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3jbe8j | why do i, sometimes, really not like some people for, seemingly, no reason? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3jbe8j/eli5_why_do_i_sometimes_really_not_like_some/ | {
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"You're probably not a terrible person.\n\nEveryone has a few little things that just rub them the wrong way. Not everybody is socially compatible. The polite response is simply to tolerate those people who you don't like and observe the social niceties when necessary and avoid them the rest of the time.",
"The most likely answer is adaptable evolution. Humans are designed to conflict as most other animals do this is to ensure the continuation of the most dominant genetics. Its grim but likely the reason why. You arent a horrible person you are simply being subject to primal urges as we all are.",
"I'm the exact same way. I'm pretty introverted in truth, but most people who know me would say the opposite. I think I'm the type of person who generally takes cues from others and reflects people's moods or energies. Anyways, someone who is so nice and high energy makes me tend to act the same way, and it ends up leaving me feeling drained. So when I meet someone like that, they automatically get on my nerves because I can already feel that talking with them is going to suck my energy dry. I sometimes wonder though if it's because I'm just an a-hole. "
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691pmh | how does a church organ work? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/691pmh/eli5how_does_a_church_organ_work/ | {
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"Have you ever played a recorder or an irish tin whistle? \n\nThey're types of flute that have a duct built into the pipe that means you don't need any particularly special technique to make it sound, you just blow through it. \n\nAll a church organ does is take that technology, scale it wayyy up, giving different lengths of pipe to generate different notes, then use a system of mechanics (or in more modern organs, electro-mechanics) to allow a player to control compressed air to the pipes via a keyboard (or 'manual'). \n\nIn a modern organ, the air is compressed using an electric compressor, in the old days you'd have some assistant working a huge lever that pumped a pair of bellows to keep the organ pumped with air as you played. "
]
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[]
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||
ahvzth | in accounting world, why are assets listed as debits for balance sheets etc, | I understand that assets = liabilities + owners equity, but what is the theory behind assets being debits. Why weren't the signs swapped to have liabilities opposite signs? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ahvzth/eli5_in_accounting_world_why_are_assets_listed_as/ | {
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"Most of the time, when you hear about accounts, your are hearing about someone else's accounts. Mostly, yout bank's.\n\nFor a bank, your savings balance is a debt, an amount of money they have to pay you. Similarly, and your loans are an asset, some money they expect to be paid. So loans are 'Credits', and assets are 'Debits'. But, as most people only see their bank's use of the terms, their meaning has been flipped, because they are kind of looking at the accounting system 'in the mirror'.\n\nMostly, I recommend people think of debits and credits as 'entry type A' and 'entry type B', and try to forget that the words have any other meaning.",
"If you're asking why it's a debit instead of a credit robak's answer is perfect, if you're asking why is a liability a credit instead of a minus figure then it's a little different.\n\nThe idea of the double entry system is that any transaction is composed of two equally sized parts: Debits and Credits. When preparing your balance sheet your credited amounts should therefore perfectly equal your debits, and this helps the accountant confirm that the entries in relevant ledgers are complete. In order to ensure this fully balances some of things which are credited in a transaction are not always entirely intuitive, and a negative value in the sum instead would look s bit silly.\n\nThe easiest way to illustrate it is with a sale, so as mentioned every simple accounting entry is composed of a debit to one account, and a credit to another.\n\nYour sale of an item goes like this:\n\nNB. The bit we're going to look at here is the invoice section, not the cost of goods sold.\n\nWhen you sell your item a debit entry is made either to receivables (people owing you money) or the bank. This is the increased asset. The other side of this is revenue, now under the double entry system this is a credit.\n\nIf you had entered the opposite entry as simply being a - sign you would have a negative revenue from a sale, if you flipped this an asset would instead be a negative, equally nonsensical. "
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327lp4 | why are pregnant woman more horny? | Just curious as to why when woman are pregnant, they are more available for sex?
Like I get hormones, but is there a more detailed reason? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/327lp4/eli5why_are_pregnant_woman_more_horny/ | {
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"There is actually some evidence that sex during pregnancy causes the mother to release some hormones to the baby that are beneficial to development. In other words, more sex during pregnancy is a beneficial survival trait. In addition, the social and survival benefits of having a dedicated mate during a time of great vulnerability can't be discounted. I don't know much else about this, but hopefully this sends you in the right direction if you want to research more."
]
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47smaj | how is my water, gas and electricity usage counted? | I fail to understand how utilities companies are able to know how much my household is using. I know I have a water and gas meter, but how is that data collected and how is electricity usage collected when electricity all comes from the same power line? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/47smaj/eli5_how_is_my_water_gas_and_electricity_usage/ | {
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"Depends on where in the world you are. There are thousands of people who have been employed as meter readers around the world. Some physically read the meter, others connect a device to the meter and electronically download the usage. \n\nYou have a water meter as the water main enters the house, and records the flow of water into the house. Same with the power and gas meters. \n\nMany places are migrating towards electronic meter data collection, instead a car may drive through a neighborhood and download the data over radio waves. Others use stronger radios and transmit the data back over the cellular network, wifi, or other radio networks.",
"To answer your title question, there are several ways that the data can be collected. In most newer homes, the meters have computers built into them, and the data is uploaded through the cellular network. In older homes, like mine, a guy physically comes out to our house the 3rd Tuesday of every month, and writes down the numbers on the meters. To answer your question about how electricity is measured, your house has a meter on it for electricity on it. It's measured in Kilowatt Hours (kWh). You can read more on kWh's at _URL_0_"
]
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[],
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1epna5 | if digital cameras weren't invented until 1975 then what kind of cameras were on the probes that were sent out into space pre 1975 | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1epna5/if_digital_cameras_werent_invented_until_1975/ | {
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"text": [
"Basically the technology used to send TV images over the air. We've had electronic alternatives to film for a long time, and the storage was analog or digital video tape.\n\nFor example, the list of instruments of the [Mariner](_URL_0_) program on wikipedia might contextualize it. ",
"You can use film cameras no problem.\n\nSee the [Corona program](_URL_0_ )."
]
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"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_(satellite\\)"
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||
amwnr6 | why are our vocal chords so unique? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/amwnr6/eli5_why_are_our_vocal_chords_so_unique/ | {
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"Well, often times that depends on your genetics as well as the shape of your throat and mouth. There are a lot more reasons as to why your voice differs from many others. If you're taller you're more likely to have a deeper voice and vice versa. Your vocal cords vibrate to use airflow from your lungs so the shape and size of your lungs can also have an influence on the pitch. The vocal track above your larynx (like your mouth, tongue, etc) will then articulate the sound. For instance, I have a higher pitch voice not only because I'm a girl but because I'm petite so my mouth and lungs are smaller than someone who is 6'7 and beefy. Hope this helps!"
]
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||
3xmkhk | why does alcohol make some people amped up to fight and make others really social but makes me want to pass out? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3xmkhk/eli5_why_does_alcohol_make_some_people_amped_up/ | {
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"Alcohol is a central nervous system depressant. Which doesn't mean that it makes you depressed. It means that it depresses (i.e. reduces) the functions of the central nervous system. One of the most intensive functions of the central nervous system is behavior inhibition. For instance, maybe you hate someone and really want to punch them, but you don't because you analyze the situation and conclude that it's a bad idea. Or maybe you want to share your life story with a stranger, but you refrain because it's not really socially acceptable.\n\nBut with a moderate amount of alcohol, you lose some of your ability to moderate your own behavior, which manifests as reduced inhibitions. So the guy who's had a shitty day, hates his life, and just wants to punch someone to make himself feel powerful gets amped up to fight. And the guy who normally refrains from talking too much for fear of annoying people becomes more social.\n\nThere's a Latin phrase that describes this: [*In vino veritas*](_URL_0_), or \"in wine, truth\", which reflects the idea that how you act when drunk reflects your true mentality.\n\nAnd if you depress your central nervous system *enough*, you end up sleepy, and might pass out."
]
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||
3ro2ur | nasas conference today | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ro2ur/eli5_nasas_conference_today/ | {
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"text": [
"They're discussing recent discoveries about the red planet. Your question is pretty vague. What do you want to know about it?"
]
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|
18atkm | i can't really feel the difference between -20f and 32f as much as i can feel the difference between 70f and 80f. why? | I'm standing outside in -4 degree weather but it doesn't feel all that much colder than 32. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/18atkm/eli5_i_cant_really_feel_the_difference_between/ | {
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"How cold it feels (or how warm it feels; same difference in this context) has less to do with the absolute temperature of the air around you and more to do with *how fast* heat moves out of your body into that air.\n\nSee, your sense of temperature is all about something called *thermoregulation.* For reasons of chemistry, your body works best when it's within a fairly narrow range of temperatures — a couple degrees north or south of optimal. But your body can't just reach that temperature and stay there, because your body is constantly generating heat. In order to stay within that optimal temperature range, your body has to constantly dump heat into its environment. And what's more, it must do so at a more-or-less constant *rate.*\n\nThe rate at which your body dumps heat into the environment depends on the temperature of the air around you, yes … but it *also* depends on *other* factors, like the humidity of the air (more humid air transfers heat less readily than drier air, as water vapor acts like a thermal insulator) and whether the air's moving (moving air transfer heat more readily than still air, which is why fans work).\n\nSo how cold it feels out has less to do with how cold the air *actually is* outside than it does with other factors, like humidity and wind speed and how much heat your body is producing at the time and so on and so on."
]
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5k9sp1 | why do extremely hot items glow "red hot" as opposed to other colors, like green, blue, purple, etc.? | I was watching those recent videos on YouTube where a knife is heated until it's red hot and cuts into various objects...
I never considered it before, but I started to wonder why things turn red when they're extremely hot instead of other colors... | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5k9sp1/eli5_why_do_extremely_hot_items_glow_red_hot_as/ | {
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"Heated objects produce light.\n\nEven room-temperature objects are emitting light. It just isn't *much* light and the wavelength is way too long to see (it is low-energy).\n\nThe more an object heats up, then more energy it emits. It also starts to emit more energy of higher frequencies (higher energy levels). So if it gets hot enough, some of that light is now going to be in the visible spectrum, since it will be energetic enough to produce red light (but not much of a higher wavelength like green or blue light).\n\nIf you keep heating it, it will get yellower and yellower as more yellow light gets emitted (relative to the other energy it is emitting).\n\nEventually it does reach a point where it emitting enough higher energy light that it has a considerable amount of green or blue light being emitted. However, at this point, so much light is being emitted (and a lot of it is still red light) that the object will just appear white to us.",
"This is called black body radiation. Objects that aren't at absolute zero have thermal energy. The electrons present are constantly gaining and losing energy - which is emitted as light, one photon at a time. The color/wavelength of a photon is determined by how much energy it has. An electron will emit basically any energy it gets, almost immediately. At higher temperatures, more of the electrons can occasionally attain higher levels of energy and therefore emit \"hotter\" colors, but more electrons are gaining and losing the lesser quanta also.\n\nWe can only see a tiny range of light energy - from red (lower energy) to blue and violet (higher energy). Infrared, microwaves, and radio are examples of low energy light, below our threshold, while ultraviolet and x-rays are \"high energy\" colors of light. Anyways, even cold objects emit this thermal radiation, and continue to emit it in addition to that red glow. When you see red-hot metal, it's infringing into the visible spectrum, but there's far more light being emitted that we can't see - red is just the edge of the spectrum of light being produced by that hot knife. As it becomes even hotter, the spectrum shifts, we see even more red light in addition to the higher energy colors.\n\nBecause of the way human vision works, we don't see these colors separately. Instead, colors add up to appear more white. Ever see an RGB projector?\n\nOn a side note, that blue sky you see is actually mostly violet.",
"This [interactive tool](_URL_0_) illustrates it pretty well. Every object in a room emits light at not just one wavelength, but across a wide spectrum of wavelengths. Changing the object's temperature will shift the *predominant* wavelength being emitted, but the other wavelengths continue to be emitted as well. That's why you get a transition from red to orange to white to blue, rather than a full cycle through the rainbow.",
"Weren't the lighters a huge letdown? ",
"Tool steel glows a blue color. I'm color blind so I could be wrong. But it's definitely not red. Chrome vanadium. Check it out. "
]
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2p6ovq | why are dead bodies and objects in bogs so well preserved. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2p6ovq/eli5_why_are_dead_bodies_and_objects_in_bogs_so/ | {
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"Lack of oxygen and/or organisms that would cause decomposition.",
"bogs have 2 things going for them, there's a general lack of oxygen and the water is acidic. the acidic water basically tans the skin and organs like it would leather and the lack of oxygen means there's no real microbes or other things to eat at the flesh.\n\n*edit* also they're cold which again helps keep the microbes and bad stuff that would attack the flesh down.",
"If you're referring to the sheep preserved in a bog that was posted earlier, it's because he was frozen in a solid block of ice."
]
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2ykaki | is florida really going to be under water in 40 years? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ykaki/eli5_is_florida_really_going_to_be_under_water_in/ | {
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"In 40 years? Probably not. But Florida is a very low state, and so very susceptible to water-level rising, especially in the peninsula part. And even parts that aren't swamped will be more susceptible to storm surges from hurricanes and the like.",
"No. Conservative estimates place sea-level rise at 1.5 feet by the end of the century. Assuming a steady increase (not accurate, but good enough as a guesstimate), that's a little over half a foot in 40 years. The mean elevation of Florida is 100 feet. \n\nMind you, that's going by a conservative estimate, and a half-foot rise is ocean depth is a lot worse than it might sound, but definitely not all or most of Florida will be underwater.",
"I'd say no only because in the early 90s I remember them telling us much of Long Island would be under water by 2010. Well here we are 5yrs after their prediction and my backyard isn't an ocean yet."
]
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rvwfj | if the u.s. is a net exporter of oil for the first time since 1949, why is gasoline in my neighborhood $3.94? | I know it's a constant discussion during an election season, and I know the economics of gasoline are incredibly complex, but I think they're so complex it's beyond reasonable understanding. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/rvwfj/eli5_if_the_us_is_a_net_exporter_of_oil_for_the/ | {
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"Problem with energy is that it is difficult to get it to places that it is needed. We may produce gasoline in the Gulf Ports or border of Canada and it is easier to sell that to Canada than to try to deliver it to California. \n\nSecondly, regulations require that vessels that go between US ports bear the US flag and I enjoy registered in the US. Problem with this is that you then also pay US taxes. So say you have a tanker with $100k of oil in the port of New Orleans, would you rather ship that to NY or LA and make $65k or deliver it to Mexico or Brazil and make $100k. (see Jones Act) ",
"The United States is not a net exporter of oil. The United States [imports around 10 million barrels of oil per day](_URL_1_).\n\nUS oil production peaked around 1971.\n\n[The bears discuss gasoline prices](_URL_2_)\n\n[I recommend you read these articles on the petrodollar system](_URL_0_)",
"It shouldn't make a difference to the price whether the oil consumed is imported or if it comes from US producers. The price is set by the market and US producers, who want to sell at the highest price, will sell at the market price. They could sell to US consumers at a lower price but they'd basically be giving a portion of their profits away. If they're a company that's traded on the stock market that would be illegal in the US, I believe.\n\nThe government could also subsidise the price, in some countries the government does this. I believe that in most of those cases the government owns the oil producers so they can set the price and they don't have to make a profit. It can be argued that the US government does subsidise fuel, thanks to the low levels of taxation it's has one of the lowest fuel prices in the world.",
"We are a net exporter of refined petroleum products (gas, diesel, etc.) We are most certainly not a net exporter of oil.\n\nHuge huge difference.",
"Because gas in MY neighborhood is $4.89, so I'm clearly picking up the slack from your neighborhood.",
"If I'm drilling for oil or refining gas & I know that some guy in China will pay more than you, I'll sell it to him. China and India are catching up to Western nations & they're fucking *thirsty*. We know that \"big oil\" are not charities, nor do they actually give a shit about anything other than making money. They're going to charge you as much as they can, based on the knowledge they could just sell the shit elsewhere.\n\n...and taxes."
]
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[],
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"http://ftmdaily.com/preparing-for-the-collapse-of-the-petrodollar-system/",
"http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-04/u-s-doe-weekly-petroleum-status-report-for-march-30-text-.html",
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40hNSJEKUgo"
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20oszh | what are a series of events of the worst case scenario from this ukrainian conflict | I want to know how bad things could possibly get | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/20oszh/eli5_what_are_a_series_of_events_of_the_worst/ | {
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"text": [
"world war 3",
"Russia goes balls deep and blitzkrieg Ukraine. Poland and Lithuania respond by sending a shit ton of troops with bitch be good sticks to Ukraine. Moscow responds by nuking Poland and Lithuania. Nato goes to war with Russia. China says fuck it and decides to back the Ruskies and immediately attacks Japan. They then fight for control in southeast Asia which makes Australia say \"wait a minute, we might be next\". The Aussies get into it with china.... Someone help me finish the rest "
]
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[],
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6uzez1 | networking question - difference between a class a , class b, and class c network? | Hello, can someone explain to me the difference between a class a, b, and c network - in the context of networking?
Also, what is a loopback adapter and what are they used for?
| explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6uzez1/eli5_networking_question_difference_between_a/ | {
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"dlwjwde"
],
"score": [
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"text": [
"Yer not alone in askin', and kind strangers have explained:\n\n1. [ELI5: IP adressing and IP classes ](_URL_0_)\n1. [Can you ELI5 subnetting of a Class A network? ](_URL_1_)\n\nPost your other question separately."
]
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"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2pdhcf/eli5_ip_adressing_and_ip_classes/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/networking/comments/1ngush/can_you_eli5_subnetting_of_a_class_a_network/"
]
] |
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2yrum7 | how are a group of people determined to be an "ethnic group" rather than people who look "alike" or share a common nation? | I've been doing some off-handed browsing of Wikipedia and was on some various articles related to Africa and its various nations, and all of the country's, naturally, have a list of the various ethnic groups within said nation, and all of them are vastly different from each other, yet to me, even as a person of color, I don't really *see* a difference, at least outside.
It's really not making sense to me, how are they treated as different ethnic groups or how is that even determined as I thought the whole "Negroid" "Caucasoid" and Mongloid worked pretty well, and subcategories would be various nationalities and tribes people set themselves up in, not "genuine" sub-ethnic groups within those three classifications.
What am I missing? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2yrum7/eli5how_are_a_group_of_people_determined_to_be_an/ | {
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"Those three classifications are of Race, not ethnicity. Ethnicity are subgroups to those that also include cultural factors in addition to the genetic ones. \n\nWhat you are missing is that geographic isolation caused many mutations that happen to favor one group more than others numerous times. For Example: fair skin and blonde hair in northern Europe, darker olive complexion with dark hair along the Mediterranean, pale skin and red hair in the British Isles, Darker brown skin and black hair in the middle east. All of which are Caucasian in the 3 races model. \n\nAlso in that model Polynesian/Pacific Islanders, Native Americans, East Asians, and India are all primarily Mongloid yet very distinctly different.\n\nTo an extent nationality is what dictates and Ethnic group, particularly in the more homogeneous countries where one or a few tribes make up the bulk of the ancestry of the citizens there. But that is not true for the former colonies of Europe who are made up of a mix of different immigrant groups, or nations that are starting to have more immigrants that knock the homogeneous nature of their culture and bloodlines out of balance. \n\nThe difference between ethnic groups are both genetic and cultural because ethnicity is more than genetics. You have cultural tradition of a given tribe or country that make you a part of that ethnicity, but you also have genetic factors like type of hair, relative stature, eye shape and color, etc. ",
"Well, the most noticable difference between ethnic groups in Africa is language. There are subtle differences in how the people look but it is really only noticable to the locals and even they can be mistaken from time to time. The various ethnic groups used to live parallel to each other in decades past, a little trade here, a little war there but it was as close to different nations as it could get. There was rarely ever invasion and conquest among them like you would find in European history so their cultures remained free from each other to a large extent.\n\nThat's about it. I'm a Kikuyu, my friend over here is a Luo, we speak different languages, no common words except very recently adopted ones, as different in grammar as English and Cantonese. His people are generally around six feet tall and very dark skinned and muscular. They were fishermen and moved here down along the Nile from the Sudan. My Kikuyu ancestors are shorter, light-skinned, moved to Kenya from Cameroon, were primarily farmers traditionally. Me and him would likely never have met if we both lived 150 years ago, because the Maasai and the Kalenjin lived in the Rift Valley between the two groups back then. They were cattle herders and a murderous bunch so to cross their territory... \n\nThat's just an example and not even going into differences in culture which are like night and day. Sometimes there is less variation, sometimes, as is the case with the Somalis and Ethiopians, there are prevalent stark differences in hair and skin texture and type. Anyway, because of the languages and because of how little mixing there was, we keep the labels. Also they are very apparent to us, the differences."
]
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|
7d4dxm | why is there one standard for music and movie playback that multiple manufacturers use but not for video games. | Example: Sony, Samsung, LG etc, all make VHS, DVD, BluRay players etc, that all play one standard of media, but Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo all have proprietary gaming consoles. Why hasn't gaming gone the way of other media consumption? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7d4dxm/eli5_why_is_there_one_standard_for_music_and/ | {
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"Actually they do. Both PS4 games and Xbox One games use Blu-Ray discs. \n\nThe reason why you can't play a game for one console on the other however is twofold. First, the encoding done on the disks at the time they're burned which includes code that prevents \"unapproved\" disks from being used. This is why you can't just download a ripped version of a next-gen game and burn it to a blu-ray, then stick it in your console.\n\nSecond, each console has a very strict list of hardware that is used to create the console. This line has gotten blurrier in recent years as consoles have gotten closer and closer to being basically just PCs with specifically tailored operating systems but the hardware limitations still exist. If you were to put a disc from one system into the other and it *were* capable of reading it, the code on the disc still wouldn't necessarily be compatible with the hardware in use by the system. To use a highly generalized example the code on the disc may be expecting a specific graphics processor that isn't used on a competing console.\n\ntl;dr - Code on the disk is tailored to the console it's used for, both for antipiracy measures and in order to get as much power as possible from the machine. The fact that this forces consumers to use a specific console for specific games is just a bonus as far as the console manufacturers are concerned."
]
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[]
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|
ja79j | can someone [eli5] what would happen if the economy collapses. | I'm talking long term and short term effects. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ja79j/can_someone_eli5_what_would_happen_if_the_economy/ | {
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"If the economy completely collapses (which is unlikely) unemployment will rise far above 10%, it could go as high 25% or even 30% if things got *really really* bad. Absolutely everyone but those who had large amounts of money in savings would feel the effects, and even those who felt alright might have difficulty if their deposits are in banks, because banks would fail. The banks would fail because all only a small amount of their deposits are actually kept in the vault at any time, and because tons of people would be defaulting on their loans (which were payed for with your deposits) your money can actually just disappear. If you have a mortgage the remaining banks (and those who are bankrupt and must liquidate assets) will repossess many homes, because no one can pay. The stock market, of course, would be crashing the whole time. The cycle of this will continually push employment, investment, and consumption (buying things) down and down and down. This is short term, of course, but might still last 10-15 years before significant recovery.\n\nThe government might do several things. First, the Federal Reserve will immediately loosen its monetary policy and start giving out overnight loans at lower interest rates, and when this still doesn't work they will begin quantitative easing (digitally issuing new currency). As well, there will likely be some buyouts of bad assets (like mortgages) and companies that are critical to the economy. Banks would be bailed out as much as possible.The government will have large stimuluses, probably larger than Obama's (which his advisors though was 50% of what it should be). The stimulus will be multifaceted. Part of it will go to the states to make sure that they survive, and can continue their duties. Another part will be large contracts meant to build infrastructure. Another part will be tax cuts to the remaining middle and working class citizens who are working. Another part will be extensions of unemployment benefits and expansion of medicare. Another part will be tax cuts to small businesses and employers.",
"If the economy completely collapses (which is unlikely) unemployment will rise far above 10%, it could go as high 25% or even 30% if things got *really really* bad. Absolutely everyone but those who had large amounts of money in savings would feel the effects, and even those who felt alright might have difficulty if their deposits are in banks, because banks would fail. The banks would fail because all only a small amount of their deposits are actually kept in the vault at any time, and because tons of people would be defaulting on their loans (which were payed for with your deposits) your money can actually just disappear. If you have a mortgage the remaining banks (and those who are bankrupt and must liquidate assets) will repossess many homes, because no one can pay. The stock market, of course, would be crashing the whole time. The cycle of this will continually push employment, investment, and consumption (buying things) down and down and down. This is short term, of course, but might still last 10-15 years before significant recovery.\n\nThe government might do several things. First, the Federal Reserve will immediately loosen its monetary policy and start giving out overnight loans at lower interest rates, and when this still doesn't work they will begin quantitative easing (digitally issuing new currency). As well, there will likely be some buyouts of bad assets (like mortgages) and companies that are critical to the economy. Banks would be bailed out as much as possible.The government will have large stimuluses, probably larger than Obama's (which his advisors though was 50% of what it should be). The stimulus will be multifaceted. Part of it will go to the states to make sure that they survive, and can continue their duties. Another part will be large contracts meant to build infrastructure. Another part will be tax cuts to the remaining middle and working class citizens who are working. Another part will be extensions of unemployment benefits and expansion of medicare. Another part will be tax cuts to small businesses and employers."
]
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f5idgm | how does excess fertilizer burn the roots of a plant? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f5idgm/eli5_how_does_excess_fertilizer_burn_the_roots_of/ | {
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"The same way that too much of any vitamin will cause you to overdose. Depending on what the fertilizer is composed of and how the plant process and stores it, an excess of a nutrient could overwhelm the plant’s ability to process it. Since plants can’t really get rid of excess nutrients, they have to store them, and when it has too much then the nutrient can become toxic.",
"What I remember from a gardening school is that it's because instead of osmosis causing the roots to absorb water the too fertile ground starts taking water away from the roots due to having higher concentration of stuff than the roots. Osmosis basically meaning that certain stuff is allowed through a membrane until both sides of it have equal amounts of stuff.\n\nOf course there are other effects lot of fertilizer can cause(what exactly the effect will be depending on if it's nitrogen, phosphorus or potassium or some less common nutrient that there is too much of) but I'm pretty sure root burning was about osmosis."
]
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[],
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||
64ehdw | why do we say that spiderwebs are "stronger than steel"? | What part of a spider web is so strong? They can easily be pulled, moved, broken so how how are they strong? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/64ehdw/eli5_why_do_we_say_that_spiderwebs_are_stronger/ | {
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"Because they are stronger than steel by about five times. If you had steel filaments like that you could tear them with only a fifth of the effort it takes to tear a spider web.",
"because strength is measured proportionally to the size of the object in question. In this case, the strength being measured is tensile strength (or how strong it is while being pulled, think of trying to measure how much weight you could hang on one strand of silk before it snapped)\n\nWe don't think of spider webs as strong because they are so small in scale. (a spider's silk is significantly thinner than a human hair) However, if we produced a piece of steel as thin as the silk, it would take less force to snap it than the spider's silk. In theory, if we could harvest enough spider's silk you could create a large rope of it that would be stronger than an equivalently sized steel cable. (As you can guess this presents a whole other set of challenges that are the reason we don't have spider silk supported structures)",
"If you could make a bar out of spiderweb, it would be stronger than a steel bar of the same size."
]
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3konzr | how does a dog know it's the owner walking up to their door as opposed to a stranger? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3konzr/eli5_how_does_a_dog_know_its_the_owner_walking_up/ | {
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"Dogs have outstanding hearing. Even a person can often identify another person coming from the sound of how they walk.",
"I don't know about you, but my dumb dog barks like crazy when I come to the door until I say something and he hears it's me.",
"Dogs hearing and memory is incredible, I'm at work so I can't really cite on my phone that well, but dogs know the difference in cars coming up the driveway too, like from the sounds the tires make and engine noises it's pretty awesome, so they know if it's you or not before you even open the door ",
"If she keeps a fairly regular routine, the dog can time how long it has been since she left the house based on smell. This was studied somewhere and confirmed I'd have to google around and find the video. It's incredibly precise to the point where the dog could actually be waiting at the door before she is in earshot or visible.",
"My Bassett can tell my truck, my work truck and my wife's car from a block away. He can also hear the sound of a cheese its box opening from 300 yards away. But call him to come in, and he goes deaf. Selective hearing I guess.",
"My dog can tell when I'm awake within a minute of me actually waking up. (Getting his breakfast is the motivation.) If I lie very still he'll stay in his bed, but I can fool him this way for only a few minutes at best before he gets up and starts pestering me to feed him. Maybe my breathing is different or there are movements I make unconsciously asleep vs awake?"
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4jneld | what would it take for a country to actually create a post-scarcity society, and how far are we away from realistically making it happen? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4jneld/eli5_what_would_it_take_for_a_country_to_actually/ | {
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"Post-scarcity societies can't really exist, because some things are inherently scarce. There will always be a scarcity of concert tickets, for instance. Even if we use technology to broadcast the concert across the world, there is a scarce amount of *front-row seat* tickets with added value, and the usual market mechanics are applicable. We can build bigger venues, but the scarcity remains.\n\nOther than that, scarcity of essential resources will prevail for a long time. Minerals are scarce, and aren't becoming more plentiful. Our capacity to generate clean energy is limited, and even renewable energy infrastructure still depends on scarce resources. With unlimited energy generation, we run into an ecological scarcity--we can only add so much heat to Earth without causing environmental collapse."
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6lwhkx | what is the biological process behind the memoryloss of pot smokers? | I would love to know somethig about the short term stuff (like forgetting tasks), but also why you forget the tine in general when you are a daily smoker. Like, when you look back on the year and think: "where did my time go?" | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6lwhkx/eli5_what_is_the_biological_process_behind_the/ | {
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"Basically, when you smoke pot it causes you to lose focus. \n\nWhen you're sober, your brain stores information in a pretty complex way, but basicly it is stored in very short term (memory lasting few seconds), then moved to short term (a few moments), and eventually long term if its determained to be important.\n\nWhen you're high, your brain keeps a lot of new information just in the very short and short term memory, preventing it from being more long term. \n\nSo, you're high and you're hungry a d you look in the fridge. Your brain forgets after a moment that you're hungry, and you wonder \"why am i at the fridge?\" And then you think about it and realize you're still hungry and keep looking.\n\n\nAs far as time is concerned, pot also affects the part of your brain that keeps tract of time, leading you to not be able to track time lile you are normally able. Your memory is not good so you forgey to look at the clock and your internal clock is off, so you don't know if its been 5 seconds or 5 minutes as accurately as you normally do."
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4gdiyq | how do 2-party governments work? surely one party would always have a majority in the goverment, and therefore win every vote. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4gdiyq/eli5_how_do_2party_governments_work_surely_one/ | {
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"Not necessarily, especially in countries like the US. Here in the US, the elections of our executive branch are separate from the elections of our Representatives, which are again separate from the elections of our Senators.\n\nWhat this means is that you can have a Democratic President, and a Republican controlled House, and a Democratic controlled Senate at the same time. The three are essentially forced to work together to get anything done. Neither party can force through anything without the support of the House, Senate, and President.\n\nFurther complicating things is the fact that a Democrat doesn't have to vote the party line. They can, and often do, choose to support the other side of the issue if they so desire.\n\nEdit: didn't intend to single out Democrats in the last paragraph. Republicans can also vote against their party.",
"Game Theory says that both parties will end up shifting toward the middle. If the Republicans start winning every election, Democrats will start becoming more \"Republican\" until they can win some elections, too. ",
"That's pretty much what happens in the UK.\n\nWe don't exactly have a 2 party system, there are other parties with a significant number of seats in the House of Commons (the lower house of Parliament), but there's usually one party which has a majority of seats due to the fact we use the \"First Past the Post\" system where a party can get a majority of seats with well under 50% of the vote.\n\nSo the party in power can usually do whatever it likes because they always have more than 50% of the vote in the House of Commons. The only thing that might stop them is opposition from within their own party. The rest of the parties put together isn't enough to block their bills.\n\nThe UK does have an upper house, the House of Lords, but they don't have much power, and they can't block bills indefinitely. They are a sort of check on the power of the House of Commons, but if the House of Commons is really determined they can ultimately ignore whatever the Lords has to say and pass the bill anyway.",
"There are two kinds of political system, those with weak party discipline and strong party discipline.\n\nThe US has weak party discipline. Each representative is free to vote their conscious, and while dissenting from the parties preference might make you unpopular, it is allowed. That means even when a party has a majority of seats, they may not have the majority of votes.\n\nStrong party discipline is more common in parliamentary systems. Representatives are always expected to vote with their party, and if they feel they cannot, they resign from the party (but not their seat). The majority party can in theory win every vote, but they must show restraint, lest the force dissenting member to resign and lose their majority. "
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1urgsn | can you change your genetics? | Firstly, I apologize if there is already a topic on my question. I searched and didn't see one. Anyways, I guess I will tell the long story so it makes sense. I had a thought today about what my kids would look like, and since I am a pretty skinny dude, and my dad is too, I imagined a skinny kid. But what would happen if I were to work out and gain weight and end up looking like Arnold? Like, what I mean is, would my kid inherit my skinny gene, as I did from my dad, or would they get something a little more muscular? Obviously it would depend on the mother but lets just assume she is as average as average can be in every way, just to limit variables. Anyways, that's it. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1urgsn/eli5_can_you_change_your_genetics/ | {
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"In the great majority of cases, no. Your genetics, at least in terms of what you would pass down to your children, are fixed. Your body does modify gene *expression*: you keep the same genes, but your body can 'turn them off' under certain circumstances. This usually doesn't affect gametes (egg/sperm cells), though, so your children usually won't inherit such changes.",
"In short: Sort of. Genetics are complicated, and for the most part can not be altered. Therefore based on the description of yourself as well as your father your family clearly has a very high metabolic rate and your child will more than likely acquire the same. However, long-term exposure to new environments (i.e. building mass in your muscles) will very slowly but eventually can shift your genetic output. That being said it's always important to encourage a healthy lifestyle but realistically your child is still very likely to grow up the same as your dad and yourself. If you weight train, your child weight trains, their child weight trains and so on, eventually your family's genetic pool will shift and offspring will one day have that \"naturally built\" look "
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kr36p | video game edition! why don't all hd ports from past consoles run at 60fps without stuttering? | I was very dissapointed to hear that both RE4 HD and Code Veronica: X HD suffered from stuttering, at only ran at 30fps.
I could perhaps understand a game running at a locked 30fps so that it still felt like the original, but there is no reason, imo, why a PS2 game can't run at a locked 30fps on the PS360. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/kr36p/eli5_video_game_edition_why_dont_all_hd_ports/ | {
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"Because they have to use an emulator that is shitty in order to play on the PS3 at all. It would cost a lot of money to do that. ",
"Because they have to use an emulator that is shitty in order to play on the PS3 at all. It would cost a lot of money to do that. "
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3oumm7 | if pi is an infinite non-repeating number, then it contains an infinite amount of information. shouldn't this be impossible? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3oumm7/eli5_if_pi_is_an_infinite_nonrepeating_number/ | {
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"Why should it be?\n\nThe number goes on forever, that's why we can't store the number Pi in it's un-rounded form on a computer. But conceptually it can exist.\n\nInfinity is allowed to exist in nature... it's just not something that we can write down.",
"It's not really an infinite amount of information - I can write down pi in a few characters; e.g. [this](_URL_0_) is pi over 4, and so is [this](_URL_1_). What you're noticing, however, is that the decimal representation is an awfully bad way to store some real numbers.\n\nI could store your username in English, or I could add an infinite number of zeros to it and call it an infinite amount of information. You'd reply, rightly, that it doesn't contain an infinite amount of information - a lot of what I've written is redundant. The same is true here.",
"This is a common misconception.\n\nFirst of all, Pi isn't infinite - it's a finite number that lies somewhere between 3.14 and 3.15. If we try to write Pi as a decimal fraction, we get an infinite, non-repeating sequence of digits. This is because Pi is irrational, and this property is true for every irrational number, which includes numbers such as the square roots of 2, 3, 5 (and every number that isn't a square number), euler's number (e), and a whole lot more (in fact, there are more irrationals than rationals). This is not really a \"special property\" of irrational numbers, it's more like a flaw in how we represent numbers as decimal fractions.\n\nAlso, just because the decimal representation of Pi is infinite and non-repeating, it doesn't mean it contains every possible finite sequence of digits - that would require the number to be a [normal number](_URL_0_). We don't actually know whether Pi is a normal number or not.\n\n",
"So, /u/Schnutzel/ has pointed out that a number that has all possible patterns of digits somewhere in its decimal expansion is actually called a [\"normal number\"](_URL_1_) in mathematics, and that it is not currently known whether *pi* is a normal number (although it is widely believed to be).\n\nBut I don't think that was really what you were asking, so instead let me rephrase your question:\n\n > If a normal number contains all possible sequence of digits somewhere in its length, doesn't that mean it contains an *infinite amount of information*? Isn't that impossible?\n\nMy answer: *No, because it's pretty hard to find and identify that \"information\"*.\n\nYes, it is true that you can find any expansion of digits somewhere inside a normal number, but you're basically looking for a needle in a haystack.\n\nLet's say you're looking for a particular piece of information that can be represented as a sequence of 100 digits, maybe a short English phrase that was converted to numbers.\n\nSince *each* sequence of 100 digits has a 10^-100 chance of being *your* sequence, that means you'd expect to go through 10^100 digits of the number before you were likely to find it.\n\nAnd 10^100 is just so unimaginably huge, that this is not a practical venture. \n\nIt is probably worth mentioning here that [the world record for calculating pi](_URL_0_) has only calculated about 2.5 trillion digits, or about 10^13.\n\nTL:DR: Even if pi (or another number) does contain infinite information, it would take *infinite time and infinite effort* to generate/identify/find/decode it, so it's *not of any practical use*, nor does it lead to any logical contradictions or impossible situations.",
"I don't think it should. Like you said, pi doesn't ever become a repeating decimal number, because it is irrational. This means that if you calculate all of the digits in pi, you would be left with an unlimited amount of information. This is where the problem lies.\n\nEven though the full decimal expansion of pi should hold unlimited information, we haven't calculated it, so it doesn't exist in the Universe. There isn't a hard drive or object somewhere in the Universe which contains all of the information in the decimal expansion of pi.\n\nThink of it like this. Consider the set of natural numbers:\n\n***N*** = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, ... }\n\nThis set contains every single possible sequence of digits, just like pi. If we were to write out the entirety of ***N*** on paper, we would have to use up an infinite amount of paper, and the paper would contain every single number there is. This means that the set ***N***, when written out, contains infinite information. But we've never written it out, and we never will, because it is infinite. We can't do it. We can come up with algorithms of how to write down all the natural numbers (this is called counting), but we would need to count for an infinitely long time in order to count out the whole set. We can't do this, because we don't have infinite time at our disposal. That's why pi and ***N*** don't cause the Universe to collapse just by their mere existence.",
"pi has infinite digits, but finite information stemming from the fact it's a point. Draw the number line, find 3 and 4, and highlight the point corresponding to pi. since it's a point it only takes up one spot on the number line. See finite information, but because you are writing out pi in the most unhelpful way it looks like it has infinite information."
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2x3o7d | why sometimes when i open my mouth, very rarely, a stream of liquid flies out for a second | or does this only happen to me | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2x3o7d/eli5_why_sometimes_when_i_open_my_mouth_very/ | {
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"You're squeezing a salivary gland and that fires the saliva out of it's opening",
"That's called gleeking! I can do it on command. My husband thinks I'm weird, or have raptor spray",
"Wow. When I first read this I thought he was saying \"liquid flies\" come from his mouth."
]
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bd3f4e | how is electronic banking managed, wherein money can't just appear out of nowhere, considering that it's just a number in a computer? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bd3f4e/eli5_how_is_electronic_banking_managed_wherein/ | {
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"Banks _are_ permitted to create \"new money\" in the form of loans. It's just there are very heavy procedures to follow to do so, and by regulation they can't create more new money than solvency rules require. Meaning they have to demonstrate that for every X dollars they lend out in new loans they own Y dollars in actual assets (cash deposits, treasury bills, other securities). An important role banks play in the economy is identifying _creditworthy_ places to create new money. Got a new restaurant idea? If you back it with your own cash and show it will be profitable a bank will loan you new money to fill up the rest. If your restaurant takes off and is successful you repay your loan to the bank and it has now helped expand the economy and the amount of money extant in accounts had likewise grown."
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57l5pe | how do the doctors/scientists in cdc actually work on cures? where do they even start? | Rewatching the Walking dead got me asking myself a question. How do scientists/doctors that work in the CDC make cures? What do they do, Where do they even start etc. Thanks | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/57l5pe/eli5_how_do_the_doctorsscientists_in_cdc_actually/ | {
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"To explain in the simplest way possible, the process for curing a disease starts with carefully studying and analyzing the disease to figure out exactly how it functions. What causes it, what effects it has, etc. For example, is it a bacteria or a protein, what functions and materials from the body does it grow off of, etc. From that point, once every aspect of the illness is understood, it's a process of experimenting with different medicines and compounds and recording their effect on the bacteria/virus/etc while also analyzing its effect on the host system. When a compound is discovered that kills the illness cells while not causing noteworthy or consistent harm to the host, it is considered to be a cure. "
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cr2vje | how did the australians lose the emu war | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cr2vje/eli5how_did_the_australians_lose_the_emu_war/ | {
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"There were only a few soldiers assigned to eradicate the emu, a small amount of ammunition and their main weapon was a machine gun on a car, they were unsuccessful because an emu can often take more than one shot to kill and even then can run a long way before it does, making it difficult for the soldiers to assess how many they had killed. \nLater, when the army gave up on the eradication (after a fairly lacklustre effort really) they opened it up to farmers who were much more numerous, effective, and overall more successful.",
"Because the emu war was like a total of 8 guys with two machine guns and barely any ammo looking to cull several hundred thousand birds across thousands of square kilometres. The emu war is only called as such to meme it, as it was undertaken by returned veterans with equipment supplies by the government.",
"Success or failure in a war is generally related to achieving your goals. The goal here was to curb the Emu population, and the Australian military utterly failed to do this, so that's why it's considered that they lost."
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3pntvt | how is it schools in the united states can teach creationism or intelligent design in their science classes instead of evolution whenever it is clearly specified in nclb (no child left behind) that all teachings must be scientifically based methods? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3pntvt/eli5_how_is_it_schools_in_the_united_states_can/ | {
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"Legally, they probably can't.\n\nHowever, approximately 70% of the United States is Christian. Enough of them are insane fundamentalists and concentrated enough any complaints have been quashed.",
"Education for the most part in America is handled on the community level. Also I'll point you to Christian \"scientists\" who support intelligent design. So I could see an easy loop hole that they probably use.",
"NCLB only effects the eligibility for the federal funding of schools. Private religious schools are not eligible for government funding regardless so the law has no effect on how they develop their curriculum. ",
"They can't, legally speaking. Teaching creationism or any of its badly disguised cousins (such as 'intelligent design' or 'creation science') is illegal in public school science classes in the US, as per repeated rulings at [various levels]( _URL_1_ ) of courts all the way up to [the SCOTUS itself]( _URL_0_ ). Every time such a case goes to court, the creationists end up losing. It still happens fairly often though, as they're always trying out new strategies to get around the restrictions imposed by the courts, and there are also many teachers who either don't know that it's illegal or simply do not care. \n\nWhat they are allowed to do is teach it in a class about comparative religions or philosophy or the like. Just not in science classes. ",
"They aren't allowed to teach creationism over science in public schools. You are getting bad information.",
"Well there's this so now I'm even more confused if this is going on.\n_URL_0_",
"I realize it's not your fault; the news media loves playing up the \"ignorant retarded religious wackos\" stories. But you really should actually try to figure out what happens in these cases instead.\n\nEvery now and then, a bunch of religious wackos get together and decide to ram their religious views down everyone else's children's throats. They run for the local school board with stealth candidacies, never announcing that they're going to start shoveling religious nonsense in science classes. They gain enough seats to have control over the school district. Then they announce \"LOL we are religious wackos and everyone must study Jesus Creationism starting tomorrow!\"\n\nThen the ACLU sues, and over the course of two years, the school district is forced to spend several hundred thousand dollars on litigation expenses. At the next school board election, all of the religious wackos get defeated and thrown out of office. The school announces that their reign of terror is over and that everyone can study evolution again without the nonsense being thrown in. The ACLU demands a small fortune in settlement money and the court orders their legal bills to be paid.\n\nThe taxpayers get forcibly sodomized to pay the expenses, the religious wackos are all sad and butthurt, and the lawyers make out like bandits. All is as it should be in the world.\n\nThat's about it, really."
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8kintb | why do some things cut better with a serrated knife and others with a straight blade? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8kintb/eli5_why_do_some_things_cut_better_with_a/ | {
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"It actually depends on a few factors. What you are cutting, the type of knife or blade you are using, and other things like temperature of the knife and the object you are cutting.\n\nThe biggest determiner, is the thing you are cutting. Soft, malleable things like loaves of bread, or very loose meat, don't cut well with a sharp edge because you don't have enough tension in the material you are cutting to press against the blade and create an even cutting surface. Tomatoes and Bread are excellent examples of this. Only the sharpest of sharp knives can even hope to cut cleanly and evenly through some breads and most tomatoes without issue or mushing.\n\nSerated blades, seek to change this by adding in the serrations, tips and points that act to tear and have sharp points that press into what you are cutting and pull small sections, like a saw blade and tear bits and pieces instead of cutting cleanly and straight through.\n\nVery, Very hard things also have the same problem, like bone or frozen foods. The ice makes the object to cut so hard and dense, that a sharp knife is almost useless. A serrated knife on the other hand, can cut by ripping and tearing its way through the object where a standard blade could never perform.",
"Is there also an effect where a serration tooth puts tension into a piece of material and then the material springs over the tooth and slams into the next tooth?",
"Since pressure is measured as a force divided by area ( P = F/A), having serated teeth means the pressure that used to be divided by the whole length of the blade in contact of the material being cut, the pressure gets quite a bit higher, and so more likely to cut through.\n\nThere is also the case of cutting thin but strong materials (like leather), then serated teeth do a slightly different thing. The tooth now snags on the material, and instead of only cutting with the downwards force of the blade, you now add the force coming from your hands back and forth action.\n\nMost cases have the the effects added together to some degree, but those are the basic principles of serated teeth. ",
"She has a serrated edge, that she moves back and forth.\n\nIt's such a simple machine, she doesn't have to use force."
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9upsab | why are political parties in america so polarized? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9upsab/eli5_why_are_political_parties_in_america_so/ | {
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" > This level of party polarization doesn’t really happen anywhere else in the world.\n\nYes it does?\n\nPolitical polarization is nothing new, and we're not even that polarized *now* in comparison to where we have been (see the Civil War). Furthermore, I'd argue the rest of the world is doing generally worse than we are, particularly Europe.\n\nThat being said, we are more polarized than we were in the last few decades. Culturally, I'd wager it's due to the rise of Mass Media, and the Internet in particular. Edit: Politics is treated as entertainment; you find the Mass Media channel, website, twitter feed, whatever that caters to your worldview and your sensibilities, and then that media is used as a means to advertise products to you. CNN, Fox, and MSNBC are mechanisms to sell prescription drugs. Alex Jones, Breitbart, or conspiracy sites are mechanisms to sell you \"alternative\" medicines, supplements, guns, ammunition, survival kits, and other such things.\n\nPolitically, there's also less incentive to cooperate. One of the more...troubling things Obama did was kill off earmarks (i.e. pork), but the problem is that in many cases pork was the only way to get controversial or bipartisan bills passed. A given congressman could say \"yes, I voted for this bill that not all of you liked, but in the process of doing so I got funding for this new hospital that everyone in the community agrees was a good thing,\" and they could get reelected off of that. There's no mechanism to incentivize pragmatic solutions, so the only thing left are the philosophical differences between the parties and the groups they cater to. Hence, gridlock because there are two very different philosophical ideas as to what America should be.",
"Our news media is very polarized, and most people seem to gravitate to media outlets (formal and social) that their friends use. This reinforces that polarization.\n\nAnd our leadership, across the board, has learned to stoke these fires for votes. (People who think only the 'other side' is guilty of this simply don't read a good cross-section of news).\n\nThe combination has lead both sides to tacitly accept extremism that only a few short years ago would have been completely unacceptable. This helps the partisanship continue its spiral downward.\n\nThe sad thing is all it would take to stop this would be people being willing to stand up to their friends when common sense tells them they are wrong. \n\nBut no one will, because we are in an age where social media standing is more important than a functioning society. \n\n",
"Because they use identity politics, and they spin everything into partisan issues. They frame it so that people think of it as \"their team\", when in reality there are no teams. Because staying loyal to their party is more important to them than what their parties are advocating.",
"It definitely happens elsewhere in the world. There's folks in Asia massacring each other right now over basically the same type of stuff we're fighting about on Facebook. \n\nBut fear is a primal motivator. Hope and goodness is the best for the long term, but if you're looking to get out the vote and win in the short term, fear beats hope and change every time. It's just so much easier to rally an army of supporters against a common enemy than it is to get them to actually support you personally. \n\nSo you ramp up the rhetoric, say \"Fuck that guy\", and \"If they win you'll lose your health insurance\". This gives a sense of urgency, requiring the plebs to act TODAY. Get out and vote! Donate! If you don't we're all screwed! \n\nGo and meet your local politicians. They're all nice people that actually want to help. But About 5 minutes into the conversation you'll be bored as hell because they're nice. Go talk to your senator and you'll find yourself $100 short and going door to door to keep the boogie man at bay. \n\nThere's great money in creating and picking teams. It gives news outlets a target market to shoot for, and a predictable demographic to sell hair products and car parts to. That fear keeps folks tuning in every night to know what they can be doing to keep the straw man out of their field. \n\nEver listen to NPR? They're pretty good about being non-partisan if you can stay awake through an entire episode. ",
"Because FUCK YOU! THAT'S WHY!\n\n\nIn all seriousness, in a two party system with primaries, it's important to win the far reaches of your party, and the middle isn't politically viable.",
"Other countries often have many parties that have to come together to form a government and select a Prime Minister. The electoral college winner-take-all system works against the emergence of third parties. So you have two sides screaming how the other is the devil with no real incentives to work together.",
"A combination of factors produce the polarization of politics here in America . in no particular order add up the following factors and you will see how we got so polarized ; \n1 Demonizing the Opponent and his /her political party for over 100 years , \n2 The shift toward more extreme views just to be heard in the flood of information that is the internet \n3 The What I call the Team Effect Political parties are like Sports Teams we are betting on our team to win so we trash talk the other team to discourage the other teams supporters from casting their ballot\n4 the Us vs Them mentality \n5 the idea that there can only be two parties in this country . \n6 a media that is not there to inform but to entertain and distract. \n7 there may be other factors that I haven't thought of \n\nwhen you add this all up you get the mess that is American politics ",
"A lot of decent answers here, but the biggest reasons I think are Gerrymandering and low voter turnout. Gerrymandering has been done by both sides when they've been in power in state gov't which means many house seats are automatically R or D and those people can be as fringe-y as they want to be with no fear of losing their seat. Low voter turnout means that only the really motivated get out there and vote, which means the political parties run on hot button, fear related issues and not 'Our candidate is smarter, more trustworthy, and a harder worker'. I used to think it was good that voting was not required by law, but I am done with that... it should be like paying taxes.",
"As with anything else.... follow the money.\nThe media is not in business to inform you. It is in business to make money. How does the media make money? By selling \"clicks\" or advertising. The more clicks you have, the more money you make. \nNow, how do you get more clicks? You be controversial and on the fringe. (Normal and sensical is boring!) So the media hypes the extreme to get people angry, then people start talking and reading, and the media adds more fuel to the fire by giving extremists some air time to make it look like the entire party thinks that way. And before you know it people are divided and the media is selling advertising like crazy!\nTo prove the point, when was the last time you saw a media report on anything in which the person they were interviewing said something totally rational based on common sense?\nSo stop believing everything your favorite media outlet tells you, and try to look beyond the shaped message and into common sense. There you will find the best answer, but not the one that sells advertising!",
"Wait, the rest of the world doesn't have to deal with this shit? I figured American news just didn't have time to cover it everytime one foreigner called another foreigner Hitler.",
"Well, they aren't as bad as you might think.\n\nIf you look at issue polling, you see general agreement on things. It is only the very loud fringes of the two Parties that hate each other.\n\nOur main problem is that our media (who everyone agrees sucks) is trying to stoke emotions to get more page views and commercials sold.\n\nThe term is Yellow Journalism.\n\nIts like Twitter. Only matters to media figures, but they think that everyone is on it.\n\nBottom line: If someone is trying to convince you to hate someone else, don't do it. Disagree, sure. But, no need to hate people."
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f8d3vo | how are submersibles different from submarines and why are submersibles not fully autonomous? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f8d3vo/eli5_how_are_submersibles_different_from/ | {
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"Not an expert, but I think a submersible is a temporary vehicle. Some may be able to stay down for hours at a time, but not forever. They don't have the facilities to produce resources.\n\nSubmarines, on the other hand, are designed to produce their own electricity, oxygen, food, and water. They're much larger and can stay underwater for as long as their systems hold up.",
"It's a definition problem\n\nIf a vessel can submerge and operate autonomously it's a submarine\n\nIf it can submerge but can't operate autonomously it's a submersible\n\nAutonomous in this case doesn't mean self driving, but instead by itself without assistance. A submarine will have air processing and food stores that allow it to operate for weeks or months without contact with another vessel. Most research submersibles are good for an afternoons adventure, maybe a day before they need to come up and refill their air tanks"
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1zodn7 | what would happen if i shut my car off while driving? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1zodn7/eli5_what_would_happen_if_i_shut_my_car_off_while/ | {
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"The power steering will be disabled, I almost crashed once when my car died on me in a curve!",
"Every car I've had was an automatic made after 1993, and it wasn't possible to turn the car off unless it was in park. However, my uncle owned a manual from the 70's or 80's, and was actually able to push the clutch in and turn his car off and continue driving. He was basically coasting.\n\nAlso, in reference to /u/Torbunt I actually have driven with power steering disabled. It's difficult, but it's possible.",
"Power steering will be gone immediately, power brakes will be gone soon (maybe you'll have 1-2 pumps of the brake pedal, after which you'd better hope your legs are strong!) \n\nA bigger problem will be, if you turn the key to off and/or take it out of the ignition, the steering wheel will lock (most cars have steering wheel locks). And then this might happen: _URL_0_"
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1vxwqt | why does it smell worse when you fart in water? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1vxwqt/eli5_why_does_it_smell_worse_when_you_fart_in/ | {
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"Smell travels more efficiently in warm, moist environments. Same thing happens in the shower.",
"There is also another explanation. When you fart in the air due to \"diffusion\" the fart and the \"normal\" air mix up, so that you smell less fart gas.\n\nIn water (usually in the bath tub, where you are in and your head close to the water surface) the fart gas moves up the water bubble without mixing with the air. When it comes up to the surface, directly close to your nose, the smell is more \"pure\" and therefore worse.",
"Extension to question: If I fart into a jar of water, will the effect be present when I get somebody to open it?",
"Apparently you're not the only one [who has thought about this.](_URL_0_)",
"I farted in the shower this morning and a thought popped into my head that I was going to post on ELI5, but you beat me to it.\n\nI always wondered why water farts always smell the same, but normal \"air\" farts have so much variety. There are a number of factors that can change the scent of a normal fart, from diet to how soon until your next BM... but regardless of all those factors my water farts always smell exactly the same. \nMy initial thought had to do with normal farts being filtered by clothing and furniture and mixing with external sources to alter the smell. In contrast a water fart doesn't get that same filtering and is true representation of the fart",
"Why sometimes when I fart does it feel like a bubble rolls up my ass crack when I'm not in water?",
"I read once that moisture in the air helps your sense of smell. You can absorb the smell better or something. Ever notice how you can smell the rain? Well you're really just smelling the world around you better. Same with farts in the shower.",
"The way your nose senses odors is significantly heightened by the presence of water vapor. When you're in the water, there's a lot of vapor in the air above the water, so your sense of smell is more sensitive, and therefore your farts smell stronger. \n(Note: this is the same reason your pee smells stronger when you're in the shower than the urinal--there's much more water vapor in the air.)",
"i've heard that smells travel better when there is moisture in the air.. hence why your farts smell so much danker in the shower",
"Water vapor makes your sense of smell much better. You know how after a rain you can \"smell the rain\". That is actually the dirt you are smelling. You just couldn't smell it before when the air was drier. Same with farts.",
"This may account for the worse smell in water, but humidity likely plays a larger role. Do you know how it smells different outside after rain? Well, that's not actually rain you're smelling. An increase in humidity gives you a boost in your ability to pick up different scents. You aren't smelling rain, you are just smelling better. This is why a fart in the shower smells so much worse than in dry air. Humidity is higher near bodies of water, and this is what leads me to believe that OP's farting underwater smells worse primarily due to humidity rather than proximity.",
"College swimmer here. When you fart in a chlorinated pool the sulfer in your fart combines with some of the H+ ions in the water and makes H2S which is the same chemical used in stink bombs.\n\nWhen I'd eat high sulphur content food like garlic or onions, and then fart at morning practice it could clear the lane it smelled so bad.\n\nThe same reaction does not occur to as great of an extent in a non chlorinated pool (lake, ocean, or saline pool). Been a long time since I took chemistry, but I guess there is more free hydrogen in a chlorinated pool for the sulfur to combine with.",
"It's not that farts smell worse in water...it's that your nose works better in warm, humid climates. So you are getting the full smell of the fart to the best of your nose' ability.",
"TIL how ~~my bong~~ underwater farting works.",
"Don't forget that many water farts occur in warm water. I doubt anyone remembers a stinky fart in an ice cold bath or pool, because we generally don't enjoy immersion in cold water. Bathtub or shower water is warm, and prevents the fart from cooling, as if released in air. The fart begins to diffuse closer to your face, allowing for a larger sample size of its components (in a shower, the curtain or door prevents diffusion, to similar effect). I call this \"cooking the fart\". The term is slightly misleading, because the fart doesn't actually increase in temperature, it is only prevented from cooling quickly in air. It also occurs often in wintry locations in automobiles with the heater on full blast.\n\nELI 12:\nAccording to [Gay-Lussac's](_URL_0_) gas law, P1/T1 = P2/T2, where P is pressure and T is temperature, if you increase the temperature, you also increase the pressure by a proportional amount. This increased pressure combined with increased proximity allows the fartee to inhale slightly more of their own juices. As a fart mixes with air, diffusion and fluid/gas dynamics can horribly complicate fart purity.\n\nFinally, it's likely that a fart's warmer temperature allows one's olfactory receptors to better detect certain chemicals in the air. Perhaps a biologist can comment on this.\n\n\nTL, DR: When you fart in water, it concentrates, warms, and slightly increases the pressure of the sample.\n\nEDIT: I initially had P/V, with V as volume as Gay-Lussac's gas law. I was incorrect. Chalk it up to a brain fart.\n",
"There are a bunch of chemicals in a fart which make it smell bad, and the density of these chemicals when they reach your nose determines just how stinky it is.\n\nWhen you fart in the air, it diffuses in all directions before reaching your nose. So, it spreads out over an entire sphere before you get the opportunity to smell it.\n\nWhen you fart in water, it quickly rises to the surface before expanding. When it hits the surface and begins diffusing, it can't go back into the water (or else it would float right back out), and so can only expand into the top half of the sphere. So, all other things held constant, the density of \"noxious fumes\" is twice as high, as is your stank.",
"There's only 2 kinds of farts in the world:\n\n1. Mine\n\n2. Everybody elses",
"If you fart in the air, by the time the smells reach your nose, they are likely to have already been diluted as they diffuse into the room, already preying on unsuspecting people...\n\nBut lets say you fart in the bath. The bubble of gas will travel as one towards your nose. If it's soapy you might actually be able to pick up the bubble of the surface of the water, before taking a waft of the pure, concentrated fart death, unable to dilute in the air around you before it reaches your nose, ready to send you to A & E...\n\nThis is how I've justified this... Could be wrong...",
"Worst ever- you fart while wearing waders and a waterproof jacket standing on dry ground. Then you step into the water and it presses all the air out of your waders and they conspire with your jacket to funnel the funk straight to your nose.\n\nJeebus its awful.",
"\"Worse?\" I have always found that when I fart in *chlorinated* water, such as a swimming pool, upon emergence at the surface my farts smell *better* than usual: crisper, with more of a tang and a slightly peppery ... not *aftertaste*, exactly, but ... *you* know. The *lingering* bit. \n \nI've always attributed this to some component of the fart dissolving into the water on the fart's way to the surface. I haven't had an opportunity to test this hypothesis by farting at different depths and comparing the scent of the results, to see if longer travel time results in a greater change.",
"Greatest farts are the ones that slap your balls. It just feels like something epic was accomplished. I love the smell of a fart that has slapped my balls.\n\nIt smells like victory.",
"ENT specialist here, farts smell worse near water or in a shower because water molecules activate the receptors in the nasal membrane. Think of a dogs wet nose. The nose is moist to allow the faintest of smells to attach to the receptors in the mucosa membrane. Most animals, including humans, have a stronger sense of smell around water. It's the same reason you can \"smell rain\" right before a storm hits. ",
"This post has just contributed to a 1% increase in the pollution of fresh water supplies today.",
"Because your tub is filled with fart bong water...",
"I told my brother once that farts smell worse underwater. The next time we were in a pool he farted while his entire body was underwater and attempted to smell it. Came up choking. \n\nAnd I was the younger brother. ",
"I enjoy bath farts better than any other kind. ",
"There are a ton of similar questions about farting in the shower. I think it is because our noses work better with moisture present (it smells good when it rains, because we can smell everything better) [here are a few](_URL_0_)",
"Will somebody fart in a pool and then eat the bubble before it reaches the top? I would but I don't have a pool and my tub isn't big enough.....",
"TIL there are people who spend their evenings smelling bathtub farts.",
"The better question is why do I continue to keep wanting to smell it?",
"Shower farts are the worst. If you combined tiny poo flakes with steamy hot water your gonna have a bad time.",
"Now THIS is something a five year old would ask."
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2vyi88 | why after downloading some applications, do i need to restart but others work straight away? | ^ | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2vyi88/eli5_why_after_downloading_some_applications_do_i/ | {
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"Because some applications use low-level resources which are already loaded into memory and used continuously by other applications and the operating system as well. Since reloading that particular resource in to memory is way too hard without crashing other applications or the OS itself, the best is to make the user reload the full operating system, hence the need to restart. ",
"One possible reason is that certain applications, usually larger or more complex ones, need to access sections of your computer that are not readily accessible during runtime. Also it may need to edit files that are constantly in use during runtime, and files cannot be written to while they are in use.\n\nUsually the restart is just your install quickly finishing whatever actions it needs to do before Windows boots. Some more lightweight apps don't need to do anything before runtime.",
"Actually, most programs still work perfectly without restarting the computer. It used to be a big thing to having to restart the computer when installing something, it it kinda just stuck as a precedent. Even changes to the registry or low-level resources can be changed without restarting. \n\nThis doesn't mean that *all* programs don't need a restart to work. Some programs hook into the OS to do certain tasks, and that has to be loaded during boot. ",
"Related Eli5: why then has Linux never once told me I need to restart to finish installing anything including the proprietary Nvidia xserver? "
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5xjiog | in academic articles, why are units of area often shown as being multiplied to the power of -1? | I'm seeing this a lot in the texts that I'm reading, especially when the unit of measurement is "[units] per [area]". For example, "cubic metres per hectare" would be noted as m^3 /ha^-1
What is the need to denote it as being to the power of -1? Would m^3 /ha be incorrect? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5xjiog/eli5_in_academic_articles_why_are_units_of_area/ | {
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"The word \"per\" implies \"divided by.\" For example, miles per hour can be represented as (miles)/(hour). Newtons per square meter (the SI unit of pressure, also known as the Pascal), can be represented as (N)/(m^2 ). m^2 is the SI unit of area.\n\nAlso, to directly answer your question, a/b is equivalent to ab^-1. Another example: a/b^2 = ab^-2. This is just a common math notation that allows everything to be written on one line. Example: (ab^2 ) / (cd^9 ) = ab^2 c^-1 d^-9"
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25pi4g | how are glaciers (the largest source of water) fresh water but the ocean is made of salt water? | That's my simple question, please and thank you. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/25pi4g/eli5_how_are_glaciers_the_largest_source_of_water/ | {
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"Sea water has gathered dissolved ions in it for billions of years. Thats why its salty. Those ions don't evaporate with the water and the don't fall as snow or rain that later becomes freshwater sources on Earth. \n\nThe ice caps may be the largest source of fresh water on Earth at the moment, but the oceans have been around before Earth was cool enough to form ice caps.\n\nGlaciers are not the source of the sea."
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l1ga0 | please eli5: finding the exact value of sin, cos and tan. | I know that 2π is a period is 360 degrees, and I get from looking at the graph of a sin wave that sin of 0 is 0, π/2 is 1... etc, but if a teach hands me a piece of paper with "Find the exact value of tan 4π/3", nothing.
So please, explain it like I'm five. Because this is one of the only things in math that I really do not understand.
Thanks in advance! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/l1ga0/please_eli5_finding_the_exact_value_of_sin_cos/ | {
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"I don't think it can be done like you're 5, but [read this section on the Wiki article for them](_URL_0_).\n\n",
"Draw a circle with a cross through its center. Then we draw a triangle in the following way: \"tan 4π/3\" means you rotate the hypotenuse (= radius of circle) 4π/3 radians from the x-axis positive line. This gives you a right triangle pointing downwards in the southwest quadrant of the circle, with its adjacent line lying on the negative x-axis.\n\nSOH CAH TOA : sine = opp/hyp, cosine = adjacent/hypotenuse, tangent = opposite/adjacent.\n\nThe tangent of this triangle = opp/adj, and we know the hypotenuse = 1.\n\nConvert 4π/3 to degrees of rotation on the unit circle. You get 240° (same thing as 4(180)/3, because pi = 180° counterclockwise rotation from position x-axis line).\n\nNow you know the angles of the triangle = 90°, 60° (because of our 240° knowledge), and 30° (because triangle's angles must add up to 180°). You also know the hypotenuse = 1 because it equals the unit circle's radius.\n\nIn a 30°-60°-90° triangle the sides are in the ratio 1 : 2 : √3. The hypotenuse we have of 1 must equate to the 2 in this ratio (makes sense geometrically). Therefore, the adjacent side must = 1/2, and the opposite side must = √3/2.\n\ntan(4π/3) = opp/adj = (√3/2)/(1/2) = √3\n\nThe tangent can be visually represented by extending the triangle out to touch the circumference of the unit circle on the left ([see here](_URL_0_)). The height of the new opposite line formed is equal to the tangent of the smaller triangle.",
"I don't think it can be done like you're 5, but [read this section on the Wiki article for them](_URL_0_).\n\n",
"Draw a circle with a cross through its center. Then we draw a triangle in the following way: \"tan 4π/3\" means you rotate the hypotenuse (= radius of circle) 4π/3 radians from the x-axis positive line. This gives you a right triangle pointing downwards in the southwest quadrant of the circle, with its adjacent line lying on the negative x-axis.\n\nSOH CAH TOA : sine = opp/hyp, cosine = adjacent/hypotenuse, tangent = opposite/adjacent.\n\nThe tangent of this triangle = opp/adj, and we know the hypotenuse = 1.\n\nConvert 4π/3 to degrees of rotation on the unit circle. You get 240° (same thing as 4(180)/3, because pi = 180° counterclockwise rotation from position x-axis line).\n\nNow you know the angles of the triangle = 90°, 60° (because of our 240° knowledge), and 30° (because triangle's angles must add up to 180°). You also know the hypotenuse = 1 because it equals the unit circle's radius.\n\nIn a 30°-60°-90° triangle the sides are in the ratio 1 : 2 : √3. The hypotenuse we have of 1 must equate to the 2 in this ratio (makes sense geometrically). Therefore, the adjacent side must = 1/2, and the opposite side must = √3/2.\n\ntan(4π/3) = opp/adj = (√3/2)/(1/2) = √3\n\nThe tangent can be visually represented by extending the triangle out to touch the circumference of the unit circle on the left ([see here](_URL_0_)). The height of the new opposite line formed is equal to the tangent of the smaller triangle."
]
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9dhyms | why can’t those liquid meal replacements completely substitute the benefits of eating real solid food? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9dhyms/eli5_why_cant_those_liquid_meal_replacements/ | {
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"You eat solid foods to get nutrients. However nutrients do not have to be solid. Once liquidfied the nutrients can be drunk or given through an IV. ",
"They can. The problem is that unless they are made specifically for you, then the nutrients in them may be unsuitable or in incorrect amounts related to your requirements. "
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64h76k | why do video games crash and stop working, rather than produce an error and move on? | For example, if the game is told to do something with an object that doesn't exist, why does the entire game need to stop? Couldn't it function without moving the non-existent object? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/64h76k/eli5_why_do_video_games_crash_and_stop_working/ | {
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"In most cases, carrying on after interacting with something that's not there would result in more impossible interactions - either caused by the original missing thing or by whatever caused that thing to be missing.\n\nIf you let the game keep running in such a circumstance you'll get more and more errors, and a significant chance of crashing the whole computer system on which the game is running, so games are often designed to stop rather than take the risk of starting to overwhelm all the system resources.",
"If the game was engineered to do that, then yes it could.\n\nGames, and most other programs, are actually very fragile and have no way to adapt to anything unexpected.\n\nWhen the game has to deal with moving an object that doesn't exist, this is something unexpected, and so it breaks.",
"I'm speaking from a general programming standpoint, not as a game dev, so my information may be inaccurate. That being said:\n\nPrograms that crash do so because they try to execute an impossible action. Either dividing by zero, accessing memory that doesn't exist, etc. This causes crashes because, if we didn't, and just continued blindly executing instructions, it could result in a worse scenario than the crash. Sure, if its trying to move a non-existent random object, maybe its not a thing that would actually disrupt the gameplay at all. But (for example) it could have been trying to activate a plot-critical quest. A crash at least lets the player start from their last save point: if we didn't crash, the quest could just not show up. Then, the player saves, overwriting their uncorrupted file with the new, unbeatable save file, and now cannot play any further in the game without restarting.\n\nA good example of this is the Missingno bug from the old Pokemon games. It didn't cause a crash, but it was entirely possible that the bug could corrupt your save file to the point you were forced to start over. If the game had crashed when this bug started happening, instead of continuing to work with unintended consequences, people may have only lost a couple of hours of progress, as opposed to their entire save file. (Note, this wasn't a \"conscious descision\" to not crash the game, it just so happened to be a bug of a type that didn't cause a crash. However, its still a good example of what happens when bugs of any sort don't cause a crash.)\n\n\nTL;DR: Games crash because worse things could happen if they didn't",
"They do both; if they can move on when the error occurs, they will, but you only get to know about the times when they can't move on and are forced to crash.",
"So, as a programmer, my game level might reference an object called \"Enemy_45\". In the program, I request this object. The code either tells me where that object is in memory, or, if it doesn't exist, it gives me a special value for a memory location that doesn't exist. \n\nI ask for the object at that location that doesn't exist. The default behaviour of a computer program when you ask for that is to crash. Programmer prefer this to happen, because we know something has gone wrong and we can fix it. Otherwise strange things happen and it can be hard to spot.\n\nI could write it so that I test \"If this memory location is the 'non-existent' value then don't do anything\". There might even be a good reason to do this (for example, if we allow users to create their own levels we don't want to crash, although perhaps we should come up with an error message) but usually we expect all the assets to be correct and validated. ",
"Most answers are covering programming in general, but the question is about games, which typically do have a different response when their code finds an abnormality.\n\n*Mission critical* systems are regarded by their fault tolerance. They can't just stop doing their job whenever they face an unexpected condition. An hospital device's software can't just let the patient die if it finds a null pointer or something. In most cases mission critical systems would log some info about the error (to be reviewed later) and \"move on\" whenever possible.\n\nVideo games on the other hand aren't mission critical. Nobody would die or lose money if they stop working now and then. In fact, it's in the best interest of everybody if they crash spectacularly whenever something odd happens in their code. Otherwise the error might get unnoticed or ignored and possibly never reported to the developer.\n"
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5kf6iz | why is it often only possible to focus on one eye when trying to look someone in the eyes | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5kf6iz/eli5_why_is_it_often_only_possible_to_focus_on/ | {
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"Having two eyes never meant we were able to focus on two things simultaneously. Our sight converges on whatever it is we're focusing on, and the stereoscopy provides us with depth perception. ",
"Both of your eyes are always looking at the same point. They move together. This allows for depth perception, among other things.",
"We are scanners. We rarely stare at a single spot when we look at something. The eye wants to scan back and forth to pick out detail and to ensure our blind spots aren't preventing us from seeing something. \n\nAt the same time, during a conversation we want to give the other person our attention by making eye contact. The problem is that eye contact means focusing your gaze on a single spot, which is un-natural. So we pick an eye and look into it to show our attention. It feels a little awkward because you are balancing interest with un-natural staring. You also don't want to scan around which is your instinct for fear that the other person will see your eyes flitting around and think you are checking them out and judging them. \n\nThe interesting thing is that many of us will look only at the persons right eye (we look to the left but since they are facing us it is their right eye) as this may feel less intimate than gazing into a persons left eye (looking to our right facing them). Try it some time and see if you feel comfortable with one eye, and strangely more intimate or being familiar if you look them in their other eye. \n\nThere could be an entire ELI5 about the unwritten rules in social interactions, dos and don'ts. "
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6g5m21 | how the u.k. elects a prime minister and what makes this most recent election so weird? | So I live in the U.S. and have been hearing about this election in the U.K. a lot lately. From what I've seen I know that you actually don't elect the Prime Minister directly. But what also fascinates me is that it seems like they the Prime Minister can call for an election even when it isn't technically time for one. Also, what makes this election so odd? I have heard that the current Prime Minister really messed up by calling this election.
Thanks in advance for any answers! | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6g5m21/eli5_how_the_uk_elects_a_prime_minister_and_what/ | {
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"The UK citizenry does not vote for the Prime Minister at all. They vote for their Member of Parliament (MP) which is roughly the equivalent of the US House of Representative, and then the party that gets control of Parliament (or coalition if on party does not get enough seats) chooses the Prime Minister. \n\nAnd yes, the UK can have elections just about whenever they want. ",
"You don't. Like in a lot of Parliamentary nations around the world the nation votes for representatives to protect their views in parliament. the parties in parliament then try to gain a majority by allying with each other and forming a stable government. this government then elects the PM from their ranks, usually selecting the leader of the largest government party. \n\nThe PM cannot call for an election whenever. To dissolve the house of commons either of the following conditions need to be met:\n\na ) the government fails a motion of no confidence (they no longer have the support of at least half the parliament)\n\nb ) if a hypermajority (2/3 of all seats) elect to dissolve the parliament and re-elect. \n\nMay called for an election and nearly all seats in the house of commons voted for the motion, triggering the re-election. \n\n\n\nAnd yeah, May is just uncharismatic, stiff, and the conservative manifesto is on some parts like someone read 1984 and thought \"This is a great idea! I'll have that!\"\n\nMay was a perfect storm of incompetence, doing almost everything she could wrong.",
" > Also, what makes this election so odd? I have heard that the current Prime Minister really messed up by calling this election.\n\nI haven't seen this addressed fully yet, so here we go.\n\nTheresa May wasn't actually voted in through the normal methods; she stepped in as Prime Minister after David Cameron resigned in the wake of the EU referendum. At the time this snap election was called, the Conservatives held a majority of Parliament seats, and were polling at an even larger majority. The intention was to carry this through to winning even more seats, thereby both solidifying their leadership and legitimising May as Prime Minister.\n\nIt's backfired horribly. The Tories' election campaign was a shambles from start to finish, and by contrast, the Labour Party's campaign was incredibly strong. As a result, the Tories have managed to lose enough seats that they're no longer the majority party.\n\nThis results in what's called a hung parliament, where no single party has the majority required to lead on its own. There are two solutions; hold another General Election and hope to win a majority, or form a coalition government with other parties, such that your total number of seats comprises a majority. Reportedly, May is already making arrangements to attempt to form a coalition and secure the necessary seats to remain in power.",
"No, in 2011 the Fixed Term Parliament Act 2011 was passed meaning that by law Parliament would hold an election on the first Thursday in May 5 years after the last election, thus the next election was held on 7 May 2015. However the Act made two provisions for a early election, if the House of Commons resolves \"That this House has no confidence in Her Majesty's Government\", an early general election is held, unless the House of Commons subsequently resolves \"That this House has confidence in Her Majesty's Government\". This second resolution must be made within fourteen days of the first. Though a new Government could also form. Or if the House of Commons, with the support of two-thirds of its total membership (including vacant seats), resolves \"That there shall be an early parliamentary general election\".\nThe later option led to the snap election.\nBefore the FTP Act 2011 the Prime Minister had to request the Monarch dissolve Parliament, they didn't have the power themselves though I don't believe the Monarch could really reject the request. \n \nThe Party with the most seats will likely form the new Government, the last Government remains in place though if the PM can't continue they'd resign and recommend the Queen appoints the leader of the largest party to be the new PM. She can however appoint any Lord or MP to be the PM, the last Lord PM, was appointed be Queen-Empress Victoria, was led by the Marquess of Salisbury and ended in 1902. \n \n > Also, what makes this election so odd? I have heard that the current Prime Minister really messed up by calling this election. \n \nThat is being very polite about the matter. When Theresa May called for the election her net approval was +50, Jeremy Corbyn (leader of the Most Loyal Opposition) was at -20. At the time of the vote Theresa May was at -22 and Corbyn had remained stagnent at -20. She dropped 70 points. When she called the election in a 2 way poll of who'd be the best PM, Theresa May or Jermey Corbyn Corbyn finished third, after Don't Know. \n \nThe Conservative Party was polling at close to 50% of the vote when the election was called, Labour were at 25%. The actual vote was 43% Conservative 40% Labour. \n \nShe went from a Conservative Majority to a Minority, a lot of the campaign she linked Corbyn to IRA terrorism and claimed it'd be a coalition of Chaos. She is now going into coalition with the DUP, a party linked to terrorism with what in Great Britian is seen as extreme views. \n \nThree weeks before the election she was predicted to get 414 seats \nTwo weeks before the election she was predicted to get 370 seats \nA week before the election she was predicted to get 370 seats \nThe Exit Poll showed her getting 314 seats. \nShe got 317. You need 326 to have a majority. Before the election they had a majority. \n \nShe lost the seat of Lincoln, the oldest seat in the UK, it being established in 1265. \nShe lost what would be considered safe Tory seats and lost Ministers."
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btsaad | how is sweating good for your health? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/btsaad/eli5_how_is_sweating_good_for_your_health/ | {
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"It keeps you from overheating and flushes out your sweat glands, keeping them from clogging and getting infected.",
"Sweating is our way of cooling down so we don’t overheat. When we sweat our skin gets wet and as that water evaporates, it cools us off. It is the same thing that happens when you get out of the pool or the shower and haven’t dried off yet, so it feels really cold."
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196rhz | why you get thrown into a corner when you are driving around a bend but don't when you fly in circles? | Just about to get on board and was thinking about this | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/196rhz/eli5_why_you_get_thrown_into_a_corner_when_you/ | {
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"Because the plane banks, you feel the turn as pushing down on you rather than to the side like in a car."
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4r2hc7 | why did socialism and communism reach mainstream political status in europe & asia, but remained comparatively fringe in the us? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4r2hc7/eli5_why_did_socialism_and_communism_reach/ | {
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"Perhaps it was because the United States was not weakened by war while socialism and communism were coming up. Would communism have been able to take over Russia without WWI? ",
"We have a strong sense of property rights.\n \nWe are very individualistic (even when we are not).\n \nThe atheism of communism was a big turn off (Imagine what would have happened if communism was Christian instead of atheist)\n \nEdit: additionally, consider the concept of the gospel of wealth in the US",
"Thank the American Dream. \n\nYour average working Americans don't see themselves as an exploited working class. They're just waiting for their big break to become millionaires. Socialism isn't in the best interest of the people on top, and thanks to the *American Dream* we're all just a hop skip and a jump from being millionaires. ",
"These forms of government seem to creep in when the citizens are in distress. Think of FDRs new deal. After the Great Depression, all of these social programs took hold and they were hailed as socialist but they got through the door because of huge financial problems that affected people across the board. People across economic lines, political lines, it didn't matter anymore: the Great Depression didn't discriminate. This made it easier to pass the legislation necessary to begin the socialist state. Everyone benefit.\n\nWar seems to have the same effect. Both world wars crippled Europe and war doesn't discriminate. After the Second World War, the US provided aid to rebuild their infrastructure (Marshall plan) and that government aid is essentially a socialist policy. They also used this momentum to pass many social welfare programs like the UKs National Health Care service (1948) and Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and Finland followed suit within the next 16 years.\n\nCommunism had a different route. Most of these countries were developing countries, (third world) not developed like Europe already was. Countries that became communist were countries the USSR could look to as political allies. They would send in spies, money, and resources to countries that would agree to have communism. The biggest driver of this was that they would protect from the US's imperial rule (a big issue during the Cold War). Seeing this as a threat, the US then started picking up its own allies and supporting its friends with money to overthrow any communist groups forming in their country. It was a race of who could funnel more money and man power into the country of their choosing and that included funding political campaigns for people in their ideology. Then you have gave to convince people of your economic success (which the USSR and USA both had at the time) and persuade them that they could make money by changing their economy to either a capitalist or communist one and it was easier to go communist because capitalism relied on some countries failing in order to succeed."
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ly1gt | in sound, what is a note? | What is it about, say, C-sharp that makes it C-sharp? How come you can play the same note on two different instruments and it sounds totally different, yet people still claim it's the same note? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ly1gt/eli5_in_sound_what_is_a_note/ | {
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"Music Q's! Love 'em.\n\nHere's the deal with \"tone\" or \"timbre\". When I play a single note (let's take your C# and change it a bit to be an A, because I'm a lazy, lazy bastard of a musician) I am not *actually* playing a single note. I am playing a single note that CAUSES a bunch of notes that your brain (and mine) interprets as a single note. This is because each individual note is a frequency, right? This means:\n\nA440. A concert \"A\", as it's called, is a column of air wobbling 440 times per second. You can fit another note in there, tho. If it wobbles 440 times per second, then if you wobbled *twice* within each of those wobbles, you'd have 880 times per second. This happens to be also an A, 880. This is an octave above the original note. Nifty!\n\nWhat about more wobbling, you say? Let's do it! 3 wobbles to 1 in your original A440. That's 1320. This is not another A, because each octave is twice the frequency of the previous. What is it? Turns out to be a 5th.\n\nKeep on going up, and you got what's called 'overtones' or 'harmonic overtones' or the 'overtone series' or some things. If you play an A, then you get along with it, for free, an A 1 octave up, a 5th above that (E), an A 2 octaves up, a major 3rd above that (C#), a minor 3rd above that (E an octave above the other E), and so on 'til it gets too small to hear the differences.\n\nSuper cool! Then if there's enough energy in the tone, each of *those* things will toss out tiny little harmonic series-es, giving you 'partials'. So, now you hopefully believe me that 1 note is lots of notes.\n\nSo why, when a trumpet a sax a clarinet and a vocalist all play/sing the same note (A440) does it SOUND different. Simple! The way the instrument is shaped contributes to more or fewer of these harmonics speaking out louder or softer. Your ear interprets this as the difference in tone between the pitches.\n\nBonus #1: The oboe is the instrument which plays the pitch for the rest of the orchestra to tune to because it has a very simple, pure overtone series, making it easiest to hear the fundamental pitch without all that other stuff mucking it up.\n\nBonus #2: I kinda lied, other things contribute to timbre, like the attack and decay of a note. But this is the harmonic component of timbre.\n\nAsk me anything else. Psychoacoustics is fun!",
" > C-sharp that makes it C-sharp\n\nIt is a certain frequency, a wave that you can hear.\n\n > different instruments and it sounds totally different\n\ninstruments not only let you hear that actual, pure \"c-sharp\" frequency but also a lot of other waves that come from the instrument's body, materials and constructions and means of sound production - harmonics, overtones etc... plus different instruments have different attack and decay and focus on certain frequencies a bit more than others and all this together ringing at the same time will make for the characteristic sound of an instrument.",
"Music Q's! Love 'em.\n\nHere's the deal with \"tone\" or \"timbre\". When I play a single note (let's take your C# and change it a bit to be an A, because I'm a lazy, lazy bastard of a musician) I am not *actually* playing a single note. I am playing a single note that CAUSES a bunch of notes that your brain (and mine) interprets as a single note. This is because each individual note is a frequency, right? This means:\n\nA440. A concert \"A\", as it's called, is a column of air wobbling 440 times per second. You can fit another note in there, tho. If it wobbles 440 times per second, then if you wobbled *twice* within each of those wobbles, you'd have 880 times per second. This happens to be also an A, 880. This is an octave above the original note. Nifty!\n\nWhat about more wobbling, you say? Let's do it! 3 wobbles to 1 in your original A440. That's 1320. This is not another A, because each octave is twice the frequency of the previous. What is it? Turns out to be a 5th.\n\nKeep on going up, and you got what's called 'overtones' or 'harmonic overtones' or the 'overtone series' or some things. If you play an A, then you get along with it, for free, an A 1 octave up, a 5th above that (E), an A 2 octaves up, a major 3rd above that (C#), a minor 3rd above that (E an octave above the other E), and so on 'til it gets too small to hear the differences.\n\nSuper cool! Then if there's enough energy in the tone, each of *those* things will toss out tiny little harmonic series-es, giving you 'partials'. So, now you hopefully believe me that 1 note is lots of notes.\n\nSo why, when a trumpet a sax a clarinet and a vocalist all play/sing the same note (A440) does it SOUND different. Simple! The way the instrument is shaped contributes to more or fewer of these harmonics speaking out louder or softer. Your ear interprets this as the difference in tone between the pitches.\n\nBonus #1: The oboe is the instrument which plays the pitch for the rest of the orchestra to tune to because it has a very simple, pure overtone series, making it easiest to hear the fundamental pitch without all that other stuff mucking it up.\n\nBonus #2: I kinda lied, other things contribute to timbre, like the attack and decay of a note. But this is the harmonic component of timbre.\n\nAsk me anything else. Psychoacoustics is fun!",
" > C-sharp that makes it C-sharp\n\nIt is a certain frequency, a wave that you can hear.\n\n > different instruments and it sounds totally different\n\ninstruments not only let you hear that actual, pure \"c-sharp\" frequency but also a lot of other waves that come from the instrument's body, materials and constructions and means of sound production - harmonics, overtones etc... plus different instruments have different attack and decay and focus on certain frequencies a bit more than others and all this together ringing at the same time will make for the characteristic sound of an instrument."
]
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[],
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8e5idw | how can space be constantly growing? what emptiness is it replacing, if any? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8e5idw/eli5_how_can_space_be_constantly_growing_what/ | {
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"It's not thought to be replacing anything. Rather over time, any two very distant points in space are further apart. \n\nOur leading theories of the universe are one that is infinite. There's no point where you reach an edge of \"stuff,\" rather it's voids, galaxies, stars, and planets, in every direction forever. So there's not some sort of 'edge' that is encroaching into another sort of space.\n\nOn very large scales (much larger than even galaxies) these objects are becoming farther apart over time. This is the expansion. "
]
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[]
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||
21bj63 | why don't americans get medical operations done abroad to avoid the staggering costs at home? | I just don't understand why this is not a viable option. It seems like it would help alleviate the financial burden for many Americans. Surgeries can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in the US. Wouldn't a round-trip ticket to a European country with the price of surgery be cheaper?
Thanks for helping! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/21bj63/eli5_why_dont_americans_get_medical_operations/ | {
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"_URL_0_\n\nthey do",
"First, people put quality over cost. If they feel the US has better quality healthcare, that's where they'll stay - especially for risky things like surgery.\n\nSecond, the cost of a ticket is out of reach for most people who have trouble paying for healthcare to begin with,\n\nThird, depending on the country, a foreign visitor may not be able to take advantage of their socialized healthcare and would still have to pay.\n\nFourth - travel and surgery rarely go well together, so they would need to stay at their destination long enough to recuperate, and living expenses can add up fast when travelling.",
"Flying( or any form of travel ) isn't an excellent idea while recovering from major surgery.",
"A rather large chunk of operations are done pretty urgently and you don't have time to wait. Most American's don't have passports and it takes several months to get one. So that's a part of it as well."
]
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"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_tourism"
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vg9yo | v-sync in video games. | If I have a low-end PC, do I want it on or off? What is it actually doing? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/vg9yo/eli5_vsync_in_video_games/ | {
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"Monitors don't paint the whole picture at once. Now with flatscreens it's even more confusing than it used to be so let's assume a CRT. The picture is created by lighting up the picture starting in the upper left corner and then going row by row to the bottom right. Then that starts again really fast.\n\nHow often the whole picture is redrawn is the vertical refresh rate. How often a new line is created is the horizontal refresh rate.\n\nOnce your computer has drawn a picture it could be displayed. Unfortunately it can not just push a new picture to the monitor whenever it wants to because the monitor has to finish the picture it is currently drawing. So when the computer is too fast the picture changes early: while drawing the old picture its content changes. This results in so called tearing. The top and bottom parts of the picture don't align perfectly and you get a offset effect.\nThere are ways to solve that. One is to use a buffer. There are two places to store pictures and as long as the picture is drawn to the screen the content of one place may not change. Once that's done the two buffers are exchanged. Of course that means that the computer may calculate more pictures than you actually get to see, wasting processing power.\n\nAnother way is vsync. In a perfect world the computer calculates only lines that have already been sent to the screen and always finishes lines before they need to be drawn. On old machines where the programmers had total control over the system that worked very well. That's why Mario on the original famicom was smoother than emulators are.\n\nA problem is if the computer can't finish calculating in time. The picture is not ready but it has to be displayed. So either you display the old picture again. Or you display a mix of the picture you already have and fill the rest in with the old picture. Now the computer is late already and my guess is that it will still finish calculating the picture. then start the next and be late again. Which is still better than never finishing the next picture.\n\nSo do you want it on or off? I don't know. If your computer is fast enough to deliver the next picture in time it should give you the same experience as having it off while creating less load on the system and thus less heat. What actually happens depends on so many factors that your best bet is to give it a try and use what feels better.\n\nWhat I really don't get is why with Flatscreens being basically a kind of memory we don't get more variable refreshs. Shouldn't it be okay to have a minimum and maximum refresh rate? The refresh rate is not a useful timebase in most cases anyways. Pal is 50Hz NTSC is 60Hz. Cinema material is at rates that don't fit evenly in either. Imho that needs to be solved. It's like having a 800x600 resolution on a 1024x768 panel except in time instead of a plane.\n\nLY5: You flip through a flipbook and the pages need to be drawn while you're flipping. With vsync on the guy drawing the pages needs to put them in at a constant rate. If he is faster everything's great. If he isn't things become sloppy in different ways and you need to try what looks better to you. \nWith vsync off a lot of pictures go to the trash and the guy starts sweating without you benefitting.",
"tl;dr - Enabling vsync ensures that your monitor's displaying of images stays in sync with your video card's drawing of the in-game world. Disabling it can lead to lesser image quality. Enabling it can lead to slightly more control lag, but probably not enough for anyone who's not a pro gamer to notice. If you want your games to look good, you will usually want it on. However, *forcing* it to be on all the time may not necessarily be a good thing. It's usually best to let the individual game choose whether it wants to use vsync or not.\n\n\nSo, first you need to understand how visual processing in the human brain works. When the brain gets a quickly changing series of still images sent to it by the eye, it will smooth out the transitions between these still images, and perceive a smoothly changing image instead of a series of rapid \"jumps.\"\n\nComputer monitors take advantage of this. They redraw the image they're displaying between 50-80 times per second. This is fast enough so that when there are small changes between consecutive images, the brain perceives a smooth transition between images.\n\nThe idea of vsync originated in older CRT monitors. Older CRT monitors paint the image onto the screen by sweeping an electron beam across the screen, hitting individual pixels with exactly the right amount of electrons to make them glow the correct amount. The pixels are hit by the beam in a strict order that never changes. The beam sweeps across the screen horizontally, lighting up a row of pixels. Then it moves on to the next row, which is immediately adjacent to the row it just swept. It keeps going in this fashion, painting horizontal lines one after the other, until the whole screen has been drawn. Now the electron beam has to be re-pointed back at the first line.\n\nThere is where vsync comes in. Vsync is the period of time it takes for the electron beam to be moved back up to the first line. It isn't a long time by human standards (generally less than a thousandth of a second), but it actually turns out that a modern computer can do quite a bit of computation in that short vsync interval.\n\nIn particular, it turns out that if you tell the video card \"give me the next frame, now!\" during the vsync, it can usually give it to you. (Often because it has the frame already drawn and stored in fast memory, waiting for you.) Then the monitor paints that frame on the screen, you look at it for 1/70th of a second (or whatever), and all is well. The next vsync happens, the next frame is fetched from the video card and painted to the screen, you look at briefly, all good. This gives a very consistent image on the screen. Motion looks smooth because everything is moving very consistently.\n\nNow consider what would happen if the video card was halfway through drawing the game world when the monitor asked for the next frame. The video card might send a partially drawn image to the monitor. Strange things could happen. If an object in the game was moving, you might see that object half in one position and half in another. You'd only see this for maybe 1/70th of a second, but sharper-eyed people can spot this \"tearing\" effect and it's kind of annoying. Vsync prevents this tearing.\n\nNow, you'd think that with modern LCD monitors, this wouldn't be a problem. LCD monitors don't use a sweeping electron beam. Instead they brighten and dim each pixel individually, with an individual control line for each pixel. As it turns out, though, the way a video card output a video signal, it still chops the signal up into individual frames. And if the video card has vsync disabled, it might send part of one frame and part of another frame down the cable to the monitor. So the image could look torn, even though the LCD monitor itself doesn't have a vsync.\n\nThere are disadvantages to vsync. For starters, turning on vsync will limit the frame rate of your video card to what your monitor is capable of displaying. This also means that the visual response to your keyboard and mouse inputs may get delayed a little bit. Again, this is something that mostly pro gamers care about. The difference is very small, probably below the threshold of reaction for nearly everybody people. Also, some game engines pay attention to the timing of vsync, and ensure that the video card doesn't send out partial frames. In these cases, forcing vsync isn't a good idea either, as it could in theory half your frame-rate if the vsync of the card and monitor are just exactly wrong in terms of their relative timing.\n\nSee also _URL_0_"
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"http://www.tweakguides.com/Graphics_9.html"
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|
ag3mp8 | how can the government lower college cost effectively? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ag3mp8/eli5_how_can_the_government_lower_college_cost/ | {
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"The government could stop subsidizing banks that offer predatory loans to students, and thus stop fueling the insane spiral of tuition and debt.",
"Severely restrict Pell Grant's and lending for college. The primary reason that it's so expensive is because the general public has too easy access to those funds and colleges have done a great job of gate keeping the general public by saying \"you want to make more than $30k a year? Better get ready for $50k in student loans!\"\n\nLimit grants and lending to STEM fields only (if someone wants a, for example, art degree, they can get a scholarship). Require accreditation at high levels for all degrees offered.\n\nThen you'll see how quickly the price drops, because it will force colleges to be competitive again."
]
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773gfx | why can't computers use storage devices as ram? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/773gfx/eli5_why_cant_computers_use_storage_devices_as_ram/ | {
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"text": [
"They can and do, it's called a swap space(unix)/paging file(windows). It can't be the main RAM source though due to speed limitations. "
]
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|
2xmdn4 | what's the difference between voice, text, and data on modern cell networks? | Isn't voice just encoded data like VoIP? Isn't all cell communication 'data' ? Are we just billed this way because of historical reasons? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2xmdn4/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_voice_text_and/ | {
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"text": [
"Voice requires the necessary bandwidth to be reserved for the call duration, while data services take whatever is available. Messages skip the call setup phase entirely."
]
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|
476ogb | is it possible to develop a resistance to motion sickness through constant exposure? | As someone who's struggled with carsickness and motion sickness throughout his life I wondered: would it be possible to eventually develop a resistance to it by repeatedly exposing yourself to motion sickness inducing situations? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/476ogb/eli5_is_it_possible_to_develop_a_resistance_to/ | {
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"The short answer is maybe. Habituation helps most people, but not all. There are a bunch of coping mechanisms that help me, but there are some combinations of motion that will still get me. [This](_URL_0_) article gives you a pretty good overview. The Scopolamine patches work for me, but only if I put one on before I'm exposed to motion. Good luck.",
"Definitely *to some extent* for *most people*. Although it's probably better described as \"tolerance\" than \"resistance\".\n\nThat is to say, most people can develop some tolerance. Some people can get rid of motion sickness entirely, others can't develop any tolerance to it at all.\n\nWhy? Because for some people their inner ear is just too sensitive to be able to get used to \"artificial\" motion.\n\nAs a child I had terrible motion sickness. After a few years of travelling on buses regularly I became fairly immune to them unless on a very bad road. When I learned to drive, however, I stopped getting buses and now I've developed motion sickness on buses again.\n\nEssentially, motion sickness is your brain not being able to \"combine\" the signals it's getting from your eyes seeing directional motion but with some objects moving and not others, from your ears feeling the \"jolts\" of motion and acceleration/deceleration, but not the constant motion, and arms/legs not propelling you anywhere.\n\nTo your brain, these things can't possibly be happening at the same time. It assumes, therefore, that you're ill and have been poisoned and it tries to remove the poison by making you sick. This is why it can be especially bad if you try to read (now we have a non-moving item) or play games on your phone (the phone isn't moving, the picture on the phone is moving differently to the rest of the world...)\n\nAs with most things, however, the brain can learn and also becomes less sensitised to things over time - so if you get the bus every day, your brain will start to realise that the motion isn't due to being poisoned (particularly if you distract yourself during the journey enough that it isn't focusing on the motion). This can reduce sensitivity, particularly to gentler motion - but typically still leads to you feeling ill if the motion is very bad.\n\nWorth noting, also, that we get used to \"up/down\" and \"rocking\" motion far faster and more effectively than we do \"turning\" motion. You can get used to a train or plane (even fairly bad turbulence) far more easily than you can get used to a bus on a twisty, turning road. This is partly because we can better handle a repetitive, limited motion, and partly because \"turning\" is a very un-natural motion compared to, say, sitting on a tree branch.",
"It was for me, as an aviator who struggled with motion sickness. I attended a program that involved inducing motion sickness without triggering the extreme responses, and using various methods to recognize and reduce the bodies stressors. Mostly, it involved sitting in a chair, in the dark, that was positioned on a turntable. The technician would start the chair rotating (2 rpm initially), and then I would move my head in different axis until symptoms started. Then, I would remain still (while rotating) and use relaxation techniques to decrease symptoms. I did 30 min sessions, twice a day, for a week. Lost a few pounds too, but it worked, and I kept my career. - [ Here is a research paper from the Canadian military for more info.](_URL_0_)"
]
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"http://www.aafp.org/afp/2014/0701/p41.html"
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[],
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"http://pubs.drdc-rddc.gc.ca/BASIS/pcandid/www/engpub/DDW?W%3DSYSNUM=516211"
]
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6ka414 | why do you feel light headed when you quickly get out of bed? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6ka414/eli5_why_do_you_feel_light_headed_when_you/ | {
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"When you go upright quickly, gravity is suddenly asserting itself against your circulation in a more dramatic fashion. Your blood has a lot 'higher' to go when you are standing up, than when you are laying down.\n\nYour body works to constrict blood vessels lower in your body to help with this, but the process is not instantaneous. \n\nSo when you stand up, you may experience a brief drop in blood pressure at your brain, which causes the disruption. Typically this passes quickly, but in more severe cases can lead to several seconds of disorientation, muscle weakness, visual/audio impairment, or even fainting. \n\nSome medications can exacerbate the condition as well.",
"ELI5: Gravity pulls blood from the heart so your brain won't get enough oxygen and nutrients for the brain (you get dizzy) \n\nIn depth :\nWhen you lay down, blood flow to the heart is facilitated by not having to work against gravity. To preserve a normal blood pressure in this scenario, blood vessels dilate and the heart beats with less force of contraction. \n\nWith these physiological processes taking place, if you suddenly get up from bed, gravity makes blood return to the heart more difficult and blood pressure initially drops. Less blood gets pumped to the brain and you get light headed. "
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24nnzy | why is a cinema advert called a trailer? other things that trail go behind the main object (car trailer, contrails, a trailer stalking an animal...), not before. | Seems very odd to me. Did film trailers originally air *after* the motion picture? Or is there a different origin to the word in this context? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/24nnzy/eli5_why_is_a_cinema_advert_called_a_trailer/ | {
"a_id": [
"ch8v8oa",
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"text": [
"Originally \"trailers\" were shown at the end of a feature film.",
"Trailers did trail. But people left before the trailer played. So cinemas moved trailers to the start. "
]
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[],
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|
1orxxb | how do websites that stream tv shows for free earn money? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1orxxb/eli5_how_do_websites_that_stream_tv_shows_for/ | {
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"text": [
"Ads and subscription services.",
"Mostly money-per-views and advertisements attached to them. Also, many are sponsored by investors willing to support the site in hopes it will be profitable."
]
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[],
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||
bqt4cv | why does toothpaste and mouthwash give that intense cold and sometimes spicy feeling in your mouth, when it isn’t actually cold or spicy? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bqt4cv/eli5_why_does_toothpaste_and_mouthwash_give_that/ | {
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"text": [
"The neurons that are sensitive to cold are also triggered by the presence of the flavour compound menthol.\n\nSo a drop of menthol mouthwash on your tongue sends basically the same message to your brain as a drop of cold water would.",
"The sensors in your skin and mouth that detect heat and cold are also set off by the chemicals in things like mint and peppers, purely by a quirk of nature."
]
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[],
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||
3o4u8p | w4 tax paperwork and claiming exempt? | What are the requirements to file exempt from taxes? I've looked up the two requirements but I dont understand. I'm 23, don't file taxes, almost have always claimed exempt for the few jobs I've had and make far less then 10,000 a year.
Can your claims be changed by your employer or irs from exempt to something else without informing you? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3o4u8p/eli5_w4_tax_paperwork_and_claiming_exempt/ | {
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"text": [
"You should file taxes regardless of how much money you make. There are refundable credits that you can qualify for.\n\nIf you expect to owe no taxes, and did not owe any last year, you can tell your employer not to withhold anything by indicating as such on line 7 of form W4. They cannot change your withholding status without a signed W4 from you. \n\nIf your employer did withhold taxes and you want to switch to exempt, you have to file a tax return in order to get that money they withheld back.\n\nMake sense?"
]
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[]
] |
|
37viwd | why do photos load differently when i have slow internet. | To elaborate, whenever my internet is slow, I've seen two different ways that photos will often load. Sometimes they'll load top to bottom and other times they'll load the whole image in really low quality first and then gradually keep increasing the quality. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/37viwd/eli5why_do_photos_load_differently_when_i_have/ | {
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"It depends on the file format of the image. Most image files contain one giant representation of the image and your browser will receive the image data from top to bottom so it'll start displaying the top while it downloads the rest.\n\nOther image formats (progressive JPEG for example, I don't know if there are others in common use) contain a very small, low quality copy of the whole image that the browser can display straight away, the rest of the file contains more scans of the image, each of which adds more detail. As the file downloads the browser will gradually add this new information to make the image sharper.",
"It depends on whoever created the photo. When they are saving the image, they have a option to save as “traditional” or “interlaced”.\n\nThe traditional mode orders the data of the entire image in the top-to-bottom way, so when you download 50% of the image you have the complete top half.\n\nThe interlaced mode contains first the data of an overview, low quality version of the image, then more data that forms a better quality image, and so on. So when you download 50% of it you have the complete image, but at a worst quality than 100%.\n\n[This gif](_URL_3_) from Wikipedia illustrate how this method is made. It doesn’t show another process called “interpolation”, which is whenever the browser receives the first blue pixels of the interlaced image, it tries to guess which pixels are in between, so you never see the white spaces as in the gif, but instead a overall pixelated image, like [this right one](_URL_0_).\n\n---\n\nThe interlaced method is used to improve your experience in slow internet, so you can have a better idea of how the image looks like earlier and choose if you want to stop or continue loading it.\n\nIt was way more popular years ago, when internet was limited to 56kbps dial-up connections. Today, with broadband, most people just don’t notice there’s a difference between the methods, so they just use whatever is the default option of their image editor.\n\n---\n\nSources:\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_2_"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
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"http://i.imgur.com/EoCH7K6.gif",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlacing_%28bitmaps%29",
"http://www.brandon.me/blogging-tools/visual-design/2010/11/difference-interlaced-non-interlaced-images/",
"http://i.imgur.com/KGxsOLk.gif"
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3u40fk | why is advised to create a 500 calorie deficit through exercise to achieve weight loss. why not just eat 500 calories less? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3u40fk/eli5_why_is_advised_to_create_a_500_calorie/ | {
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"1. exercise is generally great for you.\n2. studies have shown very clearly that people are more succesful over longer periods of time with the exercise option than the food option.\n3. exercise can result in muscle mass which increase your basel metabolic rate, which means you're burning more calories just being. That lasts.",
"Metabolism comes into play. You don't want your body to get to hungry or too full. Neither help to loose weight correctly and without negative side effects.",
"it's not wrong. if you want to lose weight, you create a deficit. this can be achieved by simply eating less or by working out to burn off additional calories.\n\nfor a lot of people, eating less is simpler so they do that\n\nexercise is generally healthy for your body in ways other than weight loss. its good for your heart and muscles and all of that.\n\n\nif you're talking just about losing weight, eat less. if you want to be healthier, eat less and work out.",
"When it comes to loosing weight, a change to your diet is a lot more important/effective than simply exercising.\n\nBut to get/be/stay healthy overall, exercise is probably just as or more important than your diet. "
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c3e17h | how does a town's water supply become decontaminated of e coli? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c3e17h/eli5_how_does_a_towns_water_supply_become/ | {
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"The water company uses chemicals to kill it, generally chlorine. It doesn't take that much chlorine so you don't taste it in the water.",
"There's two major category of tests that are done for water safety.\n\nThe first tests what is called the microbial quality. This is a measure of the total number of microorganisms (although really only those that grow under certain conditions). Water always has *some* microroganisms in it, which doesn't mean it's unsafe.\n\nThe other category tests for signs of animal fecal contamination. The proxy for this is *E. coli*. *E. coli* does not grow \"in the wild\" for the most part. If it's in water, it is presumed to have come from animal waste (this isn't necessarily scientifically true, but it is how we base our water quality policy). The problem is the features which distinguish *E. coli* from \"wild-growing\" bacteria are somewhat subtle, so the classic test relies on the ability of the bacteria to grow in bile. Health departments will usually issue a boil order anytime something meets certain conditions (basically: Gram negative rods that grow in bile). This is presumed to be positive for fecal contamination and *E. coli*, even though this is not actually a positive ID of *E. coli*. (A positive ID typically involves a DNA test, but it is bad policy to wait for these results). \n\nInterestingly, the vast majority of *E. coli* you might encounter from animal feces is quite harmless to humans when found in the water supply, mainly because there's just so little of it even after \"substantial\" contamination. It is just very uncommon for someone to actually get sick *from E. coli* from contaminated water. The *E. coli* is instead a proxy for much more dangerous animal gut microorganisms. \n\nBut, yea, it's from feces. Decontamination is some combination of identifying the source of contamination and treating the water. if the contamination occurs after processing, then it's a simple matter of stopping the contamination and letting the water run the contamination out. The volume of water is huge, and *E. coli* and other gut contaminants don't last in the supply for long without a constant new source. \n\nI taught microbiology to college students, and we always replicated these water quality tests. They fortunately always came back clean for tap water in our area!"
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3u0oqg | how do bail bonds work? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3u0oqg/eli5_how_do_bail_bonds_work/ | {
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"Let's say you get arrested for a crime. Your trial will be in three weeks.\n\nNow, we have an issue. You're innocent until proven guilty (at least in America). But at the same time, you're both a potential threat to society as well as a flight risk. So what do we do?\n\nThe answer is bail. You're ordered to stay in jail to await your trial. However, the judge will declare a bail amount for you. If you can pay the amount of money required, you're allowed to leave jail and go home until your trial starts. If you show up for your court date, you get the money you paid in bail back. \n\nThe idea is that bail is an insurance policy. If you give the court a bunch of money to get out of jail while you wait for trial, the idea is that you're not going to want to skip town and lose the money."
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7lu6az | what makes sunlight so special? why does it make your skin produce vitamin d but an uv lamp doesn't? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7lu6az/eli5_what_makes_sunlight_so_special_why_does_it/ | {
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"An UV lamp does make you produce vitamin D.\n\n\nThe main difference is the intensity of the light / radiation. Most lamps only work well if they are very close to you. Also, ideally they should be used very early in the morning. "
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fz6ql0 | why do some credit card readers tell you to insert and remove your card as quickly as possible and others tell you to leave it in for several seconds? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fz6ql0/eli5_why_do_some_credit_card_readers_tell_you_to/ | {
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"There are two ways you can insert a credit card:\n\nSwiping it through the strip, and inserting it to read the chip.\n\nReading the chip is much more secure than swiping the strip and guarantees that the credit card being used is, in fact, real. And because it is more secure, it takes longer to read the chip.\n\nI hope this answers your question. Cheers!",
"The ones that want you to go fast are reading the swipe strip.\n\nThe ones that want you to hold it are reading the chip.\n\n\nChip is more secure and the rest of the world has been using it for years.\n\nAmerica is currently catching up with the new tech, but there's a lot of POS out there that don't read chips."
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21w87y | since the gravitational pull of an object is based on the object's mass and not it's density, how does a black hole have such strong gravity when its the same star, just really really compressed? where does this mass come from, or is one's gravitational pull also based on it's density? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/21w87y/eli5_since_the_gravitational_pull_of_an_object_is/ | {
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"It has the same gravitational pull as a star, but because it's more dense objects can get much much closer to it then to a star without actually hitting it.\n\nBlack holes don't have more gravity than their corresponding star, it's just possible to get closer to it without colliding with it than a star. \n\nImagine a star, like this:\n\n ||||||||||||||||||||o||||||||||||||||||||\n\nthe o is the center. When light travels from the center, to the right:\n\n ||||||||||||||||||||o||| > |||||||||||||||||\n\nThere is still plenty of gravity pulling it to the right, so it's able to continue traveling out of the star, being slowed down just slightly.\n\nOnce it gets to the edge:\n\n ||||||||||||||||||||o|||||||||||||||||||| > \n\nThe majority of the mass of the star is too far away to pull it back, so it continues on forever:\n\n ||||||||||||||||||||o|||||||||||||||||||| > \n\nBut with a black hole, everything is more compressed:\n\n IIoII\n\nEven though there is the same amount of mass. So when light is emitted:\n\n IIoII > \n\nIt has all of the mass RIGHT next to it, and pulling entirely backwards. This is enough to cause the light to get pulled back in, creating what we call a black hole. It's not that the black hole has more mass though.\n"
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58vsxb | why do wooden power poles have so many staples and nails on them? is there a purpose? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/58vsxb/eli5_why_do_wooden_power_poles_have_so_many/ | {
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"Staples are probably leftovers from people stapling \"lost cat\" signs to them. Nails, could bet anything - election posters?",
"I've designed many-a-distribution system. The nails going from top to bottom are generally going to be for the ground wire (it connects under the butt of the pole to a ground plate or spiral wrap). \n\nAny nails and staples you see are generally from people illegally hanging signs on them."
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9xgj4x | what does "non-linear model" mean? | I'm having to do a sociology report for university which involves statistical research, and part of the report is that I have to explain the methods used in said research. However, when I look at the research itself, the methods section begins with "Non-linear models were estimated for three different health indicators", and as I've been told not to directly quote the work, I'm having trouble trying to phrase it in my own words, as I have no idea what a non-linear model actually is. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9xgj4x/eli5_what_does_nonlinear_model_mean/ | {
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"A linear regression model means that if you look at the graph that they drew up, its a linear line. Like its straight as a rule. A non-linear regression model means that the graph is a non-straight line. It could be exponential, or logarithmic, etc. It's curved. \n\nBecause \"non-linear model\" or \"non-linear regression model\" is a term for the technique, I think its fine to just use it as is. You're relaying the methods they used. It would be cruel to ask you to reword it, it's like asking you to reword \"multiply\""
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5cxyx8 | why would my brother's wife be called my sister-in-law? doesn't that imply that they became brother and sister? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5cxyx8/eli5_why_would_my_brothers_wife_be_called_my/ | {
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"No, it implies that she became your sister by marriage rather than blood relation. They are the actual married pair, and so by the same ruleset, they are husband and wife. The status change between them results in a set of changes between the non-blood family and blood family. But that *second* set of changes do not cause a similar secondary set of changes, and so on. In other words, the change in relationship between your brother and his wife (marriage) changes your relationship to the unrelated woman, now sister-in-law. the change in relationship in you gaining a sister-in-law does not result in any other change, (your brother gaining a sister-in-law through you).",
"Here's the funky way that I like to think of it: legally, in a lot of ways a married couple can be thought of like a single person - they can file joint tax returns, they can't be forced to testify (in many cases) against each other, they share ownership of most property and income obtained during the marriage, etc. That's a simplified way of putting it, but bear with me.\n\nSo if we think of your brother and wife as \"one person,\" then you have one sibling: your brother/sister. One of those parts is biological, the other is legal, so we have a special legal term for them. And neither of them is brother/sister to each other, because they're \"one person.\"\n\n"
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la7q4 | where did the phrase "bat shit crazy" come from? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/la7q4/eli5_where_did_the_phrase_bat_shit_crazy_come_from/ | {
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"I believe it's a clever play on the older term for the same thing, 'bats in the belfry', a belfry being the top bit of a bell tower. The idea being that a belfry with lots of bats in it will also have lots of bat shit. \n\nHence 'Bat shit crazy\"\n\nEDIT: Bats in the balfrey would come from the fact that a balfry infested with bats is unused and abandoned",
"I believe it's a clever play on the older term for the same thing, 'bats in the belfry', a belfry being the top bit of a bell tower. The idea being that a belfry with lots of bats in it will also have lots of bat shit. \n\nHence 'Bat shit crazy\"\n\nEDIT: Bats in the balfrey would come from the fact that a balfry infested with bats is unused and abandoned"
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31h1ii | on a walk with my dog, why does he not bark back at other dogs behind fences? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/31h1ii/eli5_on_a_walk_with_my_dog_why_does_he_not_bark/ | {
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"There could be a number of reasons. What breed is he? Some dogs are more apathetic towards other dogs. \n\n Could also be territorial. The dog barking at yours could be signaling their territorial claim, and your dog isn't challenging their claim. just moving along"
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1qw698 | why won't gas prices go back to pre-9/11 prices if we are producing as much if not more oil? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1qw698/eli5_why_wont_gas_prices_go_back_to_pre911_prices/ | {
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"Combination of speculation and OPEC controlling their production to keep prices inflated. ",
"Demand from India and China ramping up, weakened dollar from printing money out of thin air, speculators that are speculating high prices, instability in oil producing nations.",
"Inflation and demand. \n\nInflation is the slow devaluation of currency over time, usually kept to around 2-3% a year deliberately (this is done for a number of reasons, the most direct of which is that it encourages investment, since keeping money stuffed under your mattress means it loses value). Fixing a numerical target to 'beat' is therefore kind of pointless, since that number doesn't mean what it used to.\n\nDemand is the aggregate amount of stuff the economy is wanting to buy (in this case gas sold around the world). Supply and demand interact based on volume and price (higher price tends to mean lower demand, higher supply) but since you have to sell gas TO someone supply needs to equal demand. Supply of gas hasn't fallen off at all, but demand has risen massively, due to significantly higher energy use without a significant change in the make-up of how that energy is sourced.\n\nAs to some of the other answers, some are sensible-ish but most need some criticism. I think you can safely ignore the people saying it's OPEC (who export 40% of crude oil worldwide, and control 60% of the market for petroleum products) and their Illuminati ways. They're powerful and drive a lot of things in this arena, but they're the only player in town. Neither is it oil companies who charge \"whatever the fuck they want\". The Federal Reserve is supposed to foster a low rate of inflation (not zero, not too high), and the rising cost of oil is not a hidden tax (gas already has a really obvious tax on it, it's called [excise (US specific)](_URL_0_)). ",
"There's a few things going on.\n\nFirst and foremost is \"inflation.\" Basically, how much is money worth. If $1 is worth less, then the $1 of oil is worth less.\n\nSecond, we \"cut\" oil with Ethanol now (Corn Alcohol). The cost of Corn has skyrocketed, and continues to go up about 30% every year. The more it goes up, and the more ethanol we put in gas, the more gas costs.\n\nThird, \"Speculation\" in gas pricing. Basically, this is people betting on how much oil will be produced on any given day, how much said oil will be worth on any given day, etc. This all adds up to an \"upward\" trend in pricing.\n\nThe \"real value\" isn't changing\" much. A gallon of gas is around the same cost as a gallon of milk, and has been for a long time. The profit margin on it's actually really trim (the government makes more profit than big oil).",
"Economics is largely to blame, but I think another important factor to keep in mind is the decreasing quality of the oil.\n\nYes, The US will produce more oil in the coming years than the middle east, but this oil is much more difficult to process than middle eastern oil. Oil isn’t like water, you don’t just pump it out of the ground, filter it, maybe add some disinfectant and it’s good to go. Oil is a complex mixture of many different chemical, gasoline is just one small cut of that. \n\nGasoline is on the lighter end of the oil spectrum, and the new oil being produced by the US is very heavy. That means that it needs to be “cracked” to cut the hydrocarbon chains down to the gasoline size. This requires a lot of energy and usually a supply of hydrogen. \n\nAlso the new US oil is also “sour” which means it contains a lot of impurities that you don’t want in gasoline, (e.g. sulphur, acids, etc.) So these impurities need to be reacted (usually with Hydrogen) to make them easier to remove, and then chemically removed. This is also very energy intensive. Also the environmental standards for gasoline are increasing from 30ppm (IIRC) down to 10ppm. So now this dirtier oil has to be cleaned even more than it used to be. All these factors add to the cost that you pay at the pump.\n\nSource I am a chemical engineer working for an oil contractor. \n",
"a very simple answer is that the demand curve for oil is inelastic.\n\nthey can charge whatever they want and people will pay it.",
"Increased demand from a growing middle class in China, and to a lesser extent, India.",
"Whenever I hear people in the US mentioning the gas prices there I just get a little depressed :\n\nUS price per gallon average : USD 2.88, Netherlands price per gallon average : USD 8.91",
"Old oil wells in very productive areas [e.g. Saudi Arabia] cost $5 per barrel to pull oil out of the ground. The Saudis are very cautious about their oil supply because they are starting to run out, or they will start to run out (Saudi Aramco is owned by the King, so it's not exactly publically available information.) \n\nNew oil wells [e.g. the Bakken Shale in North Dakota] are much more expensive because it requires more equipment and more energy to get the oil out of the ground. It costs something like $60 or $80 a barrel to get that oil out of the ground. \n\nIf oil prices go below that point, they'll just stop drilling and producing, the supply will go down and the price will go up.",
"Oil is like drugs, once someone is hooked you can charge them whatever you like.",
"The minimum price for a service or resource is the cost to the producer plus whatever margin they need to stay in business. The maximum price is whatever they can convince consumers to pay for it. We're used to spending more now.",
"Many answers here that do not have an understanding for how oil prices, in particular how off shore oil prices, effect the price of gasoline. I will do my best to explain it in easy terms, the truth is the price of gasoline is essentially set by the marginal barrel of crude oil which is an off shore barrel. Until the off shore barrel is eliminated completely from the USA you will see prices set by this barrel.\n\n[Square bracket for detail beyond ELI5]\n\n[By we, I assume you mean USA and you are referring to the new tight oil, aka shale oil plays (Williston, Permian and Eagleford)]. The USA is producing more oil than it has in many years. Still, it is not nearly enough to meet refinery and domestic demand. Thus, the USA relies on importing crude oil from various regions. This is the price setting mechanism, all barrels of oil must compete with what we call Brent crude oil.\n\nThis is because Brent is always available as a substitute. So while domestic production has increased, and certain production areas have created an over supply, meaning domestic crude oil [such as WTI] can be cheaper at times, yet the price of the Brent barrel is still acting as the price setting mechanism. \n\nBecause various regions of the USA, called PADDs, import product from each other, [mostly PADD 3 exporting to other PADD regions for instance 1, 2, and 4,] the Brent barrel makes its way from the Gulf Coast, or East Coast through out the USA. The Brent barrel is refined into product, like gasoline and exported to other regions where it sets the price.\n\nNo more ELI 5. For real evidence of this, you can look up average retail gasoline prices on the _URL_0_ and compare it to WTI and Brent. The prices de-link around 2010 (because of a few factors the \"Arab Spring\", domestic production, Cushing bottleneck) and you can see gasoline more closely follows Brent. Then for extra fun check the product export/import for PADD regions, and then check refinery profits by PADD region to see that those with access to cheaper domestic crude (PADD 2 and 4) have been making much larger profits, lately, than those with out the same access (PADD 1, 3). I left California (PADD 5) out of this analysis as it does not play a major role in PADD export/imports.",
"Because the companies that produce and sell oil have figured out that you can and will pay whatever they ask you to pay... we are all the root cause.",
"Because greed and profit.",
"The price of a good is determined by two fundamental factors: how much people want the good and difficult/costly it is to produce it. People really, really want and need drinking water, but it's relatively easy to supply, so it's relatively inexpensive. Not many people are interested in owning the Dragon Armchair designed by Eileen Gray, but there's only one of them, and, because Gray is dead it would be impossible (i.e. infinitely costly) to make another one, so it sold for $30 million at auction. \n\nIn [this NBER paper](_URL_0_), UCSD economics professor James Hamilton identifies 3 main drivers of oil prices: 1. low price elasticity of demand for oil (that is, people really, really want to have oil), 2. demand growth in China and other newly industrialized countries, and 3. the failure of global production to increase. \n\nPut all together, and you have a good with a lot of people who want it and that is difficult to produce, or produce more of. So prices went up.\n\nCommodity speculation and monopoly pricing by OPEC don't have near the effect on pricing as these three above.",
"1) Financialization of Markets\nA)The Financialization of Commodities - There is a lot of buying and selling of oil beforehand - this buying and selling of contracts before the oil is even extracted. This raises the price by adding middlemen that are only there to extract profit.\nB) The Financialization of the economy as a whole - Exxon and large companies are more than ever pushed for higher ROI (Return on Investment) this puts many of the managers in the situation of finding inventive ways of finding higher profits.\n\n2) Development in countries that didn't buy as much - This isn't as big a factor as you'd think because a lot of the oil that is out there is already bought or guaranteed to a certain country.\n\n3) Peak oil - The Oil is harder to get and of worse quality.\n\n4) Inflation - Dollars lose value overtime (Which is a national monetary policy)",
"Market price has nothing to do with WHO makes it.\n\nWhen the US comes up with an oilfield on federal land, the government makes out like gangbusters. It's tax income. \n\nThe oil will ALWAYS be sold at market value, no matter where it comes from. Even if you were so deluded as to say \"we're gonna sell gas to Americans for $1/gal!\" some American will buy up all the $1 gasoline and resell at $3/gal and laugh all the way to the Billionaire's Club.\n\n",
"Capitalism. Why charge less when people will pay more?",
"A lot of young people are posting about inflation and stuff. Gas was $0.54 for regular in 1999 at exit 1 on I-95 in Georgia (I filled my first tank at this price in that year). The first time I paid more than $0.99 was 2003. It has nothing to do with inflation and the price increases have had very little to do with supply. Oil companies have simply increased their profit margins. If oil companies reverted to the margins they had in 2000, you'd be paying about $0.85 a gallon.",
"Supply and demand is about as simple an explanation as we can come to:\n\nDemand is up because China and India have grown significantly and are becoming developed enough to use a significant volume of the oil produced in the world.\n\nDemand is up because the population in general has risen.\n\nSupply is down because of political instability in regions of the world that contain oil or are vital regions for the safe export of oil (Iran, Syria, Egypt, etc)\n\nSupply is down because oil is a finite resource, and the easy to gather sources of oil are being depleted and more expensive sources such as from the Alberta oil sands, deep sea drilling and from regions with higher transportation distances/costs. \n\nOverall, there is no simple answer, but to explain it to a five year old.. Think of oil as good snow in the winter, and everybody just wants to make snow forts. After a big snowfall there is a lot of soft, clean white snow to use. After playing for severals hours, everybody has used up all of the good snow, forts are constructed all over the playground and people are trying harder to find good snow to continue building their forts or for making snowballs. Kids start looking for snow gathered on the leaves of trees, or cluttered up in the sandbox, or the snow from outside of the playground. It gets harder and harder to find good snow, and getting the snow back to the playground is a pain. Now in this example, it never snows again, imagine how it would become harder and harder to get snow to keep building snowforts over the course of several weeks. \n\nNow imagine the unpopular foreign kid has a pretty poorly defended snowfort, what would YOU do?",
"Because we've established that we're willing to pay $4.50/gallon for the damn stuff, so why should the price go down? That's less money for the stockholders.",
"To put it as simply as possible. What motivation does the oil companies have for lowering it if we will pay the higher price?",
"I use to work in the gas station world for many many years and the answer is simple: People get used to paying more. \nWhen I first started gas was 90 cents a gallon (this was only 1998 BTW).\nThe average for a long time was 90-1.25. \nThen the oil companies got together and jacked up the price to over 2 bucks a gallon and everyone had a royal fit. They then lowered it to about 1.50 a gallon, nearly 25 cents more than what it used to cost, and everyone was happy.\nThen they did it again. Each time rising higher and higher and lowering less and less. Now we have gas sitting at 3 bucks or more per gallon and no one is saying a word because of all the \"Fuel Discount\" programs. It's usually done through a grocery store (they sell the data of what you're buying to marketers) or through online shopping like FRN. BP has you buy 20 gallons of gas for a 5 cent discount. \nSome stations offer a discount for cash. Which is nice but the thing is, stations pay 5% for credit card processing fees. So if gas is $3/gallon then 15 cents is paid to the processing company. Those discounts for cash aren't that great when you realize you're only saving 5 cents and they still pocket 10.\n\nOh and BTW, gas stations are dying pretty quick. Rent is through the roof (land owners see gas prices and jack up the rent thinking the station owners can afford it but in reality the gas companies/jobbers get most of the cash), you don't actually own anything but the gas/merchandise (the pumps are rented, the register is rented, etc etc) and unless your station has a gimmick (like a deli) you're toast, mostly because the thing that kept stations open is going extinct: Cigarettes. \nThe kiosk I first worked at sold nearly 500 packs/day and the profit margins were incredible. Now, smokers are a dying breed (literally), and the few smokers who remain have no loyalty and go wherever is cheapest and the profit margins have shrunk.\nCompanies like Shell and Exxon pretty much have little to do with the gas stations anymore. They use to be \"hands on\" but now they realize there is little money in individual stations (after all they can just raise the price a cent or two and make millions in a single day).\nOh and one more thing: All gas is the same. No matter what they claim it all comes from the same terminals and there is no difference. \nWhen I filled in as manager at one kiosk, we got a partial gas load in. After filling our tanks the truck drove across the street and filled a different branded kiosk with the same truck. ",
"In the words of Patrice oneal. \"Cause what the fuck you really gon' do?\""
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8i65uq | why does a country downstream from a dam suffer a hit to its water supply? doesn't the net water flow stay the same? | Take Egypt and Ehtiopia. Wouldn't the water volume coming out of the renaissance dam be the same as the water volume going in and the net flow to Egypt remain constant? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8i65uq/eli5_why_does_a_country_downstream_from_a_dam/ | {
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"Not necessarily.\n\nIf you dam up a river, the backup of water above the dam may cause excess water to flow down different rivers instead, as it is easier for water to go down that river.\n\nThink of it like your commute at the end of the working day. Most people normally take the highway, and a few people take side roads. But then an accident happens on the highway. Sure, as soon as you're through the accident site it'll open up and you can get just as many cars through, but people are going to be diverting off onto side roads from the highway as well.",
"One big factor is evaporation. A reservoir generally creates a greater water temperature in the upper layer and a larger surface area, which increases evaporation and reduces downstream water availability. Also infiltration can be a problem, with water becoming groundwater due to the fact that it's sitting in the reservoir for so long.",
"It will take up to 15 years to fill the reservoir, during that time flow will be reduced. Also, some of the water may be used for irrigation, that will not be returned to the river.",
"By definition it does not. Dams slow the flow of water downstream by storing it in their resivuoir. \n\nThis higher water elevation is usually used to divert water to other places like irrigation and city plumbing.\n\nThe river downstream will flow more consistently, but on a total water per year basis deliver less water. So no floods or droughts, but you also don't get the extra water to store yourself if the guys that own the dam feel like hogging it for themselves. ",
" > Doesn't the net water flow stay the same?\n\nNope.\n\nAt the very least, the dam is going to form a reservoir, resulting in more evaporation and seepage loss.\n\nBut the real impact is irrigation, as dams are often used to retain water and divert it to farmlands."
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3aj4jj | how does windows know wether i am plugin in a new printer/keyboard/mouse/etc? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3aj4jj/eli5_how_does_windows_know_wether_i_am_plugin_in/ | {
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"every device has a chip that says what it is. like a person says his/her name to you. so you know name of that person.",
"When you put in the usb cord, the computer can feel something is connected. So it asks the device what it is and the ship in the printer/keyboard/mouse responds."
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3dxznz | when producers say, let's say, an episode of the sopranos cost 2 million dollars, what do they mean? | Where does all that money go to for an hour of television? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3dxznz/eli5when_producers_say_lets_say_an_episode_of_the/ | {
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"Actors, Directors, Editors, Janitorial Staff, paying for stage time, cameras, effects etc.\n\nSo many people are involved who arent cheap to pay and then you have lots of expensive equipment that it all adds up very quickly.\n\nI mean the three main actors on the Big Bang Theory each make 1 million dollars an episode.",
"I'm sure it's not cheap flying production crews around the world to different shooting locations for game of thrones"
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4innd8 | how do our bodies/brains know how to do things we haven't learned? | For instance, say I fall off my bike and create a wound in my knee. My body will start a healing process to repair my knee and make it good as new. However, I never learned how this healing process works, what certain cells have certain jobs, what antibodies do certain things, to fix this wound. So how does my brain magically know how to heal myself when I never was taught it? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4innd8/eli5_how_do_our_bodiesbrains_know_how_to_do/ | {
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"Genetics/instincts. \n\nAll living things are born with innate abilities that we just know how to do. \n\nCoagulation takes so many different cells and factors to work in harmony with each other. Could you imagine if we had to teach each cell what their job is? How to make our hearts beat...how to make our lungs expand and contract. We wouldn't be alive...We would have to teach each cell their job simultaneously and they will have to learn instantly. ",
"In your case FYI, your brain does not know shit, it is all the natural processes of the body. The brain is actually a little less important than you think, still important, just slightly less.\n\nHow does it know? These mechanisms are simply programmed into DNA and the proteins it makes and the molecules said proteins make. For example in your case, the breaking of skin, your blood has things called platelets. These platelets travel throughout your body, and normally do not do anything until something starts bleeding, at which point, it will clot. How? Simply because the cells outside of the walls of the blood vessel have things on them that make these platelets \"stick to them,\" at the same time, chemicals on this cell also trigger a cascading effect, the platelet will detect it using special proteins, causing itself to push these chemicals to its surface, making it sticky to other platelets as well. This is known as clotting. Then for example, there is stuff like the Epidermal Growth Factor, which is found in skin cells, when skin cells break, they release it. Skin cells below these skin cells have receptors for this, if the receptors detect this, they will trigger a response in this cell that causes them to grow and multiply faster, fixing the wound.\n\nThen there is the immune response, some broken cells will also contain a hormone called histamine, which triggers the immune reaction in said location, causing blood vessels to expand and causing many immune system cells to come rushing to defend the body against pathogens that come through this wall.\n\n\nThe way the body works is unbelievably complicated, and it is more unbelievable that the entire code that makes it work, DNA, can be fit onto one gigabyte of data. But in the end, it is just DNA being able to abuse the laws of chemistry and physics."
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7uh782 | what makes the travelling salesman problem so difficult to solve? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7uh782/eli5_what_makes_the_travelling_salesman_problem/ | {
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"Two reasons: input space growth, and a lack of greedy choice heuristics that can help.\n\nSo the traveling salesman has an solution space size that grows in factorials based on its input space.\n\nIf we were going to go through all possible paths with N cities, we’d have N! Combinations to go though. This grows much faster than you think. Although this may be reasonable done with a super small number of cities, the numbers grow to unfathomable sizes as soon as we break double digits.\n\nCities-solutions\n1-1\n2-2\n3-6\n4-24\n5-120\n6-720\n...\n\n\nSecondly, greedy choices. A greedy choice algorithm is basically something like “pick a city, then go the closest to that” over and over again. In a TSP problem, this doesn’t work because the shortest closed path will not necessarily go through and connect two cities that are super close to one another. \nNow don’t get me wrong, it’s not a *terrible* heuristic; you can try genetic algorithms or dynamic programming approaches and get good paths, but they will most likely be suboptimal. This means that the one and only optimal path would still beat these.\n\n\nSo it’s hard because there’s a lot of sequences to go through and check, and the best ways we have of picking the “better” paths don’t actually give us the “best” paths.",
"Because you have to evaluate all possible solutions. Verifying the solutions is the easy part, and can be done quickly by, in the classic example here, getting the sum of the distance of all the routes, and choosing the shortest. What took you the longest time was that you had to evaluate all of those routes to determine which one was best , or most optimal.\n\nWhen dealing with a small amount of 'cities' the solutions are usually easy to come up with, as the amount of variables are small, but once you start adding add'l cities, the various routes become exponentially more complicated and have to each be investigated individually.",
"The thing you need to understand about NP-hard/NP-complete problems (and algorithm complexity in general) is that they're relatively simple with a small number - **N** - of elements. When we talk about them being hard, it's because the complexity grows *exponentially with the number of elements* (or worse).\n\nSolving TSP for 10 cities is a toy. Solving TSP for 100 or 1000 cities becomes a huge problem because there's *millions* of possible combinations to examine and decide which is the best best one.",
"To be more specific, I'll answer the question why does it take so *long* to find the *optimal* path in the travelling salesman problem.\n\nThe main reason is because you can't really break it down into pieces. If I have the optimal solution for a 9 city problem, that solution provides almost no help if I add a city to make a 10 city problem. It is *likely* the solution will be similar, but it could be completely different. \n\nThe only real way to solve breaks down to trying all possible routes. A fully connected (every city has a route to every other city) map of 10 cities has 3.6M possible route, and by 15 it is over a trillion. A 30 city route with an average of 9 routes each is about 5 trillion. Also, there is in general no way to know a particular leg doesn't belong to the optimal route. Even if NY to LA is twice as expensive as any other route, it could still be part of the best route.\n\nThat said, it is not that hard find a good solution, just not the optimal one. For most plausible maps, remember you best route so far and bailing when the route you are checking exceeds this can greatly cut down on the number of possibilities you have to check, and every if you still can't search all of them, you are likely to find a nearly optimal solution quickly. That might be good enough for a salesman, but not for mathematicians, because that isn't true for all maps. For any given strategy, I can construct a perverse map where finding the optimal route means checking every possibility.\n\nFinally, while we don't know of any better way of finding the optimal, we haven't *proven* there is no better way. Doing so would also solve the P =? NP problem, the greatest unsolved problem in all of computer science."
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4moupu | are cyborg enhancements ever going to be a thing, and if so how far are we from it? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4moupu/eli5_are_cyborg_enhancements_ever_going_to_be_a/ | {
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"I think it'll be a thing.\n\nThink about your phone. It's a portable device that responds to touch and voice commands, has global communications and GPS, allows near-instantaneous lookup of any information humans have ever researched, and functions as an entertainment system as well. \n\nGoing back 30 years, don't you think people then would think us pretty damn close to cyborgs already? The only thing we're lacking is having the phone be controlled by your brainwaves, and there's research in this area.",
"I saw a video of a prototype suit that allowed humans to carry a considerable amount. They were using it in an oriental country for construction. \n\nPersonally I feel like people would rather that than replacing their body parts.",
"[this article about oscar pistorius being too fast for olympics](_URL_1_) is already 8 years old. \nanother example is [the guy who lost an eye and replaced it with a camera](_URL_0_). \ni think it's only a matter of time until artifical body parts become better for specific uses that people might consider having fully functional parts replaced. ",
"The two big issues are power and control.\n\nRight now, we just don't have batteries than can provide enough power long enough to be practical. A typical wheelchair battery will give 8 hours of use, take 8 hours to recharge, and weight about 20 lbs. That just doesn't translate well to a leg, which is going to use power a lot less efficiently.\n\nThe control systems are also very tricky. Every now and then, we hear of a \"breakthrough\" where someone is able to control a prosthetic with their mind. Unfortunately, this comes only after months of training, the control is limited, feedback nonexistent, and requires bulky external equipment. We are far away from having artificial limbs feel anything like real ones.\n\n",
"The biggest issue right now is actually powering most of these systems, they require very large batteries to last all day. ",
"Depending on your definition of cyborg, we're already there. Hearing aids allow people to sharpen their hearing with a removable device, and cochlear implants allow deaf people to hear. Pace-makers regulate heartbeats, and artificial hearts can replace the most important organ in our bodies. Artificial limbs have seen massive improvements, especially legs, allowing people missing one or both legs to sprint and run as fast as people with the limbs they were born with. There's a bionic eye in development that could help the blind to see, and there's at least one patent out there for a computerized contact lens with google glass like capability. We are in the cybernetic age, and while most of these devices are designed to help the disable, once these technologies are fine tuned and miniaturized, its not a long leap to believe that instead of helping compensate for disability, devices will be made to improve what nature gave us. "
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27ncgx | how does the "bidding website" scam work? | The websites where you bid on TVs, cameras and other electronics for super cheap. How do these websites operate and scam you, because you know they do. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/27ncgx/eli5_how_does_the_bidding_website_scam_work/ | {
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"Those web site you see ads for that say PS3 just sold for $2.56. Well it did \"sell\" for that but the trick is that you must pay for each bid you enter like $1.And they will keep changing the end time of the auction so more people will pay that dollar to enter a bid. Technically it did sell for that, but that was after several hundred bids were placed at a dollar each, so really it is that sell price plus how many bids were placed, they make a lot of money off that.",
"It's basically a lottery. You are betting you will be the last person to buy a ticket. With each ticket (bid) costing you $0.60, $1, etc. The so called \"price\" of the item is irrelevant. "
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3ehyki | why do air conditioners on airplanes suck? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ehyki/eli5_why_do_air_conditioners_on_airplanes_suck/ | {
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"Do you have non anecdotal evidence that they do?\n\nPlanes spend most of their time so high in the air that the outside temperature is -50, so ensuring comfort, most of the time, is more about heating.",
"Are you saying they don't cool you down enough? I've always found them to keep me quite cool. ",
"before take off they can be bad at cooling the cabin of the plane because the cooling/ heating system isn't operational until the engines are running. There is an external unit hooked up to the plane when it's at the gate that pumps in cooled/heated air. A lot of times they don't seem to do a great job, especially if the plane was empty at the gate for a while and the air unit wasn't hooked up until just before you boarded. I believe the cabin temp has to be within a certain temperature range before they can let you board. Not sure if that's some sort of rule or just a common practice but I've been delayed from boarding before because the cabin temperature was too low since the external air unit wasn't working at all they had to source another one. ",
"They worked fine for me on my last flight\n\nThis is a lazy question, you don't give the name of an airline or a plane model",
"Do you mean they suck air away from you instead of blowing air on you? What kind of plane are you talking about? "
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39m1g4 | why don't desktop computer have their own battery? | Sorry, I'm not very techsavvy and never understood why desktops dont have their own battery like laptops do | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/39m1g4/eli5_why_dont_desktop_computer_have_their_own/ | {
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"They are called Uninterruptible Power Supplies and are optional so people who do not need them do not have to pay for them.",
"They dont have one because they simply dont need one. Why have a battery when you are plugged in all the time? Itd only ever get used when the power went out. You can buy UPS systems for your desktops already so theres no demand for batteries built in to desktops. Itd add cost for no benefit to most people.",
"Large capacity batteries are expensive. It is assumed that your desktop doesnt move around a lot (or at all) and will be near a power outlet. When running off of an outlet you also dont have to worry too much about power saving (conserving the battery) so your computer can always run as fast as possible.",
"Desktops aren't designed to be very power efficient, so you would need a much larger battery to get the same effect. And 99.9999% of desktop users would have no use for it since it's going to sit in one place. If you have issues with the power going out regularly or something, get a UPS.",
"There's no reason they can't. They just aren't built that way. What would be the point? It's not really portable, so it's not like you could use a desktop on battery wherever you went. I guess you could use it if the power went out, but how are you going to use a desktop without power for the monitor. If you're going to put a battery in the monitor and the battery, well you might as well have a laptop. ",
"They're not designed for portability. They're designed to sit in the same place for the majority of their lives, and just function there. Seeing as if you installed a battery you'd need to plug it in to charge it anyway, what would be the point of having one if you could keep it plugged in and powered all the time?",
"You can get one but they're often fairly expensive (search for uninterruptible power supply). Desktops are often trying to compete to be the cheapest one possible and having a large battery drives up the price unnecessarily.\n\nLaptops can have a battery for a few reasons. First, they're designed to be portable so a battery is core to that design. To help with this they use much lower power components, but those components are expensive. A laptop will be much slower than a desktop of an equivalent cost (all else being equal).\n\nAnother issue is that your power coming from the wall is AC (alternating current), while computers need DC (direct current). You computer has a power supply that converts AC into DC for the computer to use, while your laptop makes the AC to DC conversion in the power brick on the charging cord, then the battery and all other hardware on the laptop is using DC. Adding a battery to a desktop either means that you put a second AC-to-DC converter (relatively cheap) to charge the battery, then a DC-to-AC converter (more expensive) to give the desktop's power supply the AC that it's expecting, *or* you have to put the battery inside the computer's case. Most computers require several hundred watts of power, so this would have to be a large (and heavy) battery.\n\nIt winds up just being too much effort to engineer a solution which isn't in demand on the mass market. People who need reliability even in the face of unreliable power will put in a UPS and call it a day. By the time a computer is small and low-power enough that a light and cheap battery will serve it you can just slap in a keyboard and monitor and call it a laptop. ",
"\nComponents used in laptops aren't just designed to be small, they're designed to be more energy efficient than desktops. So a desktop would need a much bigger, more expensive battery bank to get the same running time as a laptop. Most people don't have power outages often enough to really care about whether their computer will stay up. And those who do can always buy separate backup power systems.\n\nIn vital commercial / industrial / military etc. installations where the computers must stay up at all times regardless of the expense, the computers (and sometimes the whole building) usually has a battery bank capable of powering them for a couple minutes until generators can fire up."
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7fwm9n | what's the difference between bacteria, viruses, fungi and pathogens? | So I'm super confused between all these terms. Can someone ELI5 what's the difference between them? Starting at the beginning, like in a spider diagram which I find easy to understand :) | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7fwm9n/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_bacteria/ | {
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"Bacteria and fungi are living things. They're made of cells, they all have DNA, they reproduce themselves, they eat stuff, break it down and use it to power themselves, excreting any waste etc. They essentially do all the basic things we can do.\n\nBacteria are always made up of a single cell, and inside that cell their DNA is just floating about with the rest of the little machines that help them survive. They reproduce by literally splitting themselves into two.\n\nFungi are sometimes made up of only one cell, but often they can, like ourselves, be made up of lots of cells working together (like a mushroom). They can reproduce by splitting themselves into two, or by full-blown sexual reproduction, by getting male and female sex cells to meet. Their DNA, instead of floating about freely in their cells, is protected in a little membrane capsule called a nucleus. Plants and animals also keep their DNA inside a nucleus - and we call all living things that do this [eukaryotes](_URL_2_). Bacteria, without a nucleus, are called [prokaryotes](_URL_0_).\n\nViruses are just packages of genetic material, like DNA or [RNA](_URL_1_), surrounded by a protective protein capsule and not much else - they're not made up of a cell. Unlike all of the above, viruses cannot reproduce themselves - they have to infect a living cell and hijack some of the teeny machinery inside, which they lack, in order to make more copies of themselves. Because of this it's a bit fuzzy whether we can really call them 'alive'.\n\nA pathogen is any of the above that can be harmful to you, and cause disease. For example, lotsa' bacteria are beneficial, or otherwise neutral, when they're in/on your body; pathogenic bacteria are likely to make you ill however.\n\nSo in short: fungi and bacteria are living organisms made of cells, with and without a nucleus that contains their DNA respectively (eukaryotes and prokaryotes), and can happily make more of themselves. Viruses are just bits of genetic material (DNA/RNA) that can't reproduce, therefore aren't really alive, and need to infect other things to replicate. A pathogen can be anything biological that causes you harm.",
"Pathogen - any microbe that can cause sickness\n\nBacteria - single-celled lifeforms without a nucleus, some are pathogens\n\nVirus - non-living biological entities that can inject DNA or RNA into cells, almost all are pathogens\n\nFungi - single and multicellular lifeforms with cell walls but without chloroplasts, including mushrooms, yeasts, and molds...some are pathogens\n\n"
]
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"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA",
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7wouup | how are lenticular clouds formed? | I just saw [a picture of lenticular clouds](_URL_0_) and was wondering how on earth this works. Given that clouds probably have something to do with physics because of water vapour and stuff, I gave it physics flair. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7wouup/eli5_how_are_lenticular_clouds_formed/ | {
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"Pretty simple, actually. If you have a fairly stable air mass that flows over an obstruction, it gets lifted. As it rises, it cools, and when it reaches the dew point you can now see the cloud as the moisture condenses to form droplets. A good way to think of clouds is that they are the visible part of a moisture plume. The moisture still there below the cloud, but it not visible as it is vapor and not droplets.\n\nThe pic you posted is likely a photoshop, BTW.",
"A teacher of mine told me to think of large air currents just like water (this was before actual fluid dynamics would be used just like that by NASA et al to study global climate):\n\nJust as a rock in a stream causes water to slow around it, warm moist air climbs as slows around a mountain causing a lens shaped cloud."
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5aa59i | how can the president "bypass" congress to make legislation without congressional approval? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5aa59i/eli5_how_can_the_president_bypass_congress_to/ | {
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"He can't. He can issue executive orders, but those are directions to employees in the Executive Branch on how to carry out enforcing federal laws. Actual laws have to be passed by Congress.",
"He can't. That is not possible in the US system. \n\nHe can issue an executive order, but that is instructions on how to carry out enforcing current laws, not making new ones. ",
"Here's a quick refresher:\n\n* Congress passes the laws\n* The Executive (president) enforces them\n\nWhen Congress passes a law they leave a lot of room for a law to be interpreted and enforced. Otherwise it's like passing a law saying \"no bad things\": that's fine. But without knowing what it means to be bad, what it means to enforce, how to enforce, when to enforce, where to enforce, who to enforce, etc, just saying \"don't be bad\" doesn't mean anything.\n\nIn an instance like you're asking about: Congress passes a law saying something like \"don't allow bad food to be sold\". Then the Executive gets to interpret that how they want. When someone talks about bypassing Congress they mean the president exercising his or her judgment within the boundaries that the Congress has set. "
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5ez6pr | why do computers have detachable power cords when most appliances have fixed ones? and why do they all have the strange 3 pronged connector? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ez6pr/eli5why_do_computers_have_detachable_power_cords/ | {
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"It allows computers & their components to easily be used in other countries. A modern computer power supply can handle American 110V@60Hz power or European 220V@50Hz sources without even having to flip a switch. In the old days, they could still be switched with a single switch.\n\nMost consumer electronics are built to be sold in massive quantities and be as cheap as possible. The large sales figures allow you to have hardwired connections & the low prices means you don't want to deal with the added cost of a connector.",
"The connector you mention is a C13/C14 connector.\n\nThe female part is a C13 and the male part is a C14.\n\nThey are part of an international standard called [IEC 60320](_URL_0_) that also includes the two pronged razor type connectors (C1/C2) and the three pronged \"mickey mouse\" style connectors (C5/C6) as well as bigger connectors for larger devices like the (C19/C20) and variants of these common connectors for things that get really, really hot like waffle irons and kettles.\n\nThe idea behind these connectors is that, most countries have different sort of wall-plugs and if you make a product that is going to be sold world-wide and hardwire the cord into it you are going to need dozens of different versions of your product.\n\nIf you make them with these standardized connectors instead you can make only one version and just include a cord that fits for the region you are shipping it.\n\nYou can even take your device to a different region and simply switch out the cord to use it there.\n\nIn the old days that would sometimes lead to danger because some countries run on 240V and others on 110V but modern computer power supplies don't care about that anymore. \n\nThe power supplies transform whatever AC you give them into the right sort of DC, so they really don't care about what region you are in and what voltage and frequency your electricity has or what type of wallplugs you use.\n\nIn fact if you go into a real server-room or data-center you will find that the wallplugs of whatever region you are in are really non-existent, all the electronic devices connect directly with C13 < - > C14 extension cords into the power supply of the server-rom usually redundantly and with some sort of emergency power in case of blackout being involved.\n\nThe plugs of the IEC standard have sort of become universal for that sort of equipment.\n\nAs for the specififc shape of the plug and outlet. there are three prongs because it is earthed and the shape is so that you can only plug it in one-way because it allows for polarization. (Of course that doesn't mean that the other end that plugs into the wall will have to also have these features).\n\nThe plugs are compatible with the inlets of the unearthed version of the standard (C17/C18) and the inlets are compatible with the plugs of the higher temperature versions of the standard (C15(a)/C16(a)).\n\nThey are rated for up to 10 ampere and incompatible with the plugs and inlets of the standards for more or less Ampere.\n\nAll that is designed to keep people from accidentally frying their equipment, themselves or burning their house down to easily.",
"TLDR answer: it allows for different power cords so that it can be shipped to a lot of countries. The odd shape is standardized. And three pins are needed because your PC is made of metal and needs to be earthed to prevent a possible electric shock.",
"The other comments do an excellent job of explaining why the detachable cord is useful. However if like to point out that it's not just computers that use this type of connector. TV's, computer monitors, speakers, and printers also use the same one.",
"I also want to point out the 3 prong connector really isn't that odd. My TV, Printer, and quite a few other electronics in my house use the exact same connector. I have used spare cables from old computers when I have misplaced the power cord to my TV or Printer.",
"An international standard is used so you can get a cable for every region. And a different cable, for a battery backup for example. Which has the same type of plug.\n\nThis eases manufacturing, and makes using it all over the world easy. Since the cables of the region you're in will be very commonplace.\n",
"Like others have said you can change them when you visit countries but they'd also be a pain in the arse to fit if the plug didn't detach, most cases have mesh where the psu goes and only enough room for the socket. Same thing with tvs, if you wall mount a TV you're better off with a 90° plug. It's easier to fit if you can change the plug at the base, you can also buy longer plugs if you have a strange layout without having a massive extension cord on the floor. Pcs and tvs are also easier to transport and package flat rather than having wires coming out from the backs which could get damaged.",
"TLDR: IBM used medical power supplies in their first PCs, they used that cord. Once a standard was picked there was no reason to change.\n\nLots of people have explained the cords and why we use detachable ones, but if you are wondering why that specific cord. It's because when computers where first being made by IBM they where choosing off the shelf parts, and the only power supplies that existed that where powerful enough and small enough where used in medical equipment. The power supplies they choose used that cord and while no one uses PSU from medical equipment anymore, once that cord style was picked there was no reason to change. \n\nEDIT: PC should read micro-computers. Those where the desk sized machines that came before PCs. Some people have rightly pointed out that IBM had the power supplies made for PCs specific, however they used all the standard from the micro-computer which where using power supplies made by medical equipment manufactures because they already had the capacity to make the power supplies. We can nit pick more details if we want but the cord comes from the fact that IBM used 3rd party manufactures for lots of equipment and power supplies for DC power where easy to order from medical equipment manufactures, so they did. That's why it uses that cord.",
"Well more exactly, its the power supply piece inside which is part of the computer where the power cord is plugged into through the back, or could have a fixed one if that was the norm",
"Computers are all about being able to change parts. All the cables inside can be changes as well, so why not the power cord? Oh and it would be quite awkward to build a computer when the cord is attached to the power supply. ",
"In the UK these connectors are known as kettle leads, because since decades before computer power supplies used them they have been the [standard connector for kettles](_URL_1_). Unlike in the United States, [97% of UK households own a kettle.](_URL_0_) This is to maximise the efficiency of our constant tea consumption.",
"If the benefits of having interchangeable plugs for international use are so overwhelming why do appliances still have fixed ones?",
"Well, even you're building a computer, it's gonna be hard to insert the Power Supply Unit into a case with a fixed cable. \n\nIt's essentially designed for building ease and also\n portability.",
"It's a smart design. If the cable goes bad you don't need to replace the whole god damn PSU like you have to with Headphones that have their cords attached to the speakers.\n\nI know this is probably not the explanation OP wanted, but this an alternate perspective.",
"Because it's not technically hooked up to the computer as a whole, it's plugged into an individual part inside the case, called a power supply (PSU). The cords used are universal, so if you change your PSU, you can just use the same cord. Also if the cord faults, you can just replace the cord instead of the PSU unit as a whole.",
"It is so that the power supplies work on 120 or 220 volt power grids. Most power supplies have a physical switch and the user just needs the correct power cord for the local power socket. ",
"Strange 3-pronged connector? Have you never seen a grounded power plug on any device other than a PC?",
"What I never understood is that all the old peripheral connectors (VGA, Serial, Parallel) had screw locks on them so they wouldn't accidentally fall out, but the *power* connector which everything relies on didn't.",
"As a techie I find it hilarious that an IEC cable is considered \"strange\" by some. No shade",
"It's a complicated answer but to simplify one big reason, replaceable parts are always better when you're dealing with any machine which has many potential points of failure. If that cord broke, and we all know cords break, then you can just replace it, but a properly connected one would require replacing the whole power supply. The idea brings up a problem, though, which is that I think in modern times we're being conditioned into expecting that everything is completely stuck together and irreplaceable and that's just a fact of technology. We look at tech we buy as products and brands rather than a set of crucial parts, and we're completely fine with the fact that they expect any failure in the device to put that device out of service for good (so you buy another). Replaceable parts are the best part of the industrial revolution, and then we realized it isn't profitable. EDIT: I should add that this doesn't usually apply to expensive goods like PCs, because there's a threshold where people just stop buying your products because they break too quickly in relation to price, so that's good. A blender or a coffee maker though? Dog chews through the cable and the thing is done.",
"Your on about the IEC chief, bloody nice bit of gear.\n\nThe IEC is by far the most common lead you'll come across, however there is increasingly the \"cloverleaf\" three prong, but that seems to be more prevalent in DA2 double insulated equipment, not sure if that falls into the realms of defacto standard or not.\n\nNow this maybe the bottle of rum inside me at this point speaking but.....\n\nPersonally I think cloverleafs are shite and American plugs are a joke.\n\nIts weird but Britain weirdly seems to lead the world with regards to safe plugs, seriously BS1362 standard is ridiculously better than America and European standards, seriously why do they not fuse the sockets? Ffs guys familiar with the concept of failsafe?\n\nThe IEC is a magical standard as well for the likes of Brittish technicians, as we are required in a workplace to carry out routine \"portable appliance tests\" \n\nBecause it's so common all of our testers are fitted to suit. It just makes life easier.\n\nThere is also a high current version of the IEC which is slightly different which has a notch in it, this is supposed to signify it is fused at 13 amps, though Idiots will use them with lower value fuses on standard IEC equipment.\n\nBasically, to answer the question it's cos fuck rewiring it every time it breaks",
"Because the power supply is modular and you can easily replace it with a new one if it burns out instead of throwing the whole computer away. Naturally since its field replaceable you can also replace the cord. ",
"Detachable power cords have the power supply inside the appliance. The third prong is to ground the electrons. ",
"My god. Some of these replies need to be in a 4th year university electrical engineering sub",
"The main reason is that appliances aren't moved nearly as much as computers are. It's actually relatively inconvenient to move a device with an attacked cable, and if the cable breaks, the device is ruined. Computers are devices that are moved quite a bit, often to repair them, and so all design constraints point to detachment even before internationalization.",
"Even moreso, why do they all have DIFFERENT 3-prong connectors?\n\nSeriously, why the need to redesign that over and over?",
"The computers have detachable power cords so the Parents can punish their child by taking the cord away! ",
"every upgrade the power supply in your microwave or TV? yea, didn't think so.",
"This question is very easily answered, as I'm sure the thread shows. What confuses me is how goddamned hard it is to actually ask a question in this subreddit though. How this got through this sub's ludicrous auto modding is beyond me, but my questions regarding things that beg genuine expertise never do. Very odd.",
"It's a standardized electronic connector. Many other devices have them, you just don't own any of them.",
" > strange 3 pronged connector\n\nI guess international standards are (ahem) foreign to you guys, huh?",
"Both my monitors, TV, Blu-Ray player, and guitar amp have detachable power cables. All three-pronged except for the Blu-Ray player and one monitor which is two-pronged AC and barrel connector respectively. My PS3, 3DO, box fan, and battery charger also use a two-pronged AC cable while my Original NES and laptop use a barrel connector.\n\nThat's a lot of shit with \"weird\" detachable cables."
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1jqt0a | credit cards, what are they, are they all the same? if not, which are better for whom? | Edit: thanks guys :) | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1jqt0a/eli5_credit_cards_what_are_they_are_they_all_the/ | {
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"Credit Cards are a way of paying for things. When you need to buy something, you can put it on a Credit Card, which is like promising the person you are buying it from that you will pay for it later. But what actually happens is that the credit card company pays them, and you owe the credit card company instead.\n\nDepending on how quickly you pay them for it, it may cost you a different amount of money. For example: If you pay for something with a credit card, and pay it off within 30-60 days, then it will only cost you what you originally said you would pay. If you don't, you will pay a credit card company \"interest\" on the purchase. This is because the credit card company has to have people pay things back quickly, or else they won't work.\n\nSome credit cards also offer benefits like Cash Back. A cash back card basically pays you 1%-6% of every purchase you make, saving you money! If you pay your credit card off every month, this may be a good thing for you.\n\nOther credit cards offer lower interest rates, so if you have to pay interest you an save money with these credit cards.\n\nAnd some credit cards offer more protections, like extended warranties and other special deals. But these often have additional fees, so they are best for people who have a lot of money or plan to buy a lot of things with the credit card."
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359y58 | uk elections - after the election...what do the members of parliament who are not elected do with themselves? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/359y58/eli5_uk_elections_after_the_electionwhat_do_the/ | {
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" > Or are they still MPs with an active role in our country? Who is paying them?\n\n\nIf they are not re-elected they are no longer MPs (that's the point) and so have no formal role in government. \n\n\n > Also when other parties are debating against the elected party in the house of parliament, who is paying these other parties to be there? Tax payers?\n\n\nThe people debating in parliament are *all* elected and paid by the tax-payer - not just the party that has an overall majority. The House is made up of 650 seats and it looks like this election will end with the Conservative party will having ~330 seats, Labour ~230 and various other parties the rest (SNP being the big minor party now with 56 seats). All votes still count equal so the 230 labour MPs will have a say in government policy/government, it is just that whichever party has over 50% of the seats (Conservatives in this case) doesn't need to rely on their support to push through policies.\n\n\nOutside of the House of Parliament those 650 MPs are tasked with the responsibility of serving their constituency - that includes supporting individuals/businesses in their community, representing the interests of their constituency in political debate/parliament. ",
"some will retire, some will just move onto other jobs whether in the private sector or elsewhere. Like any job, it depends on the person, some of the MPs have held their seats for decades and have purely been a MP all their life, they will find it hardest. \nOthers will stay in political life and campaign for their party, or their seat again in future elections. \nI'm sure some will look to join board of directors, or work with political adjacent jobs, be campaigners or lobbyists of some sort or advisers for companies, they will be sought after due to being a MP. \n\nIf someone loses the election it means they are no longer a MP, they've lost their job and so move on. As for the ones debating against them, they are still MPs, just not the one that has the most power, all MPs are paid by the taxpayer. "
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2lqje6 | why is the u.s. rail system so awful? | The railway system in the U.S. is horrible. There are very few routes, fare is more expensive than flying, and it is incredibly slow. I've never been to Europe, but I've only heard great things about the rail systems. Why is the U.S. railway system lacking compared to many other developed nations? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2lqje6/eli5_why_is_the_us_rail_system_so_awful/ | {
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"The U.S. rail system is second to none. The passenger railway _service_ is fairly shitty. Partly it's because the relative distance between places in the U.S. is _very_ large making the number of potentially useful train routes somewhat smaller than many other countries or geographies that have them.\n\nOther than that, consumer demand just isn't there. There is a chicken and egg issue around that I suppose!",
"The U.S. *passenger* rail system is bad. The U.S. has one of the best freight rail systems in the world.\n\nSimply put, the U.S. is an enormous country with its population comparatively spread out. Rail is good for linking densely populated areas but no good for the scattered towns and sprawling cities that most Americans live in. Flying or driving is almost guaranteed to be faster and cheaper, so there's no demand for passenger rail.",
"The US rail system is best in the world for cargo. Which is what it was designed for. \n\nPassenger trains fell out of use due to the adoption of the car and the implementation of the highway system, and the implementation of air travel.",
"A few places in the US have excellent passenger rail - NY comes to mind, DC as well.\n\nThe US is a young country, when you compare it to other nations with developed rail systems. \n\nDC is an interesting case, as it is one of our older cities, but it also has one of the newest large-scale rail systems. I imagine this was largely due to the confidence of bondholders in assuming the seat of government would still require as many people, and still be in business, long enough to repay construction costs. Other cities can't be so certain of this - parts of Houston that were booming 50 years ago are now deserted. Parts which were farmland 20 years ago are now covered with skyscrapers.\n\nIf you live in America, outside of large cities, you *need* a car. So you have to support both the cost of a car, and also the cost of a rail system. \n\nTL;DR: Cities which didn't have a rail system largely developed by 1960 will probably never catch up with ones that do.\n\nMaybe it's time to look at a technology more adapted to shifting, growing populations than rail, which is tied to long, expensive stretches of real estate."
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294lld | what would happen if no insects were killed; would the earth be overrun with insects? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/294lld/eli5_what_would_happen_if_no_insects_were_killed/ | {
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"Yes. That's why predators are important. The loss of predators in an environment can cause an ecological disaster. See the Mexican Wolf in the American Southwest. Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico have been granting unprecedently high limits for hunters in the area, because, with the wolves near extinction, the deer have been overfeeding and destroying the local food supply. "
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amlp9j | how do people with diseases like dementia and alzheimer's remember how to speak their language? | If they can't remember much, how can they remember how to fluently speak their language? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/amlp9j/eli5_how_do_people_with_diseases_like_dementia/ | {
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"The long and short of it is they eventually dont. Because language is so ingrained tho, it can be one of the last things to go. And in cases of multilingual people, languages can go in different ways. My grandmother knew sign language and when she lost her English to Alzheimer's, she could still sign effectively.",
"Alzheimer's disease affects the retention or creation of memory. Use this metaphor to help you:\n\nThink of your memory as a huge stack of paper.\n\nEvery time you need to remember something, you flip through the stack until you find the right page.\n\nWhen you need to remember something else, you place the page you were using on the top of the stack.\n\nThis process continues, and the most used pages tend to be on the top of the stack.\n\nHowever with Alzheimer's disease, a person going through their 'stack' has a chance of accidentally dropping that page, losing it forever. \n\nThis means that the most recently used pages tend to be lost sooner. Eventually, the person's stack begins to dwindle, the victim starts to pull pages from lower and lower parts of the stack as pages are lost.\n\nThis dosen't answer your question:\nWhat about language?\n\nWell, language is on every page. The victim has used it throughout all of their life, and is present in all of the memories. \n\nI hope this helped.\n\n",
"Alzheimer's is a complex disease. I used to work in a nursing home with lots of dementia and Alzheimer's patients. People with the disease start losing their vocabulary as the disease advances. You'll see people who can speak 2 languages keep switching back and forth, with word losses in both. You may also see an uprise in profanity.\n\nThe really neat thing about Alzheimer's is, while you lose your vocabulary and ability to speak, the part of your brain that processes music stays intact longer. Take an elderly person. Odds are they know the song \"Amazing Grace.\" They might not be able to speak anymore, but they could still sing the song word for word."
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1040s4 | virtual public networks (vpns), proxy servers, and how to set them up on a computer | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1040s4/eli5_virtual_public_networks_vpns_proxy_servers/ | {
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"Five Year old Answer (i.e, not 100% accurate and simplified) \n\n**A virtual PRIVATE network:**\n\nA VPN allows your computer to act as if it were physically connected to your work's office network even though you might be at home. You will have connections to file shares, printers, and other resources on your local office's network. Also, your computer will access the internet though your office's network. If your office network has websites blocked, like reddit, you won't be able to access reddit. \n\nNow, another big thing about VPNs, your network traffic is encrypted between your computer and the \"private network\" you're connecting to. This allows you to do things like use credit cards safely from a public network like a hotel, or defeat fire walls. \n\n**A Proxy Servers:**\n\nIs kinda like a VPN but simpler. Instead of pretending to be on a local network, you're just routing your internet traffic though another server. However, it's not (necessarily) encrypted between your computer and the proxi. A use for this is if your trying to hide your internet activity, or your personal identity, for some reason. Using certain technology with a proxi, like a SSH tunnel, allows you to defeat certain firewalls and corporate internet filters. \n\n**How to set them up on a computer:**\n\nI'm assuming you're talking about hosting these services, and not connecting to one. A 5 year doesn't do this. Someone with a 5 year old's level of knowledge shouldn't do this. You'll need a deeper understanding of the technology to do it safely. "
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4w2hfa | what causes the point in your voice that drastically changes the pitch? | Say you're starting from the lowest pitch you can go, and then slowly increase pitch. At some point, the pitch goes up drastically, what causes this?
I have no idea if my voice is fucked or not, but this happens to me a little bit higher than my normal voice.
And no, I'm not talking about a voice-crack that happens randomly, I mean when you purposefully rise your pitch. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4w2hfa/eli5_what_causes_the_point_in_your_voice_that/ | {
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"Basically your voice has several different \"registers,\" or areas of production. These registers are characterized by a different vocal fold position and vibration pattern in order to create higher or lower pitches but we experience them mostly by where we feel them resonate. The lowest normal register is called \"chest voice\" because most people feel it vibrate or emanate from their chest area; this is the register you speak in most of the time (especially if you're a male). The next register up is called \"head voice\" because most people feel it resonate somewhere in their head (sometimes the forehead, the mask of the face, or even sometimes the top of the skull). This voice is not normally used by most people for speaking and as a result the muscles that create it are quite weak. The next register up (in males) would be falsetto. If you are speaking or singing really high and it sounds and feels breathy it's probably falsetto. \n\nYou feel and hear the break in your voice as you slowly raise (or lower) in pitch because your brain doesn't know how to control the little muscles that control your vocal cords well enough to smoothly transition between two different registers (which have two different methods of making the cords vibrate). As a result, it abruptly switches your cords between one method of vibration to another and this causes the pitch of your voice to jump abruptly as well. \n\nOne of the main focuses of learning how to sing is actually smoothing out this transition so that the voice sounds even as you sing up and down the scale. The area your voice jumps between is called the passagio (passage in Italian) and is usually about the interval of a fourth (if that means anything to you). "
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6thl4b | why do humans sing along to songs on the radio instead of just listening to them? | This might be a stupid question but I've always wondered | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6thl4b/eli5_why_do_humans_sing_along_to_songs_on_the/ | {
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"I think for my part it has to do with appreciation of the song and being part of art the someone else created. \n",
"Singing is fun and feels good. It's tied to why you listen to songs recreationally to begin with.",
"Humans are social creatures, and singing together is a somewhat instinctive reaction that appears across many separate cultures. It helps us to bond, as a ritual."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
cgmzrv | how can the price of food, school, cars, and consumer goods in general outpace inflation? isn't that the definition of inflation? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cgmzrv/eli5_how_can_the_price_of_food_school_cars_and/ | {
"a_id": [
"euio4jv",
"euirjxt"
],
"score": [
8,
2
],
"text": [
"Rising prices can't outpace inflation, because they \\*are\\*, as you say, inflation. They can outpace the purchasing power of a dollar (or whatever monetary unit.) They can outpace income, or specifically the minimum wage, which is often a topic of discussion.\n\nPeople often use the word 'inflation' to mean 'the whole problem caused by rising prices without a similar rise in income'. But this is, as you point out, not strictly correct usage.",
"Inflation is an average increase of price. Usually it is measured on many items over a large area and over a long time.\n\nWhen talking about a single good, there are many factors that come into play. Brocolli may seem like a simple commodity, but by the time it gets to the store it has been affected by: the price of gas to transport it, the price of electricity to cool it, the price of water to grow it, the price of labor to tend it, and the price of pesticides and farm equipment.\n\nSo if a regulation or law passed that changed pesticide use, that will affect the price of broccoli in a significant way. It will not affect the price of glass, gas, or houses though.\n\nOne sector of the economy might see faster price changes than another, but inflation is the average of all sectors."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
|
5rtxvg | why do the same apps and programs on different operating systems perform differently on the same hardware? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5rtxvg/eli5_why_do_the_same_apps_and_programs_on/ | {
"a_id": [
"dda1v8k",
"dda5q0l"
],
"score": [
2,
2
],
"text": [
"I suppose that's because different systems consume different quantities of your resources like cpu, ram and others to be working, so it's different when you have 50% of cpu power and 70% of cpu power left to use on your apps and programs.",
"What Malageo says, plus different operating systems are well... Different. Most windows applications run off of Microsoft's .NET framework, apple has its own framework. Different code is used to perform different functions on different OSs, differences in the efficiencies of the frameworks and the programmers working on the app for the different OSs will factor into it as well.\n\nIn addition, there's potential that drivers will factor into things as well especially for something that uses the GPU's hardware acceleration. If the graphic card's Windows drivers are more efficient than say, the linux or apple drivers, you'd notice a difference."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
||
6fp9ba | how are small businesses allowed to sell shirts based on popular shows/movies | So, looking through Instagram, I see a lot of "stores" (Etsy, Redbubble... etc) where people will sell shirts or pins that have famous cartoon characters and other things that should be under copyright or trademark.
How do these stores not get shut down or sued? I was always told that if you don't own the rights or have permission it's ilegal. I'm American by the way and the stores that I've seen for the most part are also American. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6fp9ba/eli5_how_are_small_businesses_allowed_to_sell/ | {
"a_id": [
"dijwyk5",
"dijwzio"
],
"score": [
2,
3
],
"text": [
"They are not allowed to. However, it takes time and money to go after these really small time sellers, both in terms of tracking them down (and then hoping they are based from the USA, and in term of actually taking them to court) and it is not always worth it. Furthermore, cracking down too harshly on fan stuff can sometimes create bad PR which companies want to avoid. Even if it is illegal, lots of people will have an emotional reaction of 'omg they weren't doing anything wrong, big business being assholes' which can affect how they will view the company. ",
"Because the owner of the trademark isn't willing to put forth the legal manpower to sue. An attorney costs hundreds per hour. To file paperwork to sue thousands of shops for $100 of sales is economically unsound. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
|
6xomcf | how do radio stations transmit digital "hd" radio signal over the same fm frequencies used for standard radio? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6xomcf/eli5_how_do_radio_stations_transmit_digital_hd/ | {
"a_id": [
"dmhbil9"
],
"score": [
6
],
"text": [
"They aren't the same *exact* frequencies. The frequencies used for the HD signals are right next to the ones used for analog broadcasts.\n\nFrom Wikipedia:\n > HD Radio is a trademarked term for iBiquity's in-band on-channel (IBOC) digital radio technology used by AM and FM radio stations to transmit audio and data by using a digital signal embedded \"on-frequency\" *immediately above and below a station's standard analog signal*, providing the means to listen to the same program in either HD (digital radio with less noise) or as a standard broadcast (analog radio with standard sound quality). \n\n_URL_0_"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_Radio"
]
] |
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