. This causes the air to expand as it flows, you get less air into the cylinders. \n\nMore restriction = less air, less fuel, less push, less torque.\n\nBUT\n\nIf you make air flow faster through a longer path, it will also develop momentum. When the intake valve closes, air backs up behind it producing a pocket of higher pressure. If the intake valve opens before this high pressure starts to backflow, it will get an extra burst of air.\n\nMore momentum = more air, more fuel, more push, more torque.\n\nWhich effect dominates depends on engine speed. \n\nGet rid of restriction, and you'll make an engine that doesn't pull as well at low speed. Tune for low-end torque and you'll lose high-end power. Improving both at the same time is difficult.\n\nPower is simply torque * rpm. (Times the conversion factor of 1HP / 5252(ft-lb * RPM)) Different torque, different power. \n"
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d8vi25 | why are there unique hats for different professions, such as a painters hat or chefs hat? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d8vi25/eli5_why_are_there_unique_hats_for_different/ | {
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"Chefs hats (think the big white one with all the folds) started in France, you traditionally earned a gold for every technique of cooking eggs. An apprentice chef would wear a floppy “toque” until they started mastering techniques. Current day you’ll see a lot of skull-caps, worn to keep hair contained with a cool-vent top to promote air circulation because it easily gets to 120+*F in restaurant kitchens depending on where your restaurant is located. \n\nSource: am a chef therefore only knowledgeable on those hats",
"Read this interesting kids book on how Stetson invented the cowboy hat. Basically it keeps sun off and when it rains it pours the rain out front and back. It was ten gallons because I think it held water too.\n\nA welder wears a cotton skull cap thing with a small cotton bill because of the welding shield that is constant raised and lowered and for protection.\n\nBaseball cap keeps the sun out of your face.\n\nPainter's cap is paper and disposable. It keeps paint out of your hair and can be thrown out when too much paint is on it.\n\nConstruction hard hat for protection. \n\nA helmet for safety.\n\nA beekeeper hat with netting do you don't get stung by bees.\n\nIs that a good start?",
"Some are just fancy and part of a tradition, like those little ones that grocery store, pharmacy, candy shop or milkmen wore.\n\nOthers (almost certainly all hard hats) are associated with their professions because it's just practical and safe. Construction workers have hard hats in case things fall on them, or if they're getting up after bending underneath a beam. Foresters are much the same except they have full-brims to keep pinecones and scruff from falling down their jackets in the back of the neck.\n\nSlouch hats, fishermen's hats, those Asian sorta-cone-shaped hats are all to keep the sun/rain off in otherwise normal outdoor conditions.",
"The simple answer is usually necessity. Sure, some fashion involved, but, construction hat? It was developed as a good way to protect against falling objects. Painters hat? Disposable (frequently gets dirty with paint) and easy, cowboy hat kept the sun and rain out of their faces. Fashion comes into it, when someone is trying to address the need. For instance, a cowboy hat keeps the sun and rain out of ones face, but, it's not tight fitting. It would be next to useless when running, or sliding in baseball. A tighter fit, smaller hat that doesn't get in the way was developed to fit the need, with its own style. Style and function people liked it, and it caught on",
"Flat Caps were used by Nightsoilman because it was easier to balance a bucket on a flat cap.\n\nAustralian military slouch hats keep the sun off but also could be pinned up on the side of the dominant eye for sighting rifles.",
"and what about traditional nursing caps?",
"The nuns at st. Vincent's (Jacksonville, FL) had sick ones that I think were supposed to look like birds flying. I meant awesome..",
"Side note, I believe it wasn't until well into the 20th century that hat-wearing stopped being the default. In most of the Western world, it used to be that when you went outside, you wore a hat, period. There's old photos of street urchins wearing miserable rags instead of shoes, and they've all got battered, hand-me-down hats. Chaingang prisoners in stripey suits, the same.\n\nA lot of job-specific hats are from a time when every uniform came with a hat, for the same reason it came with pants and a shirt. The hat became a symbol, and remained even as the rest of the uniform changed.",
"What kind of hat does a hat maker wear? Cause I want that. It’s like asking a chef what’s a good restaurant",
"At least in the US, firemen’s helmets, similar to cowboy hats are shaped with a long brim so boiling water rolls off the back, away from the neck when making interior attacks. The front shields are unit identifiers so you know who is who, and color can indicate rank or, in the case of some places like San Francisco, the type of apparatus.",
"When my mom earned her RN back in 1961 they were given a specific hat at graduation. RNs wore the hats so patients would automatically know who was an actual registered nurse and who was among the army of support positions like nursing assistants and physical therapists. Somewhere along the way they stopped wearing hats, and today you often don't know who you're talking. They all wear name tags that has their name followed by an alphabet of certifications or degrees. Even nursing assistants have an alphabet of certifications after their name. So unless you're hospital savvy on what the alphabets mean, most people are clueless about whether they're talking to a nursing assistant, an LVN, an RN, a PA, or an MD, not to mention all the other respiratory therapist, physical therapist, phlebotomist etc alphabets that may appear. Once upon a time it was easy to spot your registered nurse on the floor in a hospital."
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7putbw | how do the internet clocks that our computers sync to stay so accurate? | Since a majority of the computers in the world are syncing their clocks to the internet through services like _URL_0_, _URL_1_, etc. how do those services maintain the time so accurately when clocks around my house lose minutes over time? Is it possible that the "internet time" could be wrong? Same thing goes for phone services like there used to be a number my parents called when I was a kid to get the time to set our clocks. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7putbw/eli5_how_do_the_internet_clocks_that_our/ | {
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"In the US they are very likely updating their clock according to the time maintained by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, who have a number of super-accurate atomic clocks.",
"The short answer is better clocks. Nowadays that \"better clock\" is the [atomic clock](_URL_0_).\n\nMechanical clocks drift because either the devices degrade over time, or were manufactured with imperfections.\n\nOn the other hand, every single atom is identical and doesn't change over time. So if you can measure the vibration of atoms, you can keep time at exactly the pace of other atomic clocks and never get fast or slow.\n\nYou don't need to _build_ an atomic clock to have access to one -- the GPS satellites carry atomic clocks and constantly beam the current time down to earth. That means you can just listen to the sky from anywhere on earth and you can get a very accurate, synchronized time.\n\nModern clock synchronization often uses a mix of atomic clocks on the ground and the signals from the GPS satellites.",
"Really really good clocks. \n\nUTC is the common standard for civil time, and is in turn based off International Atomic Time (TIA), with the difference being that UTC adds in leap seconds when needed (basically UTC is exactly 37 seconds behind TIA). \n\nTIA meanwhile is the weighted average of some 400 atomic clocks located around the world. These clock can be stupendously accurate, the losing or gaining less than a second ever million years, and some are even better than that. These atomic clocks are compared against one another and the results are usually published monthly which then sets the standard. \n\nFrom there various national agencies synchronize their atomic clocks to that time, usually keeping them within a few nanoseconds of one another, and they broadcast the time in some way. For something you can literally listen to, the BBC still broadcasts the pips to mark the start of the hour, which is based off an based off an atomic clock in the basement of Broadcasting House and synchronized to the MSF time signal broadcast by the National Physical Laboratory . This is fairly redundant today, but if you've ever heard [this](_URL_0_) on a bbc broadcast, that's why. \n\nNetwork Time Protocol is how computers keep synchronized. You computer talks to a server that tells it the time, and those servers are split into strata based off where they get their time from. Stratum 0 is the most accurate, and will be things like atomic clocks, GPS clocks and so on. Stratum 1 tends to be primary time servers, and they'll synchronize as best as possible to Stratum 0 clocks and also cross check with each other. Stratum 2, then synchronizes to Stratum 1, Stratum 3 to Stratum 2 and so on down the line. The further down they go, the less accurate you can expect to clock to be, although the entire system is designed to try to minimize the total round trip time to keep this as small as possible. \n\nSo because all (internet connected anyways) clocks are automatically synchronizing to more accurate clocks, we can usually keep things like your computer accurate to within a millisecond or so without much hassle. The clock in your house meanwhile is on it own, so if it loses time, you need to go synchronize it yourself instead of having it self correct on a regular basis. "
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3jfqn4 | why does hard fat (or visceral fat) occur in some people's belly, especially in alcoholics? | There are probably answers out there, but when I Google the topic I get barrages of crappy belly fat "cures". I don't wanna know how to get rid of it, I just want to know how it differs from soft belly fat. Is it just more compressed? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3jfqn4/eli5_why_does_hard_fat_or_visceral_fat_occur_in/ | {
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"Alcoholics get big, hard bellies not from fat, but from fluid buildup called ascities. Heavy alcohol use damages your liver, and that liver damage causes fluid to back up into the belly, causing it to swell up and get firm like a water balloon. Someone who has ascities needs to see a doctor"
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dbscgx | can ants carry diseases (not poison) to human beings? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dbscgx/eli5_can_ants_carry_diseases_not_poison_to_human/ | {
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"Theoretically possible, but as far as I know they are not a vector for any well known disease.",
"Diseases are transmitted to humans via vectors (Arthropods, specifically fleas, tick, and mosquitos) which can transmit in one of two ways - mechanical or biological transmission. Mechanical transmission is when the pathogen on its feet. Biological transmission is when the pathogen reproduces or undergoes some form of reproductive change, then is transmitted to people via bites or feces. \n\nAnts do transmit disease but the prevalence is not nearly as high as in mosquitos or ticks. Usually ants are vectors of transmission through mechanical transmission. The main cause of ant related disease is through bacterial and fungal infections in countries that are less hygienic. Usually these diseases present themselves through a secondary infection - an infection which normally would not infect someone but now does given a weaken immune system for example. \n\nSource - I’m a microbiology major in my senior year",
"Not specifically for humans, but if you want to read about something really interesting, try the life cycle of [Dicrocoelium dendriticum] (_URL_0_), which goes between snails, ants, and sheep. One of the more fascinating parasite life cycles."
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2h6sze | how does esp and other sport networks come up with these obscure stats? | As in a baseball player had 5 hits with 4 being doubles and one single that the left fielder had an error for the first time since 1882 | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2h6sze/eli5_how_does_esp_and_other_sport_networks_come/ | {
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"They have computer programs that do it. All the stats are recorded and maintained by either the league or the media themselves (usually both), so the data is all there. It's just a question of writing a computer program that pieces together stats out of that data, which isn't that hard to do: computers don't mind just combing through spreadsheets for hours.\n\nThe programs themselves aren't simple, but the basic idea is that you have the program constantly look for patterns of data and learn to flag it as \"maybe this is interesting (it doesn't actually know).\" So, since it's been keeping track, it knows that it hasn't seen the pattern of \"lefty with 4 doubles, a single, and one error\" since 1882, so that's rare enough to potentially be interesting.\n\nedit: I should add that it's a person who actually chooses what goes on screen. The computer just gives them a bunch of options.",
"There are companies that specialize in doing nothing but generating sports statistics. The most popular one is called [Stats Inc.](_URL_0_)",
"The store all the raw data, down to every at bat, every pitch, every fly ball and force out, in a database.\n\nThen they have a query language, where they can say things like \"select Player where Game.Hits > = 5 and Game.Doubles > = 4 and Game.Fielder.LF.Errors > = 1 and Game.Data > = 1882\" and get a list of of everything that matches that criteria. "
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z5s9b | why is the euro collapsing? it seems like such a good idea for all of europe to share a currency. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/z5s9b/why_is_the_euro_collapsing_it_seems_like_such_a/ | {
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"A single currency allows for more efficient trade, but removes monetary policy from the individual nations and gives it to the bank of the entire EuroZone.\n\nAs everyone is using and borrowing the same currency, when some countries *cough Greece cough* lie about their finances to get in and then do a terrible job on their own economy, it hurts their currency which is also the currency of everyone else in the Eurozone. This makes it harder for other countries to borrow money, which hurts their economies, and makes it even HARDER for the others (and those initial countries) to borrow money, etc. etc.",
"I'm no super expert on this but my father is an accountant and this what I can remember of what he told me.\n\nThe idea of the euro was that only countries with strong enough economies could join but if they upheld those strict rules only Germany would have joined so they let in a bunch of countries with terrible economies. What this means is that you have a huge imbalance in economy strength between the countries in the euro. What this means is that when those weak countries hit hard times, make stupid decisions and go bankrupt the euro is in danger of devaluing, so people lose confidence in the currency so the currency devalues (yes this is fucked up logic but that is how it works) the only thing keeping the euro up is people confidence in Germany and their confidence that weak counties will recover. So if any weak country collapses the euro will collapse.\n\nHaving a lot of counties on 1 currency is unbelievably stupid, it works well in times of prosperity because it allows countries (especially weak countries) to trade and grow much better however in times of recession everything falls apart like a stack of cards (the EU and euro was designed to strengthen Europe economy so it could compete with china and america but actually weakened the economy) \n\nThe only country to actually benefit from the euro was Germany as it allowed them to make a lot more money from its exports and is refusing to bail out countries like Greece that it could easily afford to bail out.\n\nThis isn't exactly a good answer but its hard to explain over Reddit as it is such a complex issue. If you want to know more then you have to learn about the subject and Google it",
"let's say you just graduated and you're now sharing an apartment with you best buddies from college.\n\neveryone is different and has different jobs and obviously a different income. now lets say that you're super smart and super ambitious. and you work in finance. every month you rake in the cash and you are rich as fuck.\n\nnow lets say some of your other bum-ass friends aren't like you and they make maybe 10k a year or even less. barely enough to scrape by. not only that though, they drink, they gamble, and they just fucking lie about their finances.\n\nnow imagine having to pay rent. because you adopted a new \"always-pay-rent-no-matter-what\" rule, you end up fronting the bill when your housemates cannot make ends meet. \n\nobviously this will strain your own wallet and is just all around frustrating. \n\nyou are germany and your housemates are the other countries of europe. GTFO and find a new house bro",
"Right now Mommy and Daddy give you and your many and brothers and sisters a combined allowance. Based on whether you all saved that money and spent it on good things like crayons for school, or whether you wasted it on bad things like candy, mommy and daddy give you all more or less allowance next time.\n\nNow imagine a you and a few of the other kids were very responsible with your money, and didn't have any candy at all so that you could have more allowance, while some kids ate lots of candy and had all the fun they wanted with the money. Since you all shared the responsibility of keeping the amount of allowance high, their bad decisions meant that despite your hard work, the allowance does not improve like it should.\n\nDoes this sound fair to you? It's not fair to the hard working kids. That is why mommy and daddy are starting to think it might be a better idea to give you all a separate allowance, like our parents did to us when we were five :)",
"I have no real data to back up any of the things I say. If you are looking for facts, skip this.\n\nI will state them as anecdotal evidence, from the perspective of a German guy.\n\nWhen the Euro was introduced, everything got more expensive overnight. Food to clothing, the conversion to Euros was a ripoff in DM (Deutsche Mark, the former German currency), raising prices a good 50% or more.\n\nAnd ever since then, people had to eat that difference. Where did it all go? Did the fair trade make things cheaper or better for consumers? Fucking no is the answer. However, deficits in places outside of Germany certainly made out like bandits. In whose interest? Are the Germans benefiting from Greece, Spain or some other shithole being bailed out? No.\n\nBut it was beautiful! For a lot of the cost was rolled up with economic problems stemming from the situation with East Germany having joined a union that was undoubtedly going to cost a major amount of money initially. Isn't that nice how it all came together?\n\nI'm not a very paranoid person in general, but this one was clear from the get-go: fleece those who have been successful as a country and take what they have in surplus, and make rich a few selected in a move that is supposed to \"rescue\" entire countries. Only that the rescue is artificial, but the banks made a killing.\n\nI sound like kook, but look at the situation today. Who really has chips left in this game? The banks, foreign and domestic. And that's it.",
"There is no redistribution of money between countries. In America, different states have different amounts of money. Alaska is poor. New York is wealthy. The federal government taxes people, and redistributes that money in spending. New Yorkers pay a lot more than they receive, and Alaskans receive a lot more than they pay. This allows for all of us to share a currency, because even though a New York dollar would be stronger than the US dollar is, and the Alaskan dollar would be weaker, it gets balanced out by the redistribution of wealth through federal taxes and spending. \n\nNow look at Europe. There is a common currency, meaning that Germany, which would have a strong German Mark (German dollar), gets to have a weaker Euro. Greece, on the other hand, which would have a really weak Greek Drachma, has a stronger Euro. This means that Germany's healthy economy can export a ton of stuff, similarly to China, because of a relatively devalued currency. Greece on the other hand imports more than it should because of a stronger currency. This means that they get an economy that is continually getting weaker, while Germany is benefiting. This is solved in the United States by federal redistribution, but EU doesn't have that, so certain member states (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain in particular, or the PIIGS) are doing very poorly economically while others, like France and Germany, are doing comparatively very well because of the effects of a shared currency over seriously different economies.\n\nTL;DR The EU doesn't have a way to address the issues that come from different regions benefitting from, while others are hurt by, a shared currency. This means the EU can't survive indefinitely, and the recession kick-started what would have been an issue further down the road.",
"You are probably thinking \"Just like the 50 States have the Dollar, all European countries should be able to share a currency too, right?\"\n\nNo. The thing is, in the US, we're all roughly the same. Sure, some parts like Cali and NY are richer, and places like the midwest are a little poorer, but in general we all on average make close to the same amount of money, spend about the same amount, etc etc. Not to mention, all of the State Govts are roughly the same as each other, with very similar policies, as well as the Federal Govt.\n\nIn Europe, the difference between the countries is huge. Each have unique governments to each other, with lots of policies differences that vary much greater than between the 50 USA states. So take the big policies differences, as well as highly varying incomes and spending, not to mention different cultures in regards to money and the economy, and it is extremely hard to group them all together and get them on the same currency.\n\nAt least, that's my opinion. Not to mention, France, Germany and the other big governments are providing a lot of the support for the smaller countries. Yes, Cali, NY etc earn a lot more and put a lot more into the US govt than the other states do, and a lot of states take a lot of aid back, but the USA has a couple hundred years of practice. The EU has been around for 20, and didn't have the advantage of starting along with the other governments. They're stuck trying to bridge divides between lots of very different governments and countries.",
"A unified currency does not equal a unified economy.",
"In a nutshell, the primary reason behind the collapse is that while the currency is shared, each EMU country is allowed to regulate it their own way.",
"Money issued from a central bank works because the money is created and issued to all the other banks on interest, which then is loaned to the people on interest. The people have to pay back the bank they got the money from, which has to pay back the central bank. If somebody produces and sells $325k worth of VALUE of a product but only gets to keep a $300k house, they lose $25k worth of value from the product they created.\n\nWhile it doesn't sound like a bad idea on the surface to profit off of money being used as a service for people to exchange their goods (after all - somebody had to create the money, so why should they not get paid for it?), but beneath the surface, since everybody owes the money back to somebody else on interest, somebody is profiting each time by the simple act of people exchanging goods. It sucks value from the goods being produced by the entire community, and cripples the community.\n\nThis is exactly what is happening in Europe (and most other western countries) with the Euro. A system becomes created where everybody owes things to other people, so everybody is forced to work, but eventually (since all the value is being sucked from the society) more and more people can't afford to buy basic necessities and they become lower class. Since Euro is now a system that many countries in Europe use, it is effecting the entire continent and many other continents that trade with it.",
"The question you should ask is: Is the euro collapsing? No it is not.",
"Fiat Currency. Fiat currency is backed by no commodity whether that be gold, silver, uranium, oil, or whatever. When it is not backed by a commodity it can be inflated rapidly, and printed rapidly to cover budget deficits. Because all the countries have budget deficits in varying amounts, it is dragging other countries down with the rest. \n\nBasically the same thing happening to our currency, only its happening faster and much worse due to each nation having different national budgets.",
"Think of it this way:\n\nYou're in a rowing boat, and each person rowing is a European country. Suddenly, some of the people rowing get too tired, which means the boat starts to slow down, to make up for this the other rowers have to try harder (by bailing other countries out) This causes those rowers to tire faster, and eventually everyone is nackered.",
"The problem with the Euro is that it's being used by more than 20 different economies, and while they've synchronized their currency, they haven't synchronized their economic policies, and the cultural variance from Sweden to Greece is vast.\n\nGreece, for example, is a pretty laid back country where people, from what I understand, feel entitled to their pensions. This, combined with a history of tax evasion, and you have a country that's using the euro, not paying taxes, paying out pensions, and racking up a large amount of debt. When this system collapsed on the Greeks in 2008, it sparked what we know today as the Euro Crisis. Basically, Greece must either pay off its debts and cut back on public programs and pensions, increase taxes (neither of which it really wants to do), or default.\n\nSo why doesn't Greece just default then? Well if it does default, it'll cause a devaluing in the Greek currency and force it to trade at a lower price on the global market. That's right, the Euro. If Greece were to default, it would cause all of Europe's currency to be valued less, which would likely cause an economic collapse in Spain, Portugal, or Ireland, which would in turn cause a collapse in other countries, eventually making its way throughout Europe and likely causing another recession, of greater severity than the last.\n\nThis is why Germany has it in it's interests to continue bailing out Eurozone countries: if any of these countries were to default, Germany would be directly affected, and it could be possible that Germany would face similar issues as Spain or Italy today down the road as a result. Germany for the most part has had a smooth economic recovery thanks to smart economic organization, reducing taxes strategically, and offering aid to industry wherever it's needed.\n\n**TL;DR VERSION:** Countries in the euro use the same currency but not the same economic strategy; their cultures in regards to economics differ vastly enough so that the way they deal with day to day economics is different; no country in the Eurozone can default on their debts without causing a continental economic disaster.",
"*Why* does it seem like such a good idea? There are lots of benefits to a country controlling its own currency, rather than sharing with the rest of Europe.",
"2 words: regional imbalances",
"I heard a thing on NPR once about how uniting Europe in a currency is a much different situation than the US and our dollar.\n\nI have nothing to contribute to this thread."
]
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3cgghr | i've heard that no matter where you are in the universe, you're still equidistant from the universe's "edges" as it expands. how is this so? or am i getting this wrong? | If I'm not getting this wrong, does this mean that, going forever in one direction in the universe, one would eventually end up where they started? With the curvature of space-time and whatnot? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3cgghr/eli5_ive_heard_that_no_matter_where_you_are_in/ | {
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"The \"edges\" of the universe are just as far as we can see, not physical edges, because the light at the edges is from the beginning of the universe and there can't be any light from before the universe.\n\nIt's like two ships on the ocean, which both see the horizon equidistant from themselves no matter where they are.",
"The current leading cosmological theories about the universe are a universe that is unbounded and infinite. There is no edge to approach, in any direction, and you would not return to where you started, but be forever further from that location. ",
"The most likely is no edge to the Universe. \n\nThere is an edge to the so-called \"visible universe\" which means the part of the Universe from which the light has had time enough to reach us. This visible Universe is roughly a sphere centered on whoever is observing, just the part of the ocean you would see on a boat would roughly describe a circle on the map, centered around the observer.",
"Don't think of the universe as a \"flat\" object that has edges. Instead, imagine yourself as a microscopic being living on an inflated balloon that is slowly expanding. No matter where you are on the balloon, you aren't any closer to an edge because there is no edge."
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p6gdb | why do central banks change interest rates? | Why do banks change interest rates? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/p6gdb/elif_why_do_central_banks_change_interest_rates/ | {
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"Interest rates are powerful tools available with the banks to regulate the monetary policy of a country. The basic aim is to provide stability to the economy so that it does not fall apart.\n\nCentral banks can increase the interest rates, resulting in increase in borrowing cost. By doing so, they are effectively trying to reduce the supply of money in the system. This is done when the banks feel that the economy is overheating or to tame down inflation. \n\nCentral banks can also reduce interest rates reducing the cost of borrowing. Cheaper money can result in increased economic activity and thus boost growth."
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ctqao9 | why do popcorn kernels generally have either a smooth surface but are randomly shaped, or a distinct cracked surface but are usually more sphere shaped? | Help me understand lol | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ctqao9/eli5_why_do_popcorn_kernels_generally_have_either/ | {
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"it has to do with the \"wet\" kernels. things like the rates of water evaporation, thickness of the skin, density of the meat/pulp inside will affect how each kernel dries and shrinks, thus its shape and texture when its a \"dry\" kernel. to be clear there is still water inside, thats why they pop when you heat them.",
"Also there are two different varieties of popcorn from a culinary standpoint: butterfly and mushroom. butterfly is the irregular shaped ones that most people just eat as \"popcorn\". mushroom is the rounded, \"firmer\" variety that is usually used for coating like caramel corn or kettle corn, as it is a sturdier variety and less \"fluffy\"."
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3ax6c7 | the splitting of the atom.. what is it and why is it so significant? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ax6c7/eli5_the_splitting_of_the_atom_what_is_it_and_why/ | {
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"When an atom splits a releases a HUGE amount of energy. With some atoms like Uranium, when an atom splits it releases energy but also a few particles called neutrons. These neutrons each go on to hit more atoms creating a chain reaction. If there are enough atoms the chain reaction keeps going on until it runs out of fuel or it fly apart from the energy created. This can be taken two ways. You can make a bomb by creating ideal conditions for the splitting. This bomb will be very powerful because split atoms (as stated above) release tons and tons of energy. You can also a chain reaction but put other elements in it that absorb some of the nuetrons. This makes it so it doesn't fly apart and you use that energy as the basis of a nuclear power plant.",
"Imagine you and your brother own some Lego, where each piece is magnetic and can snap together (releasing energy) and some can be forced together (requiring energy). Everyone else you know has this magnetic Lego, and spend their time building weird and wonderful things out of them. They're the smallest piece in the toy set. \n\nOne day your brother gets a very rare Lego piece and looks at it closely... It looks like even smaller Lego pieces are coming off of it, and what's left isn't the piece he started it with. Further more, it looks like each time a piece changes it happens spontaneously and releases an enormous amount of energy for just just single Lego piece. These are no longer the smallest pieces in the toy set! You call up all your friends to show it off.\n\nYears later you find another piece that does the same thing, this time though I gives of a lot of energy! A lot! You put it all together in the desert. You figure that out that if sub-lego pieces hit the unstable pieces then they should break up, releasing more sub-lego pieces... In an ever increasing amount, with the amount of energy released being phenomenal. \n\nBoom, you were right. "
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334dpv | could a baby get sleep paralysis? | And if it did, what would it see? Because most people see monsters and hear demonic voices but a baby wouldn't know either of those things. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/334dpv/eli5_could_a_baby_get_sleep_paralysis/ | {
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"A baby could physiologically get sleep paralysis, sure. As to what their subconscious produces (and let's face it, babies are cognitively almost entirely subconscious), no one really knows. Technology has not gotten to a point where we can figure out what's going on in the brain of beings unable to effectively communicate. "
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35qxkl | how do you pay bills in prison? (for long sentences, multiple years) | Do you still have access to your bank accounts? What about bills that can't be cancelled and must be repaid like student loan payments? What if you have no savings, do you just spiral into debt and collections? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/35qxkl/eli5_how_do_you_pay_bills_in_prison_for_long/ | {
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"Well, first off, you cancel everything you can. Terminate the lease, sell the house, let them repossess the car.\n\nAs for student loans, a prisoner can apply for the income based repayment schedule, and with the zero income, they won't be paying on the loan.\n\nBut yes, there may well be a lot of debt and collections, just one of the many problems that someone has to deal with as a consequence of being unwise enough to commit a felony.",
" > Do you still have access to your bank accounts?\n\nYou do.\n\n > What about bills that can't be cancelled and must be repaid like student loan payments?\n\nYou are encouraged to liquidate all of your assets and put the money into an account to be used to pay any expenses you can't cancel.\n\n > What if you have no savings, do you just spiral into debt and collections?\n\nIf you are in prison long enough for this to be an issue, you probably committed a felony. It is legal to discriminate against felons, which will probably have a far greater impact on your ability to borrow money than bad credit will. Declaring bankruptcy will not make things significantly worse.\n"
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5kbb1o | why do gas stations list the gas price to the thousands place? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5kbb1o/eli5why_do_gas_stations_list_the_gas_price_to_the/ | {
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"Off topic: To the 3 people who commented, you are [shadowbanned](_URL_0_) since it says 4 reactions but i only see 1. Visit /r/ShadowBan/ to see if for Reddit as a whole, if not, then just this sub. "
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ygcab | - totalitarianism and politics | I am supposed to give a speech about totalitarianism and how people's or countries' form of government affect their politics and other. I searched but websites like wikipedia uses big words, politic words that normal people would never use (another way of saying I'm a big dumb). Please ELI5, do go into details about Totalitarianism and explain it like i'm 5. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ygcab/eli5_totalitarianism_and_politics/ | {
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"Totalitarianism is another way of saying that the country's government (Usually one person) gets to do whatever it wants. That's where the 'total' comes from. The government controls the economy, military, art, education, science, everything. They totally control the public.",
"I dont exactly agree with Schmaltzed. \n\nTotalitarianism is political system, where the government tries to control every aspect of public but ALSO private life.\n\nIn contrast a government that just controls the economy, military, art, education, science is not perse a totalitarian government. \n\nThe greatest example is Soviet Union. It was all about building up a Nation where everyone would have equal rights and chances for a stable future. The State literally built schools, paid for your education, found a job for you, paid your pension. You never really had to worry about your future, state was promising you that stability. While it sounds great to live that , one must realize that in case you were unhappy with how things were, you had no liberty or chances to change it.\n\nA things about Totalitarian Government ( from top of my head):\n1. uses media to justify and promote itself.\n2. limits freedom of speech ( as a back up to 1.)\n3. strives to control every aspect of your life.\n4. not perse a dictatorship\n5. sells ideology, brainwashes citizens.\n6. low on corruption (officials also brainwashed)\n....\nedit: spelling"
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2no3ks | women who use contraception, stopping their periods for months/years at a time, where does it go? and is it unhealthy? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2no3ks/eli5_women_who_use_contraception_stopping_their/ | {
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"First, pick your poison. Hormonal contraception, barrier contraception, Intrauterine devices, etc...\n\nLet's assume you're talking about hormonal options which include pills and shots and such.\n\nGenerally speaking, all they do is prevent the woman from ovulation by tricking the body into thinking it's in the follicular phase, which is when follicles mature and it's the last stage before ovulation.\n\nOvulation of course is when a woman releases ovaries and is at the prime time to get pregnant. \n\nThe majority of hormonal contraceptives and conception boosters focus on the ovulatory phase of the menstrual cycle because it is the most important determinant of fertility. Hormone therapy can positively or negatively interfere with ovulation and can give a sense of cycle control to the woman.\n\nSo, the periods just stop. And it's not unhealthy when done properly.",
"Also, many forms of hormonal bc do not stop menstruation, they prevent an egg from dropping/implanting. The uterine wall is still shed monthly.",
"My gynecologist said that it's absolutely 100% fine. There are no adverse side effects to choosing to not menstruate every month. Some IUDs stop your period without hormonal assistance, but what I do is just take birth control pills without stopping for the last week of the month (this is the week that a period is triggered by the absence of birth control hormones). As long as you normally react well to hormonal birth control methods, it should be fine. The only problems I've noticed is that your first period after a long streak of not having any sometimes results in a dark brown or black colored menstrual fluid. This is fine. It's just a build up of old blood. I also noticed that my body is way more receptive when I miss a birth control pill (doesn't happen often, maybe twice a year). When I had been taking it normally, I'd have to miss two or three pills before my period started. Now that I take them constantly, if I miss one pill, even doubling up the dosage the next day won't stop a period from coming. Sometimes it's just a day or two of spotting, but sometimes it's like a full period even though I'm continuing to take the pill each day. But aside from that, I'd highly recommend this method to women who have had luck with hormonal birth control before and aren't particularly attached to their period. It's a great way to 1) avoid the mess/cramps/hassle/week of no sex and 2) save eggs (if you're into that). "
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480mt0 | why do guns recoil upwards and not any other direction? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/480mt0/eli5_why_do_guns_recoil_upwards_and_not_any_other/ | {
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"You are referencing *muzzle rise*.\n\n > The primary reason for muzzle rise is that for nearly all firearms, the centerline of the barrel is above the center of contact between the shooter and the firearms' grips and stock. The recoil forces from the bullet being fired and the propellant gases exiting the muzzle act directly down the centerline of the barrel.\n\n > **If that line of force is above the center of the contact points, this creates a couple, a rotational force. That couple causes the firearm to rotate, and the muzzle end to rise upwards.**\n\nSource: _URL_0_",
"Because the part that fires the bullet is above the part you hold onto.\nNotice how the handle is always below the barrel. The part the bullet comes out of goes back and its like leaver with the handle as the fulcrum. \nIf the barrel was directly infront of the handle it would push only backwards, but this would make the gun impossible to hold with two hands and too long to fire with one hand. \nIf the barrel was underneath it would be very difficult to aim with. Plus gravity and recoil would combine to make it hard to control.",
"You hold the gun at the bottom and rear of the rifle or handgun. When fired, the force of the burning powder in the gun pushes in all 6 directions, up, down, left, right, forward, backward. Up/down and left/right are equal and balance out. \n\nForward a bullet is forced out, and backward is against your arm. Since you're holding the gun, your arm acts like the pivot point for the gun, causing the front to rise, as the rear of the gun pivots downward.",
"Guns, naturally, recoil in exactly the opposite direction of that of the bullet. Since you're holding it below the line of fire, you're creating a rotation point. The backwards force goes over that point, and introduces a rotation.\n\nIn a similar way, pushing down on a door lever will make it rotate around the axis. "
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5fmetr | why you have to pay the bbc for your tv licence to watch programmes on itv, ch4 etc. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5fmetr/eli5_why_you_have_to_pay_the_bbc_for_your_tv/ | {
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"Because they are all part of the same funding pool. The obviously don't know what station you are watching at any given time, so there is no way to make that distinction, or somehow split profits based on what percentage you watch one over the other. \n \n > Are there any other situations that occur where you have to pay a rival company...to use another company's services? \n \nThat's not what's happening, you are paying the government for the privilege to watch any live broadcasted tv program OTA/cable/satellite/online (anything except on-demand content basically), and that money is collected and used to help fund the BCC/ITV. Trust me, if you didn't have to pay the license, your taxes would just increase to compensate."
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5shxpk | how does a "word" become a word? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5shxpk/eli5_how_does_a_word_become_a_word/ | {
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"A word becomes a word when people use it and other people recognise and understand it. As simple as that.\n\nDictionaries are just books, written by people. They put words and definitions for them into the books as they become common enough to need looking up.\n\nThe word \"quiz\" was famously popularized by a man trying to win a bet. [\"Quiz: what is it?\"](_URL_0_) \n\nShakespeare famously invented dozens of words, many of which are still in use today. "
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24ax4g | the difference between "created" gems and "dug 'em out of the ground" gems | I've done some googling and basic research, which all points to "Created gems are identical to Natural gems, except they are generally cheaper with a higher quality than Natural gems."
However, I have female friends who claim that Created gems are terrible/trash/awful etc. So I'm confused. Are they delusional, or is the internet lieing to me again? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/24ax4g/eli5_the_difference_between_created_gems_and_dug/ | {
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"Did you mean to say that your friends claim that created gems are bad? Regardless, they're wrong.",
"Natural gems do often have some imperfections, because synthetic gems can be made to such quantity that defects are negligible.\n\nSome people like the imperfections, they like a cloudy diamond, or gem that has a crack on the interior.",
"It takes a trained/experienced jeweler to spot the difference between a synthetic and a natural gem. In fact, for the benefit of inexperienced jewelers, synthetic gems often actually have a serial number imprinted in the crystal as a \"this gem is synthetic\" notification.\n\nIn fact, as other commenters have pointed out, synthetic gems are often *more* flawless than natural gems, because they're created by tightly controlled lab processes rather than chaotic, unpredictable natural ones.\n\nThe anti-synthetic-gem movement is nothing more than a marketing ploy by the gem industry, because if lab-grown gems get popular, their profits could drop.",
"All of the other comments saying there is no difference besides being more perfect are correct. \n\nThat said, it is an issue for some gems where perfection isn't the point. For example, opals are highly prized because each one is unique in coloring, layers, and pattern. It is very easy to distinguish a synthetic one because they look like stained glass or have a snakeskin pattern that is very ordered and repetitive. Real opals tend to have swirls of color on distinguishable layers, visible through a semi-transparent or milky white texture. \n\nTo make it ELI5, opals are like unique marbles carved out of big rocks that are collectible because they're all unique. Synthetic opals are manmade marbles that have a lot of the same pattern and are really pretty, but don't really have a uniqueness to them. ",
"I do a bit of hobby gemcutting, and my wife is a jeweler. Lab created gems are generally more flawless, and are manufactured in the very best colors, and for top tier, large stones like ruby, sapphire, or chrysoberyl, natural stones are worth *ten thousand times more per carat*\n\nGems are a status object, like designer clothing or fine art. You can go to the flea market to buy knockoff designer clothing, it is \"worth less\" even though the difference may be subtle. [Art experts debate endlessly whether a particular painting is a work of a master](_URL_0_), his apprentice, or an imitator, and the expert consensus adds or subtracts tens of millions of dollars from the price of the painting, regardless of how pretty the thing is to look at. I think gem collectors are some of the least arbitrary of all status object collectors, they use gemological insturments and a great deal of deduction to determine whether the stones they examine are \"real\" or \"fake\", I find it fascinating in a way that discovering a fake Gucci purse isn't.\n\nAs a cutter, there is no artistry in cutting synthetics, there are no flaws to work around and the material is cheap enough that you aren't trying to save every fraction of a carat. But the artistry of cutting isn't a big contributor to price.\n\nBlue topaz is an interesting case of the grey area between \"real\" and synthetic, [99% of the material on the market is colorless natural topaz that has been irrradiated to make it blue.](_URL_1_) A jeweler should disclose the treatment, although few do. I have personally watched my wife explain that one piece of handcrafted jewelry features a natural stone with radiation enhanced color, and another is fully lab created, people generally choose the enhanced one."
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"http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/irradiated-gemstones.html"
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6bfxd1 | do objects vibrating at their resonant frequencies break? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6bfxd1/eli5_do_objects_vibrating_at_their_resonant/ | {
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"Not always. Objects break when they vibrate with enough force to overcome their structure (regardless of why they're vibrating), and it's easier to do that when vibrating something at its resonant frequency, but you still have to generate enough force to break it. That's easy to do with something like a wine glass, which is relatively fragile, but is extremely difficult to do with something like a steel rod.",
"Usually not. For example, many musical instruments do this, and they don't break.\n\nHowever, if you keep adding more and more energy to such an object, making the vibrations bigger and bigger (or if it's just fragile), then it can indeed break. For example the old Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsed this way (see YouTube video of it)."
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13yhta | the difference between "entropy", "enthalpy", and how they relate to gibb's free energy. | I know that these two terms are closely related, so what is it that makes them uniquely different? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/13yhta/eli5_the_difference_between_entropy_enthalpy_and/ | {
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"Entropy - measure of the disorderliness of a system. If you had a box of toys in a box and took them out and played with them, at the end of the playtime your toys would be scattered all over the place. It's more disorderly now, so the entropy change would be positive. (Not exactly right, but for a 5 year old it will suffice) \nPositive entropy change indicates an increase in disorderliness and vice versa.\n\nEnthalpy change - change in energy. The energy/enthalpy of a system cannot be measured per se, just the change in energy. Let's say I'm running and sweaty and all hot. I give out energy in the form of heat, so my enthalpy change is negative.\n\nBoth entropy and enthalpy are measured in kJ per mol. You cannot measure the exact entropy or enthalpy of a closed system, only CHANGES in entropy or enthalpy.\n\nNow the equation: ΔG = ΔH - TΔS \nWhere ΔG = Gibbs Free Energy \nΔH = enthalpy change \nT = temperature in Kelvin \nΔS = entropy change\n\nWhen ΔG < 0, that reaction is spontaneous at that temperature. You can see that having a low ΔH and high T/ΔS would favor the spontaneity of a reaction, although it is not always guaranteed.\n\nI've tried to be thorough enough, but for a more comprehensive explanation you should probably look at a textbook or possibly KhanAcademy."
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89kvnn | why do gamers use headsets? | Is that the main audio source? Dont they use speakers to hear the game sound?
Im not a hardcore gamer and when i play i use the speakers for sound so i never understood the use of headsets in youtube twitch and e sports.
Edit: thank you for your answers i didnt know. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/89kvnn/eli5_why_do_gamers_use_headsets/ | {
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"So you can have voice and game audio at the same time. Also headsets can have 7.1 setups that actually help in games by allowing for truly accurate locational sounds. ",
"I use them when I'm also using the microphone to talk with other players. Otherwise I just use the speakers. ",
"They use headsets because in some games it gives players advantages. Like hearing where an opponent is coming from, or when a certain sound queues a unique action in game. Some players also just enjoy hearing the ambient music or fx within the game. It's also just courteous to the other people around the house who may be bothered by the sounds. ",
"The headset is both the audio source and the microphone they use\n\nHeadsets don't feed back into the microphone and provide much better sound directionality.\n\nNot feeding back into the microphone is important, it allows voice to come through clearly at reasonable volumes without distortion when in a big battle where there will be lots of sounds.\n\nSound direction is very important in figuring out where other players are located. If I have a pair of speakers then all sounds come from a variation of either in front of me to the left or in front of me to the right. Headphones with a good sound card and fancy software can simulate full surround sound giving you much better situational awareness, now instead of everything coming from the front you can have sounds come from directly left or even behind with some fancy processing.",
"Speakers and microphones do not mix, it causes alot of echoes and feed back. Its cheaper and more convenient to use headphones.",
"There are several reasons:\n\n- If you play in a \"needs to be quiet\" area, it will keep it quiet. For example having three kids playing different games will make it a battle to find out who can turn their speakers on loudest.\n\n- If you play with others, the sounds of others can confuse your perception of the game. Also if your surroundings are noisy, you will miss clues.\n\n- You will have a better chance of hearing sounds and hearing the 'direction' they are coming from. This will give you a game advantage.\n",
"Most \"competitive gamers\" use headsets as the sole source of noise.\n\nFor one, it's much easier to block our all noise except the game, so you can focus purely on the game. No hearing the neighbor mowing, or the AC kicking on, or etc. This also becomes a must as soon as two or more gamers are in the same room, you don't want to be hearing someone else's game noises and getting confused. \n\nAnother reason is that sound location can be reproduced more accurately. A game knows exactly where the speakers in a headset will be in relation to your ears, and good headsets can very accurately represent exactly where a noise should be coming from. But external speakers can be set up anywhere, and everyone has different size and shape rooms and height desks and setups. And often people only have speakers on the desk in front of them. So it's much harder to accurately represent where a sound is coming from with external speakers, especially if it's supposed to be behind or to the side of you.\n\nHeadsets also usually come with integrated microphones. Because the headset moves with your head, the microphone moves with your mouth and is always the exact same distance away from it, leading to a consistent sound quality. It's also much closer to you than a desk based microphone, so can have a much smaller pickup radius, so usually can be set to pick up much less external noise and works better with external noise canceling.\n\nAn added benefit is for streaming. If you stream your games, your microphone would usually pick up any game sounds you had on an external speaker, so it will either echo the game sounds coming directly from the game, or you'd have to not use the high quality directly from the game sound in your stream, and rely only on the sound from your speaker being re picked up by your mic, drastically reducing quality (think watching a clip of jeopardy on YouTube, vs watching a someone's recording of jeopardy on tv from a hand camera on YouTube) "
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5g3318 | why does santa claus go by so many names (st. nicholas, kris kringle, etc)? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5g3318/eli5_why_does_santa_claus_go_by_so_many_names_st/ | {
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"Santa Claus is an amalgam of dozens if not hundreds of different mythical/religious characters and a few actual historical figures. As such some of the names of those separate figures carried through to modernity as alternate names for Santa Claus. "
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fhc042 | why are absurdly misspelled scams circulated? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fhc042/eli5_why_are_absurdly_misspelled_scams_circulated/ | {
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"From what I understand, they're written like that on purpose. It helps them immediately weed out the people who would be smart enough to figure out it's a scam partway through the process. The people who see all the spelling errors and don't immediately have red flags go up are generally gullible enough to go through the whole thing without catching on.",
"It's also to avoid automatic detection by spam filters. Often, they are randomly changed/generated, with spelling errors in random places."
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6gtb60 | why is russia still so influential? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6gtb60/eli5_why_is_russia_still_so_influential/ | {
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"The russian military has the power to take over nations bordering the EU in a matter of days. Really, the only world powers capable of stopping them are the US and china, and china likely would not intervene.\n\nThis basically lets Russia reserve the right to completely destabilize eastern Europe, even worse than they already have in the past 5 years (see ukraine, crimea and syria)"
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4a9el9 | what effects do nitrites and nitrates contained in foods have on people? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4a9el9/eli5_what_effects_do_nitrites_and_nitrates/ | {
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"Too high a dose of nitrates in a human can cause nitrate toxicity. The nitrate will oxidise the iron in hemoglobin leaving it unable to carry oxygen. Babies are especially vulnerable, with \"blue baby syndrome\" being the most common diagnosis.\n\nLong term exposure to nitrates has been linked to some types of colon cancer, but the effect is very weak.",
"Toxicity from nitrate consumption is rarely, if ever, *acute*, meaning immediately and dramatically a problem. Instead, the toxicity is from *chronic* exposure, meaning damage caused over time. Much like how very few people get acute radiation poisoning, but DNA damage due to exposure to radiation over time causes many cancers. \n\nAnd like radiation, nitrate consumption can lead to DNA damage. Nitrates can form what are known as \"nitrosamines\" in the presence of amines which are found in many compounds, include amino acids, the building blocks of protein. And indeed, it has been [found](_URL_1_) that dietary nitrates can form nitrosamines.\n\nNow, nitrosamines themselves are what pose a problem. They have been [known to cause cancer](_URL_0_) in humans for quite a while, and are thought to be one of the major cancer causing constituents of tobacco smoke. \n\nSo minor DNA damage at the best, cancer at the worst. I would just avoid nitrates where possible. There are also cardiovascular and respiratory (heart and oxygen-binding) effects, but they are transient.",
"believe it or not, we're not sure if they are good or bad for your body, or what they do. some scientists emphatically say that they are actually *required* for good health, as opposed to being bad for you. and most balanced diets will contain a much higher proportion of nitrite than you might imagine, a concentration likely to be higher than if all you ate was bacon and hotdogs. nitrates are prevalent in many root vegetables, for example, which are part of a healthy diet.\n\nsome studies have shown that nitrite in the blood dilates the arteries and promotes better blood flow (more [HERE](_URL_1_) ). these studies say that about three quarters of the nitrite in our blood is produced by our own bodies for this very reason (blood flow), and that the amount is way more than we get from processed meats.\n\nthe big bugaboo... the public generally has been led to believe that studies show that diets high in nitrite/nitrate added foods cause cancer. some studies do seem to show this.\n\nbut at the same time, foods which are also believed to be *healthy* for you, like celery and spinach, or beets, contain very high levels of nitrite and nitrates themselves. and these foods are found to reduce incidence of cancer. these natural sources contain VASTLY more nitrates than the hot dog or pastrami sandwich we may have told to worry about. how much more?\n\nwell, a serving of arugula (your salad, say) contains more nitrite than almost [500 hotdogs](_URL_2_). the same amount in four servings of celery have about the same amount\n\nand your own spit in fact contains as much or more nitrite as those nearly-500 hotdogs.\n\nso it is really unclear whether the bad reputation for nitrates/nitrite in processed food is deserved.\n\nif nitrates/nitrite are bad for you, then consider this: if you have a nice garden salad, while your friend indulges in four hotdogs and a whole pound of bacon, one of you is consuming healthier levels of nitrate/nitrite. (spoiler: it isn't you). but yeah, all that fat and salt in the dogs and bacon may not be so good either. \n\nthe biggest factor in your health would be the entire nutritional/dietary quality of the food itself within which the nitrite and nitrate is found. for example, is it healthier to eat \"uncured\" bacon? well, it's still salty meat and pork fat. how healthy is \"healthy\" when we are talking about bacon.\n\nworse... the folks who believe that by buying \"uncured\" bacon (at a health food or organic food store) are being misled. since the USDA consider curing to be something done with *added* nitrites, what the \"uncured\" bacon manufacturer does is adds celery powder to the flavorings. why? well, only because celery contains such high levels of nitrite, that a small amount of celery powder will cure the bacon in the same exact way, chemically, as it would have been had they simply used nitrite by itself. a loophole. and for all intents and purposes, the same exact product as \"regular\" bacon, with all the same health risks.\n\nmore [HERE](_URL_0_)\n\nEDIT: added links",
"Nitrites and nitrates aren't bad by themselves; in fact they can be beneficial as some others have pointed out. \nThe real problem is that nitrites and nitrates can react with protein to make nitrosamines which are carcinogenic. This reaction takes place to a small degree in your stomach acid but mainly at high temperatures, for example when cooking bacon.",
"When I eat a bunch of foods associated w / nitrates nitrites (hotdogs or especially a bunch of bacon)... my pee smells funny.",
"My neurologist told me that nitrites and nitrates can aggravate my migraines. I'm not sure of the science behind this, but thought I would add that. The book he gave me that suggested avoiding this \"trigger\" was called \"Heal Your Headache\". \n\nI try to get lunch meat and bacon without nitrites and nitrates for this reason, but haven't honestly noticed a difference in my occurrence of migraines. However, everyone has different thresholds for different triggers. ",
"So don't eat. Got it. All that food is all bullshit anyways is the message I'm getting here."
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"http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9681972"
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"http://chriskresser.com/the-nitrate-and-nitrite-myth-another-reason-not-to-fear-bacon/",
"http://www.pronutritionist.net/2010/08/nitrates-are-beneficial-where-did-i-get-it-wrong/",
"http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2008/07/does-banning-hotdogs-and-bacon-make.html"
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5iao8a | why is there such a push to limit lobbying in government, but not a push to hold the government accoutable for the ills that ensue? | EDIT: I understand elections deal with this, but as long as were talking about passing laws limiting the power of lobbyists, why wouldn't we also pass laws to remove politicians that are representing industries or companies more so than individuals? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5iao8a/eli5_why_is_there_such_a_push_to_limit_lobbying/ | {
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"I assume you mean ills and boons? Just accountable?\n\nIn that vein, I've felt for a long time that when appropriate, laws should be written more like scientific grants. As in, \"we are enacting this law for this purpose, and if successful, we will see these changes to these indices after this amount of time.\" Then (also like science), we can debate the correct indices and the correct amount of time given the money, but there won't be an endless debate about whether the law accomplished its goals. "
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8mklnv | what causes a rue to thicken a sauce once it starts boiling? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8mklnv/eli5_what_causes_a_rue_to_thicken_a_sauce_once_it/ | {
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"Starch (such as the flour in roux) absorbs water and swells up when heated. Normally, these swollen starches would clump together, which is why you coat the individual starch granules in fat first by making a roux.",
"Wheat flour can absorb many times it's own weight in water. Hotter water is more readily absorbed than colder water. Roux is flour and butter and when heated the butter adds flavor, and the flour begins absorbing moisture from the food, causing the flakes of flour to swell with water. The result is a thickening of the food. \n\nThis is the basis for many thick liquids like puddings, gravies, and base sauces used in cuisine. "
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2e0prc | what does it mean when something that happens in a tv series or a movie is considered "canon" while certain other mediums are not (books or comics)? | For example, why are TV episodes of the Simpsons are considered canon but the comic book series are not. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2e0prc/eli5_what_does_it_mean_when_something_that/ | {
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"Canon means it is part of the official storyline and is approved by the author, or a group the author has put in charge.\n\nFor example ... Star Wars books had to be sent into Lucas Arts and be approved by George Lucas' team. They would read over it, edit stuff that was wrong, and send it back to the author to be corrected. ",
"Basically it means that it actually happened in the shows universe. A lot of times spin offs, while they may use the same characters, are not considered canon. The death of a character in the comic may not be meant to die in the show, therefore, that death is not canon to the show.",
"Another way this happens is with video games with multiple endings. There's one that's canon, meaning it is officially the ending. The rest are just for fun, or so you don't feel so bad about a character dying or something.",
"A lot of times, when you have a series that gets licensed out a lot, conflicting information will come up, so canon is what's official, non-canon is what's not.\n\nOne example I can think of, in the Street Fighter video games, the canon is that Charlie is killed by M. Bison, and that Blanka became a monster because he spent his life in the jungle being raised by animals. However, in the Street Fighter movie, which is non-canon, M. Bison captures Charlie and experiments on him, turning him into the monster that is Blanka."
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1d1yq3 | what's with this ameristralia thing? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1d1yq3/eli5_whats_with_this_ameristralia_thing/ | {
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"I am also confused. ",
"There was a post describing how Aussies have fought with us in every war since ww2, then things escalated quickly",
"It started as a joke about Aussies getting on as US redditors were going to beef (a shift change type thing.) Other nationalities got upset by this limited dichotomy, so in response, the US and Aussie redditors united to assert their ongoing dominance. "
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aufvdf | how do ice cream shops adjust their business models to survive the winter months? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aufvdf/eli5_how_do_ice_cream_shops_adjust_their_business/ | {
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"text": [
"Sometimes you have to save money from the busy season to cover the slow season. Just like a farm only makes money at harvest the rest of the week year it's off of savings from the sale of the harvest. \n\nCut down on inventory, reduce labor are options"
]
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b5n68s | is a heavier vehicle (truck) or a lighter vehicle (empty truck) able to stop quicker? (momentum/weight = more traction?) | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b5n68s/eli5_is_a_heavier_vehicle_truck_or_a_lighter/ | {
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"Two identical trucks, each weighing 10,000 lbs empty, and one loaded with an additional 10,000 lbs of cargo - the empty truck will stop quicker. There is simply a lot less mass to decelerate. Force is simply mass x acceleration (in this case deceleration, which is just acceleration in the opposite direction). So F=m\\*a. Applying identical brakes fully produces the same force on each truck, so F stays the same. Rework the equation and you get F/m=a. The loaded truck is 2 times as massive as the empty truck. The equation can be reworked for the loaded truck to F/2=a(heavy) and for the empty truck it's F/1=a(empty). So the same stopping force is literally half as effective at stopping a truck that's twice as heavy.\n\nDoes friction come into play? Sure, but not anywhere near enough to overcome the disparity in mass, even if the loaded truck were 10% or 20% packed rather than fully loaded. At that point, road conditions, tire tread, etc. are far more significant factors, and if all those were controlled for and equalized, the heavier truck would always need more force to slow it down when compared to the lighter (but otherwise identical) truck.",
"If we assume that the driver is slamming on the brakes (effectively locking them, getting the maximum possible deceleration from friction of the tires with the road), and in both cases that happens simultaneously, the stopping distance is the same.\n\nThe force caused by friction on the same surface (i.e the same coefficient of friction) varies directly with mass. Double the mass, double the force of friction. Which is important, because the quickness of stopping is determined entirely by acceleration and a =F/m.\n\nThe force of friction is F = μ*η which is the coefficient of friction times the normal force.\n\nOn a flat road, η = m*g, or mass * gravity.\n\nSo, in total our equation would be:\n\n(μmg)/m = a\n\nRight away you notice that the \"m\" cancels, mass is irrelevant. but we can do it anyway.\n\nlet's take 1,000kg and 500kg because we're talking mass.\n\n(0.7 * 1000kg * 9.8m/s2) = 6860N (newtons).\n\n6860N/1000kg = 6.86m/s2 (the acceleration caused by friction)\n\nNow let's try the 500kg\n\n(0.7 * 500kg *9.8m/s2) = 3430N\n\n3430N/500kg = 6.86m/s2.\n\nEssentially, because mass shows up both as part of calculating force and as something you divide force by to get acceleration, doubling, halving, or otherwise interacting with mass cancels itself out.\n\nWhich is why the actual calculation for stopping distance doesn't include it:\n\nd = V^2/2fG\n\nIn English the distance is the initial velocity squared divided by 2 times the coeeficient of friction and the acceleration due to gravity applicable (on a flat surface, 9.8m/s^2)",
"It really depends on lot of things. I think empty trucks will stop faster than full truck. Full truck have lot of kinetic energy.\n\n Difference in friction of empty and full truck is not as significant in a well paved dry road. \nIf its not paved or dry road or in a slope, cant really tell without specific details."
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4bf869 | how does the flu virus adapt every year so that our body can never fully prevent it from happening? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4bf869/eli5_how_does_the_flu_virus_adapt_every_year_so/ | {
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"Think of it like a plant, there can be multiple strains of the same plant, but they arent the exact same, but in their base, they are the same, hence being the same species. It is very similar in the flu. There are different strains of it, which all mutated off of the original strain at some point. Scientists look at past records and take guesses at which strains will be prevalent during a given year, and this is how they choose what vaccines to use, and unfortunately since there are so many possible strains, scientists get it wrong sometimes, and the vaccines arent as effective as thought."
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||
7mfdjo | why can we not just drain the energy/radiation from uranium rods so that they are not as deadly when we dispose of them/store them? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7mfdjo/eli5_why_can_we_not_just_drain_the/ | {
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"Because the rate at which the energy is released is not under our controlled. It is rooted in fundamental constants of the universe and we have no way of changing it.",
"So you need to have some basic concept of what this stuff is. All stuff (matter) in the universe is made from essentially 3 main components (protons, neutrons, electrons). What makes different things different is the combinations of those three stuffs, but also the size (atomic weight). Here's the thing, because of the fundamental nature of the universe, atoms don't want to really be over a certain weight (Starting with atomic weight 83 on the periodic table). It's too much. If you go over that weight they start to rip themselves apart, creating new atoms in the process and releasing energy. The heavier over that certain weight you go, the more energetic, and the faster that process is. We can't stop it. It's just the way the universe is. Once that stuff gets heavy enough it will decay according to its half life the same as an apple will fall from a tree or oil will float on water. The mechanism is not under our control. "
]
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[],
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] |
||
uliik | - why does 9 * 1/9 not equal 1? | So 1/9 = .1 repeating. Times that by nine gives .9 repeating. But 9/9 equals 1.
Please, ELI5. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/uliik/eli5_why_does_9_19_not_equal_1/ | {
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"text": [
"It does. .9 repeating equals 1.\n\nIf you don't believe me, consider this. Any numbers that aren't equal must have some nonzero difference, right? So if 1 and .9 repeating aren't equal, what is the nonzero value of 1 - .9 repeating?",
"Amarkov is right but let me try to make it a little more LI5.\n\n.9 repeating is the same thing as 1. It is the same because there is no difference between them. If you were to try and subtract them you would get .0 repeating and then a 1. If I were to write this out then no matter how long you gave me to write it I would never get to the 1. I would just have a bunch of 0s so no matter how careful you want me to be I would still only have written 0. That means there is no difference between .9 repeating and 1.",
"Decimal notation and fractional notation are different ways of representing numbers, each of which have their own advantages and disadvantages. Fractions don't always neatly translate into finite decimals. Some fractions have an exact and straightforward decimal equivalent, like 1/4 is 0.25. Whether or not a given fraction will have a short decimal equivalent depends on whether it is a multiple of, or a whole factor of, 10. Numbers such as 1/9, or 1/3, happen to have to be represented in decimal notation as infinitely repeating digits: 0.111..., and 0.333..., respectively. Infinitely long chains of repeating digits are not especially convenient to work with, and they are a little conceptually weird, but they are actually the same number as their fractional representations.\n\nEdit: Came up with an ELI5 analogy: Imagine that I have a piece of cheese, and you and me and Joe Bob want to share it equally between us. Easy peasy: we cut it into three equal pieces, and now we each have 1/3 of the original cheese, or one piece out of the three pieces we cut the original cheese into. Yay for snacks and being good sharers! \n\n But the next day in the cafeteria, it turns out that I brought 3 pieces of cheese, you brought 4, and Joe Bob brought 3: 10 total pieces of cheese. And, again, since we're totally, like, bffs, we want to share our tasty cheeses equally. So we each take 3 pieces, and we're about to cut the remaining piece into neat, even thirds, when [my analogy kind of breaks down at this point, so I have to introduce a little *lunchlady ex machina*] the cafeteria monitor rushes over, takes our knife away lest we injure ourselves, announces a new rule that all pieces of cheese must be cut into ten pieces or not cut at all, and chops our last chunk of cheese into ten small bits. \"Goshdarnit,\" we all say, with a silent thrill at our temerity in using this potent expletive, and again each take three of the ten bits, again leaving one bit left over, which again that meddling lunch nanny splits into ten tiny cheese dots. Taboo and verboten words like cr*p flit across our guilt-ridden minds, but with pluck and foreboding we each once more select three cheese dots... leaving one cheese dot left over, as an agonizing test of our bffness. Bound by the ancient and inscrutable commands of kindergarten bffity, we furtively reach for the cheese dot, hoping to surreptitiously divide it evenly into neat, clean, simple thirds before our unexpected nemesis, that insufferable martinet of a lunch lady, can swoop in and threaten our peaceful tripartite friendship with another iteration of the intractable problem of dividing ten discrete things into three equal wholes. We fail; she swoops; cheese dot becomes cheese fragments. Intrepid, stubborn, foolish - above all devoted to the high ideals of bfferosity - we repeat the cycle forever, always getting three more, smaller, pieces of cheese each, and always having to watch the tenth bit be split into ten still smaller bits - but, gratifying our deep bff desire to share all things equally, always approaching more and more closely a perfect and exact division of our original ten cheese sticks into three even piles.\n\n**TL;DR** Yeah, I got kind of carried away by my gripping narrative. Ten things can't be broken evenly into three stacks, particularly if the individual things can each only be split into ten smaller things; which is how decimal notation works, and which is why rendering simple fractions in decimals sometimes has to make use of the non-intuitive concept of infinitely repeating digits.",
"Amarkov is right.\nThe biggest hangup, I think, that people have with this is that people have it absolutely drilled into their mind, for whatever reason, that any number must have exactly one decimal representation. This is completely false, and there's no reason to believe it's true other than that it's maybe implied when they first teach you about decimal notation in elementary school, or at least it's not made explicit that it is false. Some numbers in decimal notation have two representations—that's just a particular property of decimal notation. The number 1 actually has infinitely many representations: 1, 2/2, π/π, e0 , ln(e), √1, etc. 0.999... is just one of the two ways that we can represent the number 1 in decimal notation. 1 isn't unique in this sense—lots of numbers have two decimal representations: 0.2=0.1999..., 0.25=0.24999..., and so on. And that's just fine. It doesn't break math or decimal notation, it's not a weakness of decimal notation. It's just a property of this particular way of representing numbers.\n\nA nice proof that 0.999...=1 goes like this: Let x=0.999... . Multiply both sides by 10 so that you have 10x=9.999... . Subtract x from both sides to get 9x=9. Divide by 9: x=1.\n\n**EDIT** I would add that your question is actually also a proof that .999... = 1.",
"I used to break my head over this as well, until someone asked me this:\nwhat would you add to 0.9999... to get to 1? There is nothing you can add, because it keeps repeating. Thus you'll add 0.000...\n\n0.9999... and 1 are the same.\n"
]
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[],
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[],
[],
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|
1493ky | why does overvolting make overclocking more stable? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1493ky/why_does_overvolting_make_overclocking_more_stable/ | {
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"text": [
"This subject is way too complex to ELI5. But here's a source that actually explains how the innards of a processor work.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nEssentially the increase in clock speed requires a higher threshold voltage for the tiny digital switches in the processor to keep up.\n\nYou might want to try one of the EEs over at /r/askelectronics, they'll have a better understanding of the details and might have more experience explaining it.",
"First let's answer the question \"Why can't I run my processor faster than I am now?\". There can be various factors that come into play, such as how hot it is getting. But the key one is \"timing margin\". \n \nFor the circuits in a processor to all work together, it requires that the output of each circuit to be in the correct 0 or 1 voltage \"state\" before it is needed for the next circuit's input downstream. System clocks help keep this all running smoothly, telling each logic gate when it is OK to depend on its inputs to all have reached their proper values, kind of like a drill sergeant calling out a cadence for troops to march to.\n \nIt takes a finite amount of time for a circuit to switch 0- > 1 or 1- > 0 and have that value reach the next gate. It also takes a certain amount of time for a gate to respond to changes to its input. If the timing, as run by the clock, doesn't allow for enough margin between the output of one gate and the input of the next, errors happen. We call that the \"timing margin\", and if it becomes negative, then failures are likely. \n \nWhen you speed everything up (running the clock faster), its like the drill sergeant starting to call things out faster and faster, leaving less margin for error. Eventually someone kicks someone else's feet and bad stuff happens. \n \nBUT....if you increase the supply voltage, it effectively makes the transistors' states switch faster and get valid 0/1 voltage levels to the next gate downstream faster. So if you apply a higher voltage, you can run the clock a bit faster, since you now have a bit more timing margin to work with. \n \nEventually, you get to a situation where increases in the power supply voltage don't give much extra speedup, or you run into a circuit that isn't as voltage sensitive as the rest, or the part starts using too much power and gets too hot. Then you've reached the overclocking limit for that part. ",
"We like to think of computer signals as being on or off, 1 or 0, but the reality is a little more messy, especially the faster you switch back and forth. On might be 1.5v and off might be 0v, but eventually you are only getting down to 0.5v and back up to 1.0v and the hardware doesn't know which one is which.\n\nIncreasing the voltage gives your hardware a little more room to work with."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"http://www.pctechguide.com/cpu-architecture/principles-of-cpu-architecture-logic-gates-mosfets-and-voltage"
],
[],
[]
] |
||
lcpjn | oxytocin and its role in pair-bonding in human sexual relationships | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/lcpjn/eli5_oxytocin_and_its_role_in_pairbonding_in/ | {
"a_id": [
"c2rlnie",
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"score": [
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"text": [
"Happy to explain this one but I'll need you to be a bit more specific about what you want to understand. Are you asking the how or why?",
"Happy to explain this one but I'll need you to be a bit more specific about what you want to understand. Are you asking the how or why?"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
||
thwot | what causes tattoo ink to stay in skin, when we are constantly shedding skin flakes? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/thwot/what_causes_tattoo_ink_to_stay_in_skin_when_we/ | {
"a_id": [
"c4mqynm",
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2,
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"text": [
"The ink is injected much deeper in the skin. You usually lose the first few layers of skin, the ink is injected into the deepest layers of skin.",
"There are a few layers of skin on your body, the tattoo gun injects the ink under the first layer of skin because that layer doesn't shed, and if the needle gets too deep into the skin it begins to smear and bleed out.\n\nSource : My father is a tattoo artist. ",
"Ink injection causes an immune response in the dermis. Phagocytes consume the ink, and later, fibroblasts induce dermal scarification, which creates a collagen network to hold the phagocytes in place."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[]
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||
2fcuru | trading gold and silver commodities | I am trying to get into the commodities market and I need more knowledge. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2fcuru/eli5trading_gold_and_silver_commodities/ | {
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"ck8165t",
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"text": [
"If you are putting money on the line, I wouldn't bother with ELI5. Go ask this question in an investing community (maybe [r/PersonalFinance](_URL_0_) would help you?).",
"If you don't have even a 5 year olds level of understanding then why do you want to get into it? If you are actually interested then I can explain some of it, but you won't make money, trust me.",
"\nWhen you buy a commodity you are buying a piece of paper (now virtual) that says \"This guy owns x amount of y commodity.\" You don't get the physical substance mailed to your house. If you want to sell it, the paper goes to somebody else. You don't need the physical commodity because it is completely interchangeable with any other instance of that good (this is what makes it a commodity, it's called fungibility). An ounce of gold is an ounce of gold is an ounce of gold, the same way a bushel of corn is a bushel of corn.",
"You have come to the wrong website."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"http://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/"
],
[],
[],
[]
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|
5ik8t2 | why are car model years not displayed on the car itself? | So I've always wondered why the make, model, and trim package of a car is displayed on the back of it, but nowhere to be found is the model year. I feel like for a lot of people (like myself) it's hard to distinguish the specific year of a car just by looking at it. I know you can determine this from the VIN, but that doesn't give you the information with a quick glance, especially if you don't want to look creepy trying to get a look at someone else's VIN. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ik8t2/eli5_why_are_car_model_years_not_displayed_on_the/ | {
"a_id": [
"db8sfjd",
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"text": [
"You can look at the owner's manual in the glovebox. \n\nPutting dates on things is essentially an expiration date. People don't want you to know their nice looking car is 8 years old.",
"Because people don't want to advertise how old their car is. It would therefore be detrimental to sales. \n\nI can tell you that I've seen examples (in other countries) where the model year was incorporated as part of the license plate. People absolutely *hated* it, and complained vehemently until that law was repealed. \n\n",
"I realize this doesn't really answer your question, but at least in the US, the model year is on the emissions sticker under the hood. If you think looking at people's VINs is creepy though, opening the hood to check their emissions sticker is probably worse."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
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|
6u5zdy | why are things that are hot to the touch, not so hot to the mouth i.e. coffee? | I've always wondered why I can drink a really hot cup of coffee and the cup is really hot to the touch, to the point where I have to put it down if I'm not holding by the handle, but when I sip it, it doesn't burn my mouth. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6u5zdy/eli5_why_are_things_that_are_hot_to_the_touch_not/ | {
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"text": [
"Because you're sipping that coffee very very lightly. You can easily splash a few drops of the same coffee on your hand and not feel a thing. If you took coffee that was 190 degrees F and had to decide to take a large sip and swallow it or spill the same amount at the same temperature on your hand, you would most definitely *not* choose the former. You'd fuck yourself up bad if you swallowed coffee that hot\n\nedit: you would most definitely *not* choose the former",
"Two reasons mostly. The first is that your mouth is actually built to handle somewhat warmer temperatures than your skin. So something that is just a little too hot to stick a finger into is probably okay to drink.\n\nThe second is that you usually aren't taking big gulps of really hot coffee - you're taking sips. And when you sip, you're mixing the fluid with air and spattering it across your mouth - this spreads out the heat and minimizes the amount of coffee that's actually in contact with your mouth. If you took a straw and swept a few drops of coffee across the back of your hand, it'd burn much less than that same amount all in one spot - that's what's happening inside of your mouth.",
"Is it possible that it also has something to do with your mouth being moist but your hands being dry? So basically the liquid covering the inside of your mouth cools down the hot tea/coffee before your cells can actually sense the change in temperature. Sorry for the lack of scientific terms, I could explain better in Hungarian...",
"Also your mouth is use to internal temperatures of 98.6degrees Fahrenheit but your skin is use to air temperature which is often closer to 75 degrees Fahrenheit. So if the coffee is 100 degrees then it's only a little warmer than what the mouth is use to but a lot warmer than what the hands are use to. "
]
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[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
39458f | how do particles 'know' when they've been observed? | And what counts towards 'observing' them? Bacteria? Animal life? What? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/39458f/eli5_how_do_particles_know_when_theyve_been/ | {
"a_id": [
"cs07jrb",
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"text": [
"The whole \"particles act differently when they are observed\" is misleading. A more accurate description is \"particles act differently when they are measured.\" This is because every method we have (or can imagine) of observing them alters some other characteristic than the one we are measuring.\n\nTL;DR: particles do not 'know' they are observed, we just screw with them every time we observe them.",
"To \"observe\" something, you shine a light on it, which means reflect a photon off of it. But when a photon reflects off of something, like a particle, that particle's spread out \"wave\" collapses.\n\nReally the idea is that to observe something, it has to interact with something, because we don't \"see\" an atom, we see light bouncing off of it."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
|
7rjdhu | si definition of a second | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7rjdhu/eli5si_definition_of_a_second/ | {
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"text": [
"Basically, they took what they knew as a second, and because everyone has slightly different biological clocks, they needed a standard definition.\n\nThere were 3 ways to compute this.\n\n1. 1/60th of a minute, which was 1/60 of an hour, which is 1/24th of a day. (The regular definition, used for old-timey clocks, but can vary based on changes to the day). \n2. The length of time light needs to travel a certain distance in a vacuum. \n3. Or a large number of steady changes that can easily be observed on Earth, like the number of cycles of a cesium atom's radiation.\n\nIn reality, they equal the same thing, 1/60 of a minute It's just about agreeing *exactly* how long that is.",
" > The second is the duration of 9192631770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom.\n\nAlright, start in reverse.\n\nCaesium-133 atom. [Caesium](_URL_0_) is an element. It's liquid at room temperature, and the most reactive of all the metals. If an atom has 55 protons it is caesium. But it can vary in the number of neutrons it has. These options are called \"Isotopes\", Caesium-133 is the only isotope of Caesium that is stable, it doesn't break down over time. It's not particularly hard to get your hands on a bunch of Caesium-133.\n\n > the two hyperfine levels of the ground state\n\nEssentially, if atoms get energy they change their hyperfine levels. This refers to a situation where it's energy changed in a specific way. You can't halfway change levels, it's either at one level, or at another. \n\n > the radiation corresponding to the transition between\n\nWhen the state changes, energy is released, radiation. We're talking about the radiation that is released when you change the levels. It's always a specific radiation because the state change is always the same.\n\n > 9192631770 periods of the radiation\n\nRadiation is a wave, a period is the time between the tops of two of the waves. So we're finding the period of our wave of radiation, but taking 9192631770 of those. \n\n > The second is the duration of \n\nHow long those 9192631770 wavelengths take, that's what a second is."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesium"
]
] |
|
rfa7v | what is it about how birds fly that humans haven't been able to replicate for human flight? | I'm talking about human-powered or human-assisted wings. Flying machines are still very expensive, too large, and not very portable. Gliders have some of the same problems. What does it take to get a human being airborne from a standing position like a bird? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/rfa7v/eli5_what_is_it_about_how_birds_fly_that_humans/ | {
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"text": [
"Hollow bones, and a whole lot of other things that make flying animals lightweight and aerodynamic. ",
"Light, hollow bones. Humans are simply too damn heavy.",
"birds have a huge wing to body ratio, if we were to have wings proportionally as large as a birds for our size/weight they'd be like the size of a bus.\n\nnote: this isn't based off any precise calculations. ",
"Human-powered wings just aren't practical due to lift and weight considerations. \n\nAll living things fall victim to something called the square-cube law. This says, essentially, that volume grows faster than area. Say I have a cube one unit on each side. Each face of the cube (as well as any non-tilted cross-section) has an area of one square unit, and the cube as a whole has a volume of one cubic unit. But if I take the cube and expand it until each of its sides is two units long, its faces now have an area of four square units—and the whole cube has a volume of *eight* cubic units. How is this important to biology? Well, imagine a living thing that walks around on legs. A dog will do. Now, the dog's weight is determined by its volume. But the strength of the dog's legs—how much weight they can support—is determined by the area of their cross-section (that is, if we cut off the bottom of the dog's leg, how big a circle the stump would make). If we took the dog and scaled it up so that it was twice as long, nose-to-tail, as it was before, it would have eight times the volume, and be eight times as heavy. But since the strength of its legs goes up with area, they would only be able to support four times the weight. The dog is now twice as heavy as its legs are meant to support! It wouldn't be able to do much, even if we hadn't cut off that leg. Large animals have to be built differently, and have different proportions, than smaller animals in order to function. This is why animals like elephants and sauropod dinosaurs (the really big kind) have thick, strong legs compared to smaller animals like cats or dogs or people.\n\nTo fly, birds have to create enough *lift* to overcome gravity and allow them to rise. Lift depends on two things: how fast air is moving around the wing, and how much area the wing has. The force of gravity depends on how heavy the bird is (if you're remembering that heavy objects don't fall any faster than light ones, you're right, but the *amount* of force is related to mass, in accordance with Newton's law of gravitation). As we just found out, the bird's weight—and thus the force exerted by gravity—goes up with the cube of its size, while the area of its wing—and thus the lift it can generate—goes up only with the square. This spells trouble for really large birds. They must have wings that are much larger in comparison to their bodies than small birds, and even then there are biological limits on how large a wing a bird's body can support. Yes, there are birds whose bodies are [nearly the size of](_URL_1_) or [even larger than](_URL_0_) a man's, but they depend heavily on assistance from airspeed (the other factor in generating lift I mentioned above) and currents. To use those two examples, the albatross (and other birds of the open ocean) depend on the high winds, or sea shear, that occur over the ocean; *Argentavis*, and other birds like it, soar on warm thermals that help push them upwards.\n\nFinally, the adaptations for light weight and aerodynamics other commenters have mentioned also come into play. Humans aren't shaped for flight. Birds' entire physiologies, from beaks to bones to feathers to digestion, excretion, and reproduction are designed to save weight in ways that humans' simply aren't; a bird the size of a human is not only more aerodynamic but substantially lighter. (Proportionally, a human would require [preposterously huge](_URL_2_) wings to bear their own weight—far larger than would be safe to carry around, even if artificial production freed them from the limits of growth.) What's more, humans don't have the respiratory, muscular, or skeletal adaptations to flap and maneuver wings the way birds do—we can't acquire oxygen anywhere near as efficiently, we don't have the huge, cleverly hinged breast muscles they use in their power flap or the keeled breastbone to attach them to, and the joints in our arms and shoulders don't move the right ways. *If* a a human with a huge glider were assisted by extremely high, wind-tunnel airspeeds, or air blasts from below mimicking thermals, they might be able to gain some little height, but they would never be able to flap their wings and rise—and agile flight, or flight from a standing start? Not happening! (At least, not until we [escape gravity](_URL_3_).)"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[],
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentavis",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wandering_Albatross",
"http://www.politedissent.com/archives/987",
"http://www.baenebooks.com/chapters/0743498747/0743498747___2.htm"
]
] |
|
5trz7k | do car headlights move faster than the speed of light? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5trz7k/eli5_do_car_headlights_move_faster_than_the_speed/ | {
"a_id": [
"ddokm51",
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"score": [
2,
2
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"text": [
"No, the headlights will always travel at speed of light because speed of light is constant. So, in order to compensate, the moving object will experience time dilation.",
"Nope, photons travel at the speed of light for whatever medium they're traveling through (barring some very specific situations). Even if your car was somehow doing 99.999% of the speed of light the photons would still be moving at *c*. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
||
3s2i3o | why do people abandon houses? | For example, I grew up in a very rural area in western Wisconsin and the ridges and valleys are peppered with abandoned homes, which have clearly been vacant for decades. Any idea why? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3s2i3o/eli5_why_do_people_abandon_houses/ | {
"a_id": [
"cwtgv71",
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5,
2
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"text": [
"There's a variety of things that happen. Sometimes a person moves away, or the house is inherited by a faraway relative. If these people can't or don't want to be landlords, and are unable to sell the house, they're stuck with the property taxes. They might just forget about the property, instead...if the county eventually tries to sell it as a tax seizure, nobody will want to buy the by-then derelict house.\n\nOther times, housing prices drop, and people have a mortgage that's worth more than their home. They might decide to run away from the mortgage and forget about the house, since that way they might be able to escape the extra debt. This is a more modern phenomenon.",
"A lot of reasons. But typically the reason is it costs too maintain the property, with hope of being able to sell it to someone else. \nIn rural areas, jobs may disappear, and people are forced to move to a different area. \n\nPeople typically don't abandon property they think has value."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
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