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9itdw9 | how do we know counting rings in a tree is a definitive "1 year"? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9itdw9/eli5_how_do_we_know_counting_rings_in_a_tree_is_a/ | {
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"In places with seasons, trees go through a predictable growth-dormant cycle that produces the distinctive ring pattern.\n\nSince most of these seasonal trees go dormant regardless of what the actual winter temperature was that year (they're timing the day lengths, not responding to unpredictable temperature swings) a ring is produced even if the year's weather was very unusual.\n\nYou get big rings for years with optimal growing conditions and weak rings for drought years.\n\nRings are less pronounced and more difficult to count in trees that prefer more tropical climates, since they may grow all year instead of stopping entirely on a regular cycle.",
"A tree's growth rate changes in a predictable pattern throughout the year in response to seasonal climate changes, resulting in visible growth rings. Each ring marks a complete cycle of seasons, or one year, in the tree's life. So after seasons pass there will be a growth ring which would be close to or right at 1 year worth of growing.",
"It might be easier to understand if you think of it as a full cycle of seasons and not exactly a 365 day period. The rings show more what happens during the growing season that makes up the most of the actual ring. It grows quite a bit. The cells appear different (darker in most cases) during the 'off season' and lighter during the time of quicker growth. This is a cycle that is made up of a year growing quickly in the spring/summer and slowing toward Autumn to winter. Then repeating. The rings come as the the tree grows outward all around.",
"* rings are caused by alternating between growing during the warm season and dormancy during the winter...one winter per year = one ring per year\n* trees in the same area will show the same ring patterns, unlikely if there wasn't some external factor involved\n* ring thickness matches up with historical records...the Annals of Ulster tells us there was a drought in 748, and tree rings in Ireland match up\n* radiocarbon dating corresponds with tree-ring dating",
"If you have a look at a stump you'll see thick bands of a light shade where the tree got bigger fairly rapidly during the warmer months followed by thinner darker bands where it didnt really grow much in the winter. It makes the same pattern every year because the seasons are predictable.\n\nSome bands will be thicker where the tree has has a good long summer with plenty of nutrients where others may be thinner and harder to count but it always makes the same pattern.",
"Can't be hard.\n\n \n\n\nGrow it 5 years, cut it, 5 rings\n\n \n\n\nGrow it 10 years, oh look, 10 rings\n\n \n\n\nExtrapolate",
"Wood biologist here. The wood as we usually think about, is a tissue called xylem and is where the water travels to go from the roots to the leaves. In an incredibly simplified way, you can see it as a bunch vertical of pipes (called vessels) and fibers. The xylem is produced continuously during the growth season by another tissue (the cambium) located as a ring around it. \nSince one of the function of the xylem is to transport water, the cambium will produce bigger pipes when the season is rainy (typically during the spring) and smaller pipes when it is dryer (like in summer). If the winter is cold enough, the activity of the cambium will stop completely creating an abrupt change of vessels size as it pass directly from summer to spring. Those vessels size variations can be seen easily (or not for some species) because bigger pipes means more empty space in the wood and thus a lighter wood color.\n\nNow those growth ring usually follow the seasonal cycle as it is what determine the water availability. The trees have evolved to expect more or less water during the different seasons and can detect the day length and temperature changes to determine what season it is. That's why they can be called \"annual rings\" and used to know the age of a tree.\nBut this is true mostly for temperate region (where the seasonality is well defined). \nIn tropical region the growth rings are less visible (and even sometimes completely absent) as the season are less marked and the cambium activity never stops, and it can be hard (or impossible) to read them.\nAlso, abrupt changes in the water availability for the tree or in his environment can produce false annual rings. But it's not so common and usually not important as it is nothing compared to the tree lifespan.\n\nIt is important to note that this mechanism is basically the same for the gymnosperms trees (like conifers) except for one thing : there is only one type of cells, called tracheids that play both the role of vessels and of fibers.",
"The annual growth cycle in trees is easily observable because there are what is known as summer rings and winter rings. \n\n .\n\nThe summer rings are lighter in color and form when the tree experiences warmer temps that promote faster growth as well as longer days which expose them to more sunlight. They are also significantly thicker than the winter rings depending on how warm the summer was.\n\n.\n\nWinter rings are thinner and darker. These occur when the temperatures are much colder than summer temps and the sun is not visible for nearly as long as it is in the summer. Did you ever notice it getting darker much earlier in the winter and the sun doesn't seem to come up as early? This means the trees cant get as much sunlight and as a result, their growth slows down during these months.\n\n\n.\n\nThere are trees out there known as \"old growth\" from hundreds of years ago which have very thin summer and winter rings because temperatures we significantly cooler than they are now, so they grew very slowly. The summer and winter rings are very close together in old growth trees.",
"You could always plant a tree and cut it down in 30 years and count the rings, if you wanted to know --for sure-- that one tree ring is one year.",
"Let's say you live in Timbuktu and you have some knowledge of the weather patterns of the last 30 years. You know that 15 years ago, there was a really bad draught, and the growing season that year was particularly bad.\n\nIf you cut down a tree that you know is 30 years old, you will be able to see, clearly that the 15th ring from the outside, the ring that was created when the tree was 15 years old, looks different than the other rings. It may be a different color, and it will be thinner than the rings that grew in better years. If you find and older tree, you will be able to read the weather patterns from years so far back that you probably don't even have records for! This is why tree rings are so important; some trees can tell us about how the local weather was changing thousands of years ago, and there are even tree fossils that have been found that give us data about weather phenomenon millions of years ago! If you have enough trees you can compare them and build up a pretty accurate calendar, year by year, which you can then compare to the local geology. It's awesome!",
"When someone plants a tree and cuts it down say 30 years later, they can see the rings correspond with the age. What they can also see is that the rings correspond with the local weather. Now if they then cut down a 500 year old tree next to it, they can see that the outer 30 rings on the 500 years old tree correspond to the 30 year one. This is the basis for [dendrochronology](_URL_0_), or the science of dating stuff by tree rings. Depending on the location we have a complete tree ring based dating yard stick for centuries (if not millenia) back.",
"Plant tree. Wait some number of years. Cut down tree and count the rings. Do they match how many years passed since you planted it? Maybe. ",
"In the summer, a tree grows fast and in the winter, a tree grows slow. Growing fast leaves a light stripe and growing slow leaves a dark stripe, like how a balloon that is full of air seems to be lighter in color than one that is deflated. The pattern of winter and summer growth, or dark and light stripes, is what gives trees their rings.",
"Rings are caused by the seasons, rather than passage of time. So 40 winters would cause 40 rings. And since winter happens once every year, we know the tree is 40 years old.",
"All answers explained why the one tree rings represent 1 year in tree age. But I understand the question as \"how it was discovered\".\n\nAccording to most documents I have skim through, it seems it was credited to American Astronomre A E Douglass, who had a strong interest in studying the climate, developed the method around 1900.\n\nHowever according to wikipedia on [Dendrochronology](_URL_0_), Leonardo da Vinci (1452 – 1519) was the first person to mention that trees form rings annually.\n\nAnyway, I think there was a lumberjack one day, looked at his work during a boring lunch and connected that: \"Wait a minute, this forest was planted 10 years ago and this tree have 10 rings!\", just like that. But his name was never recorded in history...",
"If you want a serious but readable source on this subject try Edmund Schulman book the Living Ruins. It discuses the biology of. tree rings and how they have been used in conjunction with Bristlecone Pines to refine radio carbon dating. The science is called dendrochronology.",
"Because you can use human records to pick the exact year a tree started growing. You can cut down a tree which someone a century ago recorded in their diary the exact date it was planted and count the rings. Match that with local weather records which we also have a few hundred years of and you see the result of hot summers and wet and dry periods. \n\nYou then build back a local chronology starting with the oldest tree you can find and then timbers from local buildings which overlap the periods you already have patterns from. \n\nExceptional events like the eruption of mount Tambora and the resultant _URL_0_ leave quite a distinctive mark in tree records. which help to calibrate things.",
"If some calamity caused a year to have two summer-winter cycles, that would create two rings. The rings reflect the seasonal growth cycles, not a 'calendar year'... but seasons do reflect years almost always."
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8kk4y4 | what exactly is a galaxy? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8kk4y4/eli5_what_exactly_is_a_galaxy/ | {
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"A massive collection of stars, all orbiting a central point, usually a supermassive black hole. \n\nBasically,from what we can tell, they form much the same way individual star systems form. A cloud of gas (mainly hydrogen) condensed due to gravity, the center becomes a Star, and the eddys of the cloud help condense other parts into planets. A galaxy forms like that, but on a scale trillions of times larger"
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6x23o6 | what happens when a country 'condemns' something? | What does 'condemning' actually do? Is it just a bunch of people coming to the conclusion that, 'yes, this was in fact, a bad thing. Shame on them.'
is there nothing more to it?
Like I read on the news all the time 'x organization/group/country condemns actions of other organization/group/country"
Obviously when ISIS kills 50 people, that's terrible. Why do countries have to officially acknowledge action? What is actually being accomplished? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6x23o6/eli5_what_happens_when_a_country_condemns/ | {
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"That's pretty much it - just expressing disapproval. A lot of times there's not a good/politically palatable solution to problems, so all a politician can do is talk about it.",
"It doesn't do much to solve the problem, but what's important is the act of stating in public your opposition to something.\n\nIf, as a senior politician, you're asked what you think about a particular event and you just shrug your shoulders and say, \"Well, these things happen,\" people are going to wonder whose side you're really on.\n\nThis is why Donald Trump recently got into trouble for not being strong enough in his condemnation of the Alt-Right's actions in Charlottesville. He did at one point condemn their actions outright, but later reverted to his previous line that people on both sides were to blame in roughly equal measure.\n\nThis was widely interpreted, even by some of his political allies, as a refusal to acknowledge that the Alt-Right are, in their eyes, very clearly and openly pursuing similar policies to the Nazis of 1930s Germany, and that such a movement is objectively bad. By not clearly condemning the Alt-Right, Trump is now seen by many as a Nazi sympathiser.\n\nCondemning such a movement doesn't, of course, do anything to tackle the problem. But it does make it unmistakably clear that you are strongly opposed to it, and *that's* the point."
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9dtty4 | as someone who doesnt follow sports and social trends or have a twitter or instagram, why are people burning their nike clothes? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9dtty4/eli5_as_someone_who_doesnt_follow_sports_and/ | {
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"It's an extention of the kneeling during national anthem thing. The football player who started the kneeling protest did an ad with Nike. Now people who disliked the kneeling protest are burning thier Nike stuff to show they hate Nike now.",
"Nike made Colin Kaepernick the face of their brand which is controversial because he started the whole “kneeling during the pledge” thing in the NFL due to injustices he sees being done to black people in the country. Those who are burning their Nike stuff are upset because they find this new trend of kneeling offensive to the country/military ",
"Have you seen the Colin Kapernick add? Are you familiar with the kneeling controversy at all? It is a mix of these two factors. He was the start of something (kneeling during the national anthem to protest police violence) which conservative football fans really rallied against, some even taking to burning his Jerseys. Nike, who apparently had been paying him all along as am endorsement released an add eluding to celebrating his efforts in this protest which some say led to him losing his career as a quarterback. "
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aq2vix | asian flush syndrome | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aq2vix/eli5_asian_flush_syndrome/ | {
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"Are you asking what causes it? It's caused by the buildup of a chemical called acetaldehyde, which is a natural product of the metabolism of alcohol. It's genetic, and fairly common among people of Asian decent. There are a couple of genes responsible. One gene is responsible for producing a chemical called alcohol dehydrogenase, which is what breaks down alcohol. People with a certain variant of this gene make more acetaledehyde. Another gene is one which makes the chemical that breaks down acetaldehyde itself, and people with a variant of this gene don't produce enough of the enzyme to break down the acetaldehyde, so it accumulates."
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7ljhve | why does white noise calm people down? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7ljhve/eli5why_does_white_noise_calm_people_down/ | {
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"It distracts us from our own internal dialogue, which can be a little overwhelming after a while",
"As a new father, we use white noise to help put the baby to sleep. I'm told that the womb is actually a fairly loud place, with constant breathing & pulsations. I imagine that this subconscious feeling of womb-like comfort continues into adulthood.",
"The \"shhhhhh\" sound is very close to white noise. It supposedly replicates the womb sounds which we associate with warm comfortable, safe, hence a good place to sleep.",
"When it's quiet, your body reacts to every noise with a \"what's that?\" response which makes you perk up and be alert. By drowning out the sounds with white noise, you don't have that effect as often and your body has a chance to relax.",
"I have a white noise app that I run through a speaker when I sleep. The main draw to this app was the fact you could build your own mix from sounds other people uploaded including odd, but still soothing, sounds.\n\nYou find out that people have different tastes in \"soothing\". The one that I can give an example of myself is a PC running with the fans on. This is mainly because I ran my computer 24/7 in the same room I slept in for two years (dorms) that even then if had the option to not sleep in the same room, I would move it into my room.\n\nFrom the type of sounds I am about to list, some I could not sleep to but they all have at least one of the qualities I think are critical to a good sleep noise: personal familiarity(forced to sleep in), constant, soft regular beat comparatively to main noise (no bongo drums by themselves), droning, and perfected looping (the ones you could detect where the clip's end was KEPT you up and from other people's feedback, it was very noticable and downvoted because of the defect).\n\n-Urban city : people talking, loud taxis beeps, etc\n\n-Windchimes : Random dings. Some made with built in rain\n\n-Rains of various quantities - From a sprinkle to a downpour on a car roof.\n\n-Appliances - Clothes dryers, washers, dishwashers, and air conditioners, windows fans. One major similarity between them all is they all try to muffle the sound they generate to some degree.\n\n-Vehicles - Trains, random motorcycles. I can see the train thing working because I used to live in a small town that had a train whistle far in the distance because it was approaching another town.\n\n",
"I like to think of it as a sonic curtain between you and the rest of the world. The nature of white noise* is that it fills up the whole range of sound, so every other sound is blocked out a little by...well, essentially nothing. It gives us a chance to retreat into our own little worlds a little bit. \n\n*in my experience, “pink” or “brown” noise is actually slightly better. White noise involves the whole spectrum equally but other “shades” can fill up certain parts of the spectrum more than others. It’s been my experience that these other shades are better suited to actual life, where white noise is more a laboratory thing. ",
"is this true for everyone? i use a white noise generator to sleep, but are there people who are bothered by it?",
"I grew up in the Midwest on the wrong side of the tracks--we were too poor for AC, so we used box fans and such throughout the house. The drone is soporific, it lulls you to sleep. Several of my siblings, as well as myself, use fans to this day to get to sleep. I know a lot of people in the same boat. You can buy a fancy white noise generator, or you can buy a cheap box fan.\n\nI will say that when I lived in the Colorado high country, I spent a summer and fall living in a log cabin next to a small stream cascading down from a mountain gully above the cabin. That sang me to sleep at night, it was the best."
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1w1a45 | how can the quietest room in the world be -9 decibels? | This is just very confusing for me. Would the sound be effected before it was created? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1w1a45/eli5_how_can_the_quietest_room_in_the_world_be_9/ | {
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"Decibels are a logarithmic scale. 0 isn't no sound, it's just the lower-limit of what a human can typically hear. So -9 isn't no sound at all, it's just quieter than the quietest sound a human can detect, by a factor about the same as the factor between 0 decibels and 10.",
"I hear there is a room thats dark and has no sound in it, that people cannot last more than 20 to 45 min in without wigging out... What does a room with no sound....sound like? and why does theis phenomea happen?",
"You should think of the decibel count as being an exponent value, because it basically is. Imagine that people always reported a magnitude as 10 to some power. Like, 10^2 or 10^5 or 10^2.8 or even 10^-1 (10^-1 = 1/10 = 0.1) . But then, for brevity, they cut off the \"10\" part and just say 2, 5, 2.8, or -1. The -1 doesn't mean a negative value; it just means closer to zero than e.g. 10^0 .\n\n(Late edit: I forgot to say: the mathematical operation that \"strips off\" the 10 in the above is the logarithm, specifically the logarithm of base 10.)\n\n(Except that decibel count is actually equal to 20 times the base-10 log, but same idea.)\n\nSo then they picked some reference sound-intensity value to be equal to 1 (or 0 on the decibel scale), which is arbitrary. But for convenience, they made it equal to the \"quietest sound we'll deal with in practice\". Not the quietest sound *possible*, as you can see from this room, but at just the right value that we get \"reasonable\" numbers in practice.\n\nIf you truly wanted to report \"zero\" it would have to be negative infinity on the decibel scale.\n\nBonus ELI5: why do they bother taking the logarithm in the first place? Because human perception of sound does the same thing! That is, if you double the sound intensity, then double it again, you will perceive it, not as twice as loud each time, but as the same gain in volume each time. When you go from say 2 to 3 or 3 to 4 on the volume setting, you've actually increased the actual sound wave intensity by the same factor each time.",
"dB does not measure the absolute level of something. It merely expresses the *ratio* between the value you're measuring, and some reference value.\n\nIn other words, 0 dB is just a reference sound level (a very low level, to be sure), and any other measurable sound would have either a positive dB value (louder than reference) or negative (quieter).\n\nAbsolute silence would be not 0 dB, but \"minus infinity\" dB."
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b06yxr | does “burning in” brand new audio gears such as headphones and speakers actually work? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b06yxr/eli5_does_burning_in_brand_new_audio_gears_such/ | {
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"First: The word 'gear' in this context is already plural. It's a group noun, like 'news' and 'furniture'. \n\nSecond: No. That idea comes from decades ago, when magnets were weaker and materials were worse. Even then, it had almost no impact on the sound. Only hard core audiophiles purported to hear a difference in sound quality. \n\nModern sound equipment uses materials that do not change physical characteristics over time. The diaphragm, if there is one, will not stretch. ",
"The important bit is the suspension of the cone, the [black rubber part](_URL_0_) in this drawing. This part of the speaker needs to be flexible in order to allow the membrane to move, but it also needs to be firm enough to keep it centered. Some speakers use materials which are a bit too stiff when they come from the factory, and soften up a little during use. \n\nBut this really only concerns people who test and review speakers. Before testing, they will play some music or just some noise for a few minutes before actually measuring the performance. For the average Joe who just has a pair of ears instead of a calibrated microphone, this doesn't really matter, our hearing sense is terrible at detecting stuff like that. If someone wants to sell you a special CD for burning in your stereo, they're a fraud trying to sell snake oil."
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2vtr1t | how come no one has registered trademark using internet memes? are there any policies related to that? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2vtr1t/eli5_how_come_no_one_has_registered_trademark/ | {
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"To register a phrase as trademark, you have to prove that people recognize your company's products because you use the phrase. That's never going to be true for an internet meme."
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3dr2jg | the cable companies arguement to "data cap" my monthly internet usage is to prevent congestion of the system during peak hours. can it really be congested? | I'm not the smartest about this.
When watching netflix, isn't it Netflix's servers that bear the burden of me streaming content. The internet provider is just transfering the data the server produces.
Or, is my streaming of HD video burden the infrastructure required to provide it?
If it is true, what makes cable TV different in that the infrastructure doesn't collapse during the superbowl?
| explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3dr2jg/eli5_the_cable_companies_arguement_to_data_cap_my/ | {
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"Yes, it's true. Netflix's servers are sending you the video, but it still travels down your ISP's internet connection to get to you. There is a limited amount of bandwidth from your ISP out to the Internet for you and every other customer to share.\n\nWhat's different with cable TV is that the TV signals come in via satellite, and is then distributed to your home over the cables that the cable company has run. There's no bottleneck because when you and 100,000 other customers are watching the Superbowl, there is exactly one signal that comes into the cable company that they then send out to 100,000 customers. It's a one-to-many connection that is very efficient.\n\nBut the Internet isn't one-to-many. We think of it that way sometimes because of large sites like this one. But the Internet is really a shitton worth of private one-to-one connections.",
"It is a burden. However, it's not as much as ISP's may have you think. If everyone was watching > 25 Mbps (1080p Blu-ray is usually 25-36 Mbps) videos at once, that would cause a burden. 1080p Netflix is only 5.8 Mbps (Chrome and Firefox max out at 720p 3Mbps), and 1080p Yotuhe maxes out at around 3.8 Mbps.",
"The data got to get from Netflix's server to you. There is only so much data you can send though a wire or fiber. Your city got a limited bandwidth and your neighborhood got a limited bandwidth. So yes, it can be congested.\n\nBut if your ISP want to start to cap data, you have to call BS. Having caped data for a home connection is just stupid. Your ISP should build more cables if this is the case.\n\nThe difference between internet and cable TV is that when you are watching Netflix, they are sending the video to you and only you. So everyone watching has a separate stream of data. While cable TV is sending the same to everyone, so the signal is only sent to your neighborhood once and then split so that everyone gets the same signal.",
"Yes and no. Congestion during peak hours is indeed a real problem. But if congestion during peak hours gets too bad, people will stop trying to use so much bandwidth during those hours (because they're sick of waiting for stuff to buffer). If they only cared about peak-hour congestion, they'd institute pre-emptive throttling during certain hours, where they lower your maximum download speeds during certain times of day. I believe some ISPs do this, actually. \nMonthly data caps, on the other hand, are mostly a money-making tool. Even if you completely changed your schedule to only use the internet during off-peak hours, you'd be subject to the same data cap.",
"About the bit with cable TV during the Superbowl... \n\nNot too many years ago, the TV signals, ALL of them, came over the wires in a different way. In analog. The flow was always coming to your house and you TV faucet allowed certain channels in. \n\nSince the switched to digital, its similar to all other internet traffic. (At least the ones with content distribution networks, which cable TV does inherently). With the exception that the cable companies prioritize the TV signal. If it's available, they can use the bandwidth for internet, but if someone turns on their TV, that can bump out internet users. \n\nWhy? Tradition.\n"
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adnvnt | bandwidth vs ping vs latency | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/adnvnt/eli5_bandwidth_vs_ping_vs_latency/ | {
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"Latency is a measure in milliseconds of how long it takes for another device to respond to your request for a response. \n\nPing is the most common tool for measuring latency. It sends a small packet out and measures how long it takes to get the reply.\n\nBandwidth is how much data you can send/receive at the same time. Think of it as the difference between a two-lane road through a residential neighborhood and a 16-lane super-highway - the width and speed differences of the two roads allow for different amounts of traffic to pass in the same amount of time.",
"**Please read this entire message**\n\n---\n\nYour submission has been removed for the following reason(s):\n\n* ELI5 requires that you search before posting.\n\nThere are absolutely no exceptions to this rule. Please see this [wiki entry](_URL_2_) for more details (Rule 7).\n\n\n\n---\nIf you would like this removal reviewed, please read the [detailed rules](_URL_0_) first. If you still feel the removal should be reviewed, please [message the moderators.](_URL_1_?)"
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1gakan | why the winter war happened | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1gakan/eli5_why_the_winter_war_happened/ | {
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"Relations between Russia and Finland had been strained since WWI. \n\nRussia felt that Finland was weak, and that they would be able to easily seize a decent chunk of territory. Most of the rest of Europe was distracted by Germany gearing up to start WWII, and so the Russians felt that nobody else would really do much to help Finland if they invaded.",
"As Russia (technically, the USSR) under Stalin was getting off her knees, she wanted to restore her influence in the parts of the Russian Empire that were lost after the Russian Revolution and the Civil War. The Secret Protocol to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and later amendments defined the borders of these parts. Eastern Poland, the Baltic countries and Bessarabia were annexed to the USSR against the will of their populace (technically, there were elections, where 98% of the adult population voted, and 98% of them supported the pro-annexation candidates, but they were obviously fake). Finland was also in the Soviet sphere of influence. The Soviets wanted her to give up an industrialized heavily populated region close to Leningrad in exchange for (admittedly, greater in area) unpopulated swamps. Their pretext was that Leningrad was the biggest industrial center in the Soviet Union, and should a big war come (and a big war soon came), it should be easier to defend. The Finns said, \"Njet, Molotoff!\" This started the war. The casus belli was the shelling of a village on the Soviet side; the Finns had no incentive to do so, so it was probably as fake as the false flag \"Polish\" takeover on the Gleiwitz radio station that triggered World War II.\n\nNow, when two countries go to war, usually they recognize each other's governments as legitimate. When the Americans fought with Japan, they issued the Potsdam declaration to the Japanese government in Tokyo, and when that government accepted it, the war stopped. The Americans didn't say, \"the government in Tokyo is a fake one; the real Japanese government is in Honolulu.\" However, this is what the Soviets were saying until the very end of the Winter War: the Helsinki government does not legitimately represent the Finnish people; the only legitimate Finnish government is in Terijoki (an occupied village), headed by Otto Kuusinen (a Finnish communist who lived in the USSR since 1918). This self-proclaimed \"Finnish Democratic Republic\" signed a \"treaty\" with the USSR; the [text of the \"treaty\"](_URL_0_) said that it would be ratified in Helsinki. By the \"treaty\" a large chunk of Soviet Eastern Karelia went to the \"Finnish Democratic Republic\". Local Soviet Communist Party cadres from Eastern Karelia were told not to leave so they could prepare the Finnish people for building socialism. No one knows whether, if Stalin had succeeded installing Kuusinen in Helsinki, he would have headed a satellite state like People's Poland or a Union Republic like the annexed Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian SSR.\n\nAs far as I know, this is why the Winter War happened. How it went, and what happened later, is another story."
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2x5moq | why did we, as a species, develop a taste for art? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2x5moq/eli5_why_did_we_as_a_species_develop_a_taste_for/ | {
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"There will never be any one, completely satisfying answer to question like this. But, as far as we can tell, most of the higher-level mental attributes of humans are simply byproducts of having large, advanced brains. That is to say, we *didn't* evolve to appreciate art, we appreciate art because our brains evolved to do a whole suite of complex things, one of the most obvious and important of these things is communication, which humans can do in myriad complex ways."
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2f9dde | if our blood contains iron, why is it not orange or rust colored? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2f9dde/eli5_if_our_blood_contains_iron_why_is_it_not/ | {
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"Because we have a very small amount of it in our bodies. We have around 4 grams of iron in our bodies. This is about the weight of a penny.",
"Our intuitive sense is that adding elements to a compound should be like mixing paint. \"Rust is orange, and it contains iron, so compounds that contain iron should be orange-ish\" seems like it should be true.\n\nHowever, the color of a chemical is determined by its overall electron configuration, and not by the colors that the elements involved look like individually. For instance, iron isn't orange. Iron **oxide** is orange. So blood doesn't look red because it doesn't have free-floating iron-oxide. Rather, the iron is bound up in other compounds, which have a different color.",
"The iron in the hemoglobin molecules in our blood is what makes it red in the first place. There are other animals (horseshoe crabs are well known for this) that don't use iron to bind to oxygen, and instead use metals like copper in their blood. As a result, their blood is greenish blue. "
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27lvim | why can extreme stress cause a psychotic episode? | What is the brains point in doing this (like is it protecting itself)? Are some people more likely for this to happen? Or will everyone eventually have one if put through enough stress? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/27lvim/eli5_why_can_extreme_stress_cause_a_psychotic/ | {
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"Everyone will break, it's a matter of time and level of perceived stress and bodily fatigue they are going through at the time.\n\nMy first 48 hour shift at the hospital did something similar to me.\n\nAfter finally going home I fell asleep only to wake up in a cold shower, and having my parents (whom I lived with) tell me I had been walking around the house crying about the waffle I had just eaten because it had disappeared and I was hungry. \n\nWas not my best moment and I only vaguely remember cooking the waffle too.\n",
"It can happen to anyone sadly, and sometimes permanently. I currently suffer from psychosis after recently losing my mother and being the one to perform CPR. Psychosis can actually lead to other serious mental issues including schizophrenia and PTSD. I think my doctor called it a pre cursor to other disorders. My psychosis is actually on and off at times though, like most recent was running after a lady in the store because she looked like my mom....I felt my heart so happy, then i touched her shoulder and she turned around and it wasnt my mother no more.....just some woman who happened to walk by at the right time. Man did it rip my heart out my chest to find out it wasnt my mother.",
"Stress causes the release of hormones that put you into a vigilant state. This state requires a lot of resources to maintain, specifically sugars for your brain to operate. One of the side effects of this vigilant state is digestion is de-prioritized which ends up limiting the amount of sugars available to the brain to process. Sooner or later, your brain runs out of gas and sounds the alarm for emergency stop. It will do anything in its power to get out of the situation which is what results in the psychotic break. Add to the fact that the brain is now functioning at a lower level and the decisions that are made aren't that great.\n\nWhat's worse is prolonged vigilant states lead to feedback cycles between behavior and biology where the body gets stuck, generally causing anxiety disorders. This constant fight or flight state has other health implications due to the other body systems that reduce activity. It's supposed to be a temporary state to get you to safety, not something you live with constantly. This is what makes disorders like PTSD so dangerous.",
"Neuropsychologist here! Generally speaking, extreme stress may result in a dissociative episode, which may have some psychotic features, but actual brief psychotic episodes caused by stress alone are pretty rare. You'd usually need some contributing factors, like drug use, or family history, or perhaps dehydration or malnutrition.",
"I had an episode once, though I'm not sure if psychotic is the technical term. I went into a drug rehab center and was still coming down from a myriad of different things. I checked myself out AMA and wanted to go home. When I was told I wasn't going home I was going to a different (worse) facility I snapped and grabbed the wheel of the car and drove us off of an overpass. We hit several cars, (no one hurt) when we came to a stop I ran three miles across town in flip flops almost fighting two gangster dudes for running through their back yard. I broke down and laid down in the middle of a street before continuing to run. When I finally turned myself in I went to the original facility, but the psychiatric ward. In the waiting area I rearranged all the furniture and kept trying to attack my stepdad. \n\nPoint being: prior to and after that I've never been violent. Never even been in a fight. I don't know if my brain couldn't handle coming off all the drugs at the same time and it caused a disconnect, because I don't feel like I'm capable of anything like that. When I think about it, it's like watching a movie of someone else. ",
"I have no idea what's happening physiologically, but according to my psychiatrist, it tends to exacerbate an exiting phobia or anxiety, though any particular person's breaking point is impossible to predict. When my dad got sick and we all thought he wasn't going to make, my hypochondria kicked into full gear, and I had a bit of a psychotic break where I was convinced that I was dying of vCJD (mad cow disease).\n\nThe brain's a wacky organ."
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6e42wy | how do phones send texts? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6e42wy/eli5_how_do_phones_send_texts/ | {
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"In much the same way as they send voice to the tower when you talk on the phone. They have circuitry to create a signal, and send one that is the style the tower recognizes as text. They've decided certain bit patterns mean certain characters, and send a combination of address information and the text content as, essentially, a radio-wave pattern. "
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315t3e | how this battery train experiment works? | _URL_0_ | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/315t3e/eli5_how_this_battery_train_experiment_works/ | {
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"[This](_URL_1_) should help you out...people on a physics forum explaining it pretty simply\n\nEDIT: Aww hell, I guess I'll copy/paste the answer here...\n\n > If you run a current through a coil; it generates an magnetic field inside the coil [like this](_URL_0_)\n\n > If the field lines are exactly parallel a bar magnet will feel no net force. However at the ends of the coil, where the field lines diverge, a bar magnet will be either pulled into the coil or pushed out of the coil depending on which way round you insert it.\n\n > The trick in the video is that the magnets are made of a conducting material and they connect the battery terminals to the copper wire, so the battery, magnets and copper wire make a circuit that generates a magnet field just in the vicinity of the battery. The geometry means the two magnets are automatically at the ends of the generated magnetic field, where the field is divergent, so a force is exerted on the magnets.\n\n > The magnets have been carefully aligned so the force on both magnets points in the same direction, and the result is that the magnets and battery move. But as they move, the magnetic field moves with them and you get a constant motion.\n\n > If you flipped round the two magnets at the ends of the battery the battery and magnets would move in the reverse direction. If you flipped only one magnet the two magnets would then be pulling/pushing in opposite directions and the battery wouldn't move.",
"When you pass a current through a coiled wire, it generates a magnetic field. If you wind *insulated* wire around a large nail, and connect the ends of the wire to a battery, you can create an electromagnet from the nail. This is the old, boring version of this 'train' experiment. Note that a magnetic field is created whether or not the nail is inside, but the iron nail increases the strength many times.\n\nOK. The magnets that are stuck to the end of the battery (by their own magnetic attraction) form the electrical connection between the battery and the bare wire.\n\nSo, the current that flows through the wire (from the battery) produces a magnetic field, and that field exerts a force on the magnets. As there is nothing to stop the battery from sliding, apart from a small amount of friction, this force pushes the battery along the inside the coil of wire.\n\nAs the magnets move, they keep touching different parts of the wire, and the circuit is maintained.\n\nI would have thought that the magnets would have to be aligned in the same direction (ie attracting each other, rather than repelling) for the train to work. Perhaps I am just not as smart as I think.\n\n\nThis is basically the same principle that describes how a speaker works. It uses a coil, to which variable current is supplied, to slide over a magnet. The moving coil is attached to the speaker cone, and the moving cone generates sound waves by acting directly on the air."
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93nb2p | what is wikileaks? what is the current situation with them? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/93nb2p/eli5_what_is_wikileaks_what_is_the_current/ | {
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"Wikileaks is a website that originated by civil libertarians who intended to promote transparency by publishing leaks of sensitive information about governments and large corporations, given to them in secret by whistleblowers. They rose to fame in 2010 with the publication of a huge number of military records and diplomatic cables, given to them illegally by the whistleblower, Chelsea Manning, who was a soldier and computer analyst in the US Army. Chelsea Manning was sentenced to 35 years (threatened with a death sentence for “aiding the enemy”) and released after 6 after receiving a commutation of her sentence by President Obama in the last months of his president. Chelsea Manning is a transgender woman and was subject to humiliating treatment and solitary confinement inside of the military prison where she served time. She attempted suicide at least one time that we know of. The US government also put out a warrant for the arrest of one of the founders of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, an Australian citizen.\n\nJulian is also wanted in Sweden on accusations of sexual assault, and the Swedish government has been attempting to extradite him for questioning regarding the allegations against him. \n\nTo avoid these attempts at arrest and extradition, Assange applied for asylum in Ecuador and was granted it, and when blocked from boarding a plane in London, he took literal refuge inside the Ecuadorean embassy, where he has lived for the last 6 years. If he attempts to leave the building, British police intend to arrest him immediately, to extradite him to Sweden. He has said he would be willing to allow himself to be extradited to Sweden to face the sexual assault charges (which he denies) if given promises that he would not be extradited to the US. The Swedish government have said that they wouldn’t, and the British claim they would only extradite him to Sweden, not to America, but he claims to not trust their word on this.\n\nFurther complicating matters, in recent years, Assange and Wikileaks are seen to be biased by many observers. They’ve been accused of softballing or ignoring leaks that are damaging to Russia, and focusing exclusively on leaks that are damaging to the US. They are also seen as having favored Trump in the 2016 US presidential election, and opposed Hillary. Some have gone as far as to say that Wikileaks is basically an arm of FSB, the Russian intelligence agency that is the equivalent of the CIA in America.\n\nAnd then to add to it, Assange seems to have overstayed his welcome in the Ecuadorean embassy, where, as I said, he has lived for 6 years straight now and not once left the building (London police are parked outside the building 24/7 waiting to arrest him should he ever leave). They’ve built him a small residence inside the embassy building, with a bed, bathroom, and small kitchen. And they claim he is obnoxious, doesn’t shower often, and intentionally inflames the situation diplomatically, causing trouble for the Ecuadorean government. They’ve reportedly cut off his access to the Internet so he’ll stop talking. "
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24rteq | how are the us still allowed to use drone strikes when the civilian casualty rate is so high? | Just seems that if it was anyone else, people would make a bigger deal. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/24rteq/eli5_how_are_the_us_still_allowed_to_use_drone/ | {
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"Who is going to stop us.",
"The United States government believes they are effective enough to justify the high civilian casualty rate. ",
"\"Allowed\" is an interesting term, isn't it? Any other weapon with such a high civilian casualty rate would have been prohibited by now. \n\nBasically, the ability of legal bodies to create international law prohibiting weapons(like the Geneva Conventions, Hague Law, etc.) is limited by the number of parties you have to get to agree to it, while the USA(the main user of drones as weapons) has developed the technology quite rapidly. To create meaningful prohibitions against drone warfare, you'd have to get all the major international players on the same side, including the USA. That would take a lot of time, work, and lawyering.\n\nTL;DR The ability to wage war grows faster than an international lawyers' ability to argue about it.",
"* with sovereign nations, there is really no authority to \"allow\" or not \"allow\" that countries actions\n* the possibility of civilian casualties are an unfortunate reality of any armed conflict, drones or no drones\n* it is unclear whether the civilian casualty rate is high, or what \"too high\" even means...for every highly publicized mission with civilian casualties, there could be a dozen we don't hear about that only hit the intended targets",
"Many officials believe that the high casualty rate is due to underdevelopment and unfamiliarity with a new technology. They see this as a step towards reducing unwanted casualties in the long run at the cost of current mistakes. It's the \"you need to crack a few eggs to make an omelette\" mentality, which may or may not prove to be worthwhile (i'm not saying it is).",
"No one has pointed out that some countries actually ask for the US to use drones because they don't have the sufficient means to apprehend targets. Even Pakistan has approved the US of drones but publically condemn them.\n\nI haven't seen a report more than 15% civilian casualties, still too high but not nearly as some would have you believe.\n\nPeople are more willing to accept the 15% than risking boots and resources along with potentially more bystanders.\n\nAlso like others have said, who is going to stop the US. By the time anyone complains the US has already moved on to other things. Most of the countries that can stop the attacks are allies or don't care. If the US were to halt all drone attacks then its just going to find other ways to get to its targets. The US isn't just going to stop going after targets because the drones have been grounded. ",
"The military alternative would be just dropping bombs from a plane which would have a higher civilian casualty rate.",
"Drones have a much lower civilian casualty rate than the weapons they used before.",
"Even if it were a big deal, it's like asking \"how is Russia *allowed* to take over parts of Ukraine?\" Even if other nations wanted to stop us or tried to stop us, they couldn't/wouldn't.",
"It comes down to International Humanitarian Law, or \"the laws of war\", which state that an attack must be \"proportional\". According to the United States and its lawyers, the US is still in an ongoing armed conflict against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, which means that International Humanitarian Law, and not International Human Rights Law, applies. Although some of the strikes may kill large numbers of civilians, if the strike is targeting a high-level operative, then the collateral damage for the attack, although high, would be considered proportional. \n\nELI5 - Under the laws of war it is legal to kill civilians as long as the target is of sufficient military value to justify the collateral damage. The US Gov't considers its actions to fall under the Laws of War. ",
"The OP (and many of the other posters) missunderstand the problem.\n\nSimply put, drones are extremely precise weapon systems. Compared to coventional artillery or GPS guided munitions (such as JDAMS), they offer significant advantages: they are direct fire (so you actually have eyes on target, rather than presumed location), and their CEP is tiny (I think hellfire IIs are something ridiculous like 50% of rounds within a meter of the aim point and 90% within 2?).\n\nSo it's not that drone strikes create more civillian casualties than other kinds of attacks. What they do create however is more opportunities.\n\nDrones are extremely effective. They can fly in circles for hours, using very little fuel and rotating the flight crew on the ground. Bombs and artillery, by contrast, usually require a spotter on the ground. This means that drones are cheap, and keep personel out of harms way, so they can be used with impugnity.\n\nThere is no \"safe\" way to kill someone with a high explosive round. Despite their precision, everyone nearby is still going to get killed or injured, and unfortunately the targets of drone strikes rarely elect to stand out in the open, away from their friends and family. \n\nTLDR: Drones are crazy precise, and you tried to kill the same target with bombs, infantry and artillery, you'd have even higher civillian casualties. But people don't compare casualties of drone strikes to casualties from conventional weapons, they compare it to \"doing nothing at all\", on the (possibly correct) assumption that the military wouldn't engage in so many attacks if they weren't so cheap.\n\nEdit: If you are REALLY wondering why we attack people at all? Good question. War is a terrible way of running foreign policy, but the sad truth is it's easy and appealing to a broad section of every population in every country. So long as there are warriors, there will be war. So long as there is war, the countries without warriors will be destroyed. Good luck trying to solve THAT problem.",
"So High??? ~55 million civilians died from world war II, doubt we're REMOTELY near that...\n\n",
"Why is the US government allowed? Simple answer really: Who's gonna stop them?",
"\"The strong do what they have to do, the weak accept what they have to accept\"\r\r- Thucydides",
"Because drone strike civilian casualty rates are lower than casualty rates when we put men on the ground. We just don't report when out soldiers accidentally blow up a truck full of civilians because we protect our soldiers identity. ",
"Drones have a 15% civilian casualty rate. Meaning for every 100 targets killed 15 civilians are killed. \n\nIn recent history, including these conflicts where we use drones, putting soldiers on the ground has a civilian casualty rate between 50-70%. Meaning for every 100 targets killed, 50 - 70 civilians are killed. In historical wars civilian casualty rates have normally been over 100%, meaning more civilians were killed than enemy combatants. This pattern of more civilians killed than combatants didn't change for the US until the Korean War. \n\nWWII for example, had a civilian casualty rate of 140%. At least for the US, for Russia, it was approaching 700%.\n\nVietnam was also horrible, with about 180% civilian casualty rate, **on the side that didn't just massacre civilians.**\n\n15% is lower than 50% or 70%. Do the math, drones cause the least civilian casualties. "
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35a7ej | how do doctors perform 20+ hour surgeries? don't they get mentally and physically exhausted? | I wouldn't want a tired doctor performing surgery on me. Do they get rest cycles with other doctors? Do they have places where they can "pause" the surgery to take a nap? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/35a7ej/eli5_how_do_doctors_perform_20_hour_surgeries/ | {
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"Yes, if it's going to take that long they work in shifts. Even during a more mundane procedure, the surgeon will often have a resident come in to do certain parts.",
"Most surgeries (when things go to plan) take around 30 min-2 hours. Some major surgeries e.g. a liver transplant might take ~6-8 hours. \n\n20+ hour surgeries would be exceptional e.g. conjoined twin separations where you actually need multiple different teams e.g. plastic surgeons, neurosurgeons etc.\n\nUsually surgery is a very controlled situation so it would be theoretically possible to take a break. It might be reasonable (e.g. 20-30 min in a 6+ hour surgery) but you don't want to leave the patient open/unconscious too long. \n\nIn most specialty surgeries you would have someone else who can take over for some of it. ",
"Yes, they do. Although, if you've ever met or dealt with surgeons, they are a separate breed. Due to training and the personality traits that most of them have, they tend to thrive on long hours. Growing up, my friends dad was a Cardiac surgeon, and had a few marathon sessions in his career. He always said that during the surgery, you don't notice it as much, but crash HARD after.",
"Ok so ex-surgery resident here. The vast majority of our cases don't go that long. Neurosurgery cases on the other hand can go that long, but surgeons take breaks and if they need to nap. However I've been in a few cases that have gone 8-10 hours, but these cases go this long because either something has really gone awry or the person has terrible anatomy. Also surgery residency trains you to power through anything despite you being dehydrated, hungry, and tired. Honestly though time flies when your having fun and you don't really notice it because of the immediate pressing issues at hand. ",
"People take turns or switch out for various steps. Sometimes they partner up, eg general surgery does the main part and plastics can close and do grafts etc. Honestly, sometimes it's just really interesting and the adrenaline can be enough to keep you comfortably engaged. I can easily stand holding and retracting for a patient more than double my size for eight hours, but have me do paperwork? I'd probably be drooling in forty five minutes. That stamina will probably change after years of grueling work, but for now it's awesome and exciting. Also you kinda know how to prepare, I probably get pretty dehydrated, sorry kidneys, and inhale tons of food in the bathroom beforehand lol. I used to hide a donut in my coat or scrubs and secretly eat in preop and hide a drink in my white coat and cookies for my friends. "
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1jb8ri | in special relativity, how is it determined which reference point will have time slowed down? | Please correct me where I'm wrong on this:
Since there is no known ether creating a universal material/fabric limiting the speed of light (or is there based on string theory?), and since time dilation manifests as slowed passage of time for those traveling fast as relative to those not traveling fast, what baffles me is since a person on Earth and a person traveling past Earth at 0.75 times the speed of light have no difference in relative speed, so how is it that only one will experience 'slowed time'? Why not the other?
To be more clear:
Person A is standing on Earth.
Person B gets in a super space ship that launches up and then accelerates to 0.75 times the speed of light and travels for 1 year, then turns around, comes back, and lands on Earth.
Is time slower for one than the other?
That answer being yes, then since the frame of reference of the person in the super space ship after acceleration is that she is stationary and the Earth is travelling away from her at 0.75 times the speed of light, why would time slow for her and not the man on Earth? After all, their frames of reference are relative, right?
(The only difference I can see is acceleration being greater for one of the two people.)
If anyone can point out any videos or web pages that explain this conceptually (without too much math,) and really get to the core of this, I'd love that, too.
Thank you in advance!
--------
**EDIT** I've had several informative responses so far. I'm currently reading about the Twin Paradox: [_URL_0_](_URL_0_) | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1jb8ri/eli5_in_special_relativity_how_is_it_determined/ | {
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" > Person B gets in a super space ship that launches up and then accelerates to 0.75 times the speed of light and travels for 1 year, then turns around, comes back, and lands on Earth.\nIs time slower for one than the other?\n\nActually, once the traveler lands, he and the person that stayed on earth will experience time at exactly the same rate. However, the traveler will have aged less than the earthling.",
"I believe what your referring to is called the [\"twin paradox\"](_URL_0_). ",
"I think you are absolutly correct but I find it hard to follow.\n\nThis is refered to as the [twins paradox](_URL_0_).\n\nA lot of people think that the paradox is one twin leaves earth travels very fast (an apriciable fraction of the speed of light) then come back to earth to find that the other twin has aged more than the other.\n\nBut you are astute in realising that by symetry if A is traveling relative to B then B is equally travelling reative to A. So what breaks the symetry to decide who has aged more than the other: acceleration.\n\nThe one who accelerates is the one who ages less.\n\nWhat if there is no one accelerating? And both people are traveling relative to each other.\n\nthen there is no problem since they never meet together in the end both parties can be happy that they are \"right\" in thinking that the other person is ageing more slowly and than them.\n\nDoes this answer your question."
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cfgphn | what is asmr exactly and how is it supposedly pleasant to the ears? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cfgphn/eli5_what_is_asmr_exactly_and_how_is_it/ | {
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"This is the best answer I've ever found.\n_URL_0_\n\nPlus it comes from a great comic to read.",
"ASMR is an actual physical sensation, it’s not just a metaphor. It’s hard to explain if you’ve never felt it, kinda like trying to explain colour to a blind person, but it’s tingly and sorta runs down your back. If you’ve ever gotten shivers from music (which is called frisson by the way, and some people don’t get these either), it kinda feels like that but a bit warmer and originating from your head. It’s usually triggered by sound, but sight and touch can do it too, at least it can for me.\n\nThere is little scientific knowledge of what ASMR actually is and what it is caused by, but it is accepted to be a real phenomenon in the sense that “enough people have claimed to have experienced it, therefore it exists, whatever the hell it is.”\n\nASMR, the videos, arose to try to create ASMR, the feeling, manually. Obviously, if you don’t experience ASMR, the videos are gonna seem a little pointless, maybe even weird. That being said, some people find ASMR videos relaxing, even if they don’t get ASMR tingles, which is why you sometimes see ASMR being used as a blanket term for anything relaxing.\n\ntl;dr: For some people, certain sounds and maybe other senses create pleasant tingles called ASMR. ASMR videos try to create ASMR tingles and sometimes also try to be relaxing, your mileage may vary."
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4bb9z0 | how do we know cold is the absence of heat and not the other way around? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4bb9z0/eli5_how_do_we_know_cold_is_the_absence_of_heat/ | {
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"Temperature is a measurement of energy, specifically kinetic energy on a molecular scale with warmer things having more of this energy than colder things.\nBecause we warm something up by adding energy we define warm/hot as the presence of this energy. Since there is nothing that we can \"add\" to make an object colder, cold is inherently the absence of this energy or in other words, the absence of heat.",
"Cold is the absence of heat just like darkness is the absence of light. So, you can't \"add cold\" to something just like you can't make a room less bright by \"adding darkness.\" You can only add heat or take away heat, and add light or take away light."
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8ksc43 | what does being turing complete means? | I've seen it's a machine that can solve any computational problem, but can you ELI5 please? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8ksc43/eli5_what_does_being_turing_complete_means/ | {
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"In colloquial usage, the terms \"Turing complete\" or \"Turing equivalent\" are used to mean that any real-world general-purpose computer or computer language can approximately simulate the computational aspects of any other real-world general-purpose computer or computer language.",
"Turing described a minimal, hypothetical computer which he used to mathematically prove results, known as a Turing Machine. It wasn't intended as a practical device, but rather to be as simple as possible to make proofs easier. A computing device that is capable of doing everything that a Turing Machine can is Turing Complete. One way to show that a computer or programming environment is Turing Complete is to implement a Turing Machine emulator.",
"Computer engineer here,\n\nA computational device is said to be Turing complete if it can simulate any other Turing machine.\n\nIn practical terms, Turing completeness specifies a minimum set of instructions that an instruction set architecture must implement, including conditional flow control, arithmetic (addition, multiplication, division), logic (predicate and boolean), and a reasonable (technically arbitrary, but this is not realistic) amount of memory.\n\nMany programmable processors, such as DMA processors used to transfer memory between peripheral devices and main memory, are not Turing complete because they do not need to be. They have a specific set of instructions tailored to the task for which they are designed; they can be simulated by any machine that is Turing complete but they cannot perform Turing complete simulation on their own.",
"A Turing machine consists of only a few things. A paper tape, a head that can either read, erase, or write a symbol on that tape, and advance/reverse the tape by one step. It's an impractical computer design, but very easy to reason about and prove properties. It turns out that this extremely limited machine can compute anything that is computable - the mathematician Turing proved this, and so it is a very important mathematical result. \n\nNow, your PC is not designed like a Turing machine. For example, its memory is random access - you can read any memory location you want, you don't have to advance a paper tape 10,000,000 positions. \n\nHowever, it is \"turing complete\" - we can prove that it can do everything that the Turing machine can do, which therefore means it can compute anything that is computable. \n\nThis makes the proof easy. If you show a device can do the few simple things the Turing machine does, it must be a general purpose computing machine. It can be very difficult to proof that it is general purpose otherwise, if you try to take all its capabilities into account. But you don't have to perform that difficult action since this much easier proof is available to you.\n\n In summary, it is a way of saying 'we know this machine can compute anything that is computable', and we know from Turing's work what is computable and what isn't. ~~~~"
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3nepjr | why do we have sports commentators on television that talk non stop during the games? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3nepjr/eli5_why_do_we_have_sports_commentators_on/ | {
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"Probably carry over from before people could watch games on their television. The commentators would give a play by play to those listening on the radio. And now it is tradition. Though they're supposed to be \"analyzing\" the game as well. Or telling people things they might have missed ",
"It is to keep people watching the game. You can find some YouTube videos of sporting events without the commentary. If you try watching them, you will see how hard it is to watch. Like between plays, there would be silence. Silence is hard for people to take. "
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395eaq | how did children from completely different parts of the world come up with the exact-same schoolyard games? | We all played the same games with eerily identical names and rules, like "blind man's bluff", "bulldog", "the floor is lava" etc. How did we all come up with these games? Seems improbable that they'd all stem from one source and spread out from school-to-school in such a short timespan. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/395eaq/eli5_how_did_children_from_completely_different/ | {
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"Think you are underestimating both the time these games have been around for and the extent to which families move around.",
"Kids talk to other kids and go to summer camp. Stuff like that packed with games their parents tell them really."
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364r80 | credit score lookup. why does it impede your credit score? seems like a basic, no hassle thing to find like checking your bank account. | Why is this such a big deal considering it's all numbers based on an algorithm? Seems like such a benign thing to check up on being your average American consumer. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/364r80/eli5_credit_score_lookup_why_does_it_impede_your/ | {
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"There's two types of credit checks. \"Soft\" checks are done when you want to look at your score or somebody's doing a background check on you. \"Hard\" checks are done when somebody's checking your score for the sake of lending you money.\n\nThe logic is that if somebody has suddenly started applying for lots of credit, they might be on the edge of a serious financial problem.",
"To keep you toiling away in the dirt. It's all a massive scam. They ping you for looking at it, they ping you for paying on time but not all in one payment. Come on, lets be 100% honest. The financial system is set up so idiots fail. Banks made $30billion (with a B) off of overdraft fees. This nation is making BILLIONS off of the most broke citizens in society. Yes, we have cable and walmart, we're free!",
"It's like asking \"am I cool?\".\n\nAsking the question automatically makes you less cool. "
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7aa9nz | how are car batteries able to be charged up with a jump start, if car batteries use chemicals for energy? | I am confused about Car Batteries and how they get external charged by other electrical sources if a car battery's electricity is chemical based. Can you eli5? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7aa9nz/eli5_how_are_car_batteries_able_to_be_charged_up/ | {
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"In a battery, you have electrons moving from one of these chemicals to the other (it's a one-way road), and that motion is the \"electricity\" we use.\n\nThink of the chemicals as workers : when they run out of energy (let's say they ran out of food), you do not need to get new workers, but could get them food instead. That's what the charging process is about : you are bringing electrons back to the part of the battery that has been losing electrons while you were using it.",
"The jump start doesn't charge the battery, it just starts the car.\n\nWhen the car is running, it charges the battery.",
"Not specific to car batteries but the chemical reaction in most batteries is a reversible process.\n\nBy putting an electrical charge back into the battery the chemicals slowly revert to their unreacted state by a process known as electrolysis.\n\nWhen you jump start a car it is too little time for the borrowed energy to have any effect on the depleted battery, you are simply allowing the starter motor to turn over and get the engine running. Once running it is self sustaining, and so long as the engine is not switched off it will slowly recharge the battery via the alternator.",
"Car batteries are always being constantly recharged by the alternator, which is in your engine. They are not one - time - use batteries. If you leave your headlights on overnight or something and drain your battery, you hook it up to another car's battery to charge up a bit. Once you have enough in there to start your car, the alternator will recharge it the rest of the way. \n\nWhat's really fun is when your alternator dies. Then you sit there with the jumper cables on for 10-20 minutes to get enough charge into the battery so you can drive home, or to the shop. Driving a car with a dying battery is interesting, the radio goes out, the headlights flicker, and the engine starts misfiring. Then when your engine dies at 45 mph, the power steering goes with it! "
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5ihjqb | lightspeed | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ihjqb/eli5_lightspeed/ | {
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4mw0jf | renouncing citizenship | I have a few questions about renouncing citizenship (I don't plan on it, just curious) in the United States:
- Why would someone do it?
- Is it necessary to become a citizen of another country?
- What are the consequences?
- What are the benefits?
- Can you still live in the US after renouncing citizenship?
- Can you still become president after renouncing citizenship?
Thanks :) | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4mw0jf/eli5_renouncing_citizenship/ | {
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"1. It sometimes has benefits. Some countries don't allow for dual citizenship, so you must renounce your old one to get a new one. In some cases having a foreign citizenship can bar you from certain jobs, especially dealing with secret government information.\n\n2. Usually yes. Most countries won't allow you to become a stateless person.\n\n3. You lose all the privileges associated with being a citizen. The legal system treats you differently, you no longer have free access to your former country, etc.\n\n4. Benefits are things like avoiding a certain cost of citizenship (like mandatory military service in some countries) or being granted another citizenship that conflicts with your old one.\n\n5. You can, but you would have to file as a non-citizen resident. You would require a visa and other immigration documents to be able to work and live in the US.\n\n6. You know, maybe you could, but probably not. The Constitution requires the President be a \"natural born citizen\" which could apply to someone who renounced, but it would be a tough case for the courts. Congress would probably also seek to bar any non-citizen from being elected, by a Constitutional amendment if necessary."
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22p4yv | i was recently diagnosed with coeliac (gluten allergy) and of course need to change my diet. how does this come about when for the last 30 years or so i was fine? | Can you 'catch' an allergy? Has it always been there and something set it off?
EDIT - Thanks for all the replies (even the daft ones!) I have a lot of reading to do still! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22p4yv/eli5_i_was_recently_diagnosed_with_coeliac_gluten/ | {
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"ELur5? Honestly, we don't know. The genetic markers for Celiac are fairly common, but most people with those genes never develop an immune problem. \n\nThere seems to be a correlation between heavy antibiotic use and developing Celiac Disease, so one hypothesis is that the antibiotics kill off some kind of friendly gut bacteria that help prevent the immune response. \n\nLow Vitamin D levels also seems to correlate with adult-onset Celiac, moreso than it correlates with childhood and adolescent onset. ",
"Celiac is an autoimmune disorder. It is not an allergy.\n\nYou absorb gluten as well as nutrients through villi in your intestines. Because your immune system immune system thinks that gluten is a foreign invader, it will try to destroy it. In the process, it will actually destroy your villi, meaning eventually you not only stop digesting gluten but all other nutrients as well... and that can kill you, puts you at increased risk of prostate cancer, and other fun stuff.\n\nAs for what triggers Celiac, it can be any number of things. [Stressful life events may be a cause](_URL_0_). It could just be bad luck!\n\nIn some ways, you are very lucky to be diagnosed now. 10 years ago, there was basically nothing in the way of gluten free options. Today GF is everywhere and you should have not trouble adjusting to a GF lifestyle. \n\nIf you want advice, recipes, or support, I am happy to share with you. Just send me a PM :)",
"People with celiac disease is born with the genes necessary to \"release\" the disease. But you need something to trigger it, and we don't know exactly what that is yet (there are several different theories). So you can be one year or a hundred years old before the disease kicks in.",
"The damage to your intestines has to reach a certain level before it can be detected by that stupid blood test, if you aren't willing to go on a high gluten diet for two months, drink liquid barium, and let them stick a camera up your ass while spinning you really fast. So I guess in short, yes; you have always been a celiac and it just took this long for the damage to be bad enough for you and the doctors to notice.\n\nOne tip; once you quit gluten cold turkey and it all flushes out of your system, you can never go back. Your body will begin to react badly to smaller and smaller amounts of gluten so you really do have to be careful of what you put in your face. Even some generic brands of tylenol throw wheat down on the conveyor belts to keep the ingredients from sticking, shit's everywhere. Nutritional labels are about to become your best friends.",
"My girlfriend has celiac, and is a nutritionist graduating from Johnson & Wales in May (and about be begin her dietetic internship to become a registered dietician).\n\nShe has run a gluten-free blog for the past several years and is extremely knowledgeable. If you have any questions, I'm sure she would be glad to answer them for you (just contact her through her website). She's busy finishing up classes for the semester so please be patient if she doesn't respond right away.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThere are a lot of great recipes and numerous product reviews. Honestly, she's a fantastic cook, and the vast majority of the time I do not miss eating gluten (exceptions: pizza and bagels).",
"Get a second opinion, if you're able to. Misdiagnosis is very common. Best of luck to you. I know many allergies and autoimmune disorders develop later in life. I developed my two allergies at age 19, ironically just as I outgrew my autoimmune disorder.",
"My Mother and her sisters and brother were all diagnosed after age 30. "
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94sbao | how does self-disappearing ink work? | I got one of these pens for free with a calligraphy practice workbook. After about 5 minutes, the ink just vanishes as if nothing was written. I've tried it on multiple different papers and the same result occurs so it shouldn't have to do with a specific kind of paper. How does this happen? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/94sbao/eli5_how_does_selfdisappearing_ink_work/ | {
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"Disappearing ink is usually reacting to carbon dioxide in the air around us, creating carbonic acid through an interaction with an agent in the ink, which causes it to \"disappear\" as sodium carbonate. Sometimes, the ink is photosensitive instead, which will cause it to disappear due to exposure to light.",
"there are some inks that are sensitive to temperature. wave a lighter underneath the paper, ink disappears. toss paper in a freezer, ink comes back",
"Would you be able to see whats written after the ink has \"disappeared\"? I wonder if you could see the contour of what was written or drawn?"
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29uto4 | competitive eating. how can people eat so much in one sitting? what happens to their stomachs and bodies after eating so much? and why does it seem that so many competitive eaters are very skinny? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/29uto4/eli5_competitive_eating_how_can_people_eat_so/ | {
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"a lot of competitive eaters stay active outside of the eating events",
"They are able to eat so much because they prepare. They stretch their stomachs, they practice techniques for speed, etc. \n\nAfter a competition, it's not unlike how you feel after Thanksgiving. Full, sluggish, tired, maybe even a little nauseous. Just to a greater degree. Most of these people don't vomit after competition. Other than that, you recover pretty easily within a day. \n\nIt isn't necessarily that most competitive eaters are skinny so much that the successful ones tend to be. This is for several reasons. First, your stomach is (supposedly) better able to expand when you don't have shit tons of fat around it. Second, people who are fit burn more calories, so if you do a lot of competitions it benefits you to stay in shape for your health. Third, competitions are exhausting. It may seem like just aggressive eating, but it's tiring and if you aren't in shape it is hard to keep up aggressive activity for 10-12 minutes non-stop. \n\nSource: Former low level competitive eater. ",
"It helps to be skinny too, so your stomach has more room to stretch. A bigger person doesnt have as much stretching room for their stomachs.",
"[This video shows the expansion of the stomach.](_URL_0_)",
"_URL_0_\n\nEat This Book was an interesting read about competetive eating. ",
"One Japanese competitive eater named Gal Sone was checked by doctors. They found out the entry of her large intestine is larger than usual and she produces more bile, which dilutes more fat in the food she eats. Once, she ate 100 or more sushis in a tv show, her waist bloated by 3 inches. She's really skinny too, and said she poops 6 times a day. ",
"I heard some can also relax their pyloric sphincter, the sphincter at the bottom of the stomach which keeps the food in until it's digested enough to go to the colon. Competitive eaters can allow their stomachs to stretch, and open that sphincter up, and let the food go into the colon before the stomach has extracted the calories. This also opens up more space in the stomach for more food. \n\nKobiyashi used to say being skinny was a benefit because there was no \"belt of fat\" which held the stomach in and stopped expansion."
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4cbelj | abortion as a costitutional right | Before anyone gets mad, I do believe, very firmly in fact, that access to abortion is a basic human right, but I don't have a firm enough grasp on the constitution to understand how it protects a womans right to an abortion, given that it was written in a time where abortion probably didn't exsist. I understand that an amendment was made (something something Roe v Wade), but what else is protected beyond abortions, or rather the access to an abortion?
Edit; on my phone. Can't spell, apparently, please excuse the title
Also, I googled a bit, but I couldn't really follow what was going on the last time this got asked. Sorry, but I really do require it be spelled out in simple terms, I am not a smart man. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4cbelj/eli5_abortion_as_a_costitutional_right/ | {
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"Supreme court opinions walk through the logic of how a principle outlined in the constitution applies to a specific case. Roe v. Wade's opinions are [here](_URL_0_).\n\nThe path they take is as follows:\n\nThe constitution contains no explicit right to privacy, but it does contain enough restrictions to protect citizens privacy that it can be inferred that citizens privacy was important to the authors of the constitution (specifically the first amendment, ninth amendment, and fourteenth amendment). Therefore:\n\n > This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment's reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy. \n\nIn other words, it's either in the right is one of the not enumerated rights in the ninth amendment\n\n > The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.\n\nor that abortion bans were the state depriving a woman of her liberty without giving the woman proper due process of law. \n\n > nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.\n\nAs far as other things related to the decision, the legal logic was very similar in the court's opinion to strike State restrictions on firearms ownership in Heller v D.C. and MacDonald v Chicago. ",
"Roe v Wade ruled that the Due Process clause of the 5th and 14th amendments applied to abortions. They stated that a woman's right to privacy is one of the protected liberties and can't be deprived without due process of the law.\n\nThey also ruled that this only works up to the point where the state's interests in protecting health and human life begin, which they decided as being the point where the fetus is viable outside the womb.\n\nThere has been much controversy since on the second point and the court's ability to interpret the first point as such.",
"You can read the opinion of Roe v. Wade to get a better idea of the argument, but essentially they guaranteed the constitutional right to privacy by interpreting the 14th ammendment in a rather liberal way. \n\nThe 14th Ammendment guarantees the right to \"due process of law.\" It means that the government cannot deprive you of any liberty or freedom without some legal proceeding. For example, you have a right to travel. If you break the law and go to prison, the \"due process\" of law takes away your right to travel. \n\nIn Roe v. Wade the court decided that there was an implied right for a woman to make her own medical decisions and keep them private. The Texas law that banned abortion removed these rights without due process of law. Therefore the law was in violation of the 14th Ammendment. \n\nBut Roe v. Wade wasn't that simple. The court recognized that the State also had a right to regulate abortions, so part of the decision was to limit abortion to the first trimester of pregnancy. That was later struck down in 1993, and amended to viability of a fetus. Meaning that the right to life of a fetus isn't guaranteed until the fetus can be removed from the mother and live. "
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3f94wq | if i didn't know something was illegal, how could i get in trouble for it? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3f94wq/eli5_if_i_didnt_know_something_was_illegal_how/ | {
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"Not knowing the law is not, in itself, a defense. This is a pretty important legal principle, important enough to [have its own Latin phrase](_URL_0_). I'm not quite sure what you're asking, since there's no particular reason you *wouldn't* get in trouble for it.",
"In most places, it is expected that the citizen of the jurisdiction is aware of any and all laws that pertain to the area. This applies to travelers too as they should familiarize themselves with the laws of the place they are visiting. Usually, law enforcement will be lenient for the more obscure laws however, something obvious (eg. speeding) is an act that is generally recognized as illegal. So to make things short, \nTLDR: not knowing the laws is just your own irresponsibility and you are held accountable for knowing them. ",
"Ignorance of a law is not an excuse. It is your personal responsibility to be aware of all laws in the areas that you live or travel in. ",
"Violation of a law has nothing to do with knowledge of said law. \n\nIt is your civil responsibility to know the laws of the locale in which you live, and to not do so is only going to hurt you. \n\nAlso, allowing people to get out of crimes by saying \"I didn't know it was illegal\" would make it so that no one would ever be prosecuted unless you were able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they not only knew what they were doing, but that they also knew it was illegal, which would be nearly impossible to do.\n\n",
"Imagine that you're at a party and you go to the restroom and when you return, the other party attendees say, \"while you were gone, we ordered a pizza and took $5 of yours. Hope you like pepperoni. You implicitly agreed to it by being here at the party.\" \n\nThat's how government works. It's not consensual. However, in a free society, one could actually sign a document upon reaching the age of consent that explicitly outlines the social norms within their community. ",
"Ignorance, in and of itself, is not a defense. It can't be, as a practical matter, or everyone would claim ignorance.\n\nThe legal system does have what is known as the *reasonable person* standard. If you act as a reasonable, law abiding person would, that can a defense for breaking laws your were ignorant of.\n\nFor example, it is 2 in the morning, and you come to a red light that doesn't seem to change. You wait a few minutes, carefully look for oncoming traffic in all directions, and run it.\n\nTurns out the law says you have to wait 5 minutes, and you only waited 2, and you get a ticket. You would have a decent defense if you argued that a reasonable person would have been unlikely to known the exact legal waiting period, and your actions were otherwise reasonable.\n\nIn that sense, you might be able to use ignorance as a defense."
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521a27 | how much of the currency in films and tv shows is real? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/521a27/eli5_how_much_of_the_currency_in_films_and_tv/ | {
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"Very little, probably. Maybe a few bucks changes hands in this scene or that, but when you see a briefcase full of money it's prop currency that's been specially created not to run afoul of counterfeiting laws."
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3hqute | why don't we put msg in everything? | In my mind MSG is always connected to Asian Food. But if it's supposed to make everything tastier/more savory, why don't we put that on everything that is savory (meats, broths, soups)? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3hqute/eli5why_dont_we_put_msg_in_everything/ | {
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"People are stupid and still think it is bad for you. A lot of store bought soups and stocks will still label their product as msg free, even though there is no need to be msg free.\n\nPersonally I do put it on everything. You can get a huge thing from amazon for like 15 bucks"
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bkrihp | why do athletes look so much faster on tv compared to live (in-person)? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bkrihp/eli5_why_do_athletes_look_so_much_faster_on_tv/ | {
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"Most likely because of the camera movement.\n\n & #x200B;\n\non TV the camera focuses on the player and the rest moves around them. in person, you are already far and you point of view is the whole stadium."
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3vs02p | what is the largest known individual object in the universe and how you can understand it's true scale? | Some places cite APM 08279+5255 but when I read the wiki page I'm like wuuuuuut | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3vs02p/eli5_what_is_the_largest_known_individual_object/ | {
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"YV Canis Majoris is the largest known star we have observed.\n\nIt's as wide as our solar system.",
"_URL_0_\n\nHere's a good gif to understand scale. Thank me later",
"The Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall, a galactic filament between 6 and 10 billion lightyears long.",
"Depends what you call object. The largest structure we know of is the ~~[large quasar group](_URL_1_) : a group of 70 quasars~~ [Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall](_URL_0_) that span several *billions* light years. It's so stupidly huge that it raises questions about the universe being as [homogeneous as we thought](_URL_2_). "
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2tzyf5 | why are motorcycle engines capable of running at such higher rpm than car engines? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2tzyf5/eli5_why_are_motorcycle_engines_capable_of/ | {
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"They are smaller and don't have as much metal to sling around. Since they have less mass in order to create the forces required to move it has to have higher RPM's. When you get up to the larger high speed diesel engines 1300RPM - 1500RPM is usually a max rating. Then the even larger medium speeds will typically max around 600RPM -800RPM. Any higher RPM's from these large engines will literally tear the engine apart. \n\nEdit: A really ELI5 metaphor would be to think about throwing a punch. You can throw a lot of punches pretty fast. If you are holding a weight it would slow the punches down but have more force with each punch. If you attempt to punch too fast while holding a heavy weight you could dislocate your shoulder. ",
"There's more to it than that...\n\nThere are car engines that can rev as far as a bike engine, take F1 cars for instance. One part of the ability of engine to rev to a high rpm is what is called rod/stroke ratio. The rod/stroke ratio dictates the amount of torque the engine can create. Torque is what gets you moving, horse power is what keeps you moving. When you have a large rod/stroke ratio the is more side-loading of the piston in the cylinder, this leads to friction which leads to heat which leads to detonation if it becomes excessive. Because a car weighs roughly 10x more than a bike it needs more torque to get it moving so manufacturers have to create engines that will create enough torque to make the car usable in everyday life while also keeping it from blowing up. \n\nBecause a car engine has to be larger than a bike's and the manufacturers want to sell cars, the engines in cars are not made to such exacting standards (withholding ferrari, lambo, etc) and they are made in ways that reduce cost (casting not forging, steal not titanium, etc) but still deliver a product that can go ~150,000+ miles on average. A bike engine cannot do that, it pays the price for being a high revving beast by having a shorter life span. \n\nDiesel engines make a lot of torque for their size, that's why you see then in industrial applications instead of gas engines, and as deadpool said the rpm's are limited because in order to make all that torque they have very large rod/stroke ratios and very high compression which means a lot of shearing force is placed on the internal components. Limiting rpm in these situations makes the product last longer with fewer rebuilds along the way.\n\n\n\n",
"In short: Motorcycle engines,like Formula 1 engines have bigger bore than stroke,so there is less to travel. There is more to it but this is in short"
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5x2pha | how exactly was russia allegedly involved with the presidential election and what did they do? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5x2pha/eli5_how_exactly_was_russia_allegedly_involved/ | {
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"There is supposedly evidence that Russia was involved in hacking the DNC. They released as much damning information from the DNC as they could to try and push Trump into office, as he could potentially be financially compromised by the Russian government. They could then influence Trump through coercion to work with their hyper aggressive plan to expand into new European territory.\n\nEveryone should demand at least an investigation into this so we could move on from it, but there are people stonewalling. ",
"Russian intelligence hacked the email of the Democratic National Committee, a private political organization. They selectively released, via Wikileaks, a trove of embarrassing but almost completely substanceless chatter that made the DNC look bad. The identity of the hackers as Russian is well established, and their connection to the intelligence service is generally accepted by security professionals. [Here](_URL_0_) is an article from last July making the case. The Washington Post reported on it through the fall, but no one seemed to care much as everyone assumed the Trump campaign didn't have a chance. \n\nThis had a couple of effects. First, it likely depressed turnout in the general election for Clinton specifically from the young, mostly white, Left who supported Sanders in the Democratic primary because it showed that the DNC internally preferred Clinton, and this was spun as them \"rigging\" the primary for her (allegations which are false, although there were a couple improprieties which didn't change the outcome).\n\nIt also depressed Clinton turnout more generally because it was conflated in the popular imagination with the *other* Clinton email issue, that she legally but unwisely used a private email server during her time as Secretary of State. Critics charged that this made her communications insecure, although as far as I know there's no evidence of that (while official government servers have been hacked several times). But since most people don't pay much attention to the news, they thought reports of hacked emails were referring to Clinton's State Department emails, and that these were put in public because of Clinton's carelessness. Neither of these things were true.\n\nAs for why, well, Russia and the Trunp campaign had a cozy relationship. Charitably, this is because Trump felt Russo-American relations had deteriorated under Obama. More cynically, there was an (unverified) intelligence dossier circulated (including to President Obama and the Trunp campaign before the election) claiming that trump is personally compromised by Russian intelligence because of his extensive business ties to Russia and an illicitly recorded sextape of Trump having a golden showers party in a Moscow hotel with a bunch of Russian hookers. (Yes really.) The dossier only came out publicly after the election, and again it has not been verified (although my understanding is that some of the claims in it have since been confirmed. Maybe not the piss play.)\n\nThe Obama Administration imposed economic sanctions on Russia in December as a response to the hacking. Trump advisor Gen. Michael Flynn had a phone call the same day with the Russian Ambassador where they discussed sanctions and Flynn implied that Trump would remove them once he were in office. (This is arguably treason -- by passing on secret information to Russia that reassures them the sanctions will come down, he undermines the purpose of the United States in implementing them in the first place.) Flynn then lied to the press about the content of the call. More specifically, the Trump campaign trotted out VP-elect Pence to deny the allegations in public, which means either Pence lied about the call as well or, what might be more likely (and which seems to be the Trump party line) that Flynn lied to Pence about them. \n\nToday's breaking story is that Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who as head of the Department of Justice is charged with investigating Trump's connection to Russian intelligence and improper contacts between the campaign/administration and Russia, also spoke to the Russian ambassador of at least two occasions. This despite testifying under oath at his confirmation hearing that he wasn't aware of any such contacts between Russia and the campaign and that he personally had no such contact. But unlike the Flynn call, which was recorded by the CIA, it's not yet clear if Sessions also improperly discussed sanctions at those meetings. (He says he didn't, if you find that denial credible.) The front page of the Washington Post has the story today if you want to read more about it. ",
"The allegations claim that hackers working for two Russian intelligence agencies broke into email systems belonging to the Democratic National Committee as well as email accounts of other Democratic figures, such as Hilary Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta. The emails they found were then released through Wikileaks, an organization that specializes in sharing secret information. The release of information was carefully managed, both in terms of timing and content, in order to create a series of news stories that presented Hilary Clinton and the Democrats as dishonest and untrustworthy. By calling attention to insecurities in Democratic email systems, they also supported one of the key talking points of the Trump campaign, which was that Hilary Clinton had compromised national security by running her own email server while she was Secretary of State.\n\nI think that's a neutral summary. It is a fact that some emails were stolen and then released to the media in such a way as to hurt the Clinton campaign. It has also been _claimed_ that this was done by agents of the Russian government. So that's what people mean when they say 'Russia was involved'.\n\nBut wait, there's more. There are also allegations that Donald Trump and key figures in his campaign are sympathetic to the Russians, or are being or could be manipulated by Russia (which is to say by Russian president Vladimir Putin). It's also claimed that Trump or members of his campaign were in contact with the alleged Russian agents responsible for stealing and leaking the information.\n\nGoing into all the details would take a long time. What is certain is that some key members of Donald Trump's campaign, such as campaign manager Paul Manafort and foreign policy adviser Carter Page, had strong links to Russia. Manafort worked for the former president of the Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, an ally of president Putin. Manafort also apparently arranged to change parts of the Republican party's official policy in a way that benefited Russia. Both Manafort and Page resigned from the campaign because of concern over their ties to Russia. More recently, other people close to Trump, such as his appointee for national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and attorney general Jeff Sessions, have been revealed to have had contact with key figures in Russian intelligence. In Flynn's case, he was obliged to step down as a result of this.\n\nThere are also allegations that Trump himself may be compromised by Russia in some way.",
"Can someone do a little ELI5 about whether Sessions not disclosing his meetings with Kislyak counts as perjury? \n\nI'm British but I'm quite interested in American politics and just want to get a handle of how serious it is that a USAG went under oath in front of Congress and kind of told a lie of omission.",
"Read through the major comments in this thread, you can see clear bias on both sides. Remember most of the information here is based on ALLEGATIONS and CLAIMS, not hard evidence. Look at everything and form your own opinion, be open to new information."
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1pmma4 | why do some communities trick-or-treat on the day before halloween? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1pmma4/eli5_why_do_some_communities_trickortreat_on_the/ | {
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"For safety mostly. If you get a lot of people to Trick-or-Treat the day before you end splitting the number of people up over two days instead of everyone trying to do it all at once.\n\nAlso, it allows parent's to take really young kids out without having to worry about asshole teenagers because most of them will be out Halloween night.",
"I've only seen it happen when Halloween fell on a Sunday. Some Christian churches take 'keeping the Sabbath holy' more literally than others, so in areas where there is a high concentration of a particular religion, (Utah, Bible Belt, etc.) the local communities may choose to have Trick-or-treating on Saturday Oct 30th."
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95xgi1 | the mechanisms of voting in the us and the controversy about requiring government id in order to vote | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/95xgi1/eli5_the_mechanisms_of_voting_in_the_us_and_the/ | {
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"You have to register to vote a month or 2 before the actual election is to take place. You then get a voter ID card but your name goes on a list. Your local voting station gets a list that contains your name (and others who registered). You then tell the voting station your name, they cross you off a list and go to vote.\n\nSource: I worked at a voting station a few years back.\n\nThe issue is that for starters we don't automatically register people to vote, if you don't register before hand you usually can't vote or you have to go through a huge process to be able to vote. Additionally in terms of having a photo ID, most people use a drivers license but there are large swaths of people that don't have a license. Ok so use a state ID, well that requires a bunch of documentation that poor people are statistically expect to lose. Social Security cards and birth certificates are generally required and if poor people lose them it's super hard to get any sort of ID. Then tac on the fact that you have to go to the department of motor vehicles to get this ID (notorious for being slow) it's really hard for a poor person to take off work to find a bus to ride for an hour each direction and wait 3 hours at the DMV.\n\nEdit: also go search for the DMV in the state of Texas you'll see a handful, but you'll also notice that many people up North and West have to drive a huge distance to get to one.\n\nIt's more of an issue with how we don't register and don't automatically give people access to state issued IDs.",
"Because the US voter ID supporting contingent is composed of equal parts well meaning but not fully aware people and cynical bigots who would say anything to disenfranchise more people.\n\nOur public transit systems are atrocious and our local-level government is a mixed bag, so a policy that seems sensible and easy to support, like an ID for voting, can easily become a nightmare to comply with for many people in some areas. \n\nSome people, mostly elderly people living in rural areas, don't have a birth certificate, for instance. Not like they don't have a physical copy of one, there was never a BC created. Someone like that can be barred from voting by apparently benevolent voter ID laws despite their status as an American citizen.",
"Throughout the United State's history there's been discrimination in voting. Sometimes it was overt (women can't vote and black people can't vote). So we amended the constitution to change that (15th and 19th amendments). \n\nThe thing is, voting is controlled by the states so states that still didn't want black people (mostly) to vote instead brought up all sorts of rules that said \"okay, you can vote IF you do X\". Things like poll taxes, literacy tests, etc. So you'd show up to vote and it'd be $10 supposedly to pay for the expenses of the day and if you didn't have that money (because you're poor) then that's too bad. \n\nSo then we passed a law called the voting rights act that severely restricted the rights of states to do sneaky things like that. \n\nFast forward to today and you have voter ID laws. Some people allege this is just the latest tactic in the same pattern set up as before. It's just an extraneous requirement meant to keep people from voting rather than really having anything to do with election security. \n\nThat's because in the USA you usually have to register to vote beforehand. So you prove that you live where you live and then you can just go vote whenever there's an election. Sometimes you can use any sort of ID (doesn't even need a picture) but some proposed laws narrow the scope of what's allowed (so student IDs are no longer valid to prove you are who you say you are). ",
"Other people are saying it in more detail, but in essence the root of the problem is that actually getting appropriate ID (e.g. a driver's license) in America is *unspeakably* difficult compared to in most other first-world nations.",
" > How does this work in the states where ID is not required? You show up and just vote?\n\nI walk into the polling place, tell them my name and address, sign the register, and they hand me a ballot.\n\n > Why is it a problem to ~~register/~~obtain an ID?\n\nIt takes a significant amount of time (on the order of up to half a workday), and the documents - driver's licenses and passports, at least - aren't free.\n\n(Voter registration generally *is* required, so that you appear on the rolls.)\n\n---\n\nThe logical argument in favor of ID is that, considered wholly independently, it shouldn't be controversial to prove your identity before casting your vote.\n\nThe logical argument against ID is that the sort of voter fraud it would fight simply doesn't happen on any meaningful scale.\n\nRequiring ID, in practice, is a solution without a problem, which would create a *host* of negative side effects.",
"First, the US does not have any nationwide universal ID. Instead, each state issues its own ID (typically a Drivers License or similar) or there are photo IDs for members of the military.\n\n2nd, a LOT of people don't have a driver's license. If you don't have a car, you don't need one. This primarily impacts the elderly and the poor. Getting state ID means gathering the necessary documents, getting a ride to the driver's license office (which may be FAR away if you live in a rural area) waiting all day, paying a fee, etc. If you don't have a car this is a huge pain. If you're poor and work two jobs you just don't have this kind of time. If you're 90 years old it's unlikely you even have the correct documents any more.",
"Your country probably has a mandatory national ID system, well-funded by the national government. Due to long-standing worries about being tracked by the government, the US does not. Instead, it uses state driver's licenses as IDs. These licenses require a fee and often involve a bunch of other hidden costs and hassles, so many poor Americans don't have one.\n\nAs a result, there's no way to have a positive ID of all voters without locking some out of the voting process.\n\nThe obvious solution to that problem is to roll out a real national ID system, but some civil rights groups worry it will be used to track and monitor citizens, and some lawmakers are rather happy with the way the current system disenfranchises poor urban voters.",
"The province of Alabama created a voter ID law. Then they closed DMV offices (where you could get an ID) in predominantly Black areas. For some people, getting proper ID would take three hours of driving. In other areas, they reduced the hours that the DMV offices were open -- sometimes only a few hours a day, two days a week.\n\nEvery requirement in the way of voting is a chance for people to peddle racism via bureaucracy.",
"So everything that's not for president is a simple majority. Theres only 2 parties that matter. Republicans and Democrats. Depending on what you're running for and where, each party might only send 1 person to run, so they have inner party voting to establish who they want to run for them. For example, a city mayor might have one of each party, but a township trustee in a hyper conservative township might have 5 people running but they are all the same party.\n\nBut president is different. Again each party puts forth 1 person each and has a whole thing about who they want to represent them. It's not always a normal race for this. But then they go against the other party in the electoral college. Each state gets 2 electoral votes in the electoral college, and then they get additional electoral votes based on population size. Not all electoral votes in each state are worth the same. Most states then have their people vote for who they want the electoral votes to go to and in most cases its winner take all for that state. Theres a few states that split them in different ways. The interesting part of this is that the votes the people cast here dont mean anything. They are just suggestions for people called delegates to use their votes for because each one gets an electoral vote they get to vote for. But almost always they vote for who they people want. Who ever gets the most electoral votes wins. Not technically the half but if you get half you cant lose and since theres really only 2 parties that's all that matters.\n\nThe controversy of voting dates back to post civil war. People were still racist and this goes all the way to like the 60s or 70s. People used ridiculous and arbitrary tests to try and block black people to vote. We made that mostly illegal and are afraid of allowing that to be more loose because of what happened. But because of voter fraud we want to establish better ID systems. We dont have the best ID system now. Using drivers licenses is the main way. But poor people a lot of times dont have really any form of ID a lot of the time. And a lot of black people are poor (dont hate me this is just how it is. Say it's the man keeping them down. Idc, idk.) So people think voter ID is again a way to stop black people from voting.\n\nEdit: I almost forgot to mention in the US we dont have a national ID. It's your passport, your driver's license, or your Social security. The first 2 cost money and are usually unnecessary if you're poor. The 3rd technically IDs you but only has your name on it. They reuse SSC numbers and they aren't all that unique. While your Walmart card, if you change 1 number it won't be someone else's, change 1 number on your SSC card and it is someone else. Probably someone who got theirs in line behind you."
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6vd07i | why do we have a more intense "falling feeling" in amusement park rides than we do when we are actually free falling like in skydiving or high dives? | ELI5: That feeling around your navel region when you are on a rollercoaster drop. Why is it more intense than when you are just falling through the air as in skydiving? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6vd07i/eli5_why_do_we_have_a_more_intense_falling/ | {
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"When you are freefalling you are not falling freely for long until you pick up enough speed for air resistance to matter and stop the feeling of freefall. In fact you have more freefall time by jumping on a trampoline then if you are skydiving since on the trampoline you are experiencing freefalling both going up and going down. Roller coasters on the other hand is designed to give you as much freefall as possible. In addition to letting you experience freefall on the way up over a crest or a loop as well as down from the top the carts are very heavy compared to their air resistance so the acceleration due to air resistance is much smaller then when you are falling by yourself and you are therefore freefalling for longer.",
"That feeling is the experience of G-force. Simply put, once out of the plane, you will eventually achieve terminal velocity. That's the speed at which you stop accelerating. When you're not accelerating, you're G-force is zero. \n\nRoller coasters are designed, essentially, to basically never achieve terminal velocity. Or, a better way of saying that is, roller coasters will likely never achieve terminal velocity simply because their weight, or mass, is too high and the drops too short to achieve them. Couple that with several twists and turns, and the rider is basically \"always\" experiencing some form of G-force. ",
"The feeling comes from acceleration. When going over the hill on a rollercoaster you are accelerating the whole time (it's designed like that). When sky diving, you reach terminal velocity pretty quickly and are no longer accelerating. For all of your senses except for sight, you are no longer moving, or at least moving quickly.",
"Many coasters pull negative Gs, so you are accelerating toward the ground faster than gravity would pull you - such that you would fly out if not restrained. \n\nEven if the train does follow a ballistic trajectory, the forces experienced in different parts of the train will differ, and those near the back may still experience negative Gs. It depends on the design of the ride."
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6ir7vp | why betting the same amount on two boxers to win will not always give a payout due to differing odds. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6ir7vp/eli5_why_betting_the_same_amount_on_two_boxers_to/ | {
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"Any real-world bookie is going to adjust the odds and payouts so that they get a cut for themselves (the vig). They're not working for charity.",
"Like any gambling operation, the total of the payouts is always inferior to the total of the bets. That's the way the host makes their money. \n\nIn this case, the bookies would adjust the odds as they take bets in order to make sure that no matter the outcome they don't lose money.",
"Because the house sets the odds to try and get equal money to come in on both sides not so the winnings are equal on both sides",
"The casino needs their cut. It's easier to understand on a point spread bet where both sides are set to -110. If you bet 100 dollars on both, you are guaranteed to lose 9 dollars. The casino is taking the 100 dollars from your losing bet, pulling out 9 to pay themselves, and giving the remaining 91 to you to pay your winning bet. The same thing is happening on a moneyline bet, but it's less obvious with different odds at play. Also with the moneyline bet you aren't guaranteed to lose money if you bet an equal amount of money on both sides if the underdog wins.",
"Even if not using a bookie that takes a vig (cut of the money), you're still taking a risk. Let's say you bet $1 a piece on two boxers facing each other. One has 1:1 odds and the other has 4:5 odds. So you bet $2 on the fight. \n\nThere are two outcomes:\n\n* The 1:1 fighter wins and you make $2 from the fight. Well, since you sent $2 on both bets, you've broken even.\n* The 4:5 fighter wins and you make $1.80 from the fight. Again, you spent $2 on both bets, so you've lost $0.20.\n\nUnless the odds of one boxer winning are really huge, it isn't economically feasible to bet on both boxers and expect a guaranteed payout. Even if you do have 50:1 odds on a boxer, his opponent is going to have lower than 1:1 odds. If that boxer wins, you lose money by betting on both of them."
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2rs54w | how the fuck is spreading jelly (i.e.vapo rub) on my chest supposed to help congestion? | I mean really | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2rs54w/eli5how_the_fuck_is_spreading_jelly_ievapo_rub_on/ | {
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"You put it on your chest because you're going to be drawing air in to your lungs from that area. The vapors from the jelly mix with the air you breathe.",
"The biggest cause of congestion is inflamed tubes.\n\nThe goop is full of menthol, which evaporates very readily. As it evaporates (the \"vapo\" in vapo rub), you breath it in. \n\nOne of the reasons that menthol evaporates so readily is because it absorbs heat very well. When the menthol comes into contact with your inner tubes, the cooling helps reduce inflammation. This relieves the congestion."
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32pgkz | why do people look slimmer in certain colors? | I read an article awhile back about a woman who took a progress picture and it appeared as if she lost a lot of weight, but she revealed that all she had done was stand up straighter, fix her hair, and **wear a different color**. I was wondering how wearing a different color could change someone's bodily appearance. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/32pgkz/eli5_why_do_people_look_slimmer_in_certain_colors/ | {
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"[Here's](_URL_0_) an article about how wearing black (or other dark colors) can make you look slimmer: \n\n > If you have a very light T-shirt on, your shape will be noticeable within the fabric. Any curves, bulges, or flat areas will be noticeable beneath the white fabric. If the T-shirt is black however, that will not be the case. All that will be easily noticeable is that there is a field of black. This field will not have bulges or areas that look large unless the T-shirt is very tight. That creates a field that is slimmer and smaller looking than it would be otherwise."
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atsgk4 | why does hand sanitizer feel so cold? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/atsgk4/eli5_why_does_hand_sanitizer_feel_so_cold/ | {
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"Hand sanitizers are made to be spread over the hands and then dry quickly. Usually this is done by dissolving the sanitizing agent in a highly volatile (means evaporates or vaporizes quickly) liquid, usually alchohol.\n\nSo it acts like sweat on steroids, it evaporates so fast, and so much at one time that it basically pulls all the heat from the surface of your hands.",
"The alcohol quickly evaporates from your skin. Faster than water would. As it does, it grabs a bit of heat from your hand. It’s the same as why water evaporating from your skin cools it off including sweat. Alcohol does it faster so it cools your skin quicker. ",
"Heat is atoms bouncing around like pool balls. Higher temperatures are faster balls. Sometimes 2 balls hit 1 ball and kick 2x the amount of energy into the single ball. That ball goes so fast it flies of the table... It evaporates into the air. Since that ball had lots of energy, and it took it with it when it flies away, the pool table with all the balls bouncing around now has less energy overall and gets cooler.",
"Evaporation is an endothermic reaction, and it evaporates so quickly that you easily notice it."
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2fleis | the meaning/significance of all the nazi stuff in pink floyd's the wall. | Ok Roger Waters and crew: I'm on board for the whole "only child, absent father, oppressive mother, stifling English education, growing up to be a drug addled, slightly crazed (maybe suicidal) rock star" thing. But the "double-hammer/fire up the ovens" bits, etc.? Huh?? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2fleis/eli5_the_meaningsignificance_of_all_the_nazi/ | {
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"It's about shutting out things that are not like ourselves and withdrawing by being unpleasant to people around us. Pink has been so hurt by all of the things that have happened in his life that he is pushing people away so that they won't hurt him any more.\n\n_URL_0_",
"His father was killed at Anzio in WW2, so I'm sure that has a little bit to do with the Nazi imagery. ",
"Waters was born in 1943 in the UK devastated by the war that killed his father. The rebuilding would have lasted most of his childhood, and he would have been too young to remember or understand what the Nazi's did, just that they were the reason he didn't have a father and the country was falling apart.\n\nSounds like the perfect boogeyman to build nightmares around."
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2f65ot | when a stock market crashes and everyone is desperately 'selling', who is actually willing to 'buy'? | Wolf of Wall Street got me thinking about this. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2f65ot/eli5_when_a_stock_market_crashes_and_everyone_is/ | {
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"Smart people with cash. Buying when the market crashes is a great investment, **IF** you can afford to wait until the market recovers to realize your gains.",
"The fact that not many people are willing to buy is what *causes* the crash. If as many people were buying as selling, the price would stay about the same. The fact people are desperate to sell means there are more sellers than buyers, so the price drops.\n\nThe few people who are buying are either ignorant of the crisis, or buying speculatively thinking that he stocks will rebound at a later date. Shares that crash to near zero will either rebound, or become completely worthless if the company involved goes bankrupt and has no positive assets.",
"Many investors have a point at which they think it's always a good time to purchase a stock if it is at or below a certain point. So, yes, even when people are selling, there are going to be people buying.\n\nThe reason is that often, mass selloffs are part of a panic, which is more of an emotional reaction than a financial one. Emotions wear off, but the actual value of the company is not as affected as much.",
"There is a lot of profit to be had during crises. When industry-wide or even market-wide crashes occur, no company's stock or asset goes untouched. Perfectly healthy company stocks and assets will see their values tumble.\n\nRecessions are the perfect time to purchase assets if you have the liquidity. Emotional sentiment, and sometimes financial necessity, urges people to save money during recessions, but your money is most liquid during recessions. If you properly diversify, you're far more likely to make an immense profit than investing in a rising market.",
"Brokers and investment institutions are the buyers during a large sell-off.\n\nThe brokers on the floor of the market are responsible for lining up buyers and sellers and arranging a price for shares to change hands (the ask and offer prices). The number of shares sold by private investors seldom equals the number of shares other private investors wish to purchase and the broker on the floor is how this difference is resolved.\n\nThe broker will buy shares from sellers and keep them in a cache until a buyer wishes to purchase the shares (this is why brokers are backed by large investment banks). This can be quite profitable because it's quite risky for the broker. Large investment banks pay for the right to have traders/brokers on the floor and in exchange for that they can make money off the difference between the ask and the offer prices.\n\nPart of the terms of having access to the trading floor is a requirement that the broker must purchase shares that people wish to sell. When a sell off occurs this can be really bad for the broker, or as other people have pointed out, it can be quite good if they expect the stock to rebound from the drop in share price.\n\nTL;DR: Traders on the floor, backed by large investment banks, are required to fulfill market orders even in times of a sell-off.",
"A lot of purchases on Wall Street are made with *leverage*. You essentially borrow money from the brokerage to buy stocks, they go up, you sell them, pay back the loan, and keep the difference. There are a lot of different kinds of leverage, but they all about to risking more to make more.\n\nThis is great when stocks go up, you can make a lot more money that way. But when they go down, even for a short time, you can be in big trouble...the broker can call back the loan, and liquidate your assets to pay it back. You can wind up broke and still owing a ton of money.\n\nSo those are the guys who are frantically selling. The buyers are saying, I can get these stocks at a huge discount, weather the crash, and make a big long term profit.\n\n",
"There is a good amount of \"short\" selling & covering that goes on during a stock crash. Basically during a short sale you sell securities that you do not own, with the promise that you'll buy them back later to \"cover\" the position. With a short play, you are essentially betting that the stock will go down in value, & profiting on the difference between the sale price & the price you buy it back at.\n\nFor example, lets say after research I believe Lehman Brothers stock will be going down in price in the near future. Right now the stock is at $10.00. I can Short Sell 100 shares of it, which means I will be given $1000 ($10/share x 100 shares). Well, since I sold shares I don't actually own, I have to buy back the same number of shares to cover the position. So, I wait for a while, and as suspected, the Lehman Brothers stock drops to $5/share, so I decide to cover , and buy back the 100 shares I owe. Only, i now can buy them at the lower price of $500, so I just made $500 profit. \n\nDuring a sell-off, people who held short positions on the stock will be buying them back since they're profiting on ability to buy stock at the discounted price. The practice of short selling was actually banned on many financial assets following the crash. \n\nThe practice of \"Naked Shorting\" is thought to have contributed to the instability of the 2008 market crash. This is where you sell securities that were never actually owned or borrowed in the first place. \n\nBesides that, there are large financial institutions known as \"Market Makers\" who always provide liquidity on a stock, and buy/sell even during crashes. They are typically making money through complex trading algorithms regardless of the price of the actual asset."
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ein8rj | why is it that lobsters have the possibility to be born with so many rare colorations? | I’ve seen blue lobsters, cotton candy lobsters, and yellow lobsters. If they all had equal chances of existing, I’d understand, but any coloration besides red seems to be one in a million. Why is this possible? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ein8rj/eli5_why_is_it_that_lobsters_have_the_possibility/ | {
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"Short answer:\nEach lobster has color pigments (red, blue, yellow), that determine the color of the shell. \n\nSpecific mutations change the amount of pigment and thus the color.\n\nSome mutations that influence (for example) blue pigment naturally appear more often than others, that is why blue lobsters appear more often than yellow ones.\n\n\nSource & cool additional info and more accurate than my short description is here:\n_URL_0_"
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1tt92d | why doesn't water help with dry skin? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1tt92d/eli5_why_doesnt_water_help_with_dry_skin/ | {
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"You would think that putting water on the skin would moisturize it more, but the opposite is true. Plain water that comes in contact with skin evaporates and takes with it many of the skin's natural oils called natural moisturizing factor (NMF). The more frequently that skin comes into contact with water, the drier it gets -- unless those natural oils are replaced\n\n_URL_0_",
"its not water that makes skin stay moist - its oils in the skin. ^edit to be completely clear, the water is still important - the oil just acts to prevent that water from evaporating. \n\nIf you have dry skin, its because your skin's natural oil production is for whatever reason lower than it should be.\n\n\n\nEdit: I'm not a dermatologist, just a lumpy potato that resembles a [scrotum](_URL_4_), so any questions are going to get some less-than-stellar answers. try /r/Dermatology or /r/AskADoctor \n\nDouble edit: Dermatologists/Doctors are there for a reason, if you have a serious skin condition or are worried about your skin, talk to them and see what your options are.\n\nTriple edit: There's got to be a few dermatologists out there somewhere who can help verify answers or answer questions throughout this thread! If anyone viewing knows someone, see if you can ask them and see whats up.\n\nFinal edit; Figures one of my most well-voted comments on ELI5 involves a scrotum joke. Cheers all!\n\n---------------\nUseful Links:\n\n/u/ieatbugs posted [here](_URL_1_) a link to /r/SkincareAddiction on the types off Moisturizers out there that might be of some use to people\n\n/u/steve-s posted [here](_URL_3_) a link to an _URL_2_ article that has some information on natural skin oils\n\nBy request from /u/LgNBullseye , a [selfie](_URL_0_). That is really a potato, I promise :p",
"Chemical engineer here. Water is a mild solvent, in fact it is frequently called a 'universal' solvent and that is why water doesn't help with dry skin.",
"Water does help with dry skin, but you have to drink it first.",
"The water evaporates quickly without oils to retain it. However, if you are going to apply lotion, hydrate your skin with water first to retain the moisture.",
"Yeah, the water ends up absorbing moisture rather that moisturizing your skin.\n\nAlso, repeated water exposure can quickly dry out and chafe skin. It's why it's better to not lick your lips when they're chapped.\n\nI learned the hard way when I suffered from a case of REALLY bad chapped lips that the only way to get rid of it was to stop licking my lips. The half a gallon of lip balm and Vaseline helped too.",
"Drinking water does help, Hydration internally makes you beautiful externally.\n",
"Skin is usually dry due to impaired barrier function, meaning water can be easily evaporated into the atmosphere. It's not dry from lack of a water source. Come to /r/skincareaddiction for scientific and evidence based reasoning on skincare! Here's an explanation of how moisturizers work: _URL_0_",
"The reason water doesn't help is because of a protein called Keratin. It's on the top layer of the skin and is also what makes up a fingernail. This protein is tough and also Waterproof. That's why you don't just soak up water immediately. Since water molecules are so small they are able to slip through our skin membranes and eventually you absorb it. But just adding water to dry skin doesn't make it moist. ",
"Water is a polar solvent. It's just going to wash oils away.",
"why is my face greasy, yet dry and flaky? ",
"If you drink the water and stay hydrated, it kinda does. Water that you drink circulates throughout your body including in your largest organ (your skin).\n\nBut if you just put water on your skin it doesn't really absorb, it just rinses off the natural oils that your skin secretes to keep itself from drying out. \n",
"This epidermis (the outermost layer of skin) is composed of dead skin cells. As we go about our day, millions of these cells flake off and are replaced by new ones, which are constantly being produced from the living layers in the stratum basale (the deepest layer of the skin). The skin also has oil glands and hair follicles spread throughout it. It is the oil that keeps skin \"moist,\" and not water. If water is placed on the skin, it can be absorbed by the dead skin cell layer, but this will only cause them to loosen, stick together and then flake off more easily. You can test this by soaking in a bath for a while, and then scraping your fingernails across the back of your neck. Often times, you will gather a film under your nails comprised almost entirely of dead skin cells. ",
"The natural oils on the surface of your skin repel water. In fact, too much water can wash away these oils, which, in turn, allows the moisture in your skin to escape, causing even drier skin.\n\nFun theory: Your hands and feet wrinkle in the water to provide extra grip. Some scientists believe this is an involuntary reaction by your nervous system. ",
"Simple response.\n\nWashing your hands/having your hands exposed to water a lot will strip the oils off your skin, exposing it to the dry air (particularly in winter, which is why I believe you're asking) and causing it to try out and occasionally crack.\n\nAs someone with perennial issues with dry hands in winter, if you wash you hands, follow up with some lotion to protect your hands afterward.",
"Water has a tendency to evaporate quickly because of heat. So, when you put water on your dry skin it quickly goes away. Oil, such as Vaseline, or that which your body produces, traps the moisture.",
"I asked why people pop pimples in ELI5, and it gets deleted because you can't ask medical advice, yet this makes it to the front page. Well played.",
"Moisturisation of your skin is all about trapping the water in there. \n\nYou can add as much water as you like either by pouring it onto your skin or by drinking it. If it is not trapped in some way then it is lost (through a process called transepidermal water loss). \n\nThe way that skin naturally traps the water in the skin is by the natural loss of skin cells called keratinocytes. The keratinocytes are produced in the basal layer of the epidermis and move up through their ~28 day life cycle but as they move up through the epidermal layers they flatten out, eventually squeezing their contents out, which is essentially skin oils. This oil layer stops water from your body escaping but also from unwanted things from entering the body.\n\nWhen these oils are lost water can escape and your skin becomes dry so you moisturise. Moisturisers work in two ways. The crude way is to create a greasy layer which prevents water escaping. The clever way is that they contain a chemical which attracts water to the epidermis (both can be executed at the same time).\n\nSource: Was a Senior Scientist in charge of producing and testing on a living skin equivalent at a skin research company and now a research technician in the skin centre of a University.",
"Not a dermatologist, but I have studied structures of the hair and skin in beauty school. \nThe pH of our skin is between 4.5 and 5.5. Our skin is slightly acidic. Water is usually around pH 7, meaning in comparison to our skin, it is alkaline. Because of its alkalinity, water strips away oils on the surface of the skin . \n",
"It does help, if you drink it. ",
"Everyone here seems to be talking about why oil hydrates the skin and ignoring the question about why water doesn't. Here it is:\n\n**Your skin is supposed to be a two-way barrier to most substances. The outermost layer, the epidermis, is a bunch of tightly packed dead skin cells that are supposed to keep bad things out and good things in. Out of necessity, your skin is not very permeable to water and as such does not absorb it readily. Molecular explanation at the end for those interested.**\n\nMost biological processes are extremely dependent on and sensitive to concentration changes. If water easily absorbed into the epidermis, you would lose a ridiculous amount of water throughout the day as it diffused through your skin and evaporated at the surface. You would lose another important thing this way: nutrients. As the water diffuses through the epidermis, the important vitamins, minerals, proteins, etc. that are all dissolved in it get carried through the tissue as well. Since both water and all the nutrients dissolved in it are essential to life, if your epidermis were highly permeable to these, your body would out of necessity need to expend an incredible amount of energy to actively pump these things back into your body, against their natural flow. Your body already spends LOTS of energy doing this, without constantly leaking water through your skin all day. Your kidneys' primary purpose is to retain water while eliminating waste. While they make up roughly 0.5% of your body's mass, they use about 10% of the oxygen you take in every day in aerobic cellular respiration. In lay terms, that means they use about 20 times as much energy than the average cell in your body JUST to keep water in as they let waste pass through.\n\nAnother consideration in the case of \"what if your skin was permeable to water\" is that your skin protects you from lots and lots of infectious pathogens every day. This is why severe burn victims are placed in isolation in the hospital, in sterile rooms, because they are incredibly susceptible to deadly infections from germs that wouldn't even faze a normal, healthy individual.\n\nThese kinds of things are why dead skin cells consist of alpha keratin. It's a structural protein that is essentially insoluble in water and forms that oh-so-crucial barrier between our insides and our outsides.\n\nIf you want the molecular view from a biochemist, well here it is: the primary structural protein of skin is alpha keratin. This protein consists of several layers of structure, starting with an alpha-helix. Two alpha helices coil around each other to form a coiled coil, two coiled coils twist around each other to form a protofilament, two of these twist to form a protofibril, and four protofibrils twist to make a filament. Think of it as twisting a couple pieces of floss together to make a heavier thread, then twisting a few pieces of this heavier thread to make a light rope, then continuing until you get a really thick piece that is made of lots of these smaller ropes. Even though many of the amino residue R-groups that face the solvent are polar, the elongated structure means that it is, thermodynamically, very costly for water to solvate these. This is due to the increased ordering of the water molecules near the surface of the filament (a decrease in entropy). There are two reasons the filaments do not ball up like globular proteins do (which would make them much more soluble): the noncovalent interactions at the various levels of structure reinforce the filaments and make them resistant to curling (think how easy it is to bend a thin stranded wire but how much harder it gets when the wire is thicker), and lots of filaments near each other easily form tangled messes of protein, where there simply isn't room to curl.",
"Phone save ignore",
"I actually figured this out the other night while tripping... basically I realized how after a shower I was dried out because I scrubbed the oils that keep me moist out. Then I realized the reason the elbows and feet are prone to being dry is because they come in contact with other surfaces the most. Removing essential oils for hydration. Think of a new old wooden railing that's supper smooth and slick from years of people's hands rubbing them.\n\n"
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10tzg2 | what a "trust fund baby" is and exactly how a "trust fund" works. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/10tzg2/eli5_what_a_trust_fund_baby_is_and_exactly_how_a/ | {
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"Trust funds are basically special savings accounts that pay you an allowance. A young person with an inherited trust fund is called a trust fund baby.",
"A trust is a specific legal entity that allows someone to separate themselves from an amount of their money. Money placed in the trust is \"safe\" and can not usually be touched except for the express purposes that are outlined in the formation of the trust. A trust fund baby most likely has a trust set up for them that is for the express purpose of funding their well-being, i.e. the baby is the trust's beneficiary. \n\nTrusts typically have executives that are in charge of ensuring that funds taken out of the trust are in accordance with the trust's objective or stated purpose. For example if I made a trust for my son and decided I wanted to take out a few hundred grand to get myself a car, the executor would tell me to buzz off since that is completely unrelated to the purpose of the trust.\n\nA trust can be ordered liquidated by the court in the event that it appears to be illusory, e.g. I make a trust, make myself the executive as well the beneficiary, in that case I am simply trying to hide funds. I would imagine that unless there is abuse of the funds by the parents or executive a trust fund established for a child would be very hard to prove as illusory, I was just including this for completeness.\n\nThat's my understanding of trusts but a lawyer would be able to explain it more thoroughly. In a nutshell, think of it as a special savings account with special protections that can only be used for very specific purposes.\n\nSource: My father is an attorney and has given me a high level summary on how these work in layman's terms. I am not an actual lawyer so I may have some of the minutia wrong, I am pretty confident in the high level functionality though.",
"From a [past post](_URL_0_) included in [\"The Five-Year-Old's Guide to the Galaxy\"](_URL_1_)\n\n > \"It's a essentially a bank account with a babysitter.\n\n > Pretend we have three friends: Al, Bob, and Charlie.\n\n > * Al is rich and his parents give him lots of money.\n > * Bob is poor and his parents can't afford to give him any money.\n > * Charlie is trustworthy; everyone knows Charlie would never steal a dime from his friends.\n\n > Al, being a VERY nice guy, decides he wants to help Bob out. So he decides that he's going to take $50 he's saved up and give it to Bob. However he's worried about Bob. Bob has never had money before and if he gives him the $50 all at once, then Bob might blow it on stuff like candy and soda within a week, when what Bob really needs is lunch money for the rest of the school year. Al is also a little lazy. He doesn't want to bother slowly handing the money out himself, so he decides to give the money to Charlie to dole it out for him.\n\n > This relationship is called a TRUST because Al TRUSTS Charlie to do what has been asked of him and not steal the money. The money is called a TRUST FUND, because it's the whole point of the TRUST. So now everyone benefits: Al gets to be a good Samaritan without all the hard work, Bob gets money as he needs it, and even Charlie benefits because he'll loan the money he hasn't given out yet to other kids and they'll pay him back with interest, which he'll get to keep for himself!\"\n"
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"http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j86h2/the_fiveyearolds_guide_to_the_galaxy/"
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4vgset | it is said that children are (almost) immune to motion sickness up to the age of 2. why? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4vgset/eli5_it_is_said_that_children_are_almost_immune/ | {
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"The main reason for motion sickness is our body has trouble reconciling the visual cues for no movement with the physical sensation of movement. The difference causes our bod to freak out, and we throw up to expel whatever apparent poison we've consumed.\n\nChildren don't have the history to realize there is a discrepancy yet.",
"Toddlers have emerging balance sense. Watch them walk, and you'll see that they don't seem sensitive to the fact that they are about to tip over. That balance sense is what's upset by external accelerations to cause motion sickness.",
"Coming not from a biological standpoiny but rather a virtual reality developer's standpoint motion sickness is caused by our perceived movement being different than our actual physical (or expected) movement, so therefor if a child doesn't have those physical expectations of what movement should look/feel like there is no opposing stimuli to make them think anything is different. ",
"Huh. My parents told me that I always got horrible motion sickness in the car when I was a baby. Is this supposed to be true of all babies, or just most?"
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6007xy | court mandated community service is like forced labour? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6007xy/eli5_court_mandated_community_service_is_like/ | {
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"Court mandated community service is offered to people who commit a small crime, such as stealing a chocolate bar. The judge or justice of peace may give you an option to show that you are not a bad person by doing something such as community service or even writing an apology letter to the person you had wronged. This is called a diversion. Failure to complete your diversion means you end up in jail for the stated amount of time for the crime, which you would have faced had you not taken a diversion, but it can be worse jail time because you made a promise to do community service yet failed to complete it.",
"Yes, it is. Punishments by courts almost always involve someone doing something they'd rather not do.\n\nIf you think the community service is bad, prison is worse.",
"No one is \"forcing\" the work. Court mandated community service is considered a far less severe punishment than the alternative fines or jail time. Most people gladly take picking up garbage or volunteering at a church over paying large sums of money."
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6i531w | if the reason most mammals have testicles outside their bodies, what about sea-mammals (seals, whales etc)? how do they get around the issue of high body temperature affecting sperm? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6i531w/eli5_if_the_reason_most_mammals_have_testicles/ | {
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"text": [
"Sea mammals keep their testicles in internal pouches surrounded by thick tendon-like tissues that keep the temperature lower than the surrounding muscles."
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1r7jb6 | why are musicians/composers like mozart regarded so highly? if something almost just like it came along now, would it be regarded as highly? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1r7jb6/eli5_why_are_musicianscomposers_like_mozart/ | {
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"W.A. Mozart is considered by most musicians to be one of the most influential composers for a variety of reasons:\n\n(WALL OF TEXT WARNING, I'm on mobile, sorry)\n\n-Prolific composer: He composed over 600 works throughout his lifetime, for a large variety of mediums (symphony, string quartets, trips, duos, woodwind ensembles, solo instruments, etc...). Many of those works are considered pillars of the repertoire.\n\n-Stylistic innovation: During Mozart's early life, the \"stile galant\" was the dominant compositional language. This style was characterized by its overly simple harmonic and rhythmic structures, as well as its apparent superficiality. Composers of galant style were primarily concerned with doing away with the intellectual complexity of the Baroque period (most notably J.S. Bach). Mozart gradually did away with this style, incorporating Baroque style complexity into his compositions while maintaining utmost clarity and expressiveness. He also incorporated the \"sturm und drang\" style (storm and stress) later in life, paving the way, along with Haydn, for the Romantic period, and composers like Ludwig van Beethoven and the such.\n\nA quote by pianist Charles Rosen puts it real nicely:\n\n \"It is only through recognizing the violence and sensuality at the center of Mozart's work that we can make a start towards a comprehension of his structures and an insight into his magnificence. In a paradoxical way, Schumann's superficial characterization of the G minor Symphony can help us to see Mozart's daemon more steadily. In all of Mozart's supreme expressions of suffering and terror, there is something shockingly voluptuous.\"\n\nTL;DR: Mozart changed the musical landscape by bringing back true depth of emotion in music, writing a ton of music, and being a role model for just about all composers after him. And he had the hots for his cousin. And he liked poop and fart jokes. Go figure."
]
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fa5sfy | why can some women be in labor for more than a day and some give birth in less than an hour? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fa5sfy/eli5_why_can_some_women_be_in_labor_for_more_than/ | {
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"That’s just the way it goes. There will always be a range of time periods. Some babies, especially the second and third births, are more ready and able to make their escape."
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5kq0ko | how do colony based insects, such as ants, decide who to make the queen (or king) and how does that one get so much bigger/different in appearance? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5kq0ko/eli5_how_do_colony_based_insects_such_as_ants/ | {
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"The queen ant mates with a male and his sperm is used by her to produce eggs. The fertilized eggs develop into females and the unfertilized eggs develop into males(haplo-diploid sex determination). The workers feed the larvae and on the basis of each ones diet they develop either into workers or queens. The queens then leave the colony to find males and to start new colonies."
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fvyxti | how is it that some drugs are metabolised through the kidneys and others through the liver? | I always hear this but don’t understand how this can work? Why aren’t all drugs metabolised through the kidney or vice versa? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fvyxti/eli5_how_is_it_that_some_drugs_are_metabolised/ | {
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"Metabolism of drugs means that a certain chemical in the body, typically an enzyme, does something to the drug. Obviously, those enzymes can't operate anywhere else than where they are; certain enzymes are present in the liver, while others are present in the kidneys. That determines where a drug will be metabolized.",
"Great question! \n\nDifferent drugs display a variety of metabolic pathways. Some are metabolized by the liver, while others are metabolized in the bloodstream or other tissues. Others are never metabolized at all. The **main factors that determine how a drug is metabolized (and eliminated from the body) are (1) the intrinsic chemical properties of the drug, (2) which enzymes the drug interacts with, and (3) where the drug actually goes**.\n\nWith respect to chemical properties: in broad terms, a drug that is too large, too negatively charged, or too fat-soluble (that is, hydrophobic or with a greater affinity for fatty or nonpolar substances) is difficult for the kidneys to get rid of in the urine. This is because the drug molecule cannot be filtered by the kidney (usually because it's too big or repelled electrostatically by the negatively charged filtering cells in the kidney)—or because, after the drug is filtered by the kidney from the blood, it can simply slip back into the bloodstream by crossing the membranes that line the tubules of the kidney. \n\nHow does the body remedy this? The answer is, in most circumstances, by allowing the drug to be metabolized—which can often make the drug molecule smaller, less fat-soluble, or simply more likely to be eliminated through the bile or the urine. Metabolism also allows certain drugs to become activated or deactivated.\n\nDrugs that are metabolized in the liver are therefore usually too fat-soluble, large, or negatively charged to be eliminated by the kidney. They are also typically drugs that are taken in through the gut (that is, in most cases, you swallow the drug) or otherwise end up circulating in the bloodstream. The liver has specialized enzymes that oxidize (take negatively charged electrons away from), hydrolyze (break down), and conjugate (bind other molecules together with) the drug in the body—and only certain drugs can interact with these enzymes.\n\nOther drugs have a higher affinity for enzymes that are present either in the blood or in other tissues around the body (like nerve or muscle). For example, the commonly used paralytic drug succinylcholine is broken down by the enzyme pseudocholinesterase, which circulates in the bloodstream.\n\nStill other drugs break down by themselves or don't need any metabolism at all. Lithium, which is most commonly used today to stabilize the mood in patients with subtypes of bipolar disorder, enters the body as a lithium salt (which becomes simple ionized lithium after getting dissolved in the blood) and exits the body in the urine as a lithium salt. No metabolism necessary! \n\nAs a final note, remember that many drugs that we use don't (or, rather, shouldn't) fully enter the bloodstream at all. Most creams or ointments applied to the skin, for instance, are not meant to be used in amounts that can actually make it to the rest of the body."
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703fyj | i'm a casual sports watcher. what's the difference between the level of skill/play between the nfl/nba and their ncaa counterparts? | I see it all the time on Reddit, how these college kids aren't ready for the Pros yet, how college basketball stars get smoked (them saying this not me) by NBA regulars in street pick up games that get posted on social media, etc.
My question is WHY and HOW.
Some of these colleges they literally live and die on their sports programs, and they have tens of millions in endowments. What does the NFL and NBA have to train their players to their level of skill that the NCAA doesn't?
Why is the gap in skill that big, considering both organizations have access to a ridiculous amount of money? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/703fyj/eli5im_a_casual_sports_watcher_whats_the/ | {
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"Well, \"Some of these colleges they literally live and die on their sports programs\" isn't really true. Their educational efforts are perhaps not as splashy, but they are the university's enduring accomplishment.\n\nThe big difference is that there are 347 NCAA Division I teams. That means each team has 1/347^th of the good players. They only get to keep them for 4-5 years, and then the 30 NBA teams pick the best ones. Then the best players play for a decade. So the NBA team has 10X the selectivity over 2X the number of years. One could expect them to be 20 times better.",
"There is a skill gap, although the top college players are going to be better than the worst pros.\n\nThe biggest difference is skill consistency. Every NFL starter is one of the top 100 players in the **world** at their position. The difference between the best and the worst isn't that great. But in college, a starter the in the top 1000 of people who happened to have been born in a certain 4-5 range, a lot less exclusive. That means every college team is going to have holes in it, and the #1 RB is going to look pretty good running over the #1000 linebacker. The same player is going to face a learning curve facing even #100 in the pros.\n\n > My question is WHY and HOW.\n\nBesides the numbers game:\n\n* physical maturity - males can continue to grow into their early 20's...a 28-year-old is not only done growing, but they have had a few years to get used to their final form\n* physical conditioning - it can take a few years for even a fully mature adult to work their way up to top physical condition\n* mental and emotional maturity - college coaches have to waste a lot of time babysitting teen age boy when the could be making them better football players\n* experience - many college players only see the field of a few years of their eligibility, pros can have many years of experience on top of what they learned in college\n* pracitce - college player are more limited in the amount of time they can be required to practice and study\n* resources - pros make a lot of money, and can afford a home gym and a nutritionist and just about anything else they need to make themselves better",
"Well, \"Some of these colleges they literally live and die on their sports programs\" isn't really true. Their educational efforts are perhaps not as splashy, but they are the university's enduring accomplishment.\n\nThe big difference is that there are 347 NCAA Division I teams. That means each team has 1/347^th of the good players. They only get to keep them for 4-5 years, and then the 30 NBA teams pick the best ones. Then the best players play for a decade. So the NBA team has 10X the selectivity over 2X the number of years. One could expect them to be 20 times better.",
"There is a skill gap, although the top college players are going to be better than the worst pros.\n\nThe biggest difference is skill consistency. Every NFL starter is one of the top 100 players in the **world** at their position. The difference between the best and the worst isn't that great. But in college, a starter the in the top 1000 of people who happened to have been born in a certain 4-5 range, a lot less exclusive. That means every college team is going to have holes in it, and the #1 RB is going to look pretty good running over the #1000 linebacker. The same player is going to face a learning curve facing even #100 in the pros.\n\n > My question is WHY and HOW.\n\nBesides the numbers game:\n\n* physical maturity - males can continue to grow into their early 20's...a 28-year-old is not only done growing, but they have had a few years to get used to their final form\n* physical conditioning - it can take a few years for even a fully mature adult to work their way up to top physical condition\n* mental and emotional maturity - college coaches have to waste a lot of time babysitting teen age boy when the could be making them better football players\n* experience - many college players only see the field of a few years of their eligibility, pros can have many years of experience on top of what they learned in college\n* pracitce - college player are more limited in the amount of time they can be required to practice and study\n* resources - pros make a lot of money, and can afford a home gym and a nutritionist and just about anything else they need to make themselves better"
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53qvm7 | why people see 'waves' of color in the dark. | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/53qvm7/eli5_why_people_see_waves_of_color_in_the_dark/ | {
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"Because there's light, and your visual centers are doing their thing, but without enough information to make sense of it. \n\nYou might enjoy this article: _URL_0_"
]
} | [] | [] | [
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"http://scienceline.org/2014/12/why-do-we-see-colors-with-our-eyes-closed/"
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c968cw | why is the amazon being deforested? is it just for the wood or are there other reasons? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c968cw/eli5_why_is_the_amazon_being_deforested_is_it/ | {
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"text": [
"Its to provide grazing land for cattle. And also for palm oil farms. \n\nThey cut down the rainforest then plant either grass or lots of just one type of tree.\n\nIts not really for the wood that much at all."
]
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a41luk | how does the weather get reported by each town to the weather app on my phone? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a41luk/eli5_how_does_the_weather_get_reported_by_each/ | {
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"There are organizations (large groups of people) who have satellites (giant cameras and sensors in outer space) which send the information they find to weather apps.\n\nThe satellites along with local meteorologists (weather analysts) provide information to weather apps, which show you the information they have and their predictions.",
"Meteorologists, either local and or national gather weather data to show the current weather and predict future weather for each town. Your phone then uses your location to find which town your in and pull the weather report for that town. "
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444p8e | if we keep raising the minimum wage then won't it just decrease the value of a dollar and cause to prices to rise because of inflation? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/444p8e/eli5_if_we_keep_raising_the_minimum_wage_then/ | {
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"It does cause inflation, but minimum wage proponents don't see it that way. Yet uf you look at countries where minimum wage is high, the price of goods is higher as well.\n\nThe reason people want to raise minimum wage is because they feel better about earning more. But usually they just circle back to where they were before.\n\nThere are much better solutions to improving people's welfare, and happiness, where there isn't an adverse effect on purchasing power. A universal healthcare system for example, or public transportation, caps on real estate prices, government run educational institutes, etc. But these are harder to plan, and implement, so politicians tend to just do the easiest thing to placate people, which is not raise wages, but outlaw wages below a certain amount, which is what minimum wage really is. It doesn't mean you make more moeny, it just means that employers can't pay you below that specific amount.\n\n\n",
"the way businesses look at things is \"if people can afford it, then charge what you can get\" so even though some math can show that you just need to raise the cost of certain goods by around $.30 per [dollar](_URL_2_). the thing is that business people will not say \"what is the minimum we can charge to get by\" they say \"what is the absolute maximum we can charge and still keep growth\"\n\nso the short answer is: it doesn't necessarily cause inflation but it makes everyone want to charge more. thing is, minimum wage has not been keeping pace with inflation anyway, purchasing power of the dollar has already been going down. what will really happen is [job loss](_URL_1_) \n\nedit: and another thing, all of this is up for debate, here is the government saying that raising minimum wage won't increase unemployment _URL_0_",
"Increasing the minimum wage does cause inflation, but not at the same rate as the increase. \n\nThe thing to keep in mind is that inflation happens anyway. Not raising the minimum wage is actually decreasing the wage by decreasing buying power. The status quo hurts more people than it helps. ",
"You have it backwards. Increasing minimum wage will do two inflationary things:\n\n1) Cost-push inflation. Employers have to pay more, so costs go up. Low wage employees generally make up a fairly small part of costs for most companies, so this effect is pretty small (eg: a 10% minimum wage increase might produce a 0.5% increase in prices, numbers pulled out of my butt).\n\n2) Demand-pull inflation. Because people have more money, demand goes up. This is a small effect because not everyone is near minimum wage, and demand doesn't really increase inflation much unless the economy is already at full capacity. If a market was already at full capacity, people would be being paid significantly more than minimum wage anyway.\n\nSo, yes, it causes a slight increase in inflation, but nowhere near enough to offset the minimum wage increase. Furthermore, it also stimulates economic growth by getting more money circulating."
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"http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/052815/does-raising-minimum-wage-increase-inflation.asp",
"http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/06/08/what-will-a-higher-minimum-wage-cost-you-at-mcdona.aspx"
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3tzj1c | is there a laser color stronger than the others? if so, why? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3tzj1c/eli5is_there_a_laser_color_stronger_than_the/ | {
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"Blue is the strongest colour that we can see because it has the highest frequency of visible light. That means that there is more energy per second being delivered by a blue laser than a red laser. A UV laser would be stronger, and an X-ray laser stronger still.",
"There is no 'stronger colour'.\n\nPhotons with a shorter wavelength (and therefore higher frequency) have a higher energy per photon.\n\nA source of light that emits a higher frequency (closer to UV) doesn't produce a higher intensity of light than one that emits infra red, it emits the same intensity but using fewer photons.",
"I'll just chime in here. Generally, when you talk about light, there's no real technical definition of 'strength'. When compare lasers, generally we refer to the 'power' of a laser, or how much energy it outputs per second. And if it's power we're talking about, then /u/Lazy_Pea is incorrect, and /u/robiwill is right. The power of a laser depends on the method from which the laser is generated, and it does not have a strong dependence on the color.\n\nFor the record, the strongest lasers that exist are chemical lasers, and those are all in the infra-red (lower-wavelength than red) region."
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cc674h | octonions - what exactly are they? | I just saw Eric Weinstein talk about them on Joe Rogans podcast, but I couldn’t quite keep up. What exactly are they? Why are they significant? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cc674h/eli5_octonions_what_exactly_are_they/ | {
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"The complex numbers are a sort of two-dimensional extension of the real number line, with an imaginary axis (i, 2i, 3i, ...) along with the ordinary real axis (1, 2, 3, ...). It turns out that you can extend this idea even farther to have four distinct axes (\"quaternions\"), or eight (\"octonions\"), or sixteen (\"sedenions\"), and so on for any power of 2. While a real number might just look like 3, and a complex number might look like 3+2i, a quaternion could look like 3+2i+4j+6k, where i, j, and k are distinct values with the property that i^2 = j^2 = k^2 = -1. Octonions would then have eight distinct components, one \"real\" component and seven distinct \"imaginary\" components.\n\nThe farther you go with this, the more nice properties about numbers you lose. When you go from the real numbers to the complex numbers, you lose the fact that numbers have a neat linear ordering. When you move from the complex numbers to the quaternions, you lose the fact that multiplication is commutative: for quaternions, it need not be the case that x\\*y = y\\*x. When you move from the quaternions to the octonions, you lose the fact that multiplication is associative: for octonions you aren't even guaranteed to have x\\*(y\\*z) = (x\\*y)\\*z.\n\nDespite the fact that the octonions are both rather abstract and lack many of the properties we expect number systems to have, they show up occasionally in theoretical physics."
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2fxamy | why does yeast in bread-making not produce alcohol like yeast in brewing? | I understand that in brewing the yeast eats the sugar and poops out alcohol, but why does this not happen when making bread? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2fxamy/eli5_why_does_yeast_in_breadmaking_not_produce/ | {
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"It does, a little. But the amount produced is very small - bread rises for a matter of a day or two, brewing can take weeks or months.",
"You can make drinkable alcohol using baking yeast (and great bread using brewers yeast).",
"Both bread yeast and brewers yeast are generally the same species. Brewers yeast however has been selected for positive atributes that it provides to the finished beverage, wheather that be certain flavors or a certain ability to ferment. Brewers yeast is also used through the entire process post boil for imparting flavors. Bakers yeast is killed off by the baking process."
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2xl9kn | what is the ultimate luminosity? how many photons can we fit in a unit of 3d space? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2xl9kn/eli5_what_is_the_ultimate_luminosity_how_many/ | {
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"Interesting question. My first response is an infinite number. Quantum field theory puts no limit on the number of photons that can be in the same place. But quantum field theory doesn't account for the gravity of the photons.\n\nAt some point, you'll have so many photons in one place and so much energy in one place, they'll collapse to form a black hole. The number of photons required for this will depend on their energy and how spread out they are, but it will be an absurdly huge number.\n\nThis would never happen in nature.",
"**TL;DR** infinitely many.\n\nThere are many ways to group particles. One way is whether that particle is a Boson or a Fermion. For example, electrons are Fermions and photons are Bosons. 2 Fermions cannot be in the same space at the same time. But 2 Bosons can. Bosons can literally overlap each other in space. You need special conditions for that to happen, but it can happen, so you can have infinitely many photons in one spot."
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c9ud11 | after a natural disaster, what is the benefit of declaring state of emergency? | Why do states do this and how does it effect insurance claims? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c9ud11/eli5_after_a_natural_disaster_what_is_the_benefit/ | {
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"Not sure about insurance. But declaring a state of emergency will activate funds that have been set aside for clean up, repairs, and other needed things for after a disaster.",
"I know this is pretty far fetched since you're probably wondering about the US scenario, but here in the Philippines (Which is legally patterned after the US anyway) certain insurance clauses and budgetary releases are contingent on the government unit declaring a state of emergency. Specifically, 10% of the annual budget is set aside for use during and after a calamity.",
"There are specific emergency funds that both the State and Federal Governments set aside that legally can only be accessed when a state of emergency has been declared.",
"If a state of emergency is declared, shops cannot increase prices and capitalize off of those who are desperate. IE, It makes it illegal for Wal-Mart to gouge the price of a pack of water from $8.50 to $20.\n\nFun Fact: It also applies to sales. So if Home Depot had generators marked down from $500 to $350 for a random sale, they can’t mark them back up if a SOE is put into effect. Bitches gonna be out there getting their hurricane party on.",
"Budget: state and federal budgets have funds set aside for emergencies. \n\nLegal: certain rights of citizens can be suspended to help manage the crisis (force people out of homes, implement curfews). Decision making gets much more streamlined, allowing the governor to make certain decisions without going to the state congressional member's for approval. \n\nMilitary: for states, this would be the national guard. Without a state of emergency what they are allowed to do is very limited. \n\nMostly; it is allows leadership to sidestep potentially cumbersome oversight to quickly respond to a disaster. This is often abused, as you will see states of emergencies that are still on going after 40 years...."
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7cgn2s | what holds fingernails in place? how far under the skin do they go? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7cgn2s/eli5_what_holds_fingernails_in_place_how_far/ | {
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"Your fingernails and toenails are made up of cells that form into a hard surface called keratin. Keratin is also what makes up your hair and other parts of animals, like horse hooves and rhino horns. Underneath your fingernail is a soft surface called the nail bed. This is what produces the cells that harden and turn into keratin. The nail grows because it works kind of like the plates that make up the Earth’s crust: The nail bed forms new cells, which push on the older ones and make them grow outward. The whole structure inside your finger doesn’t extend much past the bottom of your visible fingernail. ",
"To add to this why don't fingernails hurt when they grow? Shouldn't they tug on the skin underneath? ",
"The nail is generated (grows from) the germinal matrix and grows over the sterile matrix (nail bed).\n\nIf the nail is crushed, injured, or removed, the germinal matrix and nail bed need to be protected . A defect to those structures can cause permanent nail deformities. \n\nSo after a crush injury, it's standard practice to remove the nail and inspect those structures. We use a freer elevator to gently lift it off. Once any repairs are made, the nail is slid back into place and sutured back to hold it as a splint. The nail regrows and pushes the old nail off. \n\nIf there is a nail deformity, we can either remove the nail and attempt to address the deformity, or remove the nail bed and matrix to eliminate the nail regrowth entirely."
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2mpcso | from newborn onesies to blouses, shirts and pants... why do men's and women's clothing fasten in opposite directions? | I've always noticed that men's shirts have the buttons on the right, while women's have them on the left. Now, I've discovered that even some newborn zipper onesies have the sipper going down one leg or the other depending on if it's made for a boy or a girl. What gives? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2mpcso/eli5_from_newborn_onesies_to_blouses_shirts_and/ | {
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"Men's jackets were made to be unbuttoned with their right hand so they could take it off with a cane in one hand. Women were dressed by other people so it's made to be easy for right-handed maids to button them up. Then the tradition stuck ",
"Back in the day wealthy women had numerous cumbersome layers to put on, so they had maids to help them get dressed. As 90% of people are right handed they put the buttons/zippers/whatever on the side easiest for them to work with. Mens clothing wasn't as complicated so their stuff got put on the other side. That has just become a defacto standard in the fashion industry despite the fact that it is no longer relevant. (At least that's what I've been told.)"
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2eg14v | how do these child sex allegations get proven 30+ years later if there is no pictures/videos? e.g cliff richards atm | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2eg14v/eli5_how_do_these_child_sex_allegations_get/ | {
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"Rape cases are very difficult to prove especially with no physical evidence.\n\nNot sure who Cliff Richards is, but like when Sandusky got convicted. There were so many people that all told similar stories. It's a he said she said thing, but when so many people are all telling the same story the jury tends to believe the majority of people."
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fh5jjw | normal "system" memory versus graphics memory | What is the difference between the DDR 3, 4 or 5 you install as system memory and the GDDR 4, 5, 5X or 6 used in graphics cards? What makes each of them better for their respective applications? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fh5jjw/eli5_normal_system_memory_versus_graphics_memory/ | {
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"Graphics memory is designed for ludicrous throughput and custom applications. Graphics cards need access to massive memory bandwidth to do their job, a single 4K frame is ~25 MB and the GPU will be expected to generate at least 60 of them per second requiring a minimum of 12 Gbps of memory bandwidth to achieve 60 FPS at 4k. If you want to run 8x FSAA(full scene anti-aliasing) then you need to generate each frame at 8x the resolution or 32K equivalent and then down sample it. This gives you 1.6 GB **per frame** and 768 Gbps of required memory bandwidth. The Graphics RAM on a GPU serves as its input buffer storing textures that it needs to reference during rendering and storing the finally rendered scene.\n\nBecause of this insane bandwidth requirement, GPUs often talk to several chips in parallel so they can have up to 512 bit wide memory buses so each clock edge can give them 512 bits of data and then they run at quite high frequencies. An nVidia 2080 TI has a memory bandwidth of 4,928 Gbps.\n\nStandard memory is designed to be compatible with every system, as such it has an agreed upon bus width (64 bits) and frequency set. While it will sometimes have lower latency than graphics ram and is generally significantly cheaper per GB, even the fastest stick of DDR4 can only give you 200 Gbps, but this is more than enough because your CPU isn't handling huge quantities of data generally. Its restricted on doing math on what it can fit in its L1 and L2 cache, everything else is a longggg wait for a CPU."
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49hkaa | if you're not supposed to eat or drink before midnight before a surgery, what about emergency surgeries? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/49hkaa/eli5_if_youre_not_supposed_to_eat_or_drink_before/ | {
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"In a regular surgery, the idea is to make the procedure as uncomplicated as possible, hence the restrictions.\n\nIn emergency surgery, the concern is keeping people alive. As such, there may be extra complications in the surgery that may be due to something they have drank/eaten, but it usually pales in comparison to the complications that require you to have emergency surgery.",
"In an emergency you do what you have to do, you're already dealing with an operation that's being performed under suboptimal conditions. Planned or elective surgery is different, you can take precautions to minimize risks. The concern generally is in case the patient vomits while under general anesthesia, the airways and lungs could be blocked.\n\nTake an extreme example, someone comes in from dinner, and needs a coronary artery bypass because they're suffering a heart attack, or maybe an industrial accident and someone's got a major injury. If they waited until the food passed the stomach, the patient would be dead and there would be no need to operate.",
"The concern is vomiting during anesthesia, and the chance that since most of your body's normal reflexes have been shut down, some of that vomit may be inhaled into the lungs. During emergency surgery, they take extra measures to deal with this if and when it happens, but this adds risk to the surgery. \n & nbsp; \nThe reason that this extra risk is acceptable, but only in emergencies and not in voluntary, pre-scheduled surgeries, is that in an emergency situation, the overall risk to the health of the patient if the surgery would be performed is much greater than the risk from accepting there's a chance the patient may vomit."
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708u85 | what is happening in the brain when you are not paying attention to someone saying something and you hear what they said inside your head some minutes after they've said it? | This happens usually when I am engrossed with something else and not attentive to what someone said. It echoes in my head some time later and initially it is difficult to perceive that it was said some time before, and feels like it is happening now. Why does this happen? And how does this process work inside the brain? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/708u85/eli5_what_is_happening_in_the_brain_when_you_are/ | {
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"There are different levels of consciousness layered on top of each other that make up your reality. Some you are very aware of/in control of, others are kind of like \"auto pilots\" that let you do stuff like drive a car without really thinking about it, or wake up on time even though your alarm didn't go off, or hear someone say your name even though you weren't consciously listening to their conversation.\n\n What I think is happening here, is basically your \"subconscious\" is paying attention even when your \"primary conscious\" is not, and when your conscious mind is no longer focusing on a thing at hand, sometimes your subconscious is nice enough to be like \"hey a thing happened while you weren't paying attention, here it is\". I don't really experience the thing you're talking about, but I get a thing a lot where I will just be looking around not focusing on anything in particular, and all of a sudden word pops up in my head as if I had just read it, although I didn't consciously read it. If I examine my environment again, I often find that word somewhere, and obviously my brain read it extremely quickly while I wasn't even trying to read, then helpfully handed me the information moments later."
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w26ki | the difference between a thc pill and smoking marijuana for medicinal purposes. | Is THC the only active ingredient in pot that helps? Wouldn't a pill be easier to take?
Do they work differently?
Etc general questions. Mainly the controversy over smoking pot. If you can take it in a pill why would smoking (bad for lungs) be an option?
Sorry this is worded poorly. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/w26ki/eli5_the_difference_between_a_thc_pill_and/ | {
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"There IS a drug on the market (Dronabinol) that contains the main THC in marijuana. However marijuana has a lot more cannabinoids (the class of substances that THC belongs to) and when smoked have a much quicker effect than ingesting a pill.",
"Cannabis contains, among other things; cannabidiol (CBD), cannabinol (CBN), and tetrahydrocannabivarin (THCV) (Source: Wikipedia, I was lazy).\n\nThere are many more active ingredients in cannabis over 400 (according to Wikipedia also). The problem with pills is that they like to only put a few ingredients in them. THC is the main drug in cannabis, but the others I listed have a major impact in the effects of smoked or eaten cannabis and all the many others create nuance between different strains of cannabis.\n\nTHC on its own will not give you a high like cannabis, it will give you a high but its not the same.\n\nThe reason many doctors don't like people smoking cannabis as medicine is because of the number of chemicals in it. Scientists test one drug at a time, they might study the interaction between two different drugs but they cant gather conclusive data on the interaction between so many different substances.\n",
"A pill also has to go through the digestive tract, and you lose some of the active ingredient during this process. It's known as the \"first pass effect\". You have to swallow the pill, then it goes to your stomach, blah blah blah, then to your liver where some of it will be metabolized and excreted. \n\nWhen you smoke, you inhale and the particles enter your lungs then go directly into your blood stream. So not only does inhalation deliver a faster onset of the drug, but you also get more of it, since inhalation doesn't have the first pass effect. ",
"Very surprised nobody mentioned that the other cannabinoids in weed are also medicinal. \n\nAlso thc on it's own gives a very unpleasant effect. Tends to trigger anxiety attacks. The reason for this is that there are compoundss in cannabis that make you relaxed and sleepy, and counteract the stimulating, and mildly psychedelic THC."
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abj0jz | how are broken bones in non-castable areas fixed? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/abj0jz/eli5_how_are_broken_bones_in_noncastable_areas/ | {
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"The cast is mostly to prevent further damage. It is not strictly necessary but is more comfortable. It is possible to cast a larger area in order to protect the fracture site from further injury but this will likely be less comfortable then just not putting on a cast. It is mostly the extremities that need extra protection during the healing process as this is where it is easiest to get damaged. So it is not as necessary to protect the core body. So if you for example go the the emergency room with a broken rib there is nothing the doctors can do except make sure there is nothing more serious. After the examinations and x-rays you just get sent home with orders to take it easy. However if the fracture is more serious they can operate and insert rods to join the bone back together again.",
"Well, if you break the neck of the femur, they drill a hole and install a screw bracket through the femur and into the head of the femur to hold it in place while it fuses back together. You can't put weight on that leg for 6-8 weeks. Then you get to learn how to walk again, as the muscles have all atrophied. If all that sounds incredibly painful, it is.",
"Fingers for example are taped or splinted and taped.\n\nPersonal experience more then once.\n\n",
"Many many ways. Depends on the fracture.\n\nThe function of a cast is to stop movement of the bone while it heals. There are other ways to do this if a cast won’t work.\n\nFor example: if the fracture isn’t that bad then the patient might be simply asked to not do ‘x’ movement for ‘x’ amount of time.\n\nOther examples: Slings can be used to minimize movement for collar bone fractures. External fixations which are like cages around the broken bones, can be used for more complicated fractures. Sometimes pins are put in place to keep a bone together while it heals and removed later like with certain finger fractures. \n"
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fztgox | why your feet tingle after you almost slip or sometimes when something slips from your hand | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fztgox/eli5_why_your_feet_tingle_after_you_almost_slip/ | {
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"It's a small spike of adrenaline. When you're about to slip or drop something, your adrenal glands start pumping in case you need to respond quickly with power, strength, or heightened reflexes."
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45g6by | most americans i've met are very smart, sensible people who generally seem to have been educated far better than i; how is it that there's such a prevalent cultural stereotype of the dumb american? | Mainly I wonder where this notion stemmed from. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/45g6by/eli5_most_americans_ive_met_are_very_smart/ | {
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"In the same vain that \"the squeaky wheel gets the grease\", our dumbest are generally are our loudest. ",
"Think about the context you've met them in. Was it traveling? Was it through work? I highly doubt you've a representative sample of Americans.",
"Same reason that -\n\nAll Germans are either closet nazis or robots\n\nAll French people are cheese eating surrender monkeys\n\nAll English people drink tea and speak Cockney\n\nAll Japanese people are one failure away from seppeku\n\n... on so on.\n\nStereotypes are over simplifications to help people put everyone into their \"box\". America has plenty of really ignorant people... but also more than our share of geniuses.",
"Most stereotypes are portrayed via the media, and lots of the shows that have come out of the US are ones like the Jersey Shore, Kardashians, and basically MTV. \n\nAt the same time, in some regards, the stereotype is true. Americans are actually very bad at subjects like history, geography, reading/writing, and other backgrounds.\n\nSo when it come to the international realm and Americans are placed outside the US the whole 'Americans are Dumb' comes from people not knowing the differences between Paris, France, and Europe.",
"America receives a lot of international attention, and heavily influences the world. Most people have encountered American tourists, and tourist stereotypes aren't positive anywhere. National news agencies often report on local American news stories that are strange, including the sort of thing you find on /r/FloridaMan, while equivalent news stories rarely filter back to America (except perhaps the strange things ascribed to the Chinese).\n\nThe second big factor would be that America has a more domestic focus culturally. It only makes sense--if your international neighbors are an hour's journey away, you have to interact with them more and be more knowledgeable about them. Meanwhile people around the world get to know America through its vast cultural output. The fact that many Americans are less knowledgeable about other countries gives the wrong impression. Of course, if you poll people abroad about the finer points of American geography or politics, they will probably not succeed either, but they're familiar with the broad strokes because America is so large and influential.",
"I'd point to a few things when you're thinking about this:\n\n1. Americans travel A LOT. You'll meet a lot of americans pretty much anywhere in europe that you live. You'll see them. No one is more dumb than a person who is traveling. They get uncomfortable and they start talking about what they have back home that doesn't exist in the place they are traveling. Only the most seasoned and sophisticated travelers escape the \"defend your home\" talk that people have when you travel. Since americans have often been the ones traveling, so it goes that they have this reputation.\n\n2. It's been hard for Americans to cross major cultural lines. Experiencing other cultures is easy for a spaniard - you drive less than the distance from my house to the next STATE to get to an entirely different culture. This means that we're often having a new experience being out of our cultural comfort zone. In this regard americans genuinely are more ignorant, at least they often are.\n\n3. Power. People talk about America because of its significant. Talk alot + being \"the other\" will often have some dimention of \"stupid\". This is a bit like how we always make fun of the famous, or the president or whatever. Because we can do so without a sense of pity!\n\n4. Media. If you'd spent your entire life seeing american media products and that formed your sense of american culture you'd probably think we were dumb too!",
"Assuming you're a pretty typical European, you're mostly going to be running into Americans whose careers or personal tastes are leading them to travel around the world. These people are going to be unusually well-educated by anyone's standards, they'll most likely be better educated than a typical European, and if *you're* typical they'll seem very well-educated to you.\n\nThe \"dumb American\" stereotype primarily comes from the period of roughly 1880-1980, when growing American wealth created a social mismatch where an American who was of relatively low socioeconomic status compared to other Americans would be wealthier than Europeans of a much higher socioeconomic status. This played out at all levels of the social pyramid, from American industrialists marrying into the British aristocracy, to middle class Americans going on tourist trips that would only be affordable to upper class Europeans, to backwoods GIs socializing with the European middle class. By 1990 or so European incomes had mostly caught up and the mismatch ended.\n\nThere's a lot more to say than that, of course... but this ELI5 so I'll leave it at the explanation of 90% of the phenomenon. If I kept going, would I ever stop?",
"One think I think is unique or uncommon to the United States is that we are far more frank and forthright than others. We are raised to say what we mean and mean what we say, we are taught that it's OK to say 'I don't know,' and so we do. (Canadian comedian Russell Peters has a great bit about people making up directions to places when they didn't know during a trip he took to the Middle East, for comparison.)\n\nSo we take that value when we go abroad, because wherever we go, there we are. We're far more likely to admit ignorance, so the 'ignorant' label sticks. "
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cf89tq | how the hell do deep fakes work? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cf89tq/eli5_how_the_hell_do_deep_fakes_work/ | {
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"Without going into the details of that actual technology - Computers have advanced to the point where we can create very realistic looking images using existing material. That has extended to speech as well, so for someone who is particularly well covered (like a politician) it isn't particularly surprising that a computer can create an image of them saying basically anything.",
"You take a picture of person A and you put it in a photo of person B. If you do this naively, just by copying the pixels, the image is discontinuous at the seam. This makes the fake obvious. So, to make a better fake you use a machine learning program to reprocess the pixels near the seam, to make the seam invisible. One such program, as far back as 1997, was called Video Rewrite. The most popular \"brand\" of these better fakes is called \"deep fake\", so named because or a reddit user names \"deepfakes\" who produced and distributed some high quality examples.",
"Honestly, I know it's probably against the rules of ELI5, but I would recommend Corridor's Crew video on their Keanu Reeves deepfake to fully understand everything that's behind this.\n\nIn short, you basically have to get an actor to play the body of the subject of deepfake, and train an algorithm to match the face of that celebrity you want in the scene to the body of the duble, you need to track the face of the celebrity trough interviews and movies though",
"Get lots and lots of pictures from different angles of someone, get some fancy AI that stitches those pictures onto the video depending on the angle of the face replacing it with the ones in the picture.",
"How Deep Fakes are generated is a system of machine learning called \"Generative Adversarial Networking\". It's a system which involves two networks that play a sort of \"information game\" against each other with a \"generator\" network and a \"discriminator\" network. The Generator Network is the one that maps out data patterns drawing from an information source (like drawing from a bunch of pictures of human faces and mapping the data to assemble a realistic human face of a person who does not exist) while the Discriminator network looks at the newly assembled data and attempts to figure out what it does right and wrong against the information source. It grades the Generator's attempt against the source and sends it back with new recommendations for it to incorporate into its next generative attempt. The Discriminator learns what a bad picture looks like and learns how to spot differences in order to offer better critique to the next generative attempt. The cycle continues until the discriminator network makes a certain percentage of error that it believes that the data is genuine and uniform (in other words, when the Generator \"fools\" the Discriminator enough to make it believe what it is seeing is a real image of a real person)",
"The algorithm takes an image of face(with added algorithm to identify face in question), and transforms it into some bit string basically(it's not quite that but it's close enough and I can't think of a way to explain the proper way easily. It's close enough anyway). The model is trained so that it builds this bit string representation and then undoes it. Like, you get face, turn it into bit string, and then try to build face from that bit string again.\n\nTo give an idea of how this training works, you basically score this result, and then change the algorithm so that it scores a little bit better next time. Which in this case is simple, because you just check if the result looks the same as the original image of the face. You can for example count how many pixels are the same.\n\nSo far so good. But now, we split this algorithm into three parts. First, the part A that takes face, and turns it into a bit string. This is called encoder. Next one that takes bit string and turns it back into face is called decoder. We use two separate decoders. Say you want to change face of Keanu into face of Nicholas Cage. You use one decoder, B, for Keanu, and decoder C for Nicholas. \n\nWe train it by taking A + B and feed it images of Keanu. We score results and tweak both A and B. We also use A + C and feed it images of Nicholas and tweak both A and C. As a result, A becomes capable of taking either Nicholas or Keanu face, and turn it into a bit string. B then is able to take that bit string and turn the bit string into Keanu face, and C would take that bit string and turn it into Nicholas face.\n\nSo now we take image of Keanu, and feed it to encoder A to get a bit string, and then use decoder C to turn that bit string into a face of Nicholas Cage.\n\nThis alone doesn't quite work that well, but we can use some mathematical trickery during training to force A to ignore all traits of faces it can see, if it can trust B or C can fill in the blanks. This works by adding extra scoring term during training, which gets kinda complicated, but the gist of it is simple, we want to make A not give B or C details of the face it sees that they should know just because they know the face belongs to Keanu(or Nicholas in case of C). Like, A shouldn't tell B how big a nose the face has, B should already know how big a nose Keanu has. What is the eye color of Nicholas? That's not information bit string should contain, because C learns that just by knowing who Nicholas Cage is.\n\nWith that, you get bit string that contains only things like, which way face is facing, what's the facial expression, where are they looking, etc, and B and C paint their own actors based on these details. So that makes it possible to get this algorithm take one face and replace it with another with pretty much the same position, orientation, expression etc."
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11lz0j | why do people say we aren't recovering from the recession? | I know that the DOW isn't the only marker for how the economy is performing, but isn't it a strong indicator? This is a chart of the stock market over the last 5 years.
_URL_0_; | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/11lz0j/eli5_why_do_people_say_we_arent_recovering_from/ | {
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"There are still no jobs. The health of the stock market means absolutely nothing to people who have no jobs.",
"I don't think anybody says the economy *isn't recovering.* At least, I don't think anybody *seriously* says that.\n\nWhat some people say is that the economy isn't recovering *as fast as it could.* Everybody agrees that the economy is gradually climbing back out of the hole it dug for itself in the mid-late 2000s, but not everybody agrees that that recovering is going well, or that it's being brought about in the right way."
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"http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=%5Edji+interactive#symbol=%5Edji;range=5y;compare=;indicator=volume;charttype=area;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=off;source=undefined"
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15x5mz | my co-pay is $20, but without insurance it's thousands of dollars. how does the insurance company make any money? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/15x5mz/eli5_my_copay_is_20_but_without_insurance_its/ | {
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"In part, because the insurance company doesn't actually pay that \"uninsured rate\": because they are a huge customer, they negotiate much better rates for the drugs/services. You will never see what they pay: they get an invoice for the face amount, and then get a discount off that.\n\nIt's somewhat the same for car dealers. There's an \"invoice\" with a price, but they don't actually pay that price. The manufacturer gives them all kinds of discounts and credits based on complex rules, like if they meet an overall sales goal they get an extra 5% off.\n\n",
"Actuary here. In general, it's simply because certain risks (health being one of them) are diversifiable in aggregated quantities. As you aggregate individuals, the general health (and thus health care utilization) of the population tends to approach the mean of the popuation (i.e. the variance tends toward zero). Not all risks do this naturally. For example, interest rate risk is not really diversifiable (although there are some modern financial instruments that attempt to hedge interest risk), because no matter how large of a fund you aggregate, you earn the same interest on all the cash. The same isn't true of things like expected future lifetime or expected health care utilization.\n\nThat said, other factors come into play such as network discounts (which really affect the premium side about equally as the claims side, so it is somewhat arbitrary (i.e. insurers price different regions differently due to the discounts, so it is passed on to consumers)). Rate setting is based on historical data and trends, so all that is accounted for in the rate setting based on your demographics, which are priced in order to turn a profit on aggregate pools of risk.\n\nBut the basic reason it works is simply that large groups of people can have health risk diversified in the population and tend toward some average that makes sense."
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5bfkym | why do we sweat and tear up when we vomit? | Unfortunately experienced this moments ago and my interest was piqued. Why do we tear up and sweat when we vomit? Also where does the fatigue come from? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5bfkym/eli5_why_do_we_sweat_and_tear_up_when_we_vomit/ | {
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"When you vomit you are emptying your stomach. It is surrounded by large and strong muscle fibers that are responsible for \"chewing\" the food using your stomach walls as \"teeth\". Vomiting implies those muscle fibers to suddenly contract: the food goes up and exits using your mouth. Also, there is a lot of blood going in and out near your stomach. This process is similar to a sprint run: if you run for ten seconds at full throttle you will end very tired. ",
"It is a result of activation of multiple branches of what is known as the \"autonomic nervous system.\" This is a system of the brain and spinal cord that activates a swath of reflexes often centered around getting you out of threatening situations. I can't comment on the purpose of sweating / heart rate changes, but to comment on the mechanism I would relate it to \"dialing 911\" for the body. A lot of different reasons to mobilize body result in the same non-specific responses. I can go into more detail, but when you get down to the brass tacks of the brain circuit mechanism, it's not understood."
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2p0xbt | how can there be updates on disc games? | Like, it's a physical disc. How do they make updates and apply them to the games? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2p0xbt/eli5_how_can_there_be_updates_on_disc_games/ | {
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"They store the updates on the hard drive. All files have to be loaded into RAM before they're used anyway. When the game goes to load a file, it checks the hard drive to see if there's an updated version. It doesn't actually update the disk."
]
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2thm3o | why do polar bears live at the northern pole and penguins at the southern? | Is it to do to breeding? Weather patterns? Nature? With this in mind, would Polar bears survive in Antartica? Would Penguins at the North Pole? What really is keeping them from swapping places other than being at separate sides of the planet?
Sorry if a repost, I only have my phone and can't really search too well. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2thm3o/eli5_why_do_polar_bears_live_at_the_northern_pole/ | {
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"I'd assume they could survive in either places. But neither animal would travel the length of the globe without human assistance. And they exist in those places for the same reasons that gorillas live in Africa and kangaroos live in Australia. They evolved there, they're specially adapted to that particular environment and have had no reason to migrate to other places of the world ",
"Bears swim, but primarily prefer land- they basically 'came up' from relatively close places like Russia or Canada. Penguins rook on land but have a really impressive swimming range. And they'd kind of *have* to, given how far away even the closest (and, sfaik, all bear free) land to Antarctica is.\n\nThe niche penguins would have at the North Pole is filled by the Puffin. I have heard of early researchers trying to transplant Emperor penguins to the North Pole, but it's not a very happy story. \n\n(The transplanters didn't take into account exactly how many penguins it takes to make up the 'mass huddle' that penguins do against extreme cold. And ISTR at least one wandered up to the home of someone who didn't know what a penguin was and killed it in a panic).\n\nGiven how dangerous polar bears can be (thus hard to transport) and how screwed the fauna of Antarctica would be if they took off, I couldn't see anyone trying a transplant.",
"* why are polar bears only in the north pole - if I had to guess, I'd say because millions of years ago, a normal bear (generally speaking) was able to get further and further north because there's more ice between the north pole and the nearest land (Russia and Canada). There's no ice, as far as I know, between the southern most land in South America and Antarctica.\n* why are there penguins only in the south pole - again guessing, but I'd say because millions of years ago they were able to fly there. They went further south and found somewhere (Antarctica) they could land. There would have been nowhere similar for them to land year-round in the north (as the ice melts). Once they landed, they settled, then evolved to swim instead of fly.\n* I think polar bears would be able to survive along the coasts of Antarctica. They're certainly adapted to the cold. Their main food is seals, of which there are plenty (they feed on the penguins). The problem is (and this is also a problem for penguins going north): it's not their natural habitat. They could devastate the ecosystem. Polar bears would find an easy meal in penguins (being slow/clumsy on land, and not able to get away in water either since polar bears are great swimmers). In turn that would cause the seal population to decline, and so on.\n* I don't think penguins would thrive at the north pole. There's no land there year round, just ice. There are many predators along the northern land masses that would feed on them and their eggs that aren't present in Antarctica.\n* being on separate sides of the planet is a good enough reason. Only birds, humans and large sea creatures travel those kinds of distances regularly, and humans only do it because technology enables us to. A few hundred years ago, most humans never traveled further than 20 miles from where they were born.",
"Penguins live in the southern hemisphere, not south pole. A few live in Antarctica, but theres Penguins in Australia that Don't live in polar environments at all. Sydney is more tropical and has penguins. "
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fqkrm6 | what are they doing in those numbered free mason lodges? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fqkrm6/eli5_what_are_they_doing_in_those_numbered_free/ | {
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"Networking, it's mostly small business owners being part of a fraternity. They help each other out and also do a lot of charity work. They are secretive, but that's just part of being a brotherhood. There is nothing sinister about Masonic Lodges.",
"Freemasonry is an ancient system of teaching morality. The numbers on our lodges refer to the order in which the lodge was opened in their country. What we do is recite different moral allegories that we have spent all month (or all year sometimes) memorizing, for the dual purposes of; teaching each other (and ourselves) a strict moral code for living life in a way that has a positive impact on the world around us and ourselves; and keeping these ancient words and lessons alive.\n\nIf you know a mason (I'm sure you do) I hope you have a positive view of him as a man, and if you want to be a mason, simply ask a mason.\n\nWe are not scary. We are not elitist. We are the quiet, unassuming men in your community with have a strong view of community and charity. We might be plumbers or doctors, construction workers or bankers, and we only want to make good men better.",
"r/Freemasonry knows better. You might want to ask them."
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6pks7y | king solomon and his temple | I've never been able to find anything online that states exactly what was reported to be under his temple, who he was and what he did.
All religious debate aside, why are people still fixated on a conspiracy theory? What exactly is that theory? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6pks7y/eli5_king_solomon_and_his_temple/ | {
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"According to the Bible, Solomon was the son of King David, and the third ruler of the Kingdom of Israel. He is supposed to have been the one who commissioned the construction of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, which became the place of worship for what is now the Jewish religion. In the year 586 BCE, the Temple was destroyed by the Babylonian empire. Later on, a second Temple was built on the same spot (the spot currently occupied by the Dome of the Rock), which was renovated by King Herod, and then destroyed during the Roman siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE. As an aside, both Temples were destroyed on the same date of the Hebrew calendar, which is coming up next Tuesday. Anyway, a lot of the conspiracy theories surrounding Solomon's Temple have to do with two groups. First, the Knights Templar, who, during the Crusades, set up their base on the site of the Temple. They went on to be the subject of approximately a metric fuckton of rumors, legends, and theories, including what they may have found on the Temple Mount. The second group is the Freemasons. Masons trace their traditions back to the artisans employed by Solomon to build the Temple, and they are very popular targets for conspiracy theories. To further complicate things, there is very little in the way of written extra-bibilical records of the time period in which Solomon would have lived (not to mention the fact that archaeologists are not in agreement as to when exactly that time period was) *and* the fact that the site of the two Temples is unavailable for excavation, and so much of the archaeological record has already been destroyed during construction and repair work on the two Muslim holy sites currently located there."
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1qm5o1 | with all of our technological advancements, why haven't we been able to recover the titanic yet? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1qm5o1/with_all_of_our_technological_advancements_why/ | {
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"It is possible, but to what ends and who would finance it. It would be outrageously expensive and they would be bringing up nothing but nearly rotten metal. But it can be done, check this [link](_URL_0_)\n*edit for spelling",
"Its expensive, and people arent willing to spend that much money to recover a rusted hulk that big. besides whats the point?",
"It's an enormous engineering feat which, while possible, would be very expensive. Also, there are many moral/legal objections owing to the wreckage being considered a mass gravesite (though I doube they'd have the abilitiy to actually stop an ernest effort). Additionally, keep in mind that the Titanic is not in perfect shape down there, so you're not going to raise it in one go. It's not structurally stable. \n\nThat said, they have raised parts of it, and scavenged many, many artifacts from it. "
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57mzju | is it possible to convert ocean (salt) water into drinking water? or is there some inherent property preventing this? | I was reading a-lot lately about the droughts in California and the predicted droughts to happen across the globe and wondered why we haven't figured out how to make salt water drinkable... Is it simply a lack of efficient processes? Funding? or some other factor? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/57mzju/eli5is_it_possible_to_convert_ocean_salt_water/ | {
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"Generally, the basic concept is evaporating the water (which leaves the salt behind) and re-condensing it into purified water. The big drawback is that this takes a lot of energy, so it usually makes it more expensive than finding existing sources of freshwater.",
"Yes it is possible. The inherent property that makes it difficult is salt. \n\nThere are two basic ways to convert it. \n\n1) Distill the water by boiling it and catching the steam. This takes a massive amount of energy and cannot really be done at a high enough volume to supply a community with water. \n\n2) Filter water. The filter plants are complex and hard to build so they are cost prohibitive, take years to build, and they do take a fair bit of energy to run, but several plants can provide water for a town or even a small city. Those however are not likely to be able to afford to pay for its construction or operation and the technology is not sufficient to provide for large cities yet. \n\nThe US, Australia, and a few other countries are putting significant effort in developing better technology that is cheaper and can filter higher volumes but that tech is years or decades out. "
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lnyj5 | why do people still vouch for supply-side economics? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/lnyj5/eli5_why_do_people_still_vouch_for_supplyside/ | {
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"This is an answer I gave this in r/asksocialscience about a month ago _URL_0_",
"This is an answer I gave this in r/asksocialscience about a month ago _URL_0_"
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brb4t7 | how do all these different fruit and plant seeds form? | Where did the first apple seed or orange seed come from? Googling it doesn't come up with a straightforward answer. I'm assuming that just like the What came first he chicken or egg debate, the seed came first however, where did that first seed originate from? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/brb4t7/eli5_how_do_all_these_different_fruit_and_plant/ | {
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"There wasn't an identifiable first apple or orange seed. They would have evolved from some preceding plant species slowly over time. So over thousands of generations the preceding plant becomes more and more like an apple or orange tree until eventually it matches what we would recognize as an apple or orange tree but there wasn't a single point where you could say one generation wasn't an apple or orange tree and the next was. Think of it like a person aging. Any given day they won't look any different than the day before but look at two pictures taken 20 years apart and you will see how they aged."
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erfec8 | how is that alcohol 70% is better than alcohol 90% as disinfectant ? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/erfec8/eli5_how_is_that_alcohol_70_is_better_than/ | {
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"70% alcohol has 30% water, and that water is necessary for the alcohol to interact at all with the cells it’s killing.\n\nIt’s like cooking pancakes. You know how when your pan is really hot and you put in pancake batter, it cooks the outside really fast? And then you can flip it, but it does the same thing to the other side and the middle doesn’t cook very well? 90% alcohol is like that. It doesn’t penetrate well into cells or clumps of microbes because it just fries everything it touches on the outside. The 70% alcohol is like cooking on medium heat with a moderately hot pan. It contacts the outside, too, but the water helps it penetrate to cook the inside (denature proteins deeper) as well. \n\nFrom _URL_2_\n\n > The presence of water is a crucial factor in destroying or inhibiting the growth of pathogenic microorganisms with isopropyl alcohol. Water acts as a catalyst and plays a key role in denaturing the proteins of vegetative cell membranes. 70% IPA solutions penetrate the cell wall more completely which permeates the entire cell, coagulates all proteins, and therefore the microorganism dies. Extra water content slows evaporation, therefore increasing surface contact time and enhancing effectiveness. Isopropyl alcohol concentrations over 91% coagulate proteins instantly. Consequently, a protective layer is created which protects other proteins from further coagulation.\n\n > Solutions > 91% IPA may kill some bacteria, but require longer contact times for disinfection, and enable spores to lie in a dormant state without being killed. A 50% isopropyl alcohol solution kills Staphylococcus Aureus in less than 10 seconds (pg. 238), yet a 90% solution with a contact time of over two hours is ineffective.\n\nEdit: Because there’s been some confusion, I’d like to add two points. First, higher concentrations of alcohol solutions (specifically isopropyl) may still be superior as solvents, for use on things like electronics for cleaning, because water is generally bad for electronics. Second, what we’re talking about above you should think of as referring only to ethanol and isopropyl alcohol (which is not safe to consume). There are other alcohols but we’re just sticking to the ones commonly used.\n\nEdit 2: Some people have questioned the source, which is good and part of science. The source offered a decent write-up of what numerous PhD mentors have taught me, and it’s consistent with the science. At the risk of making this too long, here’s what the CDC has to say, from _URL_0_ \n\nAdding water enhances effectiveness of isopropyl and ethyl alcohols: \n\n > The most feasible explanation for the antimicrobial action of alcohol is denaturation of proteins. This mechanism is supported by the observation that absolute ethyl alcohol, a dehydrating agent, is less bactericidal than mixtures of alcohol and water because proteins are denatured more quickly in the presence of water \n\nIsopropanol and ethanol effective bactericides\n\n > The bactericidal activity of various concentrations of ethyl alcohol (ethanol) was examined against a variety of microorganisms in exposure periods ranging from 10 seconds to 1 hour 483. Pseudomonas aeruginosa was killed in 10 seconds by all concentrations of ethanol from 30% to 100% (v/v), and Serratia marcescens, E, coli and Salmonella typhosa were killed in 10 seconds by all concentrations of ethanol from 40% to 100%. The gram-positive organisms Staphylococcus aureus and Streptococcus pyogenes were slightly more resistant, being killed in 10 seconds by ethyl alcohol concentrations of 60%–95%. Isopropyl alcohol (isopropanol) was slightly more bactericidal than ethyl alcohol for E. coli and S. aureus 489.\n\nKills viruses at these concentrations \n > Ethyl alcohol, at concentrations of 60%–80%, is a potent virucidal agent inactivating all of the lipophilic viruses (e.g., herpes, vaccinia, and influenza virus) and many hydrophilic viruses (e.g., adenovirus, enterovirus, rhinovirus, and rotaviruses but not hepatitis A virus (HAV) 58 or poliovirus) 49. \n\nIsopropanol similar to chlorhexidine\n_URL_1_",
"When you put high concentrations of alcohol on a microbe, it immediately goes into defense mode. For some bacteria this means turning into spores. Then they wait until the offending agent is gone, and re-emerge from their spores. However, the lower concentrations aren’t recognized as quickly by the bacteria, giving it more time to kill the bacteria before it had the opportunity to raise its defenses.",
"As a pharmaceutical production technician,I use 70% Isopropyl alcohol daily. The 30% sterilized water allows it time to spread the alcohol over the surface without evaporating too fast. I believe it takes about 15 seconds of contact time for it to disinfect, but at 90% it would only last 5 seconds so not enough time to fully kill even half the bacteria/spores. \nPlus 70% IPA smells good as hell.",
"Kind of a follow up question. Which one should you use for evaporating water out of your ears?\n\nWhen I was a kid we would use 90% if we had stubborn water that we couldn't shake out but if you got to western with the alcohol it would hurt.",
"There are many responses already about 70% being a better disinfectant, but it's important to keep in mind that this is about being a disinfectant only. For instance, for cleaning residue off like if you want to prep a surface for glue application or any coating where you want a clean surface, 99% IPA may be better because it quickly evaporates. There's more more chance of dust and residue from slower evaporating products like 70% IPA, as well as water reacting with stuff (e.g. electronics), which is why I stick to using 90% or 99% IPA in those cases.",
"I didn't know it was better as a disinfectant. It's definitely not better as a detergent. Mixing salt and alcohol makes the most effective cleaning solution I am aware of, and 90% is absolutely better than 70% for that.\n\nInteresting.",
"To add to OP, why does alcohol this strong kill microbes yet humans can literally drink 70% ethanol and be fine? Why can we use it to clean our pores and oily skin without much harm but it seemingly instantly kills microbes?",
"It has to do with evaporation but to be clear alcohol isn't a very good disinfectant in the first place. It's more of a germicide.\n\nYou need a large contact time, if it evaporates you're not soaking. Soaking tools in it works well. In soaking you find the strongest stuff you can find (we use denatured alcohol so 100%) With surfaces it's almost always recommended to use bleach as a disinfectant, (which can still have a soak time of 10-15 min) and alcohol as the noncorrosive, sterile cleaner to wipe up the bleach residue.\n\nO and for most phenolic disinfectants like lysol, they need to dry on the surface. If you don't let them dry you're reducing their effectiveness. \n\nMy whole family is in this world. I work in medical device manufacturing where everything has to be kept sterile (we make alcohol swabs and we have to sterilize the alcohol tanks), my sister is the environmental and health manager for a hospital (she is directly responsible for any hospital born pathogens), my father managers the water treatment and supply for our town. \n\nAlso people at all your major colleges say the same thing. \n\n_URL_0_",
"I for one use it for athletes foot and jock itch.\nIt’s the only thing that really works.\nThis is all good info I didn’t know before.",
"The alcohol works by denaturing proteins and disrupting membranes. In order to do a good job of this it needs enough contact time to propagate along transmembrane proteins through to the other side, before it evaporates.\n\nFor proteins, it is disrupting the hydration shell of water and changing the shape of the protein, often making it clump together.\n\nFor membranes, it is disrupting a phospholipid bilayer so that the cell can't keep its insides inside or its outsides outside.\n\nBoth of these processes require a bit of time, which the water content of 70% isopropanol provides.\n\nEdit: I will add that laboratory testing confirms that 70% isopropanol is in fact better at killing bacteria than 90% isopropanol.",
"I've heard that if you take that 70% alcohol disinfectant and dilute it with 1 part 70% alchohol and 9 parts of water, then take one part of the resulting mixture and dilute it in another 9 parts of water and repeat this process a lot of times eventually you'll end up with a disinfectant that is so strong it will kill you on contact.",
"So should I clean my bong with 70% or 90%?",
"One of these things I learned on reddit a while ago.\n\nPS, Tip: Because I can only get 96% alcohol here:\n\n182ml alcohol (96%) + 68ml distilled (!) Water = 70% Alcohol.\n\nSo I am always mixing a batch of \"good\" alcohol. But the 96% I use like it is for cleaning stuff, electronics etc.",
"The water kills the cell barriers, and the water getting in is what kills the cells. +90% also evaporates too fast, which means the alcohol has less time to work.\n\n70% for disinfecting, 90% for cleaning PC parts (because of the lack of water content and how fast it evaporates).",
"70% alcohol “tricks” bacteria/microorganisms into thinking that it’s water, so the bacteria will open up its spores to take it in, which ends up killing it.",
"Similar-ish thing is observed in case of salt as well. Till 4% conc, salt actually helps bacteria to grow. Further increasing conc will kill them.\n(For most of the bacteria, not all of them)"
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"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0195670183900257",
"https://blog.gotopac.com/2017/05/15/why-is-70-isopropyl-alcohol-ipa-a-better-disinfectant-than-99-isopropanol-and-what-is-ipa-used-for/"
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5hc3og | please explain how the current wage gap in america works. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5hc3og/eli5_please_explain_how_the_current_wage_gap_in/ | {
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"There is no wage gap. At least not in how you likely think. \n\nThe 75% number often thrown around for women is based on all jobs for women averaged and compared to all jobs for men averaged. That gives you false information. Men hold a larger percentage of the top paying jobs. This is often because they work more overtime, take fewer sick days, and do not take time off to have/raise children often. This means that they will get promotions more often because they have done more work. It is also due to the fact that women tend to gravitate toward lower paying jobs such as Nurse, teacher, and lots of jobs in the humanities. "
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25963o | types of government and their pros/cons | What are the different kinds of governments like totalitarianism, communism, socialism, capitalism, fascism, Nazism, and others? What are their advantages and disadvantages? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/25963o/eli5types_of_government_and_their_proscons/ | {
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"This is a rough overview of different systems, it's kinda caricatural, to help get a glimpse of what a government is about. Of course it has to be developed afterwards.\n\nCommunism : In the essence, everyone is equal and gets an equal fraction of what is produced by the workforce.\n\nSocialism : Could not explain, the definition seems different between anglo-saxon countries and others.\nIn Europe, it means that the people is what's most important to the state, and laws are written to protect the people.\n\nCapitalism : Money is a way to get a better life and to rise in the social ladder.\n\nFascism : The state is strong, the state is one man, this one man dictates laws. Fascism is an old Italian political movement, though, a form of dictatorship, as is the Nazism.\n\nNazism : a form of dictatorship, besides the lust for revenge (Triple Entente nations, mostly), I don't know the difference. Sure, there's the Holocaust, but many other dictatorships led genocides and *ethnic cleansings*.\n\nFrom what I know, totalitarism and dictatorship aren't that different. They both rely on one man (one political party) holding all power in the state, totalitarism just goes beyond and sets an ideology of devotion to this political party, a brainwashing process (that goes from propaganda to publicly executing the *opponents of the regime*). \n\nThere's much more systems and sub-systems to discuss, oligarchy, technocracy, antique democracy, and so on... \n\nNow feel free to add anything or correct me if I'm wrong. \n\nEDIT : Added Totalitarism.",
"Well first off, it should be noted that capitalism, communism, and socialism generally refer to how the country's economy works, rather than how the government works. \n\nCommunism = Government owns all businesses and provides all services to its people (healthcare, education, welfare, etc.). Advantages are that most people get what they need, and it's all easy to get thanks to the government providing it. Disadvantages are that there are no private companies, no competition in the marketplace.\n\nSocialism = Government owns most large companies, provides all services for its people, but the people also have many economic freedoms and choices. Advantages are that people still have freedom to make economic choices as opposed to communism, generally lower poverty rates, very low income gap between high and low wage workers. Disadvantages are slower economic growth, less entrepreneurial opportunities. \n\nCapitalism = free market, privately owned companies, people own their own businesses, but people must also buy their own services since they are generally not provided by the government. There is always competition in the marketplace, but often companies just strive for profit.\n\nTotalitarianism = Country rules by one political party, and what they say goes. Everyone must follow their orders. Can get things done efficiently, but often with only one party in power, bad decisions get made and they go power-crazy/corrupt.\n\nFascism = A type of totalitarianism in which the government is controlled by an extreme right-wing party (prime example being the Nazi party in WWII Germany)\n\nNazism = basically fascism which resembles WWII Nazi party actions and views.\n\nDemocracy = government by the people for the people. The people get to elect their public officials and who gets to be in power and lead their country. Advantages are that everyone's voice gets heard. Disadvantage is that they tend to be extremely inefficient due to the fact that everyone gets a voice.\n\nTheocracy = Government where rulers rule on behalf of a religion and religious values. Basically, the religion of that country runs the government and dictates the government's actions.\n\nAnarchy = no government.\n\nHope this helped!",
"To start, of the 6 examples you gave, three aren't types of government, two are basically the same thing, and one is more of a class of government. But I shall press on.\n\n**Types of government**\n\n* Anarchy [No government. Marxist communism falls here] Pros: The pros are mostly ideological, individualism taken to it's extreme. \nCons- Nothing preventing any crime, impossible to organize more than 20 people toward a common goal\n\n* Direct Democracy [Each citizen votes directly on every issue] - Pros: Everyone gets a voice in the government, which keeps people happy. No leaders to screw over the common man for their own gain. \nCons: Wildly impractical on any relevant scale; people are stupid and might vote for stupid things, 51% of the population can vote to screw over the other 49% however they like.\n\n* Republicanism [Citizens vote for representatives who then in turn vote on issues] - Pros: More conservative, unlikely to take any radical action, Career politicians can make nuances decisions, people can still hold their representatives accountable. \nCons: Career politicians get less accountable the longer they're in office, often unresponsive to change, politics becomes massively convoluted thus requiring career politicians\n\n* Aristocracy/Oligarchy [Small group of people in charge of everything] - Pros: Politicians (Aristocrats) have deep personal interest in the land they rule over, politicians careers not in jeopardy over a single gaffe, politicians can focus on doing what they believe is best rather than what the people want, Politicians can be trained from birth for their job. \nCons: Unavoidable and unalterable class system, Aristocrats can do whatever they want to the lower classes, aristocrats generally don't care about the workers, inevitable and purposeful wealth inequality\n\n* Dictatorship [One person in charge of everything] - Dictator deep personal interest in the land they rule over, dictator can focus on doing what they believe is best rather than what the people want, Dictator can be trained from birth for their job. \nCons: Unavoidable and unalterable class system, Dictator can do whatever he/she wants, dictators generally don't care about the workers, inevitable and purposeful wealth inequality, Generally unhappy people\n\n* Fascism [Very poorly defined. Generally means industries/corporations control government. Nazism was a form of fascism] - Pros: Strong economies \nCons: Stratified class system, usually nationalistic, usually militaristic, usually a police state, usually a dictator\n\n\n",
"This question assumes that all socialist systems, or all fascist systems, etc. are the same, this is simply not that case.\n\nSocialism/communism (which are ALMOST the same thing theoretically) in Western Europe, for example worked very well and led to increased living standards, better societies and didnt lead to blood thirsty dictators.\n\nSocialism in places like Russia and China on the other hand led to ruthless dictatorships which look more like fascist states than they do like idealized socialism.\n\nThis really goes for all the ideologies you mentioned, except Nazism, Nazism is always bad. Arguably China has a fascist system now (although you could also call it communist, which proves how useless these terms are) and they are doing pretty well, while other fascist countries are mired in poverty.\n\nIn places like America, Democracy is seen as the obvious best choice for running a society, but in Egypt and other places democracy is seen as an invitation to partisan bloodletting and chaos.\n\nInstead of looking at broad ideologies you should look at places/situations where the ideologies were tried out. All of these systems look good on paper, the cons dont come out until we try them in real life."
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8w51o4 | how can someone physically consume 74 hot dogs and what is the "aftermath" like? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8w51o4/eli5_how_can_someone_physically_consume_74_hot/ | {
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"For the consumption, practice. They need to eat progressively larger amounts of food or liquids per a period of time so their stomach can (somewhat) comfortably stretch to hold it all and they can get used to eating/drinking way past their body’s ‘I feel full’ point. I don’t know about the rest, it isn’t talked about much.\n\n\nEdit: Liquids too.",
"It’s a process of gradually eating more and more food to help expand your stomach. Also being able to chew and break up the food is important as well. Smaller pieces of food will pack inside a stomach a lot more efficiently. Having strong monster jaws helps a lot. \n\nAll competitive eaters purge after these competitions. That’s the aftermath, lots of puke. \n\nEdit: most competitions don’t let you puke or make you hold it in for a certain amount of time. During training they will puke a lot. ",
"There was an episode of some TV show, I think it was MTV's True Life that followed competitive eaters preparing for the Nathan's hot dog competition in New York. The reigning champ was some tiny Japanese guy. He basically just worked out all day, and when he wasn't working out he was stretching his stomache by eating pounds of food. Obviously he worked up to that point, but that's the general idea.\n\nEat a ton of food every day and exercise enough to maintain your health.",
"In a way it's like a lot of other sports at a professional level. It takes an insane amount of time, commitment, and practice to be able to eat that much in ten minutes. It's not like you just get there. Chestnut had to gradually work his way up to being able to eat that many hot dogs in ten minutes.\n\nAKA Mr. Chestnut probably writes Oscar Meyer a lot of checks ",
"You can be genetically suited to eating more. It's dependent on how low your stomach is allowing it to expand more. There are records of professional eater's stating that they do not throw up. They train to eat more each time to increase their capacity. If they throw up, that attempt is a fail. The body didn't \"improve\".",
"Competitive eaters (at least, the successful ones) have expanded their stomachs over time, so they can fit way more inside. Instead of the stomach being a pouch, for them it’s more like a bag. There’s space in your abdomen, so that’s what it’s expanding into and using.",
"Mates a competitive eater. He trains regularly for it by eating lots of tough, filling food so that he can fit more in and chew easier. There’s a whole lot of strategy involved as well with how you eat the meal and what you eat first. Afterwards he usually just doesn’t eat for a day then is fine.",
"Furious Pete, a pretty well known Canadian competitive eater and one of the best iirc, said in one of his videos that most of the food he forces down his throat doesn't even get chewed up and digested properly, so his poop comes out with half digested food. I guess that's the aftermath. ",
"ELI5: Why would someone spend time learning how to eat 74 hot dogs? ",
"There are far worse things than \"just\" eating 74 hot dogs. Take this guy for example:\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)",
"If I eat one hot dog, I get diarrhea, so my guess would be that you would get 74 diarrheas.",
"Is this 8 seconds per hotdog for 10 minutes or is my math off?",
"I actually know a lot about this! \n\nTraining involves eating a high volume of low calorie foods and letting it pass naturally. A common thing would be eating an entire head of cabbage and drinking a gallon of water in an hour. This is a large volume that doesn’t put much into the body in terms of calories, so they can do it fairly often and maintain their health.\n\nOne reason that everyone up there was so skinny is because of the “fat belt” phenomenon. This is where the larger you are, the more your fat belt restricts the expansion of your stomach. Many of the gurgitators (the unofficial name of professional eaters) are pretty athletic people and go to the gym often.\n\nAs far as the aftermath, it’s somewhat of a pride point to not throw the food back up. It doesn’t disqualify you to do so after the time frame, but most of the top eaters pass it all naturally. \n\nIf you have continued interest in the topic, read “Eat This Book” published about 12 years ago. It talks about many of the famous eaters, how the circuit got started, and the other glorious adventures of professional eaters.",
"Those guys eat tons of lettuce and drink tons of water to expand their stomachs. They also dip bread in water to make it go down easier.",
"My husband put away a 12 pack of dogs in one day ONCE. Thank goodness, only once. Granted, he is not a competitive eater, but the aftermath was FOUL & SOCIALLY UNACCEPTABLE. Oh boy, it was bad. So bad. For about two or 3 days. ",
"I don't have an answer but at my job we had a contest of our own. Same rules, buns, dogs, 10 mins. Let me tell you, it isn't fun, but I won.\n\n\n\nWith 7....",
"Professional eating is just that, professional. It's a real sport that requires real training, that being gradual growing and stretching of the stomach, usually through drinking copious amounts of water, (like gallons a day), accompanied by a healthy diet and exercise regimen. As for the aftermath I've heard about stomach aches but unless they *really* Puch themselves that's about the and of it.",
"I take it this post was made with the thought of the Nathan hotdog eating competition today on tv. Probably explains why all Nathan's aside from the jumbo were sold out at my HEB. Won't lie though.. Bought the Jumbo's and they taste good but I could use a nap now. \n\nAnyone who watched it...did you hear the intro to the 70 year old man about coffee and dying? Lol",
"I’ve gone drinking with them after the big hot dog eating contest and Krystal burger contests a few years back. After the Nathan’s contest they go to a bar on Coney Island and drink... then go to another bar later that night and drink a whole lot more. ",
"Wow! A reddit thread that I can sorta relate too. I have witness and partaken In eating 16 of the 74 Hot dogs my friend bought at a cantine in Quebec, needless to say he got up to 35 before throwing up and then gave the rest to his dog which then puked after eating the rest",
"One time I let my dog eat 15 hot dogs in one sitting. Then he took a nap. That night he wet the bed. The next day his poop was normal. I was mostly boggled that his poop was normal.",
"They should have a competitive corn eating contest. There's some aftermath for ya, visualize that!",
"_URL_0_\n\nWatch this. It’s about mukbangs or people who eat a lot of food in front of the camera \nThis girl is kinoshita Yuka and shows you how her stomach expands to fit all the food ",
"ESPN has an interesting [article](_URL_0_) that highlights how Chestnut prepares for his competitions.",
"Joey chestnut fasts for 36 hours before this event. Then chugs a shit ton of water to stretch his stomach. It’s insane to eat 73 hotdogs in 10 mins but I guess there is always a strategy when your the best in the world at anything",
"I've always been curious how is competitors can eat 69 hot dogs in a row or 80 tacos and not gain any weight but I had a cheeseburger on Wednesday in a gain 5 pounds by Thursday."
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399fc7 | why does ac´s have hot and cold mode, if it lets you select the temperature? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/399fc7/eli5why_does_acs_have_hot_and_cold_mode_if_it/ | {
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"When you select a temperature, you're not setting what temperature the air coming out of the AC is. The AC can only produce two temperatures of air: warm and cold.\n\nThe temperature setting is called a \"setpoint\". It's the temperature than the thermostat needs to move past before the AC turns on, and whether the AC turns on when moving above or below the temperature is determined by whether you select \"heat\" or \"cool\".\n\nFor example, you set the AC to 70 degrees Fahrenheit, and set it to cool. If the temperature of the air near the thermostat raises above 70 degrees, the AC will start blowing cold air until the temperature falls back below 70 degrees, and then it will shut off.\n\nIf you set the AC to 70 degrees Fahrenheit, and set it to *heat*, the AC will turn on if the temperature in the house falls *below* 70 degrees, and will blow warm air until the temperature rises back up to 70."
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70lz4y | why do manufacturers have english and metric nuts and bolts in the same system? isn't is cheaper to be consistent? | I noticed a lot of times when I'm working on a project that I'll have bolts that are 10mm or 15mm, then other bolts that are 5/8 or 1/2 inch. Sometimes it makes sense, e.g. my Toyota and Acura cars seemed to always have Metric parts and my bicycles (Huffy, Roadmaster) always seemed to have english.
Lately, though, it seems that it doesn't matter what brand something is, I can never predict whether the bolt will be english or metric. I was working on an Oldsmobile and it had a 1/2 inch bolt on the front of a bracket and 2x 15mm bolts on the back.
Is there a reason for this? It seems arbitrarily difficult and time consuming to swap out sockets all the time. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/70lz4y/eli5_why_do_manufacturers_have_english_and_metric/ | {
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"This happens when an American company uses European suppliers or even is jointly owned along with a European sister company and they share parts.\n\n",
"The US is still on its own measurements system despite (almost) every other country on Earth switching to metric decades ago. \n\nThis causes problems and confusion any time there is an insistence on using US measurements. "
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5oz66q | why do presidents wait until the very last week of their presidency to pardon convicted inmates, rather than doing it earlier on? | For example, Obama's comment regarding the 330 inmates he just pardoned was that he was trying to correct systematic injustice. So why did he wait 8 years to do it? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5oz66q/eli5_why_do_presidents_wait_until_the_very_last/ | {
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"Pardons are the most politically controversial thing a president can do. He's probably doing them for the right reason, but it would've made his re-election/presidency far more complicated if he'd done the pardons earlier.\n\nAlso, tradition.",
"There are two reasons.\n\nOne it's a bit of a tradition to grant some clemency as part of the final acts.\n\nSecondly an out going president is basically immune from political blow back so it's an opportune moment.\n\nFor one it will get mostly ignored what with the big news of having a new president, and even if people do notice you can't exactly punish the prez for it since they are entering retirement and don't need to win a popularity contest anymore.",
"Pardons tend to be somewhat to very unpopular with at least one of the President's constituents (usually at least the victim/their relatives but sometimes a much larger group). That means each pardon will make it incrementally harder to accomplish anything that requires congressional support or approval (some of the upset people will lobby congress to oppose the President's agenda). So most presidents wait until they have no time left for other Presidential goals to begin the pardon/clemency process. "
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8138rh | why do blood drives collect all types of blood, instead of prioritizing o- and o+ donors? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8138rh/eli5_why_do_blood_drives_collect_all_types_of/ | {
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"If there were an unlimited supply, it would make sense to prioritize the donors whose blood is the most compatible. But that's not the case; donations generally keep pace with the demand for blood but in the United States, there's not a large surplus. So it's more practical to collect and use blood of the same type when possible, and to save the most compatible blood for when no other match is available. Why turn away a willing and eligible blood donor?",
"There isn't a massive supply of O donors, blood banks already have shortages. In an ideal world, they'd have an unlimited supply of type O blood from donors. So having a decent supply of the other types lets them save the O types for situations where they are unable to find sufficient A, B or AB. ",
"Not all blood goes into random accident victims. Those random victims are the ones you have to give O- blood to.\n\nIf you're going into a surgery why would you waste O- blood when you can just use another matching blood type? Even O+ blood (The most common type) doesn't go into everyone. So you'd much rather use those rarer blood types if you have them on hand.",
"There are more blood groups than ABO and the Rh groups as well. Some patients who receive transfusion to stay alive (transfusion dependant) will constantly be exposed to some of the smaller blood groups (eg K, M, S, Fya/b, Jka/b, Kpa) that they don't have.\n\nSometimes our bodies will recognise these as foreign and launch a full immune response against them, and they can't have that blood anymore. Anyone from a stab victim, pregnant lady, cancer patient can have this response.\n\nSo take an A Pos patient. They can have A Pos, A Neg, O Pos and O Neg blood. It is a great blood group to have. They have a 2 unit transfusion at some point in their life and are exposed to say the Kell (K) blood group antigen which they don't have. They develop an immune response to it.\n\nThey now can't have K+ blood..... and the second unit they got also has Fya antigen which they don't have - their immune system responds to that as well. They can't have that anymore either. \n\n3% of the population has K+ blood. Their available pool shrinks. \n87.4% of people are Fya+. Their available pool shrinks.\n\nSo now you have someone who requires a blood bag that is K-,Fya- in order to not hurt/kill them. Their ABO blood group already restricts the blood they can have (they can't have B or AB blood) and now these antibodies are there too.\n\nRed Cross (or whoever does it where you are) have no idea what they are getting every time they do a blood run (or even a new donor). Every person's donation is precious because it COULD be the only unit in the bank that is negative to seven different antigens that some poor chemo patient has an immune response to and they need that specific unit of blood to say alive. \n\nBlood banking can be a complex logic puzzle and you don't always have the pieces available on hand... banks need all the donations they can get which is why they don't block based on ABO group."
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Subsets and Splits