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2wo1n4 | how does the court decide who gets to pay child support? | How does child support work? I've read that the majority of people that pays child support are the fathers, why is that? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2wo1n4/eli5_how_does_the_court_decide_who_gets_to_pay/ | {
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"The person who does not have custody of the child has to pay child support to the person that does. Usually the amount is based on how much they make.",
"In my case, and this was pretty typical for Minnesota anyway there is a formula that judges use for a guideline. Judges can of course deviate from it at their discretion. \n\nYou simply take the income of one parent times a standard percentage of your income that the state has decided should reasonably be allocated to childcare, times the percentage of time the children are in the custody of the other parent. Do the same calculation both ways in the case of shared physical custody, and whoever comes up owing more pays the difference to the other one. \n\nExample: Lets say the kids are with me 40% and with her 60%. I make $50,000 she makes $35,000. And the childcare percent of income is 25% (I have no idea what it actually is now but we'll go with it for simplicity) My obligation to her is $50,000 * .25 * .6 = $7500. Her obligation to me is $35,000 * .25 *.4 = $3500. \n\nI owe her $7500 - $3500 = $4000 child support. Divided by 12 monthly payments would be $333.33 per month.\n\nLots of other considerations are made too, like who's paying for health insurance. But that's basically how it's done."
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lekau | multiplication | Title says it all. I've always been terrible at multiplication, even though I've got a firm grasp on other basic math functions. How do you do guys do it? I've seen a method for, lets say, 89(56) in long format that has someone multiplying like, 6 by 8 and 5 by 9 or something like that, but I've never understood it. Halp? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/lekau/eli5_multiplication/ | {
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"Like, what do you even want to know? What is multiplication?\n\n[Maybe this?](_URL_0_)",
"Okay, it's simple enough. Long-form digit-by-digit arithmetic splits numbers into columns, so that the number 123 is treated as the sum of three quantities: \n\n 123 = 100 + 20 + 3\n\nWith that in mind, consider your multiplication:\n\n 89 * 56 = (80 + 9) * ( 50 + 6)\n\nNow, if you've ever done any algebra, you'll recognize that pattern:\n\n (a + b) * \n (c + d) \n ----------------- \n db + da + cb + ca\n\nIn other words, the sum of each of the multiplied pairs.\n\nSo, working it through, we get: \n\n (80 + 9)\n (50 + 6)\n -----------------\n (6 * 9) + (6 * 80) + (50 * 9) + (50 * 80) ==\n\n 54 +\n 480 +\n 450 +\n 4000\n -----------------\n 4984\nNow because we arrange our numbers neatly in columns, we can reduce that to (positionified) single-digit multiplications, and treat trailing whitespace as zeroes. \n\n 89 *\n 56\n -----------------\n 54\n 48\n 45\n 40\n -----------------\n 4984\nNow all you ever need to know is your times tables for single digit numbers, and you can proceed step-by-step for any numbers, of any size. ",
"Like, what do you even want to know? What is multiplication?\n\n[Maybe this?](_URL_0_)",
"Okay, it's simple enough. Long-form digit-by-digit arithmetic splits numbers into columns, so that the number 123 is treated as the sum of three quantities: \n\n 123 = 100 + 20 + 3\n\nWith that in mind, consider your multiplication:\n\n 89 * 56 = (80 + 9) * ( 50 + 6)\n\nNow, if you've ever done any algebra, you'll recognize that pattern:\n\n (a + b) * \n (c + d) \n ----------------- \n db + da + cb + ca\n\nIn other words, the sum of each of the multiplied pairs.\n\nSo, working it through, we get: \n\n (80 + 9)\n (50 + 6)\n -----------------\n (6 * 9) + (6 * 80) + (50 * 9) + (50 * 80) ==\n\n 54 +\n 480 +\n 450 +\n 4000\n -----------------\n 4984\nNow because we arrange our numbers neatly in columns, we can reduce that to (positionified) single-digit multiplications, and treat trailing whitespace as zeroes. \n\n 89 *\n 56\n -----------------\n 54\n 48\n 45\n 40\n -----------------\n 4984\nNow all you ever need to know is your times tables for single digit numbers, and you can proceed step-by-step for any numbers, of any size. "
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901hf1 | what is a positron and how come it's positively charged but does not weigh like a proton and is more like an electron? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/901hf1/eli5_what_is_a_positron_and_how_come_its/ | {
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"A positron (also called an anti-electron) is the antimatter version of the electron. So its exactly the same as an electron witb opposite charge.\nThe amount of charge something has is nothing to do with how big it is. \n\nThe antimatter equivalent of the proton is the anti-proton.\n",
"Why does the anti-electron get a nice name like \"positron\" but the anti-proton is just stuck with \"anti-proton\" instead of something nicer like negatron."
]
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5yffss | why is this in the constitution and what is a fair justification for it? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5yffss/eli5_why_is_this_in_the_constitution_and_what_is/ | {
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"They have to be paid because if they weren't, only rich people could hold the positions. The same way the president cannot refuse his salary. \n\nSenators and congressmen cannot be arrested at/on the way to sessions to prevent authorities from trying to disrupt votes. If someone wanted a certain vote to go a different way, they could put out a BS arrest warrant for a senator. "
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c02va3 | what is the difference between sound and heat? | Sound is the vibration of particles; heat is the vibration of particles. So why can we not hear hot things or feel the temperature of sounds? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c02va3/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_sound_and_heat/ | {
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"Sound is a wave. It means it's a perturbation that propagates over time and space without (in general) a macroscopical displacement of particles. If I talk to you, you'll ear me but none of the molecules I had in my lungs have made their way into your ear. A wave also has non-random properties : direction, etc.\n\nIn a hot gaz, particles move and their speed is linked to their temperatures. But, in average, at every moment (e.g. the average speed of all the particles at time t) and for every particles (that is, the average speed for ONE particle between time t and a bit later), this speed (accounting direction) is zero.\n\nSo they are two very different concepts.This : [_URL_2_](_URL_2_)\n\nis a wave. You see that \"something\" moves from the left to the right (without the particles themselves following it).\n\nThis : [_URL_0_](_URL_1_)\n\nis temperature (particles moving at random).\n\nSo, when a sound wave hits your tympanun, it vibrates, turns the vibration into an electrical signal that is sent to your brain.\n\n\\- > \"Yeah, but the particles moving due to the temperature can also hit the tympanun, so why can't we ear that too ?\". True, they do. But so do the ones on the other side, that ALSO make it vibrates, and they cancel each other (in average)."
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"https://www.physics.byu.edu/research/acoustics/images/gifs/LongitudinalWave.gif"
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1jb00x | how does shaving cream make steam not stick to the mirror? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1jb00x/eli5_how_does_shaving_cream_make_steam_not_stick/ | {
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"The mirror is made of glass. Glass is a relatively good conductor of heat. That means heat gets transferred to it quite well. \n\nIn a hot shower, water vapour meets the mirror, transferring heat to it and goes through a process called condensation, \"steaming\" the mirror. \n\nShaving cream is a terrible conductor of heat compared to glass due to the millions of tiny air bubbles in it (air is an excellent insulator). This minimises the process of transferring heat and thus the process of condensation, preventing the mirror from steaming up. "
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561pda | batteries - generic vs. name brand | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/561pda/eli5_batteries_generic_vs_name_brand/ | {
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"More than likely you got a bad batch of batteries.\n\nMost \"generic\" batteries that I know of are made by one of the big guys (i.e. Duracell or Energizer) and just repackaged and sold at a lower price. Yes the margins will be lower for them but they have a chance to steal sales away from one another.\n\nI used to work at an Ace Hardward and our Ace brand batteries were manufactured by Duracell. Because of this, we had to dedicate space on our shelves to Ace Brand and Duracell and could not have as extensive of a stock of Engergizer or Rayovac brands.\n\nFurther to answer your question. The batteries could have varying ages and will lose charge over time even though they haven't hit their expiration date. That could be another reason you got a bad battery.",
"Check for an expiration date on the Kroger batteries. Sometimes the no-name batteries have been sitting in a warehouse for years before they get put on a shelf and someone buys them.\n\nFrom my experiences buying batteries from Amazon, I've seen the big names usually put an expiration date on the pack, as if to show they stand behind their product, while the lesser brand batteries almost never have an expiration date. They don't want you to know the batteries you're buying are probably already half dead.",
"The baby is also likely getting heavier. I'm curious if the name brands would lat as long now a few months on"
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2783zb | why do they grade some final exams on a curve. how do they figure out the curve? | High school student here, curious as to how this works. Is the curve a set number or is it taken from class average or something? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2783zb/eli5_why_do_they_grade_some_final_exams_on_a/ | {
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"Imagine a test is 100 points. Usually, a 90/100 would be a 90%. If the exam is graded, the curve could be maybe the top score of the class (usually) or some other number. Say its the top score and the best score in the class is 96/100, all the tests are adjusted. A 96 (96%) becomes 96/96 (100%) an 85 (85%) would become 87% etc. It improves everyone's grade."
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3xfcpc | humans land on a new planet, teeming with life. how do we efficiently find out what plants and animals are safe to eat, and what ones are toxic? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3xfcpc/eli5_humans_land_on_a_new_planet_teeming_with/ | {
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"I'm reminded of some science fiction stories by Vonda McIntyre, where the ambassadors from Earth and from the Four Worlds (the aliens who were sponsoring Earth's application into the Galactic Civilization) had their first, tentative, gathering: the hors d'oeuvres were water and cotton candy—of all five species present, those were the only things compatible with everyone's metabolisms.\n\nThe answer really depends on how alien that life is: if it uses silicon and ammonia where we use carbon and water, then there's no hope: everything there is toxic and might even burn us to touch it.\n\nIf it's mostly like Earth life, but there's a little twist like it's version of DNA uses arsenic instead of phosphorus, then that's even more annoying: it might smell and taste delicious but be totally poisonous to us.\n\nThe best scenario is where it's really, really Earth-like. Then we'd do it exactly like PoundNaCl says: it might be surprising but we don't have a fancy tricorder that would scan the alien life and say whether it was good to eat or not: if it's close enough to be remotely digestible, the only way to know whether it has hidden poisonous properties is to do exactly the same thing we do with mysterious Earth berries or whatever: taste a little tiny bit and wait to see if it makes us sick. Repeat with larger and larger amounts until you're satisfied.",
"Let the new crew members wearing the red shirts try it first?",
"I was surprised not to see the basic survivalist tactic, which is old as hell, brought up here. It goes along the lines of if you don't know if a plant is safe to eat, you touch it with your hand and wait a few hours. If there isn't any reaction, touch it to your lips and wait a few hours. Then you put it in your mouth, wait. Then chew, spit out, wait. Eat a tiny amount, wait. You basically test the waters."
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5hbtp1 | why do colleges have weed out classes for different majors? | Why do colleges want to make people drop out of certain majors? (Engineering especially) | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5hbtp1/eli5_why_do_colleges_have_weed_out_classes_for/ | {
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"They aren't officially weed out classes. They are prerequisites. If you can't master algebra you can't move on to calc. If you can't master basic algorithms you can't be a computer scientist. \n\nThink about it like this- if you went to cooking school and couldn't properly fry and egg, why would they waste resources teaching you how to make a much more complex dish?",
"Not everyone gets to be an astronaut when they grow up. If you have trouble adding two numbers together, an engineering degree is probably not the right career choice for you. ",
"There's 2 reasons these classes exist. As a new college student, you have misconceptions about what certain curricula (plural of curriculum) entail. You might expect Engineering to not involve rigorous math training. But you're wrong, and you can't be an engineer if you can't do math and physics. If you can't ensure that your products are safe by testing models and double checking calculations then how could you ever be a real engineer?\n\nSecond, if you're not cut out to get through the 100 and 200 courses how the hell are you going to get past 3 and 400 level classes? Everything builds together in the end. You might not need number theory as an engineer but you'll need physics and circuits and calculus 1-4 and differentials 1 & 2 and more increasingly computer science courses. This is stuff you need for 3 and 400 levels. ",
"In engineering (and many other disciplines), you'd be surprised at how much you can need to know stuff from various areas to do the job well. You'd think that an electrical engineer has no real need of knowing thermodynamics, right? It turns out there are some overlaps between thermodynamics and information theory. \n \nAnd you never know when you'll end up working on something that isn't what you imagined where your career would lead. I'm an EE, but having a good materials science background helped me several times. ",
"I'm going to agree with what the majority of the responses are thus far - they just need to make sure you can cut it at the higher levels. I graduated from my engineering undergrad a few years as a chemical engineer and I am now practising and my experience has taught me that having a very (stress very) good understanding of the basic principles is essential when you're working in the field and need to make quick decisions and don't have time to sit down and do calculations. The 'weed' out courses, like calc 1 and 2 are just the fundamentals of calculus and same goes for thermo and organic chemistry. So if you can't nail down these fundamentals then you won't be a very successful engineer. \n\nThat being said I am a firm believer that everyone in this life is capable of anything they set their mind too. Not to toot my own horn here but when people ask me what I do for a living and I tell them I commission combined cycle power plants all over the world their response is \"oh you must be very smart\" and that's not how I think of myself. All I did in my undergrad and was listen, do all the homework and really focus on the end goal of graduating. You can't be afraid to seek help and utilise all resources that are available to you as a student. If you're determined and hard working I truly believe you can do whatever your heart desires whether that's engineering or becoming a musician, it just takes time and dedication. \n\nI don't know who originally said this but \"he who says he can and he who says he can't are both usually right.\""
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3kad08 | how does little caesars stay competitive when they don't deliver/keep their prices low? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3kad08/eli5_how_does_little_caesars_stay_competitive/ | {
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"Because if I want a pizza and am willing to drive the short distance to get it, I can have pizza in my mouth in less than 10 minutes. That's magic. ",
"They have fast service and cheap pizza. Sure, you could wait 30 minutes for a better, more expensive pizza, but sometimes all you need is a quick, cheap pizza.",
"They can charge much less by not doing delivery. The delivery charge (if there even is one) doesn't cover the amount that they have to pay the driver, so they have to charge more. Being able to deliver also inevitably means that you have to pay the drivers to sit around the shop sometimes waiting for an order.",
"Because they have pizza sitting ready to go all the time so you can just show up and take a pizza to go, and they're really, really cheap.\n\nI think you're underestimating how cheap they are. Around here, they're about half the price of a pizza chain that delivers even before you consider delivery fee and tip."
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jd0og | hydraulic fracturing and the controversy surrounding it | The Eagle Ford shale around my area and there's talk about its impact on the environment and whatnot. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jd0og/eli5_hydraulic_fracturing_and_the_controversy/ | {
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"Hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as \"fracking\", is using high-pressure water to open or widen cracks in rock. The reason you do this is because oil and natural gas are often trapped in the rock, so you crack it open to allow the oil or gas to flow out. It has other purposes, but the most popular use is in getting \"stuck\" oil and gas.\n\nThe problem with it is - what happens to the water? You can't retrieve all of it, and most of it ends up seeping through the rock, picking up all kinds of nasty and toxic chemicals. That same water can seep all the way into a local river or lake, or just sit in the groundwater affecting plant life above it. In addition, most fracking fluids are only 90% water, with the other 10% being an exotic blend of chemicals. Some of these are alleged to cause cancer.\n\nThe EPA has been onboard with the idea, and reported to Congress that fracking had not caused any direct water contamination. At the same time, though, a 2010 report showed high levels of toxic chemicals in drinking water near fracking sites.",
"Hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as \"fracking\", is using high-pressure water to open or widen cracks in rock. The reason you do this is because oil and natural gas are often trapped in the rock, so you crack it open to allow the oil or gas to flow out. It has other purposes, but the most popular use is in getting \"stuck\" oil and gas.\n\nThe problem with it is - what happens to the water? You can't retrieve all of it, and most of it ends up seeping through the rock, picking up all kinds of nasty and toxic chemicals. That same water can seep all the way into a local river or lake, or just sit in the groundwater affecting plant life above it. In addition, most fracking fluids are only 90% water, with the other 10% being an exotic blend of chemicals. Some of these are alleged to cause cancer.\n\nThe EPA has been onboard with the idea, and reported to Congress that fracking had not caused any direct water contamination. At the same time, though, a 2010 report showed high levels of toxic chemicals in drinking water near fracking sites."
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cme90c | why do some trains make a loud “violin-like” sound when they accelerate and decelerate? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cme90c/eli5_why_do_some_trains_make_a_loud_violinlike/ | {
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"That's an electrically powered train with AC induction motors. These motors can produce huge amounts of torque at low rotating speeds. One side effect is that the high currents they use to do this alternate in a speed that's low enough that humans can fear it. You're hearing the harmonics caused by starting current in the motors vibrating other metal objects near the motors.\n\nAs the train goes faster the currents go down and the rolling noise drowns out the motor whir."
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3d9814 | why is there never stars in the backgrounds of planet photos? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3d9814/eli5_why_is_there_never_stars_in_the_backgrounds/ | {
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"Because stars are really dim. If you had enough exposure to see the stars, the planet would be a washed out white smear. ",
"Photographer here. Because the stars are too dim.\n\nLonger explanation: taking photos of things with very wildly differing levels of illumination is very difficult. You can picture a sensor as a bunch of buckets that catch photons. If you wait too long, the buckets overflow and everything comes out an uniform white. If you wait too little, you don't capture anything and it all comes out black.\n\nWith a very good sensor with a high dynamic range you get a higher ability to capture large variations in light. If your sensor isn't good enough you can take several photos at different exposure times and combine them.\n\nThen the next problem appears: there's no display device that can reproduce such a thing. Human eyes can handle a very high range: you can both see in very dim light and in bright sunlight. A monitor can't reproduce this enormous range. For instance there's no way for a monitor to display the sun on the screen and make it look as blinding as it is in reality.\n\nA hack exist: you take a very large range of values, and squeeze them into a smaller one a monitor can display. This is called HDR, and it often looks very unnatural. But if you did it, you could actually have a photo with both a planet and stars. "
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bdojzl | what is the actual significance of the notre dame cathedral? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bdojzl/eli5_what_is_the_actual_significance_of_the_notre/ | {
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"\" I get that it's a huge loss of culture and history, but I just cannot bring myself to wrap my head around why it's actually so significant. \"\n\n & #x200B;\n\nIt's a huge loss of culture and history. That's why it's actually so significant. Read particulars here:\n\n [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)",
"Cultural, historical, artistic and architectural significance. It’s an icon of Paris, of Europe and of medieval/gothic times and architecture."
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5e0v1a | how do plants generate heat, how to they stop freezing when the droplets of water that are on them are frozen, when they plants are made up, mostly of, water? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5e0v1a/eli5how_do_plants_generate_heat_how_to_they_stop/ | {
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"Plants generally do not generate meaningful amounts of heat. They deal with freezing temperatures by: dying, like orange trees; freezing, but in a way that doesn't cause permanent damage, like most deciduous broad-leaf trees; or pumping themselves full of antifreeze, like most conifers."
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51j72w | if locks are based on the point of the pins, does that mean that my house key can open someone else's house, since there's only a certain number of different combinations? | Basically the title. If my house key is a certain combination of pins, and there's only a certain number of combinations until it repeats, does that mean my key can open someone's house then? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/51j72w/eli5_if_locks_are_based_on_the_point_of_the_pins/ | {
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"Yup. There's usually 5 or 6 pins and they have maybe 6 or 7 possible lengths. So that's 7^6 combinations or 117,649. However, with some jiggling and twisting as you insert the key, that number drops dramatically. It's not too uncommon for you to be able to open a lock with the wrong key. From personal experience, I'd say it's closer to 1:100 if you do a good jiggle-and-twist which is actually closer to lock picking than to say the key actually works.",
"Just some anecdotal \"evidence\" of my own. I moved from a house in London to a flat in a small town, and one of the keys I accidentally had opened the new door. I was quite confused when I realised what set of keys I had used!",
"There have been car keys that only had a few hundred different cuts, Same applies to door locks: lower quality locks have less pins and less positions (and are quite tolerant about these). Worst lock I've seen had five pins and three positions each, leading to 243 (3^5) different cuts. In theory, but they rarely use the same position in adjacent pins, so its more like 3x2^4, i.e. 48 different key cuts.\n\nThe lock I use has 15 pins (yep, it is not the usual shape...), 5 with three positions and 10 with four, and without this \"not the same position in adjacent pins\" limitation, so it has about a quarter billion different cuts (and some additional features).",
"If you buy a house, change the locks. I have worked on hundreds of bank owned houses over the years, and I changed each one to my house key so I always have it with me. ",
"I was staying at a friend's apartment and unbeknownst to me got off on the wrong floor. Went to the third door from the elevator put the key in, jiggled it a bit and walked into the apartment of strangers. Oops. "
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3zcci8 | how do (did some) hunting tribes survive living of an all-meat-diet (like some inuit tribes)? | Reddit, please explain to me how these people survive on just meat. I eat too much steak or game at Christmas and I shit black bricks the whole weekend. Do they die younger? Different digestive evolution? Are vegetables and their nutritional value just a conspiracy? How do these tribes survive by only eating seal, and moose, and idk... etc. etc. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3zcci8/eli5_how_do_did_some_hunting_tribes_survive/ | {
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"They eat a lot of things like organs, fat, and bone marrow that contain more nutrients than the normal cuts of meat you'd find at the grocery store.\n\nIt's entirely possible to meet your nutritional requirements on a totally carnivorous diet if you're willing to eat the \"gross\" parts of animals.",
"Did you ever eat a seal's eyeball? Inuit do. How about a big bowl of blubber?\n\nCarnivorous animals do not just eat a steak, they'll eat pretty much everything including organs, nerves, skin, eyeballs, etc which provides all the essential nutrients."
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4b0irq | why do they usually keep the train tracks when filling in new areas of cement? | I mean couldn't they just remove the track? I thought they do that occasionally to replace functioning ones anyway. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4b0irq/eli5_why_do_they_usually_keep_the_train_tracks/ | {
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"They could. But that would cost additional money in labor to remove and transport it away. "
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5zka75 | why can't an electric car power itself? | Couldn't you create a system that uses the circular motion of the wheels to crank a generator/alternator to create electricity to recharge a battery? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5zka75/eli5why_cant_an_electric_car_power_itself/ | {
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"No, because taking energy away from the wheels as they're turning will make the car slow down. You can never get back the same amount of energy you put in and still have the car move forward. \n\nWhat you can do is charge the battery a bit when you *want* to slow down. Electric cars can do that, but it cannot ever be enough to actually recharge the battery entirely. You just get a little bit of energy back.",
"So technically yes. But the out put of energy will always be less than the input. What you are talking is called perpetual motion and has been the goal of many fields of science since the dawn of the modern age. So over all no it's not possible to power a car with itself.",
"One of the fundamental laws of the universe is that you can never get more energy back than what you put into something. The total amount of the energy in the universe is constant--you can't make energy from nothing!\n\nAnother important factor is that no machine we can make is going to be 100% efficient. This means that some of the energy we put into a system is going to get \"wasted\", meaning that it becomes a form of energy that doesn't do the kind of work we want it to. This is usually heat in a system such as an engine. In electronics, for example, some of the electricity traveling through a wire turns into heat and heats up the wire, meaning you will always lose some energy along the trip.\n\nLet's look at this in terms of an electric car. I don't know much about the details of how an electric car engine works, but you can imagine there are lots of places where the electrical or mechanical energy gets turned into waste heat--think of electric wires heating up, or the friction of a drive shaft on its bearings heating them both up and taking some of the rotational energy away. Therefore, the energy that is put out by turning the wheels is always a little bit less than the energy you \"pull out\" of the battery.\n\nSo, in order to charge the battery, what would you have to do? You'd have to have **extra** energy in the wheels compared to the energy you put into the engine, which is impossible because of the first part up above--you can't make energy out of nothing! You could conceivably hook up a system so that half of the energy going to the wheels goes to recharge the battery, but that's kind of silly, since you would then need to pump out twice as much energy out of the battery to make the wheels spin at the same rate--so it works out to be the same.\n\nWhat about charging with solar panels? Well, now you've added another source of energy--the sun! We're no longer just powering the car off the energy stored in the battery; we're also using the gigantic fusion explosion happening constantly 93 million miles over our heads! Clearly, there's enough energy there. The problem is converting it to electricity fast enough and efficiently enough to power the wheels or recharge the battery in any sort of useful way. I don't know the mathematical details, but somebody on reddit recently did the math and I believe it would take a couple of days to charge the battery of a Tesla with the most efficient solar panels we have if they covered the car. You then have to take into account that solar panels are heavy, and they might make the car less efficient to move in general.",
"This is a perpetual motion machine. They are impossible as they violate the second law of thermodynamics, in that you cannot get out more energy than is put in. No machine is perfect, there will always be losses in the form of heat and motion. If a motor were to drive a generator, the losses come in the form of heat due to electrical resistance and bearing friction, and eddy currents opposing rotation of both the motor and the generator.\n\nSo all a car can do is try to minimize loss by reducing aerodynamic and rolling resistance, recapture inefficiency through regenerative breaking and coasting, and utilize free energy in the form of solar (though right now no production vehicle has solar panels on the sun bearing surfaces because they're not yet that cost effective, you only see this in solar racers, and those \"cars\" are made of balsa wood and weigh 300kg or less).",
"We do something like that, it's called regenerative breaking.\n\nAs you've probably never seen a Prius that doesn't need to be refueled, it should be apparent that such a system is not all that effective at 'powering itself'.\n\nAs others have said, the car spends the energy to move, the energy is lost to friction with the tires, air resistance, and so on. Even if you can capture 100% of the available energy when you brake, most of the energy has already been expended and lost in moving the car. \nWhat you do get is a neat little efficiency boost when you apply the brakes where a portion the energy that you normally lose when applying the brakes (turned in to heat as the brake pads seize the wheels in most cars) is recaptured and stored in the battery that runs the electric motor."
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2pjm4w | how does the taliban avoid widespread retaliatory violence from the communities they victimize? | Reading about the school siege in Pakistan I'm curious as to how the Taliban manages to avoid widespread retaliation from a grassroots level. Presumably each child murdered by those scumbags has a large network of family filled with people driven to despair by the act. Would they not be looking to root out the Taliban or sympathizers wherever they may be?
For all I know this is already the case but it's not something I hear reported on frequently. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2pjm4w/eli5_how_does_the_taliban_avoid_widespread/ | {
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"You mean, why don't the good people in Taliban-controlled villages rise up and throw them out? Because there's a civil war going on. The Taliban are terrorists, sure--but the Pakistani Air Force's gunships are pretty damn terrifying, too. \n\nMany civilians living in Taliban-controlled villages are *terrified* of the Pakistani government, and for good reason. [The current civil war started in 2004 & has killed perhaps 50,000 civilians and driven over 3 million from their homes.](_URL_0_) There have been atrocities on both sides; like any war, the peasants have been particularly hard hit.\n\nIt's easy for us to say that villagers sheltering the Taliban should welcome the Pakistani military as liberators, but... the war has not engendered a spirit of reconciliation and brotherhood in the region. \n\nStill, why do the locals tolerate terrorists? Well, remember how Americans lost our moral clarity when NYC was attacked? Imagine living in a war zone for years... I'm not saying it turns people into bloodthirsty killers, but people have an amazing capacity to look the other way in war zones. \n\nEDIT: Also, who's to say that the good citizens *don't* fight back on occasion? *Every* drone strike is based on some kind of information. Who's to say that a good citizen hasn't occasionally picked up the phone & dropped a dime hoping the local outlaw gang will end up in the proverbial \"bug splat\"? We really have no idea whether this has happened or how often. I mean, I'm sure the idea has occurred to them.\n\nImagine living in a war zone where \"your side\" harbors a fair number of suicidal terrorist death squads, and \"their side\" uses flying robots that circle over your town for hours, then without warning carry out a gruesome assassination and disappear. How long can this situation go on? *10 years* so far... "
]
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49ecl3 | why do humans need vitamin d to survive, but nocturnal animals do not? do they find vitamin d somewhere else? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/49ecl3/eli5why_do_humans_need_vitamin_d_to_survive_but/ | {
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"Even when we are talking about mammals - we still have very different metabolism and some mammals can produce biological stuff that other mammals can't.\n\nTake cats for example: they are incapable of producing taurine while most mammals can."
]
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||
5rzypk | what is ethereum and how is it different/related to btcoin? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5rzypk/eli5_what_is_ethereum_and_how_is_it/ | {
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"It's a wallet. A way to store, send, and receive bitcoin. Many people buy bitcoin from say, Coinbase, send them to Ethereum, tumble them, and use em for the darknet."
]
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||
39r4rr | why is everybody supporting caitlyn jenner's transsexuality but up in arms about rachel dolezal's transethnicity? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/39r4rr/eli5_why_is_everybody_supporting_caitlyn_jenners/ | {
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"There are thousands of cases of transgendered people, doctors agreeing that it's a real condition that requires treatment, scientific studies suggesting that trans people have different brain chemistry, and organized groups working to promote transgendered rights.\n\nVs one woman who is lying about her ethnicity for reasons we don't understand.\n\nWhy should we treat those both equally? ",
"A transgender person is someone who is born one gender, but, mentally and physically the other. It is a scientific, medical condition.\n\nWhat this professor is doing is perpetrating a fraud to gain credibility with her students and colleagues. It isn't the same."
]
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b1z087 | how is dyeing the chicago river safe and how does this process not damage the ecosystem? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b1z087/eli5_how_is_dyeing_the_chicago_river_safe_and_how/ | {
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"Think of the dye they use to turn beer green for St. Patrick’s Day. It’s food grade, safe for consumption. They don’t dye the River using industrial textile dyes that are toxic.",
"A dye or pigment is just something that interacts strongly with light, it doesn't need to be toxic. \n\nEven if something is toxic, as long as the dose is low enough, and the chemical easily breaks down into something non-toxic, it's not going to cause damage. This is why something like cyanide isn't nearly as problematic environmentally as something like lead or mercury. Cyanide is way more poisonous, but it breaks down, where heavy metals do not. \n"
]
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2ectmb | why does my internet upload speed double when i use a vpn? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ectmb/eli5_why_does_my_internet_upload_speed_double/ | {
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"text": [
"Any changes in the speed only happen between the server and your VPN server, so you can't download or upload any faster than your own connection goes to.",
"Because your isp sucks and your government is too stupid to mandate net neutrality. "
]
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||
4cmdf5 | why are taxes in the north generally higher than taxes in the south? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4cmdf5/eli5_why_are_taxes_in_the_north_generally_higher/ | {
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"The North, having a more liberal populous and more Democrat governors, frequently have more government programs which require tax income.",
"That's a good question, and the answer is rather complex. [THIS](_URL_0_) site should help explain a few things. \n\nFor example, the south has a significantly lower average income, a much higher poverty rate, they're also more unhealthy (more overweight, lower life expectancy), have a much lower high school graduation rate, spend much less on education, and on & on. \n\n\ntl;dr: They need more help, and haven't much to pay for it, therefore, they take a lot of federal assistance ($$$), and give back very little ($), meaning they pay less in taxes.",
"The North typically has a more prosperous population with more disposable income, and provides greater services to them. When more of your population is concentrated in cities, it is easier to provide services everyone will use.\n\nAlso, winter. Winter is expensive, snow removal, snow damage, road damage, greater need for social services, etc. You'll see Buffalo spending a lot of money on winter, that they don't have to spend in Memphis.",
"Short answer is industrialization/unions and segregation.\n\nThe north had industrialization, less agriculture. The union movement created a lot of middle class jobs and those new middle class people wanted public services like quality public schools, public transportation, ports, good roads, parks, etc. \n\nThey built up big government infrastructure to support those public services, which were often themselves unionized to keep a lot of jobs paying middle class wages.\n\nThe result is they needed more taxes to support those new services.\n\nIn the South, the culture was stratified, segregation caused a big poorer class. The south did not support public services because most would be geared to the lower classes. With a less educated work force and poorer infrastructure, industry kept away. So there were generations with a smaller than normal middle class.\n\nThen globalization made the northern workforce labor costs totally out of whack. Unionism never took hold in the South and the cost savings were significant. So the tax base in the North and their economies got smaller, but they haven't been able to reduce the costs of government. Hence higher taxes.\n\nThe south's middle class basically created a system of private stuff like Christian schools, pool clubs, private gated communities, and not funding public schooling and a lot of public services that the poor and minorities would benefit from as much. "
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"https://theprogressivecynic.com/2014/08/15/red-america-vs-blue-america-state-maps-illustrate-the-difference"
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||
1f7pqx | the mike duffy scandal in canada. | How did it start? What did this Duffy guy do? Why is the Prime Minister involved? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1f7pqx/eli5_the_mike_duffy_scandal_in_canada/ | {
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"Basically, Mike Duffy (an independent senator) spent about $90k and illegally charged it to the government. He expense claimed personal items (like living expenses, vacations etc), and had the taxpayers pay for them. When he was ordered to pay the money back, he was unable, and his friend, the Prime Minister's Chief of Staff (Nigel Wright) gave Sen. Duffy the $90k he needed. The Chief of Staff gave the $90k *of his own money* (Wright is a successful businessman) to the senator to allow him to pay back his debts.\n\nThat's the scandal in a nutshell. You can decide who is in the wrong, but as it stands, the Prime Minister is not directly involved. He is currently involved in the fallout from it.\n"
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1ch9y4 | why would stocks drop after something like the boston bombings? | "Stocks plunged late in the day after explosions at the Boston Marathon." -Chicago Trib. Why would the bombings cause this? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ch9y4/eli5_why_would_stocks_drop_after_something_like/ | {
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"Anything that causes fear of economic disturbance of any type will cause people to reduce risk by removing money from volatile sources of wealth (like stocks) to something more stable (like cash). There is also a bit of self fulfilling prophecy involved, because people are fearful that the price might go down because of the event and they want to sell ahead of the drop, which then causes the drop they were fearful of.",
"A stock price it all about the relationships between buyers and sellers. There is no central authority to buy or sell stocks from. You buy and sell from other individuals who also hold stocks. Without someone who wants to buy what you have, what you have is worthless.\n\nSo, knowing that price is all about buyers and sellers. Would an attack make people less likely to buy, and more likely to sell? Because either of those would cause prices to go down in response.\n\nThe reality is that it's likely both. It all comes down to fear. See people are kind of stupid, and they often fear investing in the market. They think Cash is nice and safe, so when people are afraid of outside forces, they will often move holdings closer to cash. So they can cut and run easier.\n\nThis fear means that people who own stocks want to sell them (to move the money into cash) and people who have cash are less willing to invest in stocks. So motivated sellers are willing to offer the stocks for sale at a lower price, to entice reluctant buyers into buying.\n\nThe \"market price\" that you see is actually a real time reflection of what it actually happening in terms of transactions. So if sellers offer discounts and buyers are holding out for deals then the \"market price\" will go lower, because it's nothing more than the recent average price."
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2rxbv0 | if we have the ability to see beyond our own galaxy, why aren't we certain about "dwarf planets" and other objects at the edge of our solar system? | I was just reading about newly discovered dwarf planets in the Oort Cloud at the edge of our solar system. Why aren't we able to know with greater certainty what lies at the edge of our solar system when we can view other objects that are deeper in space? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2rxbv0/eli5_if_we_have_the_ability_to_see_beyond_our_own/ | {
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"They are very tiny. The things we see beyond our galaxy are many orders of magnitude larger for the most part. Additionally, the dwarf planets in the Kuiper belt are often obscured by light from other objects such as the stars in our galaxy.",
"It has to do with how bright the objects are. It's like being outside at night, and being able to easily see a clump of billions of burning candles several miles away (another galaxy) while not being able to see a small pebble 10 feet away in the dim light of the single candle you're holding (a dwarf planet at the edge of the solar system illuminated by the sun).",
"It's all about comparative size and brightness.\n\nYou can see a lighthouse at night from a mile away, but maybe not a tree thirty feet from you.",
"astronomers detect objects directly by the light/ heat/ energy (x-rays etc) they emit or reflect; we can also detect them indirectly by how they influence (usually with gravity) objects that we CAN \"see\". objects in the Oort cloud emit no light/heat/energy. they are so far away, small, and non-reflective that they reflect almost no light from our sun. and their mass is too small for their gravity to disturb known objects. the few Kuiper Belt & Oort Cloud objects that are large/reflective/massive enough for us to detect are just Barely detectable so we can't determine much about them.\n\nmost Oort cloud objects are just too small, cold, dark, and far away for us to detect with current methods. \n\nedit - grammar & clarification"
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22kggx | why can people find jokes, movies, etc to be funny or entertaining more then once? | EDIT: *than. Sorry my grammar sucks. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22kggx/eli5_why_can_people_find_jokes_movies_etc_to_be/ | {
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"text": [
"I'm no expert. But I think laughter is the mind's way of coping with the absurd. The same thing can still seem absurd even after witnessing it multiple times. \n\nAlso... Than"
]
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606kei | how come when you skydive they tell you to pull your parachute at 5000-6000 ft altitude but people that base jump pull their parachutes at like 2000 ft altitude? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/606kei/eli5_how_come_when_you_skydive_they_tell_you_to/ | {
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"The reason they have you pull the parachute at about 5000 feet is solely for your own safety. You *could* pull it at a much much lower altitude, but the lower you get the more risk there is of something going wrong.\n\nParachutes sometimes get tangled and need to be untangled, sometimes they fail and you need to deploy the back up parachute. Pulling at 5000 feet gives you time to try and save yourself if something goes wrong. ",
"Margin of safety.\n\nIf your main chute doesn't deploy, you will have time to jettison it and deploy a reserve chute in a controlled manner. A reserve chute is usually set to 'automatically' deploy at 1,500 ft.. if you are descending faster than a set speed.\n\nBase jumping typically removes that margin of safety."
]
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3r90dt | how do we know where to search for precious metals? how do we know that 100 ft underneath my yard isn't the largest gold deposit in the world? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3r90dt/eli5_how_do_we_know_where_to_search_for_precious/ | {
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"Many different ways. Land gets eroded away and reveals metals, so they excavate the area to find more of it. Sometimes they prospect by experimentally drilling and just seeing if they find something. ",
"Certain rock types are more likely to have certain minerals than others, but for the most part they look around where they found some precious metals and hope there is more. Lot's of guesswork, gambling, and sampling. Maybe you find nothing, maybe you strike it rich.",
"They use advanced machinery to send a signal into the earth. Depending on how the signal bounces back they can tell that it hit iron or coal or gold etc.. Also the depth can be determined",
"Generally they will go by historical data they have on the area, where existing deposits are. Most areas of interest will have some coarse data available such as airborne gravity or magnetic data, this can be used to target more detailed survey techniques such as geochemical soil sampling, mapping, geophysical surveys and drilling.\n\nThings will often go in order of:\n\nDesktop research based on what they have already\n\nmapping (just outcropping surface rocks and soils)\n\nsoil sampling (top soils taken to labs for analysis)\n\ngeophysical survey (many different kinds depending on potential target and host geology)\n\ndrilling (couple of types they can use depending on budget, depth of interest, et cetera. \n\nIf they hit enough and have investment then mining, this step is usually years further down the road. ",
"Follow-up question: there are small mines, dug with pickaxes and shovels, all over Arizona, Nevada, California, etc. I've been riding out in the desert and there will be a mine just randomly situated on a hillside. Sometimes they go 20 feet in, and sometimes it's impossible to tell how far/deep they are. \n \nWhat I've always wondered is, 100 years ago when some guy was out in the desert, what made him decide to dig *right here in this spot*, and not 10 feet to the left or right? Or why halfway up that small hill and not at the base of it? To my untrained eye, there's nothing different about this spot *right here*, and that spot a few paces away. ",
"In answer to the part about minerals under your house. In the 1970's there was an article in a local paper about a guy who lived in Placerville, Ca. He was going to build a basement on his property. When they dug the hole he ran all the dirt from the excavation through a sluice box. The article said he was able to get enough gold from this to pay for the renovation. Placerville, Ca. is only a few miles from the original California gold rush discovery site.",
"Geologists can look on the large scale at the surrounding rock types and geological history to predict if there could possibly be precious metals in your area, if they did then they would refine their search with field work and samples. \n"
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59119e | how do shirt sponsorships etc actually make a company money? | Take Fly Emirates... They pay stupid money to be Arsenal shirt sponsors and to have the stadium named after them... But what do they gain from it?
Like, nowadays people use websites to find the best price for a flight. Nobody is surely going to choose Fly Emirates simply because they have heard of them, because an Airline is surely something that doesn't rely much on being heard of...? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/59119e/eli5how_do_shirt_sponsorships_etc_actually_make_a/ | {
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"The mere fact that you know that fly Emirate exists as a brand is proof that their advertising worked. \n \nAdvertising increases future sales through brand recognition. People is more likely to buy something they recognize regardless of value or quality.",
"You would be surprised. Advertising is very psychological.\n\nAnd YES! If you keep hearing Emirates this and Emirates that, you subconciously associate Emirates to a \"popular company\". Popular immediately means \"if everyone trusts it, I should too!\"\n\nThat's the reason all the sports atheletes have logos all over them, the reason you see McDonalds commercials still... I mean WHO DOESNT KNOW ABOUT MCDONALDS??\n\nYou'd think we could stop making McD commercials? Nope! The second you stop, people forget about it. And the second you see a commercial you say \"Damn I remember McDonalds... i used to remember all the commericals and all the sponsorships, and that weird molesty clown... I think I'll go get some McD fries right now!\"\n\n"
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1oa9gg | the federal reserve is increasing the money supply to create jobs? how does this work? | ELI5: The Federal Reserve is increasing the money supply to create jobs? How does this work?
I've heard that the "tapering" will end when unemployment reaches some X% or what not.
What is the reasoning behind how more $ in the overall $ supply allows for companies to hire more employees or gets more businesses started? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1oa9gg/eli5_the_federal_reserve_is_increasing_the_money/ | {
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"US Treasury bonds are considered the safest possible investment historically. Risk/Reward trade offs in investing means that the absolute lowest risk will have the lowest rewards. Treasuries therefore generally set the baseline 'reward' for lowest risk investment in the form of interest on your principle investment. The principle investment into treasuries causes very little economic growth or job creation due.\n\nWhen the government 'prints money' it is actually the Federal Bank printing the money by buying up more and more treasury bonds/bills out of thin air. The Fed has the right to bid on Treasury bonds without having the money in their vaults, thus printing money. By bidding for treasuries with money that no-one has 'chosen' to invest in treasuries, they drastically increase the demand for low risk/low reward investment and cause the interest on bonds to drop to near 0% annual because treasuries have a limited supply (based on how much money the federal government needs to borrow).\n\nThe theory is that by dropping treasuries to almost 0% interest, you encourage those in the private sector to take on more risk with their investment. All the 'safe' investment options don't even match inflation, so its not worth saving money in treasuries during this time. This means if Joe America wants to open a restaurant, there will be dozens of potential investors begging him to take their money to start up at either a lower interest rate or a smaller % of the business due to the increase in competition for lenders/investors/start up capital/etc.\n\nBusiness start ups DO create jobs, and DO create wealth. Service business compete and innovate to drive down cost of services and increase standard of living, while manufacturing/mining/farming operations create value/wealth to prop up the value of the currency.\n\nThe theory behind the fed is that by encouraging lenders to decrease interest rates for higher risk, higher reward lending such a start ups, the economy as a whole will have a greater growth than it would otherwise have. The creation of wealth will generally offset the increase in total monotized USD and cause limited inflation. Plus getting people back to work sooner means higher tax income and fewer dependents on social safety nets.\n\nThis is also true for borrowing money in established businesses. Often CEOs or owners will see an opportunity to expand and increase their long term profit, but cannot afford to do so and still make payroll. Banks can lend them money at a much much lower interest rate when treasuries as near 0% because they offer lower interested on savings accounts (again cause they are low risk/low reward and tend to mirror treasuries). The lower the interest a business has to pay for a payroll loan, the more often they will decide to take the risk to expand on credit and create wealth/jobs.",
"Increasing the money supply in theory lowers target interest rates and thus lowering lending rates making loans cheaper and easier to get. Businesses will want to get loans to build inventory, make improvements, etc. Homeowners may want to make improvements. Investors will invest more. Basically, the right people and individuals will spend this cheap and easy money and create demand which should create jobs. It devalues the US dollar which makes US made goods more price competitive versus goods from other countries in both domestic and foreign markets, creating more demand. This my understanding of it. \nEDIT: fixed some spelling errors and added more precise wording about rates.\n"
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8qqob6 | the us federal reserve system and effectively how much of it is under private control and how much under public control? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8qqob6/eli5_the_us_federal_reserve_system_and/ | {
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"0% of the Fed is under private control.\n\nThe Fed uses its own set of terminology in which it uses words in a manner that is totally inconsistent with those words' dictionary definitions. For example, the Fed uses words like \"stock holder\" to refer to a non-ownership relationship that it has with banks.\n\nIn short, interstate banks are required to deposit money with the Fed. Once this money is deposited, they share data on banking conditions and the monetary supply with the Fed, which then shares that data with other banks. \n\nThat is the extent of a bank's relationship with the Fed - that of a legally compelled depositor.\n\nIts not advisable to try to pick apart the Fed's operations as a layperson. When the Fed came into existence in the early 1900's it was *incredibly* controversial. To get around this controversy they created a very obtuse system that was design to look like a private bank from the outside. So technically the Fed is composed of multiple banks, each of which have their own \"governing\" structure.\n\nBut none of that structure matters because its powerless to act. The only entity with any decision making ability in the Fed is the national Board of Governors, which is appointed entirely by the US Government.\n\nOr to put it another way, when the Fed was originally created the idea of the Federal Government being allowed to interfere with the banking system was wildly unpopular. So the original creators of the Fed designed it to look like a private bank that was owned by other private banks to a person who wasn't already familiar with how it works. \n\nAs unsatisfying as it is, its not possible to explain the intricacies of how the Fed works in a few paragraphs on the internet. If you want an in-depth explanation of it that's something that you basically have to go to school for. Alternatively you can just take it on faith that the regional banks are not actually independent entities and that their governing boards have no actual power or authority."
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4cdadm | is there actually a solution to 'this statement is false'? (liar's paradox) | I mean, surely there's a Solution, right? Surely things can either be true or not true... I mean, does this statement really demonstrate that the law of excluded middle isn't right? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4cdadm/eli5is_there_actually_a_solution_to_this/ | {
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"The solution is pretty simple, but unsatisfying.\n\n\"The assumption you can create a logical system where all propositions are either true or false is incorrect.\"",
" > Surely things can either be true or not true...\n\nWhy must they be? It's no earth-shattering event if we add a third category: things that have no defined truth value, because they are paradoxical. That does not affect the things you already determined to be either true or false.",
"Language is not constructed in a way that prevents nonsensical statements to be made.\n\nThat's as simple as that."
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8ftu9g | how can the cdc trace the exact specific source of an e. coli outbreak? | Genuinely curious given the recent outbreak - they have not yet located the exact source of the outbreak, all they know is that the romaine lettuce came from Yuma. How can they figure out which farm or facility it came from? Is it just as simple as interviewing anyone with symptoms, figuring out where they ate recently, and then trying to find where the restaurant or grocery store got the packaged food? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8ftu9g/eli5_how_can_the_cdc_trace_the_exact_specific/ | {
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"Pretty much. Supply chains are tracked and catalogued pretty extensively, so when dozens of people get sick with the same (relatively rare) bacterial infection spread across multiple states, it's relatively easy for investigators to find a common denominator.",
"While retail food items are generally not marked individually, the crates/pallets/cases they are delivered in ARE marked with a tracking number and/or \"lot number\". Sometimes the retail item is marked \"Produced in Salinas, CA!\" or \"Proudly grown in Yuma, AZ!\". Most times, however, things are much less obvious.\n\nThese are numbers that work not unlike the tracking number on a FedEx package.\n\nExcept for farmer's markets, the farm delivers the corn or lettuce or eggs or whatever to a middleman distributor. The items and volume are logged and a number is assigned. At a farmer's market, the source is apparent and no tracking is needed.\n\nThis distributor middleman might sell them to a grocery store, or to a food manufacturer. In the case of as-is items, the materials go to a central hub where either your corner grocer picks them up, or they go to a distribution hub for the chain if it's a chain grocery store.\n\nThe tracking numbers are recorded again. Even if items can not be traced to a specific farm, they can be traced to a specific *distributor*--and the number of farms that *distributor* buys from are known.\n\nFor the lettuce in question, it is a distributor or distributors who buy from farms in the Yuma area. Often times the specific farm can be found, though in this case the problem could be in the processing plant that prepares and packages the materials. Maybe someone had diarrhea and dumped all over the field. Or maybe a truck wasn't washed or cleaned properly and naturally existing background \"noise\" bacteria got through. Maybe something in the plant was not in working order [a spray bath, or a fridge out of temp, or something else not working].\n\nContinuing the above: if the eggs or lettuce or bacon or whatever are bought by a food *manufacturer*, each *ingredient* is logged as it comes into the facility. These are the companies that make canned ravioli, frozen pizzas, boxed mac & cheese, vegetable relish trays, pre-made gas station sandwiches...regardless, they log each ingredient that comes in. For any given item, the finished product is given a \"lot number\" or \"batch number\" against which the ingredient list logs can be compared. A sandwich with lettuce, meat, tomatoe, cheese comes from a date and/or batch that has a set of corresponding ingredient lists. Each ingredient can be tracked down if need be.\n\nThe store receiving each item logs the batch/lot numbers same as they would for any single item [produce or meat or whatever]. For gas stations and restaurants, the delivery or commissary company handles the records because pallets are often broken up for delivery/wholesale. When a notice or recall goes out, every distributor, manufacturer, and store can look at their logs to see if the offending item appears on their logs. Those items still in holding or on the floor are destroyed, and a PSA is put out in the news so customers know to return/exchange the items they bought. For restaurants and gas stations and the like, their local distributor [or sometimes, the corporate office] sends out notices to all their customers letting them know tainted items were delivered, usually with instructions on how to exchange or replace the items; and information to share with their customers if necessary.\n\nThis way it doesn't matter if you buy a head of lettuce in Montana or a prepared salad in Florida or a frozen potpie in Alaska. The gravy and bread and vegetables and meats and crust and and and...all these can be tracked back to the region, if not the source. At the very least, all other contaminated items can be removed from the food supply system with very short notice.\n\nIn the case of lettuce it is relatively simple, it's a single ingredient/item. In the case of a prepared sandwich quite a few items may have to be sorted out, but it's only a matter of ruling in/out which items might be causing the problem and going from there. As long as all the handlers/distributors/manufacturers along the way have followed the law and tracked the numbers accordingly, the process is straightforward. Time consuming, but straightforward. "
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blu0ei | if you can get gingivitis so easily, how did people survive before proper dental hygiene existed? | This is always my first question after I go to the dentist but it feels like too dumb of a question to ask. Since gingivitis can be fatal, it baffles me how people even made it to 15 years old before toothpaste was invented. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/blu0ei/eli5_if_you_can_get_gingivitis_so_easily_how_did/ | {
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"My dentist once attributed it to the high amount of sugar in modern diets, where it was pretty scarce historically.\n\nAlso, people *did* clean their teeth in various ways, like with a rag or by rinsing their mouths or by chewing on a stick from a specific kind of tree.",
"One of the big issues these days is the amount of sugars and acids in the foods we eat now. Soda has both. Until the relatively recent boom of processed food, there wasn’t as much bad stuff that would get on your teeth. \n\nAlso many natural foods (apples, carrots, vegetables) can somewhat clean your teeth as you eat them. People tended to eat more of these foods in the past as they could grow them themselves",
"It's because of our diets, and in particular, sugar. Sugar used to be a luxury ingredient that only the wealthy could afford, and even then, they didn't eat much of it.\n\nAcidic foods could also contribute to it; But I'm not entirely sure on that one. Oranges were still fairly common before dental hygiene became common.",
"Consider that we take care of our teeth so that they (hopefully) last a lifetime. Even if our teeth last us until we are 60....that is probably longer than many of our ancestors had teeth.",
"Gingivitis itself is not really fatal. Poor dental hygiene is linked to high blood pressure which in turn is linked to Cardiovascular disease but gingivitis itself is not deadly. Not all people who have poor dental hygiene get Cardiovascular disease and not all people with Cardiovascular disease have poor oral hygiene. Generally the effects on health happen later in life when people tend to get ill. \n\nTo answer your question, people survived because like all other animals in the natural world, we live! Most of us are not fragile beings, our bodies have developed over many hundreds of thousands of years to survive and fight illness and bacteria. Other mammals don't brush their teeth and the fittest and luckiest ones survive and live to an old age. In the old days, before toothpaste, which by the way was actually invented by the Egyptians in 5000BC, if people got a gum infection they treated it with salt water. If the infection got serious enough, their teeth eventually fell out and then the gum disease went away on its own. \n\nThe other important factor to point out is that modern diets play a huge part in tooth decay. The high levels of processed sugar in most of our diets rots our teeth and causes bacteria to grow. People who live in third world countries or people who eat very natural diets don't have anywhere near the amount of tooth decay that we do. A lot of people in Africa for example, don't have access to toothpaste but have teeth that are gleaming white and very healthy gums. Serious gum disease is generally a problem of First World countries."
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52um46 | how does the foreign exchange program work? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/52um46/eli5_how_does_the_foreign_exchange_program_work/ | {
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"What context please?\n\nLike in an educational institution? You go to another country to study, while the other school sends students to your school?\n\nIf so,\n\n* Choosing who goes / Requirements\n - Typically academically excellent, active in co-curricular activity\n - Knowledge of the language used in the target country\n* How to sign up\n - Depends on the school, normally a targeted announcement will be posted somewhere public, or your teachers will recommend students for the program\n* Who do you live with\n - Depends. Either hostels, a foster-parent style accommodation, or you're on your own\n* Expenses paid\n - Normally all expenses are paid by the students themselves, though there might be financial assistance from both/either school\n "
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qwejc | the pirate bay's switch to magnet links instead of torrent files and what it changes in the big picture. | I always used to download the .torrent files, because it was easier to exclude things like sample videos and dumb usenet group txt files from certain videos, or pick out parts of a HUGE torrent that you want. Because the .torrent contains information about what you're getting.
With magnets you have to wait for the file list to load and then dick around with it.
This is mostly a client issue, I realize, and I could probably work around it myself. uTorrent will probably default to a setting that lets you do this transparently sometime.
Still, it's a tiny inconvenience, so what is gained?
Thanks! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/qwejc/eli5_the_pirate_bays_switch_to_magnet_links/ | {
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"Magnet links pretty much remove The Pirate Bay from liability while still maintaining the search and sort engine for torrents.",
"Please remember to [search](_URL_0_) before posting your question.\n\nThanks!",
"The biggest change is I can no longer download a .torrent file on a remote computer, upload it to my dropbox, and have my home server download it automatically.",
"To offer a bit more detail, the difference between magnet links and torrent files is that the information in that long link tells the torrent client the same thing that the .torrent files did. While the change in function truly is trivial, because it actually removes a step from loading a torrent in your torrent client from your web browser, it actually makes TPB a lot less liable because they are no longer hosting files that are directly associated with piracy. The law says you can't host files that help pirates, but they have no right to police what links you have. \n\nAnother helpful aspect is that is makes TPB a lot easier to maintain and keep up. Now that the site uses links instead of files the site no longer uses many server resources (which saves money) and the whole site is much smaller, approximately 1/100th or so of the original size. The whole site can now easily fit on a flash drive. Because of this, the site can me moved and easily hosted from anywhere. Therefore this change is a great one for The Pirate Bay. They are now much more resilient in their fight against the law and with little to no real change on the user end.\n\n**Edit**: After researching the laws about linking to illegal material it seems that currently this is somewhat of a gray area as far as the law in concerned. There have been people arrested for this activity although I believe, in the US anyway, that there is no real legislation that exists defining specifically the consequences. Either way, it can't hurt.",
"Somewhat unrelated but does anyone know how to view the magnet link's content before I download like I could do with .torrent files?",
"Wow. Came to this subreddit to ask this exact question and what do ya know, it's already at the top.",
"You know how Santa has a big list of children who are naughty or nice? When he wants to know if a child is good or bad, he simply looks up their name in his list and finds the answer (and this is how Napster worked). \n\nNow some bad men decided that only they could decide who gets presents and told Santa he couldn't keep his big list and they made him tear it up. It broke his heart to do so, but they gave him no choice. But the bad men didn't count on the elves, as you all know elves are very smart and so one weekend before the list was torn up, while the bad men were playing golf and cheating on their wives, the elves stayed up late and each elf memorised part of the list and then they wrote millions and millions of pages, one for each child, and each page contained a list of the elves that know if that child is naughty or nice. Now when Santa wants to know if a child is naughty or nice, he has to go find the page listing the elves that know about the child, then he has to find those elves and ask them (and this is how torrent trackers work). \n\nBut the bad men were still wroth with Santa, \"Santa can not be allowed to keep these pages!\" they exclaimed, because they still allow Santa to find the elf who knows if you are naughty, and who knows if you are nice. \"We'll see you in court\" they threatened Santa, in low and menacing tones.\n\nSanta and the elves were dismayed, it looked like, from now on the children would get no presents and Christmas would be ruined. But then ... Santa and the elves had a brilliant idea, instead of Santa keeping the pages with lists of elves on them in his workshop, he would make lots of copies and distribute them among the elves themselves. Then they could all go stand in Santa's great hall and when Santa wants to know if a child is Naughty or Nice, he simply booms out the name of the child, and the elves whisper between themselves and the ones with the pages for that child put up their hands, and Santa can ask them for a copy (and this is how magnet links work).\n\nNow Santa has nothing written down in his workshop, and the bad men cannot go after every elf and so Santa and the elves lived happily ever after ... or did they?\n\n\nEdit: Improved the description of the magnet links.",
"Is there a way to still select the individual files you want to download? Or do you just have to go ahead and download the whole thing?",
"Check out Deluge, last I checked you can screen what you're downloading before it actually hooks into the program, open source, neckbeard approved ect",
"Magnets. How do they fucking work?",
"TPB is blocked here, so I used to use _URL_0_ to get to the site. but anonymouse does not support magnets. What do?"
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365vg4 | who is winning the syrian civil war? | Hey guys,
Civil war in Syria has been going on for almost 5 years. What is the current situation in 2015? Who is winning right now? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/365vg4/eli5_who_is_winning_the_syrian_civil_war/ | {
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"I'm not sure who is winning. But what I know is that everybody is losing. Hundreds of thousands are dead. Millions are refugees. The country is almost completely destroyed. ",
"At the moment, nobody.\n\nWikipedia has this map. By going back to past version, you can see the territories evolve. They tend not to change much.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nMore detailed map.\n\n_URL_1_",
"There is no clear winner and there probably won't be one. Also the war in Syria and Northern Iraq are basically one war now. It's even unclear whether Syria as a country still exists considering that different areas are controlled by different groups. IS controls parts of Syria and Iraq and basically removed the boarder. [Here](_URL_0_) is a map of the current situation in Syria.\n\nHowever, I would say the following are kind of winners:\n\n- The Kurdish: They used to have other people ruling over them (Assad in Syria and before the Iraq war Saddam in Iraq). IS wasn't able to take their territory and now they are closer to having their own state than ever before. This is also kind of an interesting development as the Kurdish weren't an aggressor in this war. \n\n- IS: Considering that pretty much everyone is against them it's hard to imaging that they will be the winners in the long run but they are the group that controls the biggest territory now (even though a lot of it is desert). They also overpowered most other rebel groups (from moderates to other Islamists) and are now almost more influential than Al qaeda. The basically became the new, global Islamist top brand within just a few years.\n\n- Assad: Even though he lost control over the east of Syria, he is still in control of the west and that's where most big cities are and whole economy is. Also in the beginning of the war it looked like he would lose his power pretty quickly but with the raise of IS (some say Assad actually helped them / intentionally didn't attack them) he basically became the second worst option and he is still in office.\n\nThe biggest loser in this conflict are clearly the civilians in the East and cities like Aleppo. Their neighborhoods turned into a war zone where they would either get bombed by their own president or have to live under the rule of some crazy Islamists.\n\nYou might want to check /r/LevantineWar/ for the most current developments (or even ask the same question there). Most recently Assad was losing some ground, Turkey became more useful and the Saudis & co are supporting rebels other than IS. But in the grander scheme of things this are rather minor developments for now.",
"There really isn't going to be a winner. Iraq, with the help of the Iranian Quds Force, has managed to retake a few major areas, but they're largely stalled because the IS is embedded into the population now.\n\nThe Kurds have managed to just barely prevent disaster at Kobane. Had they lost that particular town, it would have made escape into Turkey much harder for refugees and supplying arms for the defenders in that area nigh impossible.\n\nAs for Assad's Loyalist faction, I don't hear much from them..."
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2p6ss1 | brands used to be kept at almost all cost, why are big companies now changing their brand (like finish and charmin for example after so many years)? | I was surprised when I first saw big companies changing their brands, I was wondering how it wouldn't hurt them by losing notoriety compared to "younger" brands. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2p6ss1/eli5_brands_used_to_be_kept_at_almost_all_cost/ | {
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"Product life cycle (introduction, growth, maturity, decline). A typical product introduced will increase sales to a peak then slowly decline. \n\nThis is why Gillette comes out with new razors every few years. They're the classic, business school example.\n\nBy re-imagining a brand marketers hope to increase to a peak again even without an actual product change.\n\n \n\n",
"Well Finish was the brand name in the UK already so that was probably a case of making it the same across all territories. "
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nzu3a | why do americans get to choose from among a dozen or so republicans for president, and *one* democrat? | I realize it's because the sitting President is a Democrat, but what if we want another Democrat? We simply *can't* have one, no matter how qualified? Where does this rule come from? What is its purpose? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/nzu3a/eli5_why_do_americans_get_to_choose_from_among_a/ | {
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"You can vote for anyone that stands for president, including third party candidates who may hold any positions at all. The problem is really that the American system has flaws leading almost unavoidably to a strong two party system (it's winner-takes-all so you marginal parties/views find it almost impossible to become represented in any way unless they join with a larger party), and that within the parties there is no advantage in presenting multiple candidates (it just splits the vote), so the system has grown such that this is the only thing that can and does happen.",
"I think it's important to know that Americans cannot vote for any of the Republicans directly for President...yet. There is a primary election where registered members of the Republican party vote to have 1 Republican candidate for President.\n\nSo it's not like there's 2 parties and one is sending 8 members and the other just one. Each party sends one to be the candidate for that party.\n\nIf you look at the election 4 years ago, there was no incumbent (Bush reached his maximum term limit) and therefore both parties had primary elections to determine their candidate.\n",
"Each party gets 1 candidate. It'd be rather silly for the dems to run anyone but Obama as their 1. \n\nThis comes from tradition and serves to reduce our actual potential choice.",
"This actually isn't the case. There will be a set of Democratic primaries and there are actually challengers to Obama for the nomination:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nBecause Obama is the sitting President and not entirely hated the process is relatively pro forma. None of the challengers have a realistic chance, but if you wanted to vote against him you could.",
"Sitting Presidents have been challenged in primaries. Ted Kennedy ran against Carter in 1980 and Ronald Reagan against Ford in 1976. Both challengers didn't win (and both Presidents weren't reelected).",
"By the time the actual election comes along, the Republican party will have chosen a single candidate and thrown all their weight behind him. The primaries are not an official part of the election process at all, but rather part of each party's internal process for choosing a candidate. In fact a party doesn't have to have a primary, strictly speaking---being a private organization it can nominate someone however it wants. The two major American parties do it by election.\n\nTechnically the Democratic party will have a primary election too, in accordance with their bylaws. But Obama's nomination is a foregone conclusion so there will probably be very little turnout.\n\nThe big thing to realize is that our parties have no particular legal standing. They're just private clubs with a political agenda. In practice people vote the party ticket, but in principle they are voting for individuals. In some states parties aren't even listed on the ballot and people have to literally bring a card reminding them whom to vote for, hence the expression 'party ticket.'"
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1q5z8j | what is the difference between software, a program and an application ? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1q5z8j/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_software_a/ | {
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"The differences are mostly contextual.\n\n\"Software\" can refer to the entire field, or in the specific to the general part of something that isn't hardware or to a collection of things that aren't necessarily part of the same program/app.\n\n\"Application\" is a complete unit that may consist of more than one module in more than one language on more than one computer, all working together. It may not, in which case it is pretty much the same as a \"program\".\n\n\"Program\" has the connotation of being a discrete unit, and while it is used interchangeably with \"application\", it seems awkward to refer to a \"web program\" instead of a \"web app\", or a \"client/server program\", instead of a \"client/server app\". \"Program\" is often used to refer to a complete operational unit as seen from a developer rather than a user perspective (it seems old-fashioned to refer, as a user, to installing a \"program\" instead of an \"app\"), and often for things that are not intended for public use, such as a testing program or proof of concept program."
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1ze4dm | russian foreign policy | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ze4dm/eli5russian_foreign_policy/ | {
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"There is no way someone can explain the entirety of the foreign policy of any great power in a single reddit post. Russian foreign policy where, regarding what? Russia has a \"foreign policy\" that regards 190 states individually. Ask a more specific question."
]
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2em1on | what are idealism and realism? what are the differences between the two? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2em1on/eli5_what_are_idealism_and_realism_what_are_the/ | {
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"Idealism is a perception of the present and future encompassing very positive and optimistic circumstances. Realism is a perception of the present and future focused on a portrayal of how things actually are, negative and positive aspects. ",
"They're actually complete opposites! They're both specific outlooks on life.\nIf you're an idealist, you live your life based on the ideals you have - how you think a perfect world should be. For example: you support the idea that it should rain candy. You spend your days dreaming about it and wishing for it to happen. You even try to think of ways to make it a reality.\n\nRealism on the other hand, is accepting the way things are. You won't try to change anything about the world because \"that's how things are\". For example: you think it would be cool if it rained candy, but that's a ridiculous notion. It rains water and nothing will ever change that. You don't believe any effort should be made on making this real.\n\nThose are extreme examples, but quite clear I think. To summarize: idealism = what could be, realism = what really is. Most people harbor a healthy mix of the two, allowing themselves to daydream, but being down-to-earth enough to know which dreams are really possible and which aren't.",
"Realist: This is what the world is like, so I will act accordingly.\n\nIdealist: This is what I want the world to be like, so I will act accordingly. ",
"Idealism: What you want, what your perfect idea or dream of something is \n \n \nRealism: Accepting what actually is, the way the world realistically is",
"Realism is only bothering about real things, a realist will not think of a utopia because there is no realistic way to achieve it. It tends to be hard and cruel but very much true. a realist worries about things that are, not things that should be, and will try to change things as long as they can be changed realisticly\n\nIdealism is bothering about ideals, not things that are, an idealist will want to think about the utopian future but not about the real world, he will think about what should be and not what is. They usualy do speak truth is what should be but in real life it tends to fall apart.\n\nsimply put, real vs ideal",
"Ideals are things you hope for, reals (?) are things which actually are."
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bu7tlv | how can scientist view the atoms of something with an electron microscope without seeing the atoms that make up the lenses of the microscope? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bu7tlv/eli5_how_can_scientist_view_the_atoms_of/ | {
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"Electron microscopes do not see things in the same sense as a microscope; it's an incredibly sensitive machine that detects the wavelengths of things with sensors. Think like echolocation or cat\\fish whiskers. Electron microscopes don't have lenses.",
"First of all, it is incredibly difficult to see anything at the atomic level with an electron microscope. \n \nAnd more importantly, electron microscopes don't use physical lenses. The lenses generate an electrical field that focuses and directs a fine electron beam. The beam travels in a vacuum before it strikes the sample. \n \nSource: I used to use a Scanning Electron Microscope quite regularly.",
"Electron Microscopes do not have lenses. They use electrons to see small objects. Sensitive instruments detect scattering of electrons coming from an electron beam by the small object to create a computer image of the object."
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2rb53g | why are laptop speakers commonly found on the bottom of the computer? | It is not very practical for times like right now when I am very hungover and in bed trying to surf the interwebs and listen to music. The sound is drowned out by my blanket. Is this just poor design or is there a reason? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2rb53g/eli5_why_are_laptop_speakers_commonly_found_on/ | {
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"text": [
"If the computer sits off of a hard surface, like a table or desk, it allows the music to bounce off of the hard table giving it a fuller sound. "
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dljdv9 | why do injured people cough up blood? | It's often seen in film/books/etc. that when someone receives a chest injury, is smashed against a wall or similar, he coughs up blood or has blood coming out from his mouth. Does this actually happen? Why?
If the lungs get damaged it makes sense that blood gets coughed up, but what about injuries that affect other organs? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dljdv9/eli5_why_do_injured_people_cough_up_blood/ | {
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"They don't. It's just a good visual representation for the movies that clearly, easily, and quickly depicts \"he's really hurt\"",
"If there is an injury anywhere from the mouth to the lungs, sure, you could cough up blood. For the most part, it is just a visual they are trying to make to show that the person in question is seriously injured.",
"They don't unless there's some lung damage. \n\nBut if you show how real injuries look, viewers whose minds haven't been warped by the far edges of the internet get grossed out. \n\nEven then, making practical, believable injuries for the camera is expensive and takes a ton of time to set and reset. Plus, if you don't get it all done in one day, then the makeup folks have to make sure tomorrow's injury looks JUST like yesterday's. \n\nCoughing blood just requires the actor to crunch a blood capsule in their mouth, and cleans up with paper towels. Plus, movie culture has already accepted that as a shorthand for \"Internal/Critical Injuries\".",
"If they’re coughing up blood then it’s in their lungs. Lungs don’t work when they have fluid in them (like blood) so they have to clear themselves out (by coughing) so they can continue pumping oxygen into the bloodstream.\n\nEdit: Regarding other organ injuries, mouth trauma is going to make you spit up blood, stomach trauma will make you vomit blood (could be mistaken for coughing it up, and other organs (ie; kidneys and liver) will make blood come out the other end. Most of the other ones cause internal bleeding which you don’t usually actually see because it’s underneath the skin."
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2brvt4 | what happened with the dot com bubble in 2000? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2brvt4/eli5_what_happened_with_the_dot_com_bubble_in_2000/ | {
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"The internet was new and exciting. Nobody new exactly how well all these new internet based companies were going to do in terms of profitability (bottom line and top). So the stock prices of these new and not yet profitable corporations were very high in terms of forward price/earnings (price of a single share based on future bottom line income that is EXPECTED). Well when a lot of the weaker companies were weeded out, many people realized that this high stock price based on expected revenues were never going to come to be and the share prices crashed (or the bubble popped). ",
"The internet became a thing in the mid-90s. Between America Online and internet service providers like Netcom, the world suddenly went from thousands of people to millions of people online. Then DSL and finally cable internet happened, where you could get on the internet without occupying a phone line (in the mid-90s unless you had a second line, you could either get on the internet or talk on the phone, but you couldn't do both). \n\nWall Street investors were suddenly very interested in the internet. Everyone could see the growth trends. When you see a market go from a few thousand users to tens of millions within a single decade, baby, you've got yourself a venture capital stew. The race was on to invest in new online business while they were starting up, in hopes that today's four dudes working out of a garage will be tomorrow's Apple Computer, and your shares will be worth billions. \n\nHere's where the problem set in. Wall Street investors didn't know dick about the internet, or web development, or computers, or Silicon Valley startups. So they just started pouring investment money... hundreds of millions, then by the late 90s, billions of dollars... into random internet startup companies. My favorite was [DigiScents](_URL_1_), a company that aimed to transmit odors and fragrances over the internet. \"You've got smell!\" \n\nThe problem isn't necessarily that the dot com companies were based on bad ideas. Many of them were good ideas, or even great ideas. Like _URL_2_, a music download company (Apple made it work), or _URL_0_, a digital currency company (Bitcoin is making it work). \n\nThe problem wasn't with the concepts, it was with business models and execution. Many of these companies vastly overestimated the number of online users they would be able to attract to their services. Some of them succeeded in attracting large numbers of users, only to face insurmountable technical problems when it came to actually delivering those services (it was still the dial-up era, after all). Finally, some of the dot coms had totally idiotic, unworkable business models. Like [CyberRebate](_URL_3_) which offered 100% rebates on electronics which they were selling at 1000% markups. Apparently they couldn't find enough suckers to make the business model work. \n\nAnyway, when AOL merged with TimeWarner in one of the worst business deals in all of recorded history, it was a signal to the stock markets that internet companies had hit the big, big, big, big time. At this point, Wall Street began doing something that it tends to do when speculative fever hits: it began feeding on itself. In other words, investors weren't just investing in companies in order to give them capital and make them successful. Instead, they were simply buying and selling shares of these companies at insane rates, buying low and selling a little bit higher in order to make ever more money off the hype that was fueling these companies. Shares that were \"hot\" on the market no longer had anything to do with how good the underlying company was. All that mattered was that share values were going up every hour, and the more investors tried to buy in to a hot company, the faster share values went up.\n\nIt no longer mattered that the companies were founded on dumb ideas, or unworkable business models, or that their CEOs and chief officers were inexperienced naifs who had no idea what they were doing. All that mattered was that shares of _URL_0_ were 5% more valuable this week than they were last week. Sell them, and make a bundle! Speculation like this drove the value of some of these companies to insane levels. According to Wall Street, some of those companies were 10,000x more valuable on paper than they could ever hope to be in the real world. \n\nThen the inevitable happened. Some of those companies started to fail. They couldn't deliver products, or if they could, they couldn't deliver them at anything approaching a profit. All of a sudden Wall Street investors started to realize that the market had sunk billions of dollars into a sector that was full of charlatans, incompetents and overnight millionaires, and nobody really knew which businesses would fail and which would succeed. It didn't even matter at that point: when the panic finally set in, it suddenly was obvious that ALL of the companies were massively overvalued on the market, whether they were viable or not, simply because the trading frenzy had driven their share prices so high. \n\nAnd then, boom.",
"TL;DR The Wallstreet Journal published an article indicating that the Internet was highly unprofitable and no one should invest in it. Everyone follows the advice and companies go bankrupt.\n\nIn 1997 the \"speculative market\" speculated that the Internet was a bottomless pit of cash. Internet start ups required very little specialty, were cheap start ups and promised high rewards. So if you throw $100,000 at a company that wants to call itself Google speculation could place them at $1,000,000 in yearly revenues and you're going... that's easy money.\n\nWhich it was. Very few of these start ups ever did get listed on the NASDAQ, but the ones that did were just insanely high purely on speculation.\n\nOf course the business was never as good as what people were lead to believe. The primary form of income off of the Internet should have been sales. People should have been selling things online like eBay and Amazon. But that's just not the kind of profit model people were going with. People wanted to make money by offering free services.\n\nSo you might have web hosting businesses like Geocities, Angelfire, and Tripod. People build their websites here and spread their websites to everyone they can. Maybe each of these websites gets 100 hits a month. But if you have 100,000 of them, well now you have 10,000,000 hits a month. Investors like the sound of hits. Hits sound like views which in turn mean advertising views. Imagine a billboard in which every single month ten million people will see it... and it costs you a fraction of the cost.\n\nThis sounds great? But it's just not reality. In reality the same person might pass a billboard a million times. And that's just what it was on the Internet. The same people might visit a website 1000 times and would never look at the banner advertisements.\n\nBut advertisers were still paying for views. Worse yet was the ridiculous amounts of money being lost to \"fake views.\" People would be guaranteed certain traffic by advertising firms who would in turn have pop-up ads show up on websites. Of course, no one looks at a pop-up ad, everyone is just completely trained to ignore them.\n\nSo you have these giant websites investing in advertising for their personal websites and their businesses. Except the advertising industry is not actually providing you with any extra sales. You're getting your view totals up, but that metric just doesn't make sense.\n\nIn the end what people wanted was unique impressions on their websites, not the same guy refreshing your page 1000000 times.\n\nSo people stopped spending money on advertising. Advertising firms bellied up and websites with their own advertising packages began to shrink... or just crumble.\n\nWith advertising basically gone it meant that a lot of websites that relied entirely on advertising for sales simply had to go. Google was able to \"sell search engine optimization\" by having people pay to be at the top of their search engine, it was highly successful. Other search engines were not so successful.\n\nWhen it all came down to it people learned how the Internet worked. A lot of the websites that survived have thrived (like Google) and some that survived are barely surviving (like IGN).\n\nAfter the crash happened the way in which we do business on the Internet fundamentally changed. Pizza Hut for example invested in the technology to create a pizza, send in an order to the most local Pizza Hut and then schedule delivery. People learned that the Internet wasn't a place where you could make money off of the Internet itself, but where it had to have real world implications.\n\nWe've moved on to a third wave of Internet in which we have digital currencies, mass free content, and full on digital only purchases. A lot of people are questioning whether a lot of these really bad businesses practices can lead to another crash.",
"People realized that in reality, making an every day service virtual didn't necessarily give it real value. ",
"Documentary on it called what happened gives some stories and interviews with people who were there. What Happened - 2001 Documentary: _URL_0_",
"Bubbles are all the same: people buy into a trend, and drive the price up past the real value.\n\nIn the dotcom bubble, people were paying huge amounts for stock in internet companies with no profits and no assets. Eventually those companies started going out of business, and the whole house of cards came tumbling down.\n\nSame thing happened with the housing bubble: people are buying and selling houses very quickly, making money, but eventually they get stuck with a house that cost *WAY* more than they can afford, and they can't sell it. \n\nIt's a characteristic of bubbles that the early adopters get rich, and the late adopters get screwed.",
"If you want to watch it happen again watch the current tech boom in San Francisco. When Instagram sells for $1billion, things are not right.",
"people got stupid.\n\neveryone thought that an idea, despite how bad it was, would make money if it had an internet component\n\nbad ideas with \"www.\" in front of them are STILL bad ideas",
"The Internet as we know it first reached widespread use around 1994-5. Before that, there were things like BBSs, Usenet groups, and subscription services like Prodigy. Most of the general public had no idea those things even existed - they were mostly used on college campuses or by people involved in technology jobs. In 1995, you could go on Yahoo and find all kinds of web sites and click around them, and most companies, newspapers, etc. were online by then.\n\nIt was clear in 1995 that (1) the Internet was going to become a much larger part of the way that we lived and did business, and (2) the changes had only just begun, and so lots of people wanted to get in on that. From around 1995-2000, people created lots of new companies to take advantage of the Internet, and venture capitalists threw money at those new companies. After they got venture money and expanded, many of them became public, and lots of members of the public bought those stocks. Even people who didn't normally invest found that they could make a lot of money on Internet stocks, since almost every stock associated with the Internet just kept going up.\n\nWhat happened next was that almost all of the companies failed, and their stock either became worthless or worth much less money. Many of them had no real way to make money - they could attract customers but couldn't make money off the customers. People talked a lot about revenue growth, assuming that if the company's revenue was growing, it would eventually become profitable, but for many of them that wasn't the case. Many of the companies just lost more and more money as they got bigger until they couldn't find any more venture capitalists to finance them, or until the public wouldn't buy their stock for any real money anymore. Some of the most notorious failures were _URL_1_ (online pet supplies) and _URL_0_ (delivery of convenience store items).\n\nAround 2000, a lot of those companies were crashing at the same time, and there was a general sense that it was all a bubble, and that very few of those companies were really sustainable in the long-term. So investors started to dump their Internet stocks, and pretty soon it was a full-scale collapse, and you sold any Internet stocks you still had for whatever you could still get for them. It caused a recession from about 2001-3, since a lot of people lost a lot of money on it.",
"It took my money, that's what happened! I went from having a couple commas worth of stock to only 1...",
"Basically there was a huge 'gold rush' to come out with concepts that would 'never fail' and be be hugely profitable. Investors and VC were throwing billions of dollars at any company that started with 'e' or ended in '.com'. Some of them ended up becoming very successful (Amazon, eBay), but many many more were dumb ideas (ie _URL_0_ - lets ship 50 pound bags of dog food). They had huge market valuations even though they were bleeding money (You would get developers getting paid $250,000/year along with game rooms, free food and drinks, and pretty much any perk you could think of). \n\nOn top of that, there was a big pile of money made on Y2K projects (including by me) where essentially there was a big push to get rid of lots of archaic technological crap (pretty much anything prior to Windows 95), and to fix whatever problems there were. This kept the labor costs for the dot com companies high. \n\nEventually, the companies started running out of money without ever getting close to making a profit. Once that happened the companies started dropping like flies, taking billions of investments with them ",
"The short version is thus: \nI've got a business idea. We're going to sell a widget. But it's new and fancy because it's being sold on the internet at _URL_0_. What's that? no, I don't have a business plan. But I think you should give me a whole lot of money for my great idea. Thanks!",
"**Here it is...** *\"Really smart people got hypnotized into thinking that it was OK for a business to spend other people's money, and never pay it back. They convinced each other that they were all so smart, that they could invent these magic new businesses that did really cool things, and never had to make a profit - meaning spending more money than they made... kind of like me and mommy.\"* \n\nIn 2000, I owned a business that sold big, high-tech systems to way too many of these dot-coms. I will never, ever forget the spring of that year, which brought on some of the darkest times in my life, including the first layoffs in the companies 26 year history (I became the lucky owner in 1999.)\n\nMy kids were young at the time - in fact, one of them actually WAS 5 years old. And I can assure you, there was NOTHING that I could have told him or his brothers that would have adequately explained to them why I was always at work and not home having dinner with them... why I was always so stressed, and why their parents ended up having to live in separate houses. \n\n**THAT'S what happened in the \"dot com bubble in 2000!\"** ",
"As a software developer who was working in Silicon Valley during the bubble, I noticed an interesting effect. New startup companies were being formed at an astounding rate. Each startup needed to have at least one \"superstar\" programmer. Why? Partly to convince the venture capitalists of the company's ability to build the product. And I think partly to serve as a barrier to competitors. So such programmers were in very high demand. Meanwhile, a lot of people who otherwise would not have become software developers, did so for the money.\n\nThe result of this is that top talent (probably not just in engineering) became extremely diluted across companies. Instead of a team of competent developers, you would find one experienced engineer leading a team of novices. And many of the novices were not so much interested in becoming experienced engineers as making a quick buck.\n\nI believe an inability to build products would have eventually burst the bubble, even if confidence in the market viability of those products had remained high.\n",
"Just wait a few years and you will understand it all and you might think of whatsapp selling for billions to facebook. \n\ndotcom equivalency aol buys icq. ",
"The one I remember imploding worst of all was _URL_0_ . They had amazing superbowl commercials, a great name, product, and then....poof it was gone."
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f99d2w | how ram in mobile phones differs from ram in pc's. are they interchangeable?? | So much brouhaha over the 16gig ram variant of Samsung S20 Ultra with everyone immediately referring to laptops of similar or lower specification as if the RAM is interchangeable.
I'm a noob so clearly there's plenty I don't know. I'd like people in the know to help explain this.
Thanks Y'all | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f99d2w/eli5_how_ram_in_mobile_phones_differs_from_ram_in/ | {
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"The RAM chip is basically the same for phones, desktops/laptops and all electronics. The difference is the hardware they have to accomodate.\n\nComputer components produce alot of heat, so desktops and laptops require cooling systems. Phones do not have the space to encorporate active cooling systems so they rely on passive cooling to the environment and use special low power electronics.",
"The technology is the same, but that's about where it ends. Laptops and desktop computers usually use removable cards with the chips soldered on top of, whereas every mobile phone has the chips soldered directly on the motherboard."
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84ddv8 | why do men in samurai movies have that haircut? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/84ddv8/eli5_why_do_men_in_samurai_movies_have_that/ | {
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"The shaved pate,in combination with the chonmage (basicly an ancient manbun) was a traditional hairstyle which apparantly was indeed supposed to make wearing a helmet less hot. It became so iconic that they kept it even when not donning a helmet.\n\nOne thing to remember aswell is that its easier to treat headwounds when theres no hair in the way. (Which was apparantly a big reason why the mohawk haircut was popular with old GI's."
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3kgbsc | why do states educations vary so wildly? and how? | I went to high school in a state that ranks very very poorly every year in education. I've also had several jobs in multiple states working at companies of various sizes and I haven't seemed to be at a disadvantage based on my education. What makes X state's education system better or worse that others?
| explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3kgbsc/eli5_why_do_states_educations_vary_so_wildly_and/ | {
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"A lot has to do with money. NY spends $22.5k per year per student, ID spends $7.4k ([Census data](_URL_0_)). School spending is associated with better outcomes for poor students much more so than non-poor students. Really the best predictor of anyone's success is the environment they grow up in, and some states have a high percentage of people from poor households. Lots of poor people and low spending levels is a recipe for poor outcomes on average.\n\nI can't guess why you're in the situation you are without knowing any details. In general, if you went to college, a student from a poorly performing state will generally have stuff they just have to learn in college. If you're talking about workplace performance, it depends on the job. If you're a mechanic, you can get by with fewer math skills than if you're an engineer."
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[
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|
2s0z87 | how are movies, music, etc. available for nomination in an annual award ceremony over a year after commercial release? | For example, "Bound 2" by Kanye West was released as a single on **August 28, 2013**. It later released on the studio album *Yeezus* on June 18, 2013.
That single is currently nominated for not one, but **two categories of the 2015 Grammy Awards** (Best Rap/Sung Collaboration & Best Rap Song).
As far as I am aware, the nominees for the 2014 Grammy's were announced in early December of 2013 (December 6th). I would assume this leaves ample time for a major release, such as one of Kanye West's studio albums, to be recognized, reviewed, and voted on.
Could someone explain how instances like this occur? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2s0z87/eli5_how_are_movies_music_etc_available_for/ | {
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"It's not so much about the year an album was released but about the year it achieved prominence. It's just that most of the nominated work achieves prominence the year it is released. \n\nKanye released Yeezus in June 2013 but Bound 2 only got kinda big after the video came out, which was in November. \n\nYeah, my username is relevant."
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3qn2tw | why do some words end in -or instead of -er? | Such as conductor, carburetor, instructor, counselor, radiator etc., Why don't they just end in -er? Both endings mean "somebody or something that does something." They are both used to make a verb into a noun, but what influences which ending is used? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3qn2tw/eli5_why_do_some_words_end_in_or_instead_of_er/ | {
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"Taken from literally the first link when you google \"or vs er\":\n\n > Generally speaking, -er is much more common in English (which should come as no surprise since it has deep Germanic roots, see the link) and can be easily attached to any English verb to form the corresponding noun (drive — driver, run — runner, drink — drinker, etc.).\n\n > The suffix -or, on the other hand, comes from Latin, and is used much more seldom, basically where Latin would do it. Just try building the words drivor, runnor or drinkor, and see for yourself. In fact, Wiktionary lists only a handful of terms that were derived using this suffix, such as actor, author and sculptor, and goes on to provide the following usage notes:\n\n > English generally appends this suffix where Latin would do it—to the root of a Latin-type perfect passive participle. For other words, English tends to use the suffix -er. Occasionally both are used (computer vs. computor)."
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f1vo8e | how did insane conspiracies spread before the internet? | How did absurd and ridiculous theories spread before the days of the Internet or Social Media? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f1vo8e/eli5_how_did_insane_conspiracies_spread_before/ | {
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"The same way witches were called witches and murdered, through gossip, then in the modern era through stupid pseudo science supported by false photos and false articles.",
"People rote pamphlets and passed them out. People are still doing this. People wrote books, e.g. saying Space Aliens built the Pyramids, and sold a bunch of copies.",
"Word of mouth, pamphlets, chain letters, books, and occasional media exposure were the main methods.\n\nConspiracy theories to a lot longer to spread and often required a large organization to foster them. But once they did take hold, it took a lot longer to change people's minds. The internet hasn't make conspiracies theory worth so much as they have accelerated their lifecycle."
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cocnyt | why did french suppress other languages like occitan to become the national language? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cocnyt/eli5_why_did_french_suppress_other_languages_like/ | {
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"This is somehow \"normal\" when it comes to nation building. Many countries as we know them today had to push their national language from varieties spoken in the capital city, which was usually considered the educated language of the elites. If they hadn't done this, maybe that country wouldn't have become a single entity as they exist today.\n\nThe Iberian peninsula has Romance varieties like Catalan/Valencian, Castillian (modern Spanish), and Galician/Portuguese, and Basque, a language that is not Romance, but in its own family. From there two countries were born, Spain and Portugal. At some point in history they were a single country. If history had played differently, today the entire peninsula could have been a single country, and maybe Portuguese would be a regional language like Catalan is today. Instead, currently we have two countries, and some Catalans and Basques want to create their own countries.\n\nItalian has many varieties as well, Venetian, Florentininan, Sardinian, Sicilian, etc. They eventually settled in the varieties surrounding Rome and Florence as a standard Italian.\n\nThe German world has very heavy dialects in the South, Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, but also Austria and Switzerland, while in the north there are dialects in Niedersachsen and Nordrhein-Westfallen that are closer to Dutch. When the Prussians became the principal German kingdom, they basically created the Standard German by pushing their Berlinesse-Brandenburg dialect.\n\nIf you don't define a national language, you have fractures, like the process of Balkanization that occured in the Balkans, where Serbians, Croatians, Montenegrins, Bosnians, etc., basically speak the same language but with small differences and regionalisms. They consider their languages to be different, although most linguists classify them as just being varieties of the same language. Yugoslavia was supposed to be that single country, but it didn't work, and it just broke up.",
"Napoleon really formalized the language with the reinstatement of the Académie Français, which has existed for centuries and regulates the French language to this day. No other language has such a well established regulatory governing body. If you originally had a group of scholars of non-Occitan speaking French, they will reform the official language to the vocabulary and grammar they are using/speaking, and eventually things became standardized.\n\nEdit: it is stated that in 2008 the Académie Français opposed the French Government‘s attempt to recognize Occitan and the regional dialects as the languages of France. So there is a bit of snooty-ness there.\n\nEdit2: Francais*\n\nSource: _URL_0_",
"As /u/mel0nwarrior said, it's pretty much what almost every country in the world does. In the UK almost nobody speaks Gaelic or Welsh. Likewise in the US, there was (and still is!) a movement to force everyone to speak English, despite the fact that the US has had regions that were previously populated by French, German and/or Hispanic speakers.\n\nCountries that have more than 1 language as national languages tend to be the exception rather than the rule. There aren't many Belgiums or Switzerlands in the world."
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5no96n | what would the physical process of gene editing through such things as crispr look like? | Curious to how an average person could have their genes edited. What instruments would be used? How would it all go down? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5no96n/eli5_what_would_the_physical_process_of_gene/ | {
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"Well, gene editing in a grown person is still not really a well-developed technology. Things like CRISPR are usually done on cell cultures in petri dishes. A common procedure, lipfection, mostly looks like mixing clear liquids together with using a [pipette](_URL_1_) and [microcentrifuge tubes](_URL_0_) and adding it to whereever your cells are, which is invariably some clear plastic thing with one or more wells. If those cells are fertilized eggs, then they can grow into people with edited genes.\n\nFor a full-grown person, you would package the necessary molecules into a non-replicating virus and infect the person with it. I'm not sure what preparing the viruses would look like (probably mostly clear liquids and pipettes), but you would end up giving someone a shot or whatever to get the virus to the tissue you want to edit."
]
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"https://www.copybook.com/media/pharmaceutical/profiles/cardiff-university/migrated/images/Microcentrifuge-Tube-1b.jpg",
"http://wheaton.com/media/catalog/category/variable-volume-single-channel-pipettes.jpg"
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3ibhla | what is the actual reason for why stupid decisions and mistakes in our lives suddenly replay in our minds as we are trying to fall asleep? | Is it satan or psychology, guys? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ibhla/eli5_what_is_the_actual_reason_for_why_stupid/ | {
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"I think we think about them and assess them to learn from it to make sure we dont do it again"
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3knrt9 | while big internet websites have hundreds of servers,how the website has one ip address ? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3knrt9/eli5while_big_internet_websites_have_hundreds_of/ | {
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"There's something called a [load balancer](_URL_0_) that does nothing but take traffic from one IP address and sends it out to all of the servers associated with it.\n\nSo each of the servers will have their own IP address (likely only visible to the load balancer), but the way you get to them is through the one IP address of the website."
]
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"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_balancing_\\(computing\\)"
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||
8busaj | what causes evaporation rings in a cup? | For example, if you leave a coffee cup sitting for days while the coffee evaporates, when you come back to it there are multiple rings inside the cup, like tree rings. To me it seems the coffee would evaporate relatively evenly, leaving perhaps one ring at the very top.
Edited for clarity. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8busaj/eli5_what_causes_evaporation_rings_in_a_cup/ | {
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"The water evaporates, the suspended solids don't. \n\nCoffee has small coffee ground particles, and whatever dissolved out of the coffee, various minerals in the water, sugar, etc. When you take away the water, all those things form precipitates and crystals at the edge of the waterline making those concentric rings."
]
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8cik58 | article 1 section 8 of the us constitution? | > The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
I kind of get the main idea I suppose but I'm confused what exactly this part means:
> but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
Any help? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8cik58/eli5_article_1_section_8_of_the_us_constitution/ | {
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"All the federal taxes will be the same for everyone. No taxing one place or group more just because of who they are. That's how I understand it, anyway. Could be wrong.",
"It means all the fees shall be the same no matter where you are.\n\nFederal income tax, as an example, is uniform across the United States. Every employer imposes the same percentage of the tax to your income to be collected federally, according to your filing status and income bracket.\n\nSo if we make the same money and you live in California but I live in Texas, we pay rhe exact same percentage of tax to the fed. If I paid more than you by percentage and we made the same money, that would be unconstitutional.",
"That mainly exists as another extension of a general rule found throughout the constitution that the government cannot discriminate between states. The fed can't go and say \"everyone has an income tax of 20% except California, they get 50% because fuck California.\"\n\nIts not that all taxes are the same for everyone, but the general rules for tax are the same for everyone. Of course one can design the rules to discriminate in such a way but that is up for the supreme court to deliberate. ",
"People here are missing an important part of the answer. This has to do specifically with foreign policy. \"Duties\" and \"Imposts\" specifically refer to import/export customs, and \"excise\" taxes are consumption taxes on a particular commodity (such as gasoline taxes today, or tea taxes back then). One of the main arguments for the union (and the articles of confederation before them) was to present a unified front abroad. The point was to prohibit politicians from creating import/export taxes that favored one state or another in global trade."
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9tfe1s | do magnets work in space? are they the same as they are on earth? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9tfe1s/eli5_do_magnets_work_in_space_are_they_the_same/ | {
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"Well technically the Earth is a giant magnet, and it's in space, so yeah magnets work in space. ",
"Yes they work in space the same as the work on earth. Compasses work the same way as well but not at first glance. Magnetism isn’t dependent on gravity or our particular planet. ",
"Depends. Things like a compass that rely on the earth's magnetic field will not, as they will have nothing to latch onto, whereas more localized magnets like a standard refrigerator magnet still will adhere to other metal objects."
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4e2exk | there are pot farms and meth labs in the us. why aren't there cocaine farms or heroine farms? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4e2exk/eli5_there_are_pot_farms_and_meth_labs_in_the_us/ | {
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"Coca grows primarily in the Andes mountains, which have a rocky mountainous soil rich in minerals, lots of sunlight, and cool temperatures. Coca has also been grown at lower elevations even down into the Amazon basin, which has rainforest conditions. It has been found that plants grown at lower altitudes produce much lower levels of cocaine, so growing it outside of its native environment are likely to produce plants which are of little value other than as an ornamental plant.\n",
"Pot can be produced by growing plants and harvesting their buds, and the plants grow well in the US climate. They grow even better when cared for and with the right growing equipment (lights, temperature control, watering equipment, and so on).\n\nMarijuana plants have even been found growing wild. It's a very resilient plant, with a number of varieties from hemp, really only suitable for making fibers or getting oil from, to the ones you probably think of when talking about pot, which are very high in THC, the chemical that people ingest to get them high.\n\nMethamphetamine can be produced from chemicals available over the counter using known processes. It's dangerous as all hell, but it's also an extremely addictive drug, which encourages people to take risks in getting it.\n\nCocaine, on the other hand, is produced from the leaves of the coca plant. It does not grow in the US and would be far harder to cultivate. I imagine it would be possible but it would be extremely difficult and expensive. Also, penalties for cocaine possession tend to be much higher than marijuana, increasing the risk for such an operation. \n\nProducing cocaine from coca leaves involves soaking the leaves in one or more chemicals, from lime to kerosene or industrial solvents, depending on the specific process- and it requires a large amount of coca leaves. The process would be almost impossible to keep secret- the authorities would notice trucks carrying barrels full of chemicals to a production facility.\n\nAnd lastly, heroin is produced from opium poppy plants, which can in theory grow anywhere, but are very easy to cultivate in places like Afghanistan (and there is also very little civil authority to stop someone from doing it). The production process, similar to cocaine, involves multiple stages and various chemicals, which is activity that would be difficult to conceal as it requires both raw materials and a lot of space.\n\nIn short, the answer is that pot and meth can be produced with lower risk, at lower cost, and don't require very large-scale facilities like a warehouse and access to large amounts of chemicals. You can hide a pot grow or a small meth lab, and access to the raw materials is much easier to obtain.\n\nYou couldn't hide a building full of coca plants or a field of opium poppies, and the process for making the drugs out of those plants would also be pretty noticeable.\n",
"Heroin is made from opium, which requires much more space than marijuana. An acre of marijuana will produce around 250 kg of pot per year. An acre of opium poppies will only produce around 1 kg of heroin. And it's a lot more labor intensive to harvest and refine it. So most of the work is left to 3rd world countries like Afghanistan."
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2bynrt | what is actually happening to the sound we hear coming from something moving faster than sound? | I've been googling for like 15 minutes and either am not asking the question right, or google can't ELI5. When a plane flies overhead travelling faster than sound, we hear the 'boom.' Or at least sometimes, according to some stuff I read. Anyway, why is it a boom? Why wouldn't the 'sound trail' of the engine and everything else just come propagating down toward us normally after the plane passed? Follow up question, and maybe the one I'm more interested in. If a medium-sized rock went flying by your head at supersonic speed, would you hear a little boom? Why/why not? What the heck is going on at supersonic speeds? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2bynrt/eli5_what_is_actually_happening_to_the_sound_we/ | {
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"[From Wikipedia:](_URL_0_)\n\nWhen an aircraft passes through the air it creates a series of pressure waves in front of it and behind it, similar to the bow and stern waves created by a boat. These waves travel at the speed of sound, and as the speed of the object increases, the waves are forced together, or compressed, because they cannot get out of the way of each other. Eventually they merge into a single shock wave.",
"The boom is breaking the sound barrier. You have punched through the waves in front of you that you are generating. As I understand it, the boom is behind the plane as you are travelling faster than it. From someone on the ground, the difference between hearing the boom (and triangulating it's origin with our two ears) and seeing the plane depends on the distance involved. If the plane is very far away then you're likely to not even hear the boom or if you do it will be very far behind the plane. The sound of the plane would be overwhelmed by the boom. \n\nAs to your rocket question, it depends on when it broke the speed of sound. If it broke it miles and miles before you observe it, then you''ll not hear the boom. Just the sound of the engines far behind where you see the plane. \n\nSound is not as complicated as light. It's simply waves moving through a medium. Think about it like waves on a still pool of water. If you disturb the still water, waves go pulsing out. Now imagine starting to accelerate towards those waves from the origin. At come point you're going to go faster than the wave and break through. That will cause other waves to pulse out. ",
"The \"sound trail\" of the engine does come propagating down toward you normally. But it's not just the engine noise - it's the wave of compressed air caused by the plane smashing air together.\n\nWhen your car moves through the air, it hits air in front of it. That air rebounds off the car, bouncing forward and hitting more air in front of it. This creates a pressure wave in front of the car, basically air molecules bouncing into each other and saying \"get out of the way! There's a car coming!\". This wave moves at the speed of sound. If you use a supersonic plane instead of a car, then the plane actually outruns this wave. The plane hits the air molecules before the \"get out of the way!\" message does. So the molecules get smashed together by the front of the plane, creating an area of super-compressed air. That area then bleeds off the sides of the airplane, moving sideways to finally get out of the way of the plane. But the compressed air stays compressed, now moving sideways at the speed of sound. When it passes your air you hear a \"boom\", because that's literally what sound is: compression waves in the air, and so if your ear senses a big compression wave it registers as a big boom.\n\nYes, if a supersonic rock flew by, you'd hear a boom. Or really a \"snap\" or a \"crack\", depending on the size of the rock. You know a whipcrack? That's the sound of the whip moving at supersonic speeds."
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558faj | what use is it using antidepressants since the brain chemistry goes back to its pretreatment level on stopping medication? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/558faj/eli5_what_use_is_it_using_antidepressants_since/ | {
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"Because they can help you function while you take them. And sometimes that means you will be on them the rest of your life. Sometimes they are a way to support you while you incorporate other techniques that can help you deal with your depression / get away from elements in your life causing that depression. \n\nYour question is basically like asking 'what use is it to give someone without legs a wheelchair if their legs won't regrow when they don't use it'.",
"In some cases, with some disorders, a person *will* have to be on medication for their entire lives.\n\nBut in other cases, a person will take medication *temporarily* as part of the therapy. For example, various talk therapies are *very* effective for many anxiety disorders. However, the disorder itself can make it very difficult to participate in those therapies. So for many patients, taking medication can reduce symptoms enough to get into therapy, which in turn helps the deal with the actual problem in a permanent way, at which point medication can be discontinued. ",
"For most people, depression isn't a lifelong illness, it's a temporary one. Medication can help get you through those few months or years, and once your life situation has turned around you can get off of them.\n\nSometimes your brain just needs a \"reset to normal levels\" to start producing and responding to the appropriate chemicals normally, as well. Just getting back up to the normal levels of dopamine, serotonin, or norepinephrine can jar your brain into working again.\n\nFinally, in the case of lifelong depression like the sort I have, taking medication makes it easier to get out of bed in the morning and go about my day. My energy levels are up, and I'm able to function almost like a normal person. Taking a few pills every day allows me to do that, and without them I'm a total mess. You ask \"what use is it\", but I think you're starting from a false premise. Why take medication to help treat your Parkinson's? You'll just go back to shaking when if you stop taking them. Why take medication to treat your diabetes if you'll just crash if you stop taking it? Or manage your blood pressure? Or treat your cancer? Or MS?\nWe take the meds because they make life livable, and we don't intend to ever stop taking those meds. ",
"You might also ask what's the use of taking blood pressure medication or heart medication or insulin if the body does not learn from taking the medication? In some cases the medication's role is to allow the person time and opportunity to change behaviors and get healthier so that they then need less or no medication. \n\nPeople can loose weight, start exercising, change diet, etc and reduce or eliminate the need for the medications because they have changed their behaviors and body such that they no longer need the medication. For **some** people antidepressants work that way. They are tool to allow talk therapy, behavior and life style changes (diet, exercise, meditation, guided visualization, etc), and other things to change so eventually less or no medication is needed long term. It is a splint to strengthen and support them during the change period.\n\nFor others the brain chemistry help via medication is needed long term just as some people have high blood pressure due to genetic factors and must take always medication. The life style changes mentioned above are still important as they can reduce the dosage need in some cases and even the type of medication used. Also as humans age their bodies change so medication levels and types can change over time due to changes in brains and bodies.\n\nFor some the idea that they will need to use medication long term is a difficult thing to accept. But as with a person with blood pressure issues or diabetes - or for that matter needing to wear glasses - we sometimes have to accept that human bodies are complex and sometimes need help to work optimally. If a person wants to see better they will wear glasses. Hear better? - they will wear hearing aids. If we want to function differently in the world sometimes the answer is antidepressants coupled with talk therapy."
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e8s54d | why have we yet found evidence of extraterrestrial life? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e8s54d/eli5_why_have_we_yet_found_evidence_of/ | {
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"Space is vast and technology evolution is super fast. Lift of earth is 4.54 billion years, homo sapiens are 200,000 years, but we are using radio wage for only the last 120 years. The Milky way, our galaxy, is 200,000 light year in diameter, which mean that our radio waves travelled 0.000144% of our milky way. So the chance of an alien species detecting our signal is really small and this should be similar very slim for us to receive a signal from an alien civilisation. If you look at us 120 years of radio out of 4.54 billions of life existing, there is a far greater chance that extraterrestrial life is not blasting radio wave in space, but it's more a primitive life form or even bacteria.\n\nThe second question is about how much time does a species will be able to send signals before it become instinct or how much time before it start using a technology so far ahead of us that we wouldn't even realising it if we see trace of it. The window of opportunity during which we could detect each other could be very small in the grand scheme of things."
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159pev | do planes travel "faster" when they fly against the earth's rotation? are the air and ground speed the same? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/159pev/do_planes_travel_faster_when_they_fly_against_the/ | {
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"No, because the air is moving with the earth. Jetstreams and winds are the reason it can be faster going one way on a flight than the return trip.\n\nThe Earth's rotation does, however, come into play when it comes to rockets. That's why they're launched East (in the direction of the Earth's rotation)."
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10mf4i | what the going on in a router/server? | IP address? subnet? Subnet mask? Defaut Gateway?
More words we don't know?
| explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/10mf4i/what_the_going_on_in_a_routerserver/ | {
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"1. Router = mail dispatcher or post office worker.\n2. IP address = address.\n3. Subnet (mask) = zip code (you are pretending to be 5... so this is roughly correct).\n4. Gateway = nearest post office.\n5. Packet = mail.\n\nYou take your mail, put a destination address on it. You then take the mail to your nearest post office that belongs to your area. The post office then looks at the address and (complicatedly, perhaps through intermediaries) dispatches your mail to the post office that belongs to the destination address's zip code. A mail man then delivers it to the correct location.\n\nA rough translation of this works for the internet as well. Same kind of difficulties as well. You have a company with a mail room that knows your \"office room number\" and delivers your mail to you? That's roughly what the router in your apartment does - it knows all the internal addresses and presents one single external address to the rest of the internet. When it receives packets, it reroutes them based on its internal set of rules to the individual machines you own. This is called NAT. Ever notice that certain post offices take longer to ship your stuff or are always busy? Ever go to a different office to mail your package? Routers do a similar thing - it's why they are called \"routers\". They handle congestion control, lost packets, dropped packets, addresses changing (think redistricting), addresses expiring (buildings being demolished), addresses being forwarded or updated (self explanatory). The exact details... well... _URL_0_\n\nOh and server is computereze of \"associate\" or \"representative\". If you are talking to someone and you are expecting them to do work, they are the server and you are the client. The server can turn around and talk to someone else and now they are the client and that other person is the server. Of course, just as in real life, the role is usually mixed in with the person itself. So we sometimes refer to the physical machine facing a customer or providing a service as a \"server\" rather than the only the role it's playing at that particular moment.",
"More words:\n\nMAC address: your latitude/longitude (a different form of addressing used at a different layer - your mailman asks his gps to take him on his route and the GPS deals in lat/long).\n\nTCP: the postal class system (sure, you know the destination, but do you want it first class, express or priority? Do you want address confirmation? Tracking? Insurance?).\n\nHTTP: one format of your letter geared towards text (From:... To:... Dear Ma'am, ... Yours Sincerely, Name)\n\nFTP: another format geared towards getting files (From:... To:Purchasre dept Invoice with Total)\n\nSSH: yet another format geared towards security (None shall pass! ... Then you shall die!)\n\n\nNotice how the message protocol has nothing to do with TCP which has nothing to do with IP which has nothing to do with MAC - except in that they are somewhat related and some of them work better with others. Don't try to mail concrete blocks through the USPS. Don't try to send your international diplomatic mail through first class post. They may work - but it's not appropriate nor is it designed for it. Similar situation with communicating on the internet in general."
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1kijqh | how can pandas survive on a diet of 99% bamboo while humans have to eat a diverse range of food?. | Humans are told that they require various types of food to ensure optimum health. Why is it that Pandas are able to thrive on diets solely based on Bamboo when they are quite large animals. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1kijqh/eli5_how_can_pandas_survive_on_a_diet_of_99/ | {
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"courtesy of _URL_0_:\n\n > As the nutrition level of bamboo is low, giant pandas take four measures to meet their needs. The first is to eat bamboo in huge amounts. The second is to choose the best variety and plant part according to season. For instance, they take tender parts of the bamboo, which have more nutrition and less fibre when it is available. The third is to feed on the protein-rich remains of animal bodies left by other predators or small animals they have caught by themselves. The fourth is to reduce their energy consumption.\n\nhumans dont have the stomach capacity to deal with the necessary amounts of food we'd need to consume if we started eating only bamboo. and we're spread all over the planet, so our needs are pretty diverse and unusual, compared to more localised species. \n\nthat being said, we can actually live on a very limited diet. in a program I watched about hoarders once, there was a guy that literally couldnt cook normal food due to all the stuff cluttering up his house (he had to swim through rubbish to get to his kitchen) and he did just fine by eating only two boiled eggs a day.",
"Pandas are peculiar animals because they're anatomically carnivores, but they act like herbivores. The reason they're able to do this is because pandas have *symbiotic bacteria* in their digestive systems that allow them to digest something called *cellulose.* Cellulose is a chemical made up of many thousands of *glucose* molecules polymerized together. Most animals can only digest cellulose inefficiently, if at all. But pandas have those symbiotic bacteria in their guts that consume cellulose and excrete various other molecules which the pandas *can* digest.\n\nBasically the way it must've happened is that many millions of years ago, the panda's ancestors had diets more similar to a typical modern-day bear, being opportunistic omnivores — meaning they ate pretty much the same kinds of foods humans can eat. But one particular ancestral proto-panda got infected with an intestinal bacterium and managed *not* to die from it, through some random genetic mutation that allowed it to tolerate those gut bacteria. That not-a-panda was able to digest cellulose more efficiently than its siblings, so it could get more nutrition out of plants like bamboo. Shake-and-bake for a few million years, and you have a type of bear which is adapted to live off cellulose as its primary source of energy.",
"My understanding is that pandas hardly *thrive.* They've evolved into a kind of over-specialized dead-end. They are a dying species, and it isn't just because of humans destroying their habitat. Their caloric and nutritional demands are difficult to supply via the one thing they've evolved to eat. Birth rates for pandas are low, and infant mortality is high. Pandas are going the way of the dinosaurs. Humans are massively difersified. We can get our nutrients from a great many things that can be found almost anywhwere. As much as humans have threatened the food supply of the panda, we are also going to be the only hope for the species' long-term survival. "
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2osrnb | what happens during an employee background check? | I'm responsible for conducting interviews as a hiring manager, but not all that involved in the HR/bureaucracy-related stuff. After I decide to hire someone, HR runs a background check on the candidate, and I'm told that it takes 5-10 days, closer to 10 in most cases. What I'm not told is why does it take so long and what exactly are they checking for? Isn't it something that can be easily completed at the push of a button? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2osrnb/eli5_what_happens_during_an_employee_background/ | {
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"The majority of background checking is credit history and criminal history. Also if they have judgments like child support, liens and other civil matters. They also usually have to pass a drug test, which takes some time. Credit checks are quick. I don't know the process for the legal/criminal checks.",
"Drug test, crime history, previous employment, family, personality, credit check, level of education, and a few other big things. The rest are minor things and differ from person to person."
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8yxq6y | why are there random times when everything looks very detailed and surreal? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8yxq6y/eli5_why_are_there_random_times_when_everything/ | {
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"For me those moments always seem related to either wind (moving certain types of leaves or plants in an interesting way) or something strange which has changed the color of sunlight (such as smoke from a distant fire making light more red or the greenish light before a tornado/severe thunderstorm).",
"This is anecdotal experience that is not shared by everyone, nor is it experienced the same by everyone. Give a better description of your experience so we can break down anything that is an objective fact."
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6w8jhn | why does resign v fired make a difference, either way you're out right? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6w8jhn/eli5_why_does_resign_v_fired_make_a_difference/ | {
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"It makes a difference for things like unemployment payments. You can't resign and then go collect unemployment.",
"There are laws that might require your employer to rehire terminated employees before new ones. The unemployment laws might have a different waiting period for people who quit vs people who were fired. Labor law is super complicated, and there are many, many special cases.",
"If a person resigns, it can be for any number of reasons in which they chose to move on from that place of employment. If a person is fired, not laid off, it means one of a few things. They were performing poorly or failing at their job or doing something else, like stealing, causing their employer to remove them.\n\n One is a voluntary change the person has made, the other involuntary and as a reflection of the job they performed. ",
"Resigning is leaving of your own volition. Fired is being unwillingly removed.\n\nAlthough for people like Gorka (I assume that's what brought on the question) the difference may be immaterial; it is traditional to fire White House staff by asking them to resign.\n\nBut for regular schlubs like you and me, quitting vs. being fired matters for whether or not you qualify for unemployment benefits and it will make a difference to potential future employers.",
"Fired means you did your job poorly, which hurts your prospect of getting another job. It also implies chaos and strife within an organization.\n\nResigned means you chose to leave, everything was peachy, you just decided it was time to do something else, like spend more time with your family. It makes the organization seem more benevolent and the parting cordial."
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61vr2y | if an inmate on death row wants a very specific and elaborately detailed meal prepared, who cooks it? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/61vr2y/eli5_if_an_inmate_on_death_row_wants_a_very/ | {
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"There's no right to get whatever you want for your last meal. If you make a ridiculous request, I'm pretty sure most prison wardens will just tell you to try again."
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4gjmxt | when a bilingual person is speaking in a non-english language, why to they pronounce the english words with such accent? | My experiences that lead to this question are in an environment where I work with many home improvement laborers that are American born, speak perfect English, but fluently bilingual. As an example they will be conversing with a customer about a counter top made of Formica (For·mi·ca) and they will turn to their bilingual helper and, in Spanish, request them to get the Formeeeka. The customer will then tell them they would like to pay with a MasterCard, they will call in the MasteeeeCar number in Spanish to our bi-lingual office manager.
***I will also Edit to clarify that in my limited experiences, this is two bilingual people conversing who's first language is both English (Americans born and raised of latino decent) | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4gjmxt/eli5_when_a_bilingual_person_is_speaking_in_a/ | {
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"There are certain ranges of sounds which exist within a language, called phonemes. These are not shared between languages although some may sound similar, and so when someone is speaking a language they may mentally be prepared with that set of sounds. Switching sets is mentally more difficult than just pronouncing the foreign word a bit oddly.",
"Well...everyone is speaking with an accent. These individuals are selecting the use of the accent to maximize communication with a specific audience. If you're speaking spanish the word \"mastercard\" is rarely said the way an english speaker would say it because those sounds are \"foreign\", and hard to understand. So, the adaptable and bi-lingual individuals uses the accent that is going to be most effective. It's all in effort to be an effective communicator!\n\nWhen we say there is a \"right way\" to say something we're either talking about relatively antiquated ideas of \"proper english\" (e.g. the british would say americans say most everything wrong by this standard), or we're very pragmatically helping someone who is from somewhere else communicate effectively so they can operate in a new area, or with different people (e.g. the foreigner who moves to american will - for better or worse - be more effective if they communicate in the local accent and dialect than if they use their own. A fascinating example is india. It is easily argued that Indian-english - which you regard as having a very strong accent - is the most common english dialect out there given the number of lifelong speakers who speak in that accent and dialect. Are they using the \"correct\" english? Or am I? The problem is with the question!",
"The most important thing about language is that the the message is understood. You can be an English genius and it'll be meaningless if your listener doesn't understand you.\n\nIf you were to talk to children, you would talk in a way that is on their level without even realising it. The same is applied when talking to adults and obviously your peers. \n\nWhen talking to someone who isn't fluent in English, you would then use a common ground to ensure maximum effectiveness, without overdoing it and looking like a condescending dick.\n\nMost bilingual children who are first generation will experience this. They would not be able to understand their parents if they were to expect proper English nor would their parent/s understand them when they talk in a way that they would to a westerner/native English speaker.\n\nThis is why English speakers have such a hard time understanding a foreigner, yet a complete stranger with the same background can instally communicate with that person.\n\n",
"For Japanese, it's using the word with japanese sounds since someone who is japanese only would most likely not understand the work otherwise. \n\nFor example... \n\nTelevision becomes Terebi, or debit card becomes debitto ka-do"
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3uxz6t | why do some commercials get interrupted by some number tones? | The tones are exactly the same like when you press the number on a telephone. I wonder why and their purpose. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3uxz6t/eli5_why_do_some_commercials_get_interrupted_by/ | {
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"These are signals from the cable network to the local cable TV company that it's time to play a commercial. You aren't actually supposed to hear them.\n\n[source.](_URL_0_)"
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1pyupu | why do people have so much pride or feel embarrassment when their favorite sports team wins or loses a game that they themselves haven't contributed to the outcome? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1pyupu/eli5_why_do_people_have_so_much_pride_or_feel/ | {
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"As a Bills fan who regularly has his weekend ruined by the predictable loss of his favorite team...I wish you godspeed in finding the answer to this question. The pride part I haven't felt in awhile.",
"Because you associate yourself with that team and when you cheer for that team you become part of them (not literally). ",
"They haven't contributed to the outcome of the *game,* sure. But they *have* contributed to the *team.* They bought the tickets and the merch, they watch the games, etc.\n\nThere's also a substantial amount of emotional investment, as well, which is a decidedly human (read: not necessarily rational) endeavor. To that end, you could ask the same question about any number of things. Why did I cry like a baby when\n\n**SONG OF ICE AND FIRE SPOILER ALERT**\n\n^Ned ^Stark ^got ^his ^head ^cut ^off?\n\n**/SONG OF ICE AND FIRE SPOILER ALERT**\n\nAfter all, I'm not a Stark of Winterfell, or any of the Starks' bannermen. There's nothing I did or could have done that would have helped. And more to the point, the entire story's fictional. Yet I felt it carried a profound and personal importance.\n\nSports are much the same. People pour themselves into a thing. When that thing turns out favorably, it's glorious. When it turns out poorly, it's heartbreaking.\n\nEdit: Formatting.",
"Fanatics (those people who claim that \"because I wore my special unwashed socks, they won\" or something similar) aside, most of the pride/embarrassment that you're referencing is a result of perceived emotional or mental investment. \n\nWhether said investment's a rational thing is something else entirely.",
"Remember the feeling you got when the Death Star blew up? I bet you felt pretty good, because you were emotionally invested in fight aginst the empire. You didn't have anything real on the line, but you would feel pretty bad if Luke didn't trust the Force. It's the same thing with sports, except more intense because you share the gained/lost \"emotional capital\"",
"My Dad attempted to explain this as Tribal support, since many are fans of teams from their home state/town/location, they feel an at home connection similar to that of tribal warriors when they returned home after a battle. It sort of made sense at the time...",
"I think it has some connection with our evolution. Essentially we came from a long, long line of tribal warfare. Most of us don't engage in that anymore, and so to scratch that itch instead we 'ally' ourselves with a team in what is essentially an organized fight (pretty much all sports are competitions, yeah?). Teams even represent towns, and therefore people of a certain region. They go off to battle against other teams, and whether they win or lose taps into the honor of the people who support them. Whenever I watch football, I like to think how similar it is to ancient Rome watching gladiators duke it out."
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f89oqz | why does electricity appear blue but sparks from electricity are yellow-ish orange | Driving down the road yesterday they were repairing some electrical lines and I guess one of them sparked and it left a trail of blue sparks on the ground. But when I hook up a battery and short it with a wire sparks appear an orangish-yellow color.
Anyone know why? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f89oqz/eli5_why_does_electricity_appear_blue_but_sparks/ | {
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"Sparks are, generally, not actually the electricity itself. Instead, they are small slivers of super-heated metal. The color is dependant on heat.\n\nNow, sometimes it is electricity jumping from the source to a grounded object. In these cases, it will primarily be a flash of white light, but may tint blue depending on atmospheric conditions.\n\nEdit: To clarify, the white and blue is the air super-heating, not electricity itself. You *might* see it go into the reds, but it is less likely.",
"None of the answers so far have correctly mentioned the reason why electricity often appears blue. Electrical sparks are a result of ionizing the nitrogen in the air, which glows violet. It’s the same phenomenon that makes neon tubes glow.\n\nThe yellow and orange sparks you see are little bits of hot metal flying off whatever the electricity is burning up.",
"Sparks are just hot pieces of things (usually metal), and they just happen to be glowing in that temperature range to produce red to white light. \"Electricity\" is that white/blue/sometimes purpleish color when it arcs because it's actually turning certain elements in the air into a plasma. The arc is so hot it's ripping electrons off the atoms, ionizing the gas, and the color light it gives off (called it's emission spectrum) is that bright blue color.",
"blue = glowing nitrogen (high voltage through a stable gas makes it glow - this is how fluorescent lights and Neon signs work)\n\norange = Burning oxygen\n\n & #x200B;\n\nElectrical arcs are blue, because they go through the air and make it glow, and since the air is mostly nitrogen, you get nitrogen blue.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nWhen you hook up a battery you should see both blue AND orange sparks, blue as you get close, and then orange after contact, because the orange sparks are from oxygen, a fuel source, and heat all meeting to create combustion together.",
"The electricity itself isn't blue, per se. It's the ionization of Nitrogen in the air that makes it look that way. When you burn metals or create a spark, you aren't ionizing Nitrogen in the air, instead you are burning the material that caused the spark, which is going to burn a different color.\n\nThat's about as ELI5 as I could get lol.",
"Electricity doesn't have a color. Light is made of tiny particles called photons, while electricity is made of electrons. When you \"see\" electricity, you are seeing a side effect of electricity, not the electricity itself. When electricity moves in outer space, where there is nothing for it to interact with, it is invisible! \n\nWhen you see sparks or lightning on earth, you are seeing ionized air created by electricity. Ionized oxygen and nitrogen glow a blueish color, and together oxygen and nitrogen make up about 99% of the atmosphere. If Earth's atmosphere was made of a different gas, sparks and lightning would be a different color! For instance a planet with an atmosphere made mostly of Neon would have bright red lightning! \n\nWhen you see red or yellow \"sparks\" caused by electricity (such as coming off an electric welder or the explosion of an electric transformer), you aren't seeing electricity, but tiny pieces of metal heated up to red or yellow hot. Electricity heated these pieces up and caused them to break off and fly away, but the electricity is invisible. You can see similar sparks come from non-electrical causes such as a flint/steel fire lighter, or metal being ground with abrasives. \n\nThere is another type of electricity-to-light effect you see every day but might not notice: light bulbs! There are several types of electric lights. In none of them do you \"see\" electricity, only its side effects. \n\n1. Old fashioned incandescent bulbs - these work by heating up a wire to be very very hot, so that it glows yellow white. There is a protective glass bulb around the wire filled with gas that prevents the wire from burning up. \n\n2. Arc bulbs - these work almost like lightning! Electricity flows through a gas inside the bulb and ionizes the gas, creating light. Different gasses glow different colors. White fluorescent lamps are a special type of arc bulb. Another common type are the yellowish bulbs used in some street lamps, which are filled mostly with sodium gas, which glows yellow when ionized. \n\n3. LED light bulbs are the newest type and are becoming more common. They use a special type of chip like in a computer that converts electrical energy to light energy. The electricity flows through the chip invisibly, the light is emitted by the chip due to complicated physics that are beyond ELI5."
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5l1ljo | why can't we survive in space without spacesuits? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5l1ljo/eli5why_cant_we_survive_in_space_without/ | {
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"we are largely composed of water and space is a vacuum (and very very cold, though the aforementioned vacuum makes this less of an issue since there is so little mass to actually absorb the heat)\n\nwater boils in a vacuum, and as it turns out, boiling blood is not good for humans.",
"Space is deadly in many different ways and it would just be race to see what kills you first if you went out without the spacesuit.\n\nThe easiest to understand is the lack of air. There is a vacuum or near vacuum in space and nothing to breath. Without oxygen from the air you asphyxiate.\n\nHowever the lack of air to breath will not kill you because you might be fine without oxygen for a minute or even a few minutes and other stuff will kill you first.\n\nThe lack of atmosphere and air pressure will also get you in other ways. You may have seen movies showing people exploding like a balloon from explosive decompression but the truth is the difference between the normal pressure and no pressure is exactly one atmospheric pressure, which is not enough to actually explode a human body. It will still kill you though, just not explosively.\n\nIt will still do a number on you though if you try to hold your breath. If you let the air gently escape from your lungs you will live a few moments longer.\n\nFluids exposed to the vacuum will boil away due to the lack of pressure which will lead to bad things happening to any parts of your body where fluids are exposed to the outside.\n\nGenerally space if neither hot nor cold. Vacuum will insulate and keep you the same temperature you are like a vacuum flask will keep hot drinks hot and cold drinks cold.\n\nSo other than the whole fluids boiling away and freezing over the wet parts of your body, the more solid parts of you won't freeze or boil from being exposed to vacuum. You won't be able to get rid of waste heat, which might lead to overheating if you lived long enough (which you won't).\n\nThere is also the problem that in space you are exposed to all sorts of unfiltered radiation. Sunshine can be surprisingly lethal if you are exposed to it completely unfiltered by any atmosphere or spacesuit and it might even heat you up with you having no way to radiate heat to cook you (or rather your dead body).\n\nThere are many other problems that would develop if you lived long enough but generally the lack of oxygen and the lack of pressure are the most pressing problems."
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1jqhhx | the phrase "the observable universe." why are some parts of the universe unobservable? how large is the observable universe relative to the whole universe? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1jqhhx/eli5_the_phrase_the_observable_universe_why_are/ | {
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"Because light travels at a fixed speed (299,792,458 m/s) and the universe (as we know it) has a finite age (roughly 13.77 billion years or 4.354±0.012×10^17 seconds), there are some areas of our universe which we cannot \"see\" via any wave in the electromagnetic spectrum as there is more distance ( > 1.305 x 10^26 m) than said wave could travel in 13.77 billion years.",
"Some parts of the universe are unobservable because the speed of light is limited - not enough time has passed since the origins of the universe's expansion, for light from that distance to reach the Earth.\n\nNo one knows how large the unobserved universe is - it is presumed to be infinite, but - no one knows."
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2v15fr | why is the range from boiling to "absolute hot" much, much longer than the range from freezing to absolute cold? | Per [this post](_URL_0_) from /r/space, temperatures go from absolute cold, -273.15 degrees C, to water freezing at 0C, to water boiling at 100C, then all the way to fuck-all 1 decillion degrees. Why is the range of hot so much longer than the range for cold? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2v15fr/eli5_why_is_the_range_from_boiling_to_absolute/ | {
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"Because you choose to think of freezing point as what should be the middle. It's like saying why is A-D a shorter than D-Z.",
"Because what you think of as hot or cold are relative to our way of life on earth. The Celsius scale uses 0 / 100 as the temperatures that water freezes and boils at 1 atmosphere of pressure (roughly sea level). \n\nBut when you break it down, all that temperature really is is a measure of the kinetic energy that whatever you're measuring has. It just so happens for us that absolute zero is only 273.15 degrees colder than the freezing point of water on earth at sea level. That's it, nothing more. ",
"How many banana peels could you have in your front lawn?\n\nIt is pretty clear there is a minimum number, namely zero. But what is the maximum number? Is a tower of banana peels one mile high still *in* your front yard? Do they still count as banana peels if the ones on the bottom are crushed into sludge? Is there any point where adding one more banana peel will put the pile beyond the definition of *in*?\n\nTemperature works the same way. It represents the average amount of kinetic energy an object's molecules have, essentially how fast are they be-bopping around. It is pretty clear there is a minimum speed, zero (more or less), achieved at absolute zero.\n\nBut there is no clear cut absolute hot, it all comes done to how your define temperature. If an substance's average kinetic energy is too high for molecules to hold together, does temperature still mean anything? What if it is too high for atoms to exist? Subatomic particles?\n\nIf you really needed an upper bound, take all the energy in the entire universe, put it all in one place, and recreate The Big Bang. The first 10^-43 seconds after the Big Bang is known as the Planck Epoch, and is the smallest amount of time the modern physics can represent in any meaningful way. During that brief epoch, the temperature of the fledgling universe would have been over 10^32 C.\n\nYou really can't get any hotter than that.",
"The real question you should be asking is, \"why do temperatures that we as humans frequently interact with (such as those from the freezing to boiling point of water) fall so much closer to the low end of observable temperatures in the universe?\". The answer to this question is that, in order for solid matter to exist, the system can't be too hot. As more heat is added to a system the molecules gain more kinetic energy and intermolecular bonds break, which doesn't allow for solid matter to exist."
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4p2fpg | how do flies deal with all the bacteria they attract? | Their main source of food being havens for bacteria, how do they themselves last any amount of time being covered in the stuff? Does it just not matter if they begin to be affected because their life span is so naturally short? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4p2fpg/eli5_how_do_flies_deal_with_all_the_bacteria_they/ | {
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"Flies have an immune system that's fairly similar to our own.\n\nThey share the ancient 'innate' system that's made up of anti-bacterial molecules and certain cells that kill bacteria, but lack the more specialised and sophisticated 'adaptive' immune system that's only found in jawed vertebrates. So they don't have immunological 'memory' that the adaptive immune system provides (and why would they? Like you said, they don't live very long!), just a very strong 'front-line' defence.\n\nYou're right in thinking that the bacteria should attack the fly. After all, flies are a mass of delicious things that bacteria need to survive: carbohydrates, lipids, proteins. But the fly fights back with its own immune system that's evolved over millennia to deal with bacteria.\n\nIn fact the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) arguably gave birth to modern immunology. There was a gene in flies called 'Toll' (it means 'weird' in German), which immunologists knew protected flies from infection. In 1996 it was found that humans also possess this gene - and now the 'Toll-like receptors' are understood to be pretty fundamental to the human immune system."
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4e9j8t | why is it important to land rockets on barges? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4e9j8t/eli5_why_is_it_important_to_land_rockets_on_barges/ | {
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"Well, the rockets are extremely expensive. If we can get the rocket back, we can refill it with fuel and we don't have to pay to build a new one. The barge catches the rocket so we can get it back. And as for why we don't just fly it back to where it came from, well, fuel is kind of heavy, so you can't put a whole lot into a rocket. And it takes a lot of fuel to slow a rocket down, turn it around, and get it to fly back in the direction it came from. So instead they shoot it out in a direction where it can come down without destroying anything else around it, i.e. a large body of water. \n\n(I am not a rocket doctor I just read an article about this the other day, there may be more to it!)",
"The important thing is landing back on earth not necessarily the water but it's safer and easier to land on water ",
"**I RECOMMED YOU WATCH THIS VIDEO BY THE VERGE TO EXPLAIN BETTER THAN I CAN: _URL_0_\n\nIn the news you will have heard about the rocket being launched and then landing on the floating barge. This actually isn't the rocket but the Engine of the rocket, which helped get it out of the atmosphere. The engines cost lots of money, however they are usually only used once, and then destroyed or lost after they detach from the rest of the rocket.\n\n\nWhen rockets launch however, they launch it in a curved line to help the rocket get into orbit. This means that to get back to the original take off point, the engine would have to use carry fuel, as it would have to stop its momentum, and then use fuel to go back to where it originally was, and then land. Scientists however can predict where the rocket will break apart, and then use gravity along with much less fuel than would originally be used to make it land on a certain area x miles away from the original take off point.\n\nAs SpaceX wishes to launch near the coast, the ocean is a good place to land.\n\n\n**The verge explains it better than I can: [Link](_URL_1_)**"
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fxubzk | programmers, aside from cost, what is preventing porting or otherwise modernizing the 220 billion lines of cobol that still run the world? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fxubzk/eli5_programmers_aside_from_cost_what_is/ | {
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"Nothing. It ultimately all comes down to cost.\n\nIt costs money to hire people to write the new code. It takes time, and therefore money, for those people to understand the existing systems. It costs a lot to rigorously test it. It costs a lot to roll the new system out and replace the old one. If it goes wrong it could cost the companies involved a lot of money (and potentially screw up the world's economy). It would be a huge undertaking which would involve thousands of people, years of work and huge risks.\n\nYou can't just disregard the cost factor, because all the other reasons boil down to that.\n\nI don't know anything specifically about these COBOL based systems. I'm just basing this answer on large IT systems in general. I can't imagine anything that would physically stop them being replaced with new systems if you had enough time and money to do it.",
"Cost, Cost, Cost.\n\nIt would cost a huge amount to **understand what the code does now**. The people who wrote it aren't around any longer and probably nobody knows what's going on in every part of the NJ unemployment insurance payment application.\n\nIt would cost a huge amount to **engineer a new system to meet those requirements** plus **it would cost even more to make the software also meet some new requirements**. When you have a global pandemic every 100 years, it's just not a common enough use case.\n\nIt would cost a huge amount to **test that the new software works as reliably as the COBOL program that's been running for 40 years**. It would probably take at least 4 years of testing to achieve an equivalent level of confidence."
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3ukelm | why do things floating in pools, lakes etc, tend to eventually float toward the edge? | EDIT: so much response! thanks!
I suppose it's a combination of most of the factors different people mentioned (specially evolution, hahaha), but its enough to calm my sudden curiosity. Thank you explainers. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ukelm/eli5why_do_things_floating_in_pools_lakes_etc/ | {
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"Lakes and pools have water surrounded by edges in all directions. If something that is floating has any sort of momentum, it will eventually get to one of the edges.",
"The pool that I managed this summer had a really awesome filter system so that any debris was blown into the drains that were at the sides of the pool on top (skimmers) or at the deep end on the bottom (main drain). \n\nThe water jets were half way between the top and bottom of the pool so all the water was either being pushed to the top and over the top of the side of the pool into [this](_URL_0_) or down into the main drain like [this](_URL_2_). \n\nI drew you a strange [diagram](_URL_1_). \n\n",
"This is all under the assumption there is no wind on the surface..\n\nShort answer\n\n > The water pushes itself upward from the bottom centre **because there is less water pressure on the surface than there is from under the water**. this means that water being pushed due to pressure goes upward, pushing away the water at the surface.\n\nLong? Answer;\n\n > In any large body of water, there is always going to be a higher pressure the further down you travel. The amount of water is what causes this pressure- as a result the water is always pushing against itself from every angle- however certain areas push more than others due to increased pressure depending on the conditions.\n\n > If an open-topped square box is containing water, the walls of the box cause the water to push back against itself. Therefore the place with the least pressure would be the centre of the water, furthest away from any boundaries and most importantly- where it would meet itself from the opposite sides.\n\n > It is here where the water is then able to rise, by meeting itself in the centre it pushes itself upwards a small amount. This affects everything above, which has to push outwards and downward to cover the change in pressure.\n\n > This process, of course, repeats itself infinitely.\n\n > This is why things float towards the edges, because of the water pressure.\n\n\n---\n\nDisclaimer: ^^^**I ^^^just ^^^used ^^^what ^^^little ^^^logic ^^^I ^^^had ^^^to ^^^come ^^^up ^^^with ^^^a ^^^reasonable ^^^explanation, ^^^I ^^^could ^^^be ^^^flat ^^^out ^^^wrong.**",
"Any disturbance in the water of the pool (or lake) results in a wave that travels in staight line (spreading in circle). Typical disturbance would be wind or objects falling in the water fom the sides.\nA wave in water is a step in height of water, so pressure is higher on the leading edge than on the trailing edge. Fluids have that tendency of moving from areas of higher pressure to areas of lower pressure, and so water molecules move in the direction opposite to that of the wave, bringing with them everything that floats around. As said earlier, waves tend to start at the edges of pools (lakes), and so debris will tend to be at the edges of the water.\n\n[Source](_URL_0_)\n\nThere is a number of other phenomenons involved, as always in fluids, this one being the most relevant in my opinion.",
"wind and currents and stuff can make floaty things move along the surface of the water. if you travel in any direction long enough, they will eventually hit some sort of edge...so they move until they hit the edge and can't move any further, because the edge is in the way, so thats where they stay for a while.",
"And yet, sometimes they don't reach shore for [over a hundred years.](_URL_0_)",
"Because every direction is in the direction of the edge. If you put something in a lake and push it in any direction, it goes towards an edge. \n\nThe most common source of movement in a lake or pond is the wind, which doesn't stop in the middle of the lake, and keeps on pushing it towards the edge.\n\nOn top of that, when something is in the middle of a lake, every impulse on it will make it move, while when it is on the edge, it runs a risk of snagging on something and resisting further movement, making it stuck to the edge.\n\nIn situations where there is no edge (like the far ocean), currents can and do make all the trash end up in the same spots, causing large trash islands to form.\n\nIn the case of rives, stuff can be washed large distances, but once it reaches the edge it still often stays there, leading to buildups of trash on the edges."
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9cwn48 | public-key cryptography | How does the public-private key system work? Why does it work? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9cwn48/eli5_publickey_cryptography/ | {
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"In one word: maths\n\nThe fundamental idea is this: some mathematical operations are pretty quick and easy to perform, but almost impossible to reverse. A specific example used for public key cryptography is multiplying two large prime numbers. A computer can do that in microseconds. But finding the prime factors of a large number takes so long it might as well be impossible.\n\nSo you have X * Y = Z, and Z is your \"public key\" that everyone can know, while X and Y together are your \"private key\" that needs to be kept a secret.\n\nNow the trick is that you can perform some additional math where you use Z (which is public) to do some operations on another number M (which is a message) to get an encrypted message C where it is only possible to get M back from C if you know X and Y. Knowing Z only lets you *encrypt* messages, not *decrypt* them - that's why it's also called an \"asymmetric cipher\".",
"[Public-key cryptography using colors](_URL_0_) \n\nI used this, which made a whole lot of sense. (Hopefully the link works)",
"ELI5 example how public-key cryptography works:\n\nImagine persons A and B want to transfer secret message but they can only send packages to each other in mail which is unsecure. Anyone can steal a package and take what ever contents are inside or even swap them to something else.\n\nIn symmetric key cryptography they would use a locked box and they both would have a key for the lock. Problem is they can't exchange keys safely. If A buys locked box, how can he send key for it to B without possibility that someone steals the key and makes copies.\n\nIn public-key cryptography person A buys a lock (and keeps the key for it in some secure place) and sends the unlocked lock to person B. Person B then puts his message inside a box and locks it with A's lock. Then he can send it safely to A without anyone having access to the message.\n\nLocks in the examples are cryptographic algorithms. Public-key algorithms are much more expensive to calculate so usually they are just used to do the key-exchange: both send a symmetric cryptography key to each other using public-key cryptography. From there on they just use the symmetric cryptography to encrypt their communication.",
"In most forms of cryptography, you take message X, use key k (kind of like a password) to mathematically scramble the message, producing message Y. Decrypting Y is a similar process, you use key k to unscramble and recreate X.\n\nThis process has one huge weakness, both people who want to communicate securely need to have the same key. If they are halfway around the world from each other and never met before, there has to be some secure channel to send the key over. And if there is such a channel, why not just use it to send the message?\n\nPublic-key cryptography solves this problem by using two keys, k*_e_* to encrypt and k*_d_* to decrypt. You can send k*_e_* over an insecure channel, even publish it to the world as a public key, because even if you have the encrypted message Y and k*_e_*, there is no easy way to get X back without k*_d_*.\n\nIt works by using what is called a trapdoor function. Normally you would just use k*_e_* and reverse the process, but with a trapdoor function, going in reverse is a lot harder than going forward. It is kind of like how dividing is harder than multiplying, taking a square root is harder than squaring, and taking a logarithm is harder than raising a power. In the case of the most famous public key system, RSA, encrypting is like multiplying two 100 digit prime numbers together, easy for a computer, and decrypting is like taking the result and getting those two numbers back, something that can take a computer years, even centuries.",
"I feel like the explanations that are already here don't rely on the reader doing thinking on their own, it's this thought that helps one truly understand this. This might not be ELI5, but it will help someone truly understand it in more detail.\n\nPublic Key cryptography relies heavily on the idea of asymmetric key cryptography. Asymmetric key cryptography is just like regular (symmetric key) cryptography, except there are two keys, one can be used by you to encrypt (the private key) and one can be used by anyone to decrypt (the public key). The reverse also works; if someone has your public key, they can encrypt a message that only you can decrypt with your private key. Which key does what depends upon which one was used to encrypt. Given that this technology exists, there are some very interesting things that we can do with this. These interesting things make up an interesting system called Public Key Infrastructure.\n\n1. The simplest thing is that you can exchange keys with someone or something (a web server for instance) securely. You can share public keys with each other (over plain text, with no need for other security) and then send encrypted messages using those public keys, containing a newly generated symmetric key to be used for the rest of that session. We do that because symmetric key is much faster than asymmetric key cryptography.\n\n2. A property of asymmetric key cryptosystems is that they necessarily provide authentication, meaning that if a message was encrypted with some entity's private key, you necessarily know that it came from that entity. Knowing that private key really came from that entity is a difficult problem that Public Key Infrastructure solves. Read on to learn how.\n\n3. The property described in number 2 can be used to create signed statements by some trusted party. This is what we call a digital certificate. When you got your computer or smartphone, the Operating System vendor included a bunch of these certificates that contain the public keys of important companies. These important companies are called Certificate Authorities, and this collection of certificates is called a Trusted Root CA store.\n\n4. Digital certificates can contain public key information of another party. Eg. I'm L0nkFromPA, and if I pay Digicert (or another Certificate Authority) a small fee, they'll encrypt a message using their private key, containing my public key in it after going through a process to verify that I'm really L0nkFromPA. This allows someone to know that my public key is really mine. This assumes that this person trusts Digicert, and they have a Trusted Root CA Certificate from them to verify (decrypt) this certificate.\n\n5. Another interesting thing that can be done is entire software programs can be proven to have been unmodified and proven to have come from an entity that produces the software. This is called Code Signing.\n\nAll of these properties and functions rely on certain assumptions. I won't go into the detail of these assumptions unless someone asks, since that would be an even longer post."
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278f6a | why can't "the people" get together and kickstarter a cable company that actually cares about its customers? | It seems ridiculous to me that there isn't ever a new corporation on the scene. There's no rising stars or new players. What is it about the current state of American politics that allows these companies to fuck everyone over?
Edit 1: Explain like I'm Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel if you want to. I didn't go to business school and I don't understand why some of these companies get to be so big, and why the Cable companies especially are basically writing their own regulations? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/278f6a/eli5_why_cant_the_people_get_together_and/ | {
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"Basically the rent is too damn high. \n\nIt takes billions of dollars to lay cables and set up the infrastructure and current cable companies already have deals with cities to be exclusive. ",
"This is cost on some of the most massive scales that exist in the commercial sector. While Kickstarters have raised millions, we'd need something on the order of billions to even dip our collective toes into the market, and other companies already have regulations and agreements that discourage competition. "
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78kc0v | how do they track baseballs during a game and turn it into a visualization for the audience? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/78kc0v/eli5_how_do_they_track_baseballs_during_a_game/ | {
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"There are three cameras set up at known locations in the ball park and the distances and angles between them, the plate and pitchers mound are known precisely. Each camera records the ball as it moves from the pitcher toward the plate and the location in each camera is combined in order to calculate the exact position, speed and even rotation of the ball at each instant in time. \n\nA different set of three+ cameras record the ball once it is hit by the batter and do the same calculation for distance, altitude, angle, etc. \n\nSource: [Pitchf/x](_URL_0_) was the system used by MLB through last year, now [Trackman](_URL_1_) does it, but pretty much the same way. "
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bwk2yd | lightning scarring | Why does being struck by lightning leave scarring resembling lightning itself rather than just a large burn at the points of "impact"? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bwk2yd/eli5_lightning_scarring/ | {
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"Lightning, because it is a series of rapid pulses of current, is “high frequency”. High frequency currents travel along the outside of the conductor (in this case, the body of poor dude standing out in the middle of the golf course) in what is known as “skin effect”. So the current travels along the outside of you and branches around, leaving lightning shaped spots on you.",
"Is that you Mr. Potter?"
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3gcbif | why do pictures taken with a microscope camera look like paintings? | For example this one: _URL_0_ | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3gcbif/eli5_why_do_pictures_taken_with_a_microscope/ | {
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"You are projecting a pattern you've experienced previously on something unknown. This is how humans internalize new information. \n\nAlso you are asking for an objective explanation for a subjective experience. Which nobody but you can provide. ",
"The photo was taken in black & white, with colour added that in post. This makes it seem \"painting\" like. "
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qu5f2 | why we couldn't just pull out of iraq once we found out there were no wmds | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/qu5f2/eli5_why_we_couldnt_just_pull_out_of_iraq_once_we/ | {
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"Lets say you made a bet with your friend that you would have sex with this crazy porn star. In order to get her in bed you end up spending a TON of money anyway (dinner, gifts, etc) but it finally happens. You are so excited so you tell your friend \"yeah dude its going down TONIGHT\". So you get in there, thinking she will have this crazy vagina and you'll have this crazy story to tell your friend about how you finally got to sleep with a pornstar. But then you get in there and its normal, totally plain old, nothing to see here. You aren't even that into it after a while, but you want to finish the job and get that load of cash your friend bet you (to help with all the money you SPENT getting to do her). Eventually you just decide to pull out, but you're still ready to go and you want to at least have a good story to tell the boys so you just blow it on her face, pack up your stuff and leave.",
"Because, in order to do a thorough search for WMDs, we had to take out Hussein and the Ba'ath party, in essence, the government that had ruled Iraq for about 25 years. We couldn't pull out immediately because there would be no government to maintain order. Anarchy would ensue and probably civil war as various groups sought to fill the power vacuum.\n\nNo problem, just set up some nice democratic elections and form a new government to take power and secure the country, right? Easier said than done. Iraq has many different ethnic groups and tribes that carry very old blood-feuds against one another, not to mention two branches of Islam, the Sunni and the Shi'a, fighting for political control of the country in a religious power struggle that has been going on, more or less, for the past 1400 years. Getting all these groups to accept the legitimacy of a new government would prove incredibly difficult and time-consuming.\n\nBesides these internal factors, there were also several external players. Though most of the surrounding countries were glad that Saddam was gone (Even they thought he was pretty crazy), the presence of Western infidels in the Middle East was taken by some as an insult to Islam, which led to foreign support of insurgency in Iraq and the condemnation of those that aided and supported Coalition forces. Some leaders who may have otherwise supported the Coalition in its attempts to form a new government were forced to publicly condemn the Coalition and rile the public against us for fear of being murdered by insurgents. These things made it even harder to legitimize the government.\n\nTL;DR: Immediate pull-out would have left Iraq without a solid government and led to chaos. Forming a new government takes years even when everyone's cooperating, and many groups in the region were violently opposed to cooperation."
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8mdjav | does sautéing food effect it's nutritional values? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8mdjav/eli5_does_sautéing_food_effect_its_nutritional/ | {
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"All cooking affects food's nutritional value.\n\nSautéing obviously adds oil (fat) to the food. It'll break down some of the less stable nutrients, like vitamin C. Carbohydrates may break down into sugars. Some nutrients may not change but become more easily absorbed as elements of the food break down.\n\nYou can look at some of the differences yourself on the [USDA nutritional database](_URL_0_). For example, here are [raw onions](_URL_2_) and [sautéd onions](_URL_1_)."
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7jkfx0 | why aren't noise cancelling headphones as effective in cancelling high pitch sounds as their in cancelling low pitch sounds? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7jkfx0/eli5_why_arent_noise_cancelling_headphones_as/ | {
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"The way noise cancelling works is that it has a microphone pick up some noise and then a speaker produce that noise phase shifted 180 degrees. The resulting waveforms precisely cancel out.\n\nHowever, the microphone can only pick up the noise as it's passing by and there's a delay before it can generate the phase-shifted sound. This means that you have to 'guess' what the future will hold in some sense.\n\nHigh frequency waves embed more information and shift more often, meaning it's a lot harder to make guesses about them than low frequency waves.",
"Low frequency sound waves are generally transmitted better than higher frequency sound waves due to several reasons: \n\n(1) Better diffraction, since lower frequency sound means longer wavelengths and longer waves bend more easily around obstacles and have more ways to reach their destination, \n\n(2) The human ear is most sensitive to frequencies around 2-2.5KHz, but when it comes to lower frequencies, the ear is not the only thing receiving the sound. Bones and organs can also feel the vibrations of a low freq sound (ultra heavy bass may even interfere with the working of the heart),\n\n (3) majority of songs have bass frequencies boosted. Since the ear is most sensitive to 2-2.5KHz sound, the lower frequencies need extra energy (i.e. higher amplitude) for their bass to be perceived \"adequately\" (and what is perceived as adequate bass today is most definitely more powerful than adequate bass 50 years ago).",
"The simple answer is because that's what they were originally invented for, engine noise. A better answer involves math.\n\nNoise cancelling headphones work by adding \"negative sound\", sound that is 180° out of phase. So let's assume that the noise cancelling headphones have only one microphone and it's located at the same place as the speaker, about a centimeter from your ear, and we'll ignore the passive effects of the headphones and your ears, just treat them both as points.\n\nIdeally, the sound and \"negative sound\" reach your ear together, 180° out of phase. 2cos(180°/2) = 0 no sound.\n\nFirst, let's ignore time and consider direction. If the sound wavefront comes in inline with the headphone a your ear, then there's a 1cm difference between the headphone and the ear. If it comes in at a 45° angle, there's only a 0.7cm difference, but the \"negative sound\" still has to travel the whole 1 cm because it's coming from the headphone. At 200hz that 0.3cm difference is a 0.6° difference, basically nothing, but at 2000Hz its a 6° still tiny but 10 times less tiny.\n\nNow assume there is a 0.1ms delay between the headphones hearing the sound and producing the \"negative sound\". At 200Hz this leads to a 7.2° lag. 2cos(187.2°/2) = -0.126 a 87.4% reduction, pretty quiet.\nAt 2000Hz however, that 0.1ms is a 72° lag. 2cos(252°/2) = -1.175 the headphones are so far from their intended phase that they're actually making the sound 17% louder. That 10x difference in lag let to a more than 10x difference in noise reduction because the cosine function is non linear.\n\nTLDR at higher frequencies, small errors make bigger differences.",
"Low frequencies are more spatially uniform due to their longer wavelength. They travel through most materials without reflection * * , and reflected waves interfere on a much larger scale than that of your head or ear * * *. If you ever listened to a pure high frequency sound, you know that moving your head even a few millimeters can change the intensity due to wave effects.\n\nSo using a microphone to pick up the sound, and then invert and send to your ear is much less useful. The sound at the microphone is not exactly the sound you hear inside the ear, and even the sound created by the headphone is not as predictable and will generate some noise instead of canceling it. \n\n** This is why low frequency sounds are so hard to remove, from the cabin of an airplane, for instance. It passes through the sound deadening materials.\n\n *** This is why a subwofer can be anywhere in a room - your ear gets no directional information by moving around or reflections.",
"_Actual ELI5_\n\nHave you ever tried clapping opposite to someone else? I mean clapping exactly when the other person has their hands apart, getting your hands apart when they clap? It's really hard to do.\n\nYou can usually only do it when the other person (or, worse, crowd) is clapping pretty slowly. When they're clapping very fast, or there's a lot of them clapping not-exactly-in-sync, it gets quite a bit harder.\n\nNoise cancelling headphones try to do exactly this but with sound waves. Lower frequency sounds _clap_ slower and are easier to predict. Higher frequency sounds _clap_ faster and are harder to predict."
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ad9qf0 | why does lettuce turn pink shortly after you cut it? | I should specify the ends, not the whole leaves themselves | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ad9qf0/eli5_why_does_lettuce_turn_pink_shortly_after_you/ | {
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"Lettuce contains iron. When the lettuce is cut the iron is exposed to the air and combines with oxygen to form rust, which is red.",
"It's the same reaction that causes Apples and other fruit and veg to brown.\n\nThey contain chemicals called polyphenols. These react with an enzyme called polyphenoloxidase. The end product contains a pigment which happens to be a brown colour.\n\n(As far as I'm aware this reaction has nothing directly linked to the presence of iron.)\n\nEdit- Spelled the enzyme incorrectly."
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522e2r | gc/ms testing substances | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/522e2r/eli5_gcms_testing_substances/ | {
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"It identifies molecules two ways (it's basically two machines -- a GC machine and an MS machine).\n\n1. Separates the molecules and measures characteristics like their weight (mass). This is a *mass spectrometer.*\n2. Heats up the substances and examines the details of what colors of light they emit when glowing. This is a *gas chromatograph.*\n\nThese methods are enough to tell you what kinds of molecules are in something."
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4d4e85 | how do we sing in key when our voices sound different in our heads? | So I know that our own voices sound different to us because they resonate differently to our ears then to someone elses, but how does this affect singing? My voice sounds a lot deeper in my head so when I listen to a recording of talking I sound higher, so when I sing along wouldn't I be singing in a higher key then I think I am?
TL DR; How can singers sing to music when they are singing to a key they hear in the head, which might be slightly different from the actual sound they are producing? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4d4e85/eli5_how_do_we_sing_in_key_when_our_voices_sound/ | {
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"Your head isn't thick enough to have an effect on the frequency that you hear. When you listen to a recording of your own voice, what's missing is the deeper harmonics that result from the sound travelling through you skull to the bones in your ear, but it doesn't really affect the accuracy with which you can judge the pitch of your voice."
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7fu4ro | how come a mechanical watch changes it’s time over a long period of time | Found an old watch from a few years ago and it’s around 20 minutes behind what my current time is. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7fu4ro/eli5_how_come_a_mechanical_watch_changes_its_time/ | {
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"It's essentially impossible to create a mechanical watch that counts time completely accurately, especially given that the internal mechanism changes its timekeeping based on the temperature and other environmental factors. The best mechanical watches typically keep time to within a second per day, which is only an error of about 0.001%, but can easily build up to being off by many minutes if you let them run for long enough.",
"Most time measurement systems experience 'drift' which is when their measurement of a second slightly differs from the 'true' measurement of a second. Theses minuscule errors accumulate over time. For example a cheap digital RTC (realtime clock) chip will have a drift of ~1 second / year. \n\nMechanical watches specifically can experience drift for a number of reasons. Temperature changes can cause the metal mechanisms to expand or contract, slightly changing how they calculate one second. Manufacturing imperfections (within set tolerances) can slightly affect the mechanisms. Hundreds of other factors can also contribute to the drive. ",
"For starters, if it's been running nonstop since \"a few years ago\", I doubt it's actually a mechanical watch. A mechanical watch, one driven by a wound up spring and gears, can only run for a few days without needing to be wound. It's far more likely that you have some sort of quartz watch - where a battery run electricity through a crystal and count the vibrations - that simply has an analog face (ie - moving hands instead of an LCD display). Quartz watches can run for years on a single battery without a problem - smart ones can even stop moving the hands to save power & just slide them back to where they belong once motion is detected.\n\nThat out of the way...\n\nWatches and clocks all do one simple thing internally: they make something happen periodically and count how many times it happens. A grandfather clock tracks swings of a pendulum, a mechanical watch tracks the oscillations of a spring loaded weight & quartz movements run electricity through a quartz crystal, causing it to vibrate and they count those vibrations.\n\nIf the speed of that periodic thing isn't precisely tuned, the timepiece might run slightly fast or slow. Being off by only 20 minutes in a year means that it's 99.996% accurate - if it's been multiple years, that's even more accurate.\n\nOne source I found online says that typical mechanical watches are typically only accurate to within 10 seconds per day & quartz watches are generally within about 15s per month. If you want to spend more money, you can get more accuracy - as little as 5s per year - but even a $100-150 watch can do 15s/year (as long as you prioritize accuracy over flashiness).\n\nAll of that pales in comparison to sensitive scientific instruments. Atomic clocks can *easily* be accurate to within a second every million years. The current record is [accurate to 1 second every 15 billion years](_URL_0_).",
"Mechanical clocks have an internal mechanism to keep track of the time. It is mostly composed of gears, springs and wheels.\r\rTo be accurate, that mechanical set must be thoroughly calculated and made. One thousandth of a millimeter more or less in one gear diameter implies the clock would be ahead or late several minutes a month, or a year.\r\rBut mechanical clocks cannot run more than two or three days without being winded. When you wind a wrist clock, you usually adjust the time using a more reliable source (the tower clock in town, the TV, etc).\r\rDigital clocks are far more accurate and can run for several years without any need to wind it or replace its battery, but you surely would need to sync it to a more accurate source.\r\rAnd when it comes to atomic clocks you are entering the realm of relativity and quantum mechanics, but that's another tale."
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3s4q38 | given enough time, could other animals, such as cats or dogs evolve to a similar intelligence level to humans? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3s4q38/eli5_given_enough_time_could_other_animals_such/ | {
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"Intelligence is a tricky thing. We measure it so we decide what is and is not intelligent, it isn't some immutable thing, it is a quality we give meaning to.\n\nCats and dogs, or any living thing may be more intelligent than we are, it could just be we don't comprehend their intelligence in any meaningful way. We look for intelligence that meets the same criteria as our own, but there is no reason to assume that is the only type of intelligence, or even the best kind.\n\nWe aren't even that good at measuring intelligence among ourselves, so you can imagine how good we are at measuring it in other species with which we can't even communicate.\n\nThe answer to your question is if the conditions were right, and increased intellect was favored and let the creature survive and procreate more then yes, any creature can evolve intelligence, given the random chance of it occurring and the favorability of it in the environment.",
"Intelligence is not the end goal of evolution. Evolution has no goals. Natural selection just leads to a species that will survive, and there are lots of different survival strategies out there beyond intelligence.\n\nCould another species select for intelligence if that makes them more likely to survive? Sure. But they could be selecting for loads of different things. And they'd have to compete with us. We were successful because our intelligence filled a niche that was empty up until that time. But that niche is now filled, which makes it much harder for that to be a successful mutation. Maybe if humans were out of the picture somehow. \n\nThen even if you had all the time in the universe and no humans to compete with, it still comes down to random chance. Mutations are not directed. They just happen. You'd have to have an animal who just happens to have an mutation that leads to more intelligence in an environment that rewards that mutation. That is a lot of random chance.",
"I like how no one is answering if we could breed or otherwise genetically engineer super smart cats and dogs and instead are waxing poetically about what \"similar intelligence level to humans\" means. ",
"Sure, but its less about time than it is about the current conditions. \n\nGiven how humans already dominate the environment, one of the smartest things a species can do is adapt to humans. \n\nDogs, cats, and even house sparrows all do very well, possibly better than their wild or feral counterparts. ",
"I think the more interesting question is sort of like.. can *we* breed more intelligent life? We already have some pretty smart dogs, and we have been selectively breeding them pretty harshly over the last 10,000 years. We are already selecting for intelligence when we breed dogs. How does it work out that man might eventually breed a dog so intelligent it actually reaches human levels of understanding? I feel like that's a far more likely scenario than that they'd just randomly mutate into intelligence like we did. ",
"Btw any answer that doesn't give an unconditional yes to your question, despite being well thought out and completely true though indirectly related, is not the correct answer. Although the 'given enough time' part muddles the intent of the question a little, the answer is still yes",
"Yes by artificial selection(by humans), not sure by natural selection. It can go either way by natural selection, maybe most retarted strong ones survive or weakest and smartest ones survive.",
"_URL_0_\n\nWhat about this?\n",
"Possibly, but it would be very, very, very, very, very difficult.\n\nHumans took a path that made us intelligent--but just barely. We had to de-evolve our jaws, which allowed for our brains to expand. Cooking allowed us to weaken our jaws for that. Probably bipedalism and intelligence allowed us to cook. Being apes allowed us to be bipeds. It is our our unique path which enabled our intelligence. Our unique head size and shape relative to our body size enabled our intelligence.\n\nCould something like that happen with a cat? Possibly, but the cat would have to de-evolve many features that it already has. It's already a pretty specialized animal compared to apes. Cats have already chosen a way to live. Cats are already intelligent--albeit in a niche, stalking sort of way.\n\nApes would be much easier to evolve to human-level intelligence because they're already apes. All you'd have to do is to breed out their testosterone and massively overpowered jaws, and then start breeding for IQ. If you started breeding for IQ right away with a cat, you'd immediately hit a wall. Bears would be another animal that I suspect this might be an interesting thing to experiment with.",
"Depends on your definition of intelligence. \n\nThere was a point in our ancestry where a genetic mutation allowed those primates to self-recognize. There have been tests done to pin point where exactly in the line of ancestry this occurred, and any primate species that evolved past this point (us plus a few others) are capable of self recognition, but any species that 'branched off' prior to this mutation aren't capable of self recognition. \n\nSo, I think it's just a matter of the right mutations occurring, allowing the species to develop some form of intelligence. You look at other species, like the dolphin, who are incredibly intelligent, but not capable of utilizing tools in as a dexterous manner as us, because of thumbs. Because they lack thumbs and the ability to utilize their vocal chords to speak our language, we dismiss them as being intelligent.",
"Here's a journal article that describes evolution of cognitive abilities for dolphins:\n\n* Connor, Richard C. \"[Dolphin social intelligence: complex alliance relationships in bottlenose dolphins and a consideration of selective environments for extreme brain size evolution in mammals](_URL_0_).\" Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences 362.1480 (2007): 587-602.\n\nFrom the article:\n\n > All three ‘peaks’ of large brain size evolution in mammals (odontocetes, humans and elephants) shared a common selective environment: extreme mutual dependence based on external threats from predators or conspecific groups. In this context, social competition, and consequently selection for greater cognitive abilities and large brain size, was intense.\n\nSo, external threats and social competition could select for greater intelligence. Domesticated cats and dogs are shielded from external threats and typically displaced from their family, so greater cognitive capability may not have enough selection pressure to evolve beyond their current capacity. Other animals in the wild, however, could increase their cognitive ability over time, e.g., orcas' consistently improving learning of cooperative techniques to kill prey. External threats may not just be other animals but also environmental factors like climate change causing ecological destruction of typical food sources.",
"I want to chime in just to say that if such creatures evolved, it wouldn't necessarily mean cats or dogs stop existing. ",
"Do a little research on octopi and crows. Tell me they don't approach human-level intelligence.\n\nAs others have said, though, there is no end goal to evolution. If members of a population have a trait that is particularly advantageous to it (meaning they survive long enough to reproduce, and do it significantly better than others in that population), then with enough selective pressure that trait will eventually become dominant enough that we can say that the population has evolved that trait.\n\nThe particular type of intelligence that humans have is just another trait.\n\nAnother thing to consider is a population can't evolve a trait if there is no potential for it. It is highly unlikely, for example, that humans will ever evolve the ability to see x-rays with our naked eyes, no matter how advantageous that might be to us, because there is nothing in our genetic code that resembles the necessary building blocks to see x-rays with our naked eyes. I'm no biologist, but I'm pretty sure we don't have the building blocks in place that would make such a mutation possible.",
"Since it seems like most people are sort of sidestepping your question:\n\nThere are quite a few stark differences between humans and other animals that seem to be related to intelligence, and not all of them are in our brains.\n\n-Free, articulate hands. Without the ability to manipulate our environment, intelligence wouldn't be very useful. Dolphins are a great example. They are extremely intelligent, but without hands all they can do is coordinate their movements with each other, making them effective predators.\n\n-Socialization: anything that an animals learn will disappear when it dies, unless that knowledge is passed on to other individuals. The smaller the social groups that an animal lives in, the less knowledge can spread between individuals, hampering advancement. Additionally, without socialization, animals can't specialize. Specialization is much more efficient; one individual can get very good at doing a single thing, while his group-mates get good at something else. It also creates free time. This is an optimal setting for individuals to discover new techniques to solving old problems.\n\n-Complex vocalization abilities. While animals raised with humans are able to learn to comprehend a lot of language, their respiratory systems don't have the physical ability to produce vocal language. Without human interference, their limited language abilities couldn't be passed to the next generation. And without language, it is very difficult for an animal to spread any technique/idea that it has discovered.\n\n-Omnivorous diet. A high calory diet is required to fuel a brain, and hunting is a huge selective pressure for intelligence. But hunting is not sustainable for dense populations; agricultural revolution seems to be necessary for a species to continue advancing, meaning that the species can't be strictly carnivorous.\n\n-Fronto-temporal and prefrontal brain regions. Complex understanding and executive abilities seem to hinge on these two brain regions that our ancestors were lacking.\n\nNow, the real question is this: which of these are \"prerequisites\" for intelligence, and which of them will easily emerge under a selective pressure for intelligence? We don't really know the answer to this question. Any of these would act as a cap for intelligence if lacking. But perhaps an animal who has reached one of these caps, and is under selective pressure for intelligence, would evolve the necessary feature to pass the cap. Or perhaps, humans were just lucky -- we evolved most or all of these traits, and then we were able to develop hyperintelligence. Certainly, many animals show *some* of these traits--but evidently not enough to begin the positive feedback loop of increasing intelligence.",
"Of course! Have you never seen the documentary Red Dwarf? ",
"Some of the responses (not all though) here are a bit ridiculous in terms of their understanding of evolution. Firstly, species do not \"evolve to\" anything. It just so happens certain traits are better for surviving and reproducing in certain environments.\n\nSo yes, if the environment of other species, like cats and dogs, let the more intelligent ones survive more often, such species would eventually become more intelligent. But be aware that this is a trade-off; likely, to get more intelligence, a species gets some other handicap. For example, they more intelligence might involve a bigger brain, which might mean a bigger head, which could cause problems with pregnancy. Of course, this isn't necessarily the only way that a species could get more intelligence, just an example. ",
"Could they? Sure, but probably they would not. Cats and dogs evolved to suit their environment and needs very well. They HAVE had just as long to evolve as we did and this is what they became. What makes humans sort of magical is that we went another route. We didn't really evolve to fit our environment, we evolved to be really adaptable and then we began evolving the ability to change our environment to suit us. Cats and dogs, being pretty good critters already without a ton of selection pressure, don't need to do this as a species. ",
"Something would need to happen that would make it beneficial for that type of intelligence to become prominent. Cats dont need weapons, they have claws. They evolve to get big enough, that's about it. With us, we moved from trees to the ground, we needed to learn how to stand upright in order to see over tall grass. We needed to become smarter to get food. We needed tools and we needed to work together. Cats would need to adapt in a similar way."
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aedv6c | air con in cars | Why does running you AC in your car use more fuel | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aedv6c/eli5_air_con_in_cars/ | {
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"Because it takes energy to drive a compressor to make the air conditioner work. Energy doesn't come from nowhere, so the fuel consumption is slightly increased.",
"The AC runs on electricity. The electricity needed for the AC is made by alternator(charger) which is rotated by the car engine.\n\nThe more electricity is used, the harder the engine has to work to rotate the alternator, and harder the engine works, more fuel is used. ",
"When you look at the engine in your car, you'll commonly see a bunch of pulleys and belts spinning, usually most visibly the last place you want to stick your finger into while the engine's running.\n\nAll of those pulleys and belts are being driven by the engine, which is powered by fuel. Generally, the more belts and pulleys you add to the engine block for it to spin, the less power you have on hand to drive the wheels. Kind of like if you're carrying a heavy backpack and you were adamant that you needed to walk at a constant 3 mph, if someone added 10 bricks to your backpack you'll be using more energy to keep that pace. You *could* spend the same amount of energy carrying that higher weight at a slower pace, or you can carry the weight at the same pace but use more energy doing so. Your engine's engineers opts for the latter.\n\nSame deal with the AC. When you press the button in your dash for A/C to come on, one of the pulley/belts driven by the engine links with the AC Compressor to begin condensing some sort of special gas to make the air flowing into your cabin cooler. Managing this pressure, blowing this air will also cost some more electricity. \n Because a vast majority of your car's electricity is powered by fuel (see battery/alternator relationships), pressing the AC button is the moment when you add bricks to your backpack.\n\nHope that helps.\n"
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