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36kbrj | how does the usa freedom act differ from the usa patriot act? | And why do many senators argue we should have the new USA FREEDOM Act? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/36kbrj/eli5_how_does_the_usa_freedom_act_differ_from_the/ | {
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"USA FREEDOM Act actually legitimizes the warrantless data collection that is done by the NSA. There is a clause in it that allows the data collection after review by a secret government court. Guess how many times that court will disallow the data collection. But now there's no suing the government over it because it was signed into law. \n\ntl;dr - Any law that the NSA likes is going to be bad for everyone else. \n\nedit - ducking autocorrect"
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6obqcn | how do they implode/destruct megastructures in large cities and confine the destruction to one area? | How do they pull this off without the building toppling over and destroying 4 buildings surrounding it? Like when tearing down skyscrapers in NYC, casinos in Las Vegas, etc., etc. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6obqcn/eli5_how_do_they_implodedestruct_megastructures/ | {
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"They do this by causing one part of the building to collapse at a different time than another. Watch a few implosion videos, you'll see the whole building kinda \"shift\" usually in one direction. If you blow the supporting columns at the left side of the building first, then rapidly blow columns going left to right, the \"falling\" material will \"pull\" the next bit down and towards the left. Doing a column in the middle first, then expanding out towards the outside will pull the outsides of the building in to the middle. "
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317k0g | what did the iraq war cost the us, and who's actually earning that money? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/317k0g/eli5_what_did_the_iraq_war_cost_the_us_and_whos/ | {
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"the producers of those machines and materials that were used. these are the private organizations that are refered to as \"the military industrial complex\". the producers make all the rifles, bullets, bombs, missiles, jets, ships, computers, communications, etc etc. the armed forces uses those systems to wage war. the armed forces does not develop and manufacture those systems. \n\n"
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1kf80p | when a scientist doesn't patent their discovery, why can't someone else? | After seeing plenty of posts about Jonas Salk, I was wondering what stopped somebody else from just stealing his vaccine, claiming it was theirs, and patenting it. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1kf80p/eli5_when_a_scientist_doesnt_patent_their/ | {
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"One of the core requirements to receive a patent is that the patent most be novel (basically something new, unthought of before). Anything known to the public is not novel, and therefore is not patentable. It's the same thing that prevents people from patenting the wheel, or patenting something that once had a patent but is no longer covered."
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acpnyp | how does liquid like alcohol reach your liver / kidneys after it's in you'r stomatch. | I was wondering how alcohol and other liquids that influence your body make their way to the liver or to the kidney. Also what is the difference between the kidney and the liver. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/acpnyp/eli5_how_does_liquid_like_alcohol_reach_your/ | {
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"Stomach and intestines are surrounded by blood vessels. Digestion means getting the nutrients into the blood, which transports them to the liver where they are broken down into nutrients that cells can use, which are put back in the blood. Liver processes nutrients and chemicals to useful compounds, and kidneys remove waste and excess water from the blood.\n\nWater and liquids usually get into the blood within half an hour. Solid food may take up to 24 hours to be broken down by acids and then the useful components absorbed into the blood.",
"After your stomach, gastric contents are shuttled to the intestines where they are broken down and absorbed. All this digested stuff then enters the “portal circulation” which leads straight to the liver for further processing and metabolism. What’s left goes into the blood stream to be circulated throughout the body. Everything that enters the blood stream eventually reaches the kidneys, which acts as a filtration system for disposal of waste, ie urine. ",
"All the foods and drinks you consume get broken down in the stomach and mushed into a sloppy gravy mess. The walls of your stomach and small intestine are lined with special cells that take substances from the gravy and dissolve it into the bloodstream. The bloodstream moves all around the body, including the liver (which chemically handles some of those substances, including alcohol). The bloodstream also removes waste from body tissues. When the blood goes to the kidneys, the kidneys filter out the waste (it's dissolved byproducts) and move the liquid waste to the bladder and you pee it out.\n\nSo the basics: things in your stomach get dissolved into your bloodstream.\n\nThe blood carries this dissolved stuff to the liver, where there are special cells that process things like alcohol.\n\nThe blood also carries liquid waste products to the kidneys, which filter the waste out of the blood.",
"Liver has many different functions, one of the main ones is processing food you just ate before it reaches your heart and distributed to the rest of the body\n\nKidney filters waste products and unneeded stuff from the blood. Like 20% of the blood pumped from your heart heads to the kidneys to be filtered\n"
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5v4qyd | why do jeans and clothes feel tighter after being washed and dried? then after wearing why are they back to 'normal' fit? | Please let me know | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5v4qyd/eli5_why_do_jeans_and_clothes_feel_tighter_after/ | {
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"text": [
"When you wet the strands (washing), they expand. When you let them dry, the contract. All you do when you wear them, is put the typical stretch the are used to back in."
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77m4w8 | how does sha-1 work? | Is there anyone who could possibly explain to me how does SHA-1 hashing algorithm work ? Explain like im 5 pls. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/77m4w8/eli5_how_does_sha1_work/ | {
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"SHA-1 is a block cypher, meaning that it breaks up a message into chunks that are 160 bits long, and scrambles them up according to a complicated formula. Then it repeats this process block-by-block on the rest of the message. And it repeats it again over the already-hashed blocks, scrambling them a second time. And then a third time, etc etc. \n\nThe scrambling formula is given by [this](_URL_0_) diagram. ",
"This is basically how it works: \n \n * The algorythm breaks up your message in 512 bit long blocks \n * On each block a set of bit-operations are done to convert the input binary code to some output binary code. Bit-operations work by taking 1 or 2 bits only and outputting 1 bit. Examples below will clarify.\n* The XOR operator outputs a 0 if the two input bits are the same and a 1 if the two input bits are different. (0 XOR 1 outputs 1, 0 XOR 0 outputs 0.)\n* The AND operator outputs a 1 if both the two input bits are 1 and otherwise it outputs a 0.\n* The OR operator outputs a 1 if either of the two input bits are 1 and otherwise it outputs a 0.\n* The NOT operator outputs a 1 if the input bit was a 0 and a 0 if the input bit was a 1.\n* The leftrotate operator works on blocks of bits. If you have a block of bits for example \"00111\" it moves all of them one place to the left, and puts the first digit on the end. This would output \"01110\". \n* the rightrotate operator does the same thing, but it moves all the bits to the right and takes the last digit and puts in on the front. (\"00111\" would become \"10011\".)\n* The leftshift operator works very simular to the leftrotate operator. Only, this time the first digit is not put on the end, instead a \"0\" is but on the end. This means that the previous example of \"00111\" would have the same output of \"01110\", but \"10101\" would have the output \"01010\", while *leftrotate* would give an output of \"01011\".\n* The rightshift operator works simular to the leftshift operator, only this time the digits are mvoed one place to the right, and the 0 is put on the front.\n* there are other operators as well, but these are the most important ones, if you have questions on this, feel free to pm me.\n * Once the operations are done, it outputs 5 different \"mini-hashes\". These \"mini-hashes\" are 32 bits long. This means they are a number from 0 to 2^32 . \n* Let's call these \"mini-hashes\" a, b, c, d, and e. These numbers are added to 5 temporary values called h0, h1, h2, h3 and h4. On the second chunk, this means that h0 is equal to a1 + a2. Should the value of h0 exceed 2^32 the value is lowered by 2^32 . (This means that h0 will always be between 0 and 2^32 . The matimathical term for this is modulo or \"mod\". (for example 12 mod 8 = 4, because 12-8=4.) Modulo is the rest after dividing by a number.\n * Once all chunks are done, you are left with 5 numbers h0, h1, h2, h3 and h4. These are all numbers of 32 binary digits. These are \"stringed together\" using another set of operations to make 1 big 32-bit number. This is your hash-value."
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50qmtc | if a couple have a baby and the father is quite dark, the mother quite fair, how on earth does the baby end up being lighter skinned than the mother and father? | Just something I've been wondering for a long time. Never really understood the genetics part of this **(no racial discrimination intended here in this question)** But I'm much paler than my mother, who is quite pale herself, yet my biological father is very dark skinned. How on Earth did I end up paler than my parents? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/50qmtc/eli5_if_a_couple_have_a_baby_and_the_father_is/ | {
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"Genetics is fully weird.\n\nExactly what genes you get is basically random chance, and then there are a ton of factors that play into how the genes get expressed. So it's entirely possible that your father had some genes for fair skin in his genetic makeup that were for one reason or another not being expressed or were overpowered by other genes. You probably just caught a bunch of genes for fairer skin from both sides.",
"The father might have had a Light skin gene and a dark skin gene , but the light skin gene has passed down to their kid. For example , both of my parents are tan but my oldest sister is actually really white and even I'm still tanned but I'm lighter than them. On the other hand , my aunt is white and her husband is light tanned and 2 of their kids are white but the last one is actually almost black , lol. Different gene combinations simply give different colors , especially if you're from a mixed or interracial background like my family's."
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5eqycn | how did they identify someone that was wanted for a crime before we had the tools we have today (fingerprints,dental records,etc. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5eqycn/eli5_how_did_they_identify_someone_that_was/ | {
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"A lot of times, quite frankly, they didn't. In medieval England, the beginnings of our modern jury system had their roots in bringing together a group of sworn men to testify before the sheriff or other royal official as to whether they felt anyone in the area was suspected of having committed a crime. In those days, though, if you were a suspect but of high social standing (a bishop or nobleman, for instance) you could take a holy oath saying you didn't do it, and that was considered sufficient. If you weren't lucky enough to be that important, you could still clear your name if you had a certain number of people vouch for your innocence--the idea being that a guilty person wouldn't be able to get people to back him up.\n\nIt was a reformed French criminal named Eugene Vidocque (sp?) that laid the groundwork for modern investigative techniques in the 19th century. One of the things he introduced was keeping dossiers on known criminals and their MO's. When things like fingerprints were discovered, they fit neatly into the framework Vidocque created."
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3nsg92 | how do conspiracy theorists believe the government is involved in school shootings like roseburg and sandy hook? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3nsg92/eli5_how_do_conspiracy_theorists_believe_the/ | {
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"from what I gather, they believe the government organizes them to drum up anti gun outrage to make the populace willfully disarm themselves so that it makes an armed uprising impossible when they implement the new world order. I realize this may be an over simplification if you happen to subscribe to this theory.\n",
"[Overwriting my comment history as a minority of brigaders are using my comment history to harass, threaten to dox me, and punish me as a way to express their dissent. Congrats on turning reddit from a forum of discussion to a place you can bully others you disagree with.]",
"There's no central thing that all conspiracy theorists mean when they say the government was involved.\n\nFor a school shooting, \"government involvement\" could be any mix of: the shooter being a hired gunman, facts being exaggerated, crisis actors being used to make the disaster look even more terrible, faked deaths or destruction, and/or complete fabrication of the event. \n\nThe general idea, however, is that the government manipulates some portion(s) of the disaster in order to further a given agenda. For example, a conspiracy theorists might say that the US government had a hand in 9/11 in order to justify going to war in the Middle East; or the sinking of the [RMS Lusitania](_URL_0_), which provided pretence for America to enter World War I. ",
"I work with a nutjob like this. His idea (which I'm sure he copied from other nutjobs) is that the government stages these events to take away your rights. Basically, a shooting happens, people get all up in arms, then they take away your guns and whatever else. That way they have public support to do these things. \n\nHe is a very sick individual. Also does not believe the Holocaust happened, 9/11 was the government, and does not believe that the ice ages happened (?)",
"A guy I know thinks the latest school shooting is another 'false flag' operation, just like all the earlier ones were."
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7cc9k5 | why does alcohol make me flushed and hot? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7cc9k5/eli5_why_does_alcohol_make_me_flushed_and_hot/ | {
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"Alcohol is a vasodilator which means it causes your blood vessels to widen somewhat. This also happens for the blood vessels that are close to your skin which releases heat that is felt by your skin. \n\n[Link](_URL_0_) ",
"Two separate things.\n1) Why does alcohol make me feel hot?\nYour body functions optimally around 37 degrees Celsius. Since your internal organs are generally more important for keeping you alive than your limbs, you body generally keeps your core at almost exactly at this temperature, while your limbs can vary quite a bit more.\nWhen you are cold, your body conserves heat by reducing the blood flow to your skin and limbs, which is why your hands and feet get cold when it's cold. When you are overheated, your body dissipates excess heat by increasing blood flow to your skin and limbs, which it why you feel flushed when it's hot.\n\nSince your core temperature is always the same (barring heat stroke or hypothermia), your body senses temperature based on what temperature your peripheral tissues are.\n\nAlcohol causes flushing (which will be explained in #2), which forces your body to increase the blood flow to your skin whether or not you actually need to dissipate extra heat. You therefore feel as hot as if the external temperature were causing the same reaction. This is actually rather dangerous, as it can cause people to feel hot and not wear appropriate clothing in cold weather, then causing a drop in core body temperature.\n\n2) Why does alcohol make me flushed?\nAlcohol itself (ethanol, to be more exact) is a vasodilator and can increase the blood flow to your skin, but the main reason it causes flushing is usually more due to its breakdown products.\n\nAlcohol is processed in your liver by a series of enzymes. The beginning of the pathway goes:\nAlcohol - > (alcohol dehydrogenase)- > acetaldehyde - > (acetaldehyde dehydrogenase)- > other products that aren't important.\n\nThe metabolite acetaldehyde is a very potent vasodilator and is responsible for most of the flushing response from alcohol consumption.\n\nThere are two genetic variations that can cause higher build-up of acetaldehyde levels and therefore a worse flush response:\n- Overactive alcohol dehydrogenase. If you have a lot of this, the first step converting alcohol to acetaldehyde is increased.\n- acetaldehyde dehydrogenase deficiency. If you don't have enough, the second step breaking acetaldehyde down is slower.\n\nBoth of these genetic variations are common in Asian populations. If you have both, your flush response will be the most severe.\n\nHope that explains things!"
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1q4kz3 | why are airline tickets so expensive? is jet fuel really that costly? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1q4kz3/why_are_airline_tickets_so_expensive_is_jet_fuel/ | {
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"You are paying for more than just the fuel. You're paying for the crew's time, the aircraft maintenance, fees the airports charge. etc.",
"An airplane is an investment for an airline. Most will run you millions of dollars, and a 747 can cost up to 30-40 million dollars. They must make a profit, and pay off the airplane over the course of its lifetime. Fuel costs, maintenance, and a whole team of professional full time staff keep the airplane in the air, and at the end of the day, the company still needs to make a net profit.\n\nYour 300$ plane ticket no longer seems like a heavy fee.",
"First, the income from the ticket is split between the airline and the airport. Not 50/50, obviously, but someone has to pay for the airport to be there.\n\nSecond, there is far more than the fuel. The most important of which is the plane. Those are millions of dollars. There's the pilots and the flight attendants, who's combined salaries make up a pretty good amount. There's the cost of maintenance on the plane. There's the cost of the airline's corporate offices running. The only thing they sell is passage on the plane, and they have to pay for all that.",
"If Spirit price breakdowns are to be believed it is mostly taxes and fuel.",
"They are putting you inside a metal building and throwing it across the world. Pay the price they ask.",
"Um, everyone is really into this fuel thing, which is expensive, but do you have any idea how difficult/expensive it is to make sure you go 550mph, 8 miles in the air, millions of times per year with NO failures/accidents? Really, Really hard.\n\nI'm an airline engineer. a guy in my group did his PhD dissertation on 1 rivet. 6 years at georgia tech, and 250 pages on 1 rivet. It's not easy.",
"Ooh, I know this one. \n\nI can give you a breakdown on a random ticket that I'll create.\n\nTOTAL With Airline fees: 866.89 \nYQ (fuel tax) 496.00 \nAirport taxes: 89.89 \nActual fare: 281.00 - used to maintain the fleet and pay the staff and buildings. \nAirline fees: 25\n\nMind you that the Airport taxes vary drastically, this bkng is for a simple intercontinental round trip, if there were more airports in the mix, especially european ones, the airport taxes would skyrocket. The usual airport tax for an US airport is 4.50 per pax. In addition to the 4.50 tax there are additional taxes that are paid to the country for example. In this instance 17.20 twice, due to the fact that you are both arriving in and departing from the US. The Second main tax is for the European airport which in this instance is 30.99 Then there are some smaller taxes, which I guess don't affect the total price that drastically.\n\nIf you have any more questions, ask away. ",
"I assume you are American. In Europe, flights can be had for under $10. It is all about the system in place formed by our government. It was a while since I learned this and I know there are many more contributing factors but consider [this model of Europe](_URL_0_). Imagine each of those letters represent a city. You see how inter connected EVERY city is. [Here is the American model](_URL_1_). The American model is a Hub to Spoke system. Not every city is connected to one another. Trying to get from Dallas to San Francisco would, according to this model, you would have go to Denver, then LA, before arriving. While I doubt this accuracy, you get the idea. There is that and I know that Europe is much more stringent in not allowing monopolies. There are a lot of low cost carriers. It is hard for one airline to dominate a single region. In America, you have several very large airlines that pretty much control the show. The low cost carriers in Europe generally don't fly into the main airport because of the price, but rather one that is further away to cut down in price. In America you don't really see that. Jetblue and all them fly into the big hubs.\n\nSo, basically the lack of competition in the U.S. and their hub and spoke system which make prices so high.",
"I wouldn't call US$250 for travel from California to Florida expensive. You just need to look around and know when to buy. I'd say most of the time an expensive ticket is expensive for no reason other than that they know people will pay it.",
"[The price of airfare has never been lower](_URL_0_) and quite frankly cheap airfare is one of the great success stories of the 1980s deregulation.\n\nSo, my question to you is, why do you think airfare is expensive, when it's substantially cheaper now than it ever has been in the past thirty years?",
"CNBC has an episode on American airlines where they briefly discuss the various aspects and costs of commercial flight.... should check it out: _URL_0_"
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15p2e1 | nfl divisions, wildcards and playoff berths. | I somewhat understand the way things work but there are a few things Google doesn't really help with.
What does it mean when a team clinches a playoff berth and how is that different between division titles and wildcards?
And also I know what it means to win the division title, but how does winning a wildcard work? Is there a separate game between possible wildcards to see who wins that?
Sorry if this has been answered already. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/15p2e1/eli5_nfl_divisions_wildcards_and_playoff_berths/ | {
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"Ok so the NFL is split into 2 different Conferences the AFC and NFC and in both of these conferences there are 4 divisions north south east and west. And in each conference there is 6 spots available for the playoffs and a shot at the superbowl.\n\nEach of these divisions are given 1 automatic spot for qualification into the playoffs, so that decides 4 of the 6 spots available. The remaining 2 spots are given to two teams that have won the most games but were unable to win their division. So basically a wildcard spot is given and they are allowed to progress into the playoffs too.\n\nTo clinch a playoff spot means that you have won enough games to win your division or be handed a wildcard spot. There is no separate wildcard game it all depends on your regular season record.\n",
"\"I know what it means to win the division title, but how does winning a wildcard work? Is there a separate game between possible wildcards to see who wins that?\"\n\nAll of the teams in each conference that don't win their division are ranked, and the two best non-division-winners in each conference get wild cards. If two or more teams have the same record, they don't play another game - there is a whole series of tiebreakers that are used to decide which team gets the wild card:\n\n_URL_0_"
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2c8ggg | what is the difference between throwing biodegradable material in the garbage and putting it in the compost? | I mean, what would the be the advantage to putting a banana peel (or other biodegradable materials) in the compost to be picked up than to put the banana peel in the garbage where it will eventually decompose? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2c8ggg/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_throwing/ | {
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"The majority of decompasable material gets buried in the landfill before it has a chance to decompose much. Dig through the dump enough, you'll find years-old banana peels.",
"Compost usually has a mix of browns and greens. It also needs air, moisture, and heat to break down into soil. I think if it's stuck in a garbage heap, it will not get all of the items listed to properly break down. A garbage heap might not be hot enough underneath, or lack moisture (if stuff is in a plastic garbage bag that doesn't break down). I have a compost bin and it breaks down amazingly quick. I used to just have a heap, but once I bought a bin with a lid, it's amazing to watch it steam when I open it. It gets that hot inside.",
"For one, compost makes the waste into a useable resource. People who compost often use the resulting soil for planting or gardening.",
"Biodegradable items in garbage are mixed with non-degradable garbage (plastics, various metals, and contaminants (chemicals, heavy metals, and human wastes), so they have to be kept separate and either buried or incinerated. The composted banana peel returns to the soil in one year, the garbage one will eventually end up decomposed among a lot of nasty stuff and materials that take decades to break down.",
"Garbage goes to landfills. Landfills aren't turned and watered so the bacteria and possibly worms have a chance to digest the organic material"
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15cs0q | immanuel kant, the categorical imperative, noumenon v. phenomenon, and a priori v. a posteriori. | I've read a bit about him on Wikipedia but I couldn't really understand much. Any help would be appreciated. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/15cs0q/eli5_immanuel_kant_the_categorical_imperative/ | {
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"The categorical imperative is the principle that Kant thought was the foundation of all morality. He had a few different forms that he thought were equivalent. I think the least confusing is the second one: roughly, \"You cannot use other people as a means to an end\".\n\nA phenomenon is something that appears to one or more of your senses. A noumenon is something that exists, but does not appear to any of your senses. Kant did not think that it was possible for human beings to know about any noumena, although he didn't rule out the possibility that they still exist.\n\n*A priori* knowledge is knowledge that exists independent of any experience. For instance, \"All humans are primates\" is *a priori* knowledge. You don't need to go and check; being a primate is part of what it means to be human. \n\nIn contrast, \"No humans have naturally neon pink skin\" is *a posteriori* knowledge. It's true, but it could be false; there's nothing inherent in the concept of \"human\" that requires humans have different colored skin.",
"Kant's categorical imperative is the foundation of his moral philosophy. To really understand it, we have to begin a little ways back.\n\nAll life is born into what Kant calls the state of nature. What separates humans from other animals is our ability to reason, and this allows us to move out of the state of nature and into the state of society. Kant argues that a state of society is preferable to the state of nature because thinking beings value (or ought to value) freedom, and we only may enter society by establishing a state, i.e., a government.\n\nKant believed that all living things enter the world with natural-born rights to do whatever they want. You, for instance, would have the right in the state of nature to murder me if you wanted, just as you would have the right to defend yourself from murder with lethal force, or do any other conceivable thing you wish.\n\nHowever, when all beings assert all their natural-born rights, these rights tend to negate each other. The gazelle has the right to live just as the lion has the right to attack and kill it. There are no value judgments to be made when a lion kills a gazelle. Whatever happens, happens. It would not make sense to apply moral reasoning to the state of nature. Even if the lion killed the gazelle for sport and doesn't eat it, it would be silly to call this behavior \"right\" or \"wrong\".\n\nBecause all rights tend to cancel each other out, no one is left with any effective rights at all. Thus in the state of nature we do not see what Kant calls freedom. In a world where the gazelle can do what it wants, it cannot be free of the consequences of other animals doing what they want. This kind of anarchic existence is capricious; existence itself is wholly dependent upon the whims of others.\n\nWith reason, however, beings can agree to give up certain rights. If you and I are willing to give up our right to murder each other, we enter a state of society, and our right to live is no longer canceled out. We each had two rights in the state of nature, the right to murder and to live, but effectively had none. By voluntarily giving up one and entering the state of society, we are left with only one, but it is now a right worth having because it is no longer canceled. Thus, paradoxically, only by giving up rights we have in the state of nature, we effectively gain rights in the state of society. Maximizing our *effective* rights, in Kant's view, maximizes our freedom.\n\nThe natural question that follows is: how do we know which rights to give up? It might seem obvious in the example I gave that we would naturally prioritize our right to live over our right to murder. But *why*? How do we know the right to live is more important than the right to murder? If someone came along and said, \"But I don't want to give up my right to murder. Why are you right and I'm wrong?\"\n\nThe answer is Kant's categorical imperative. He begins from the egalitarian principle that everyone has the same natural-born rights in the state of nature. This is a very important pillar of his moral philosophy. It sounds obvious, but it is one that many people don't actually agree with. For instance, any society that has hereditary rulers such as kings accord power to that nobility *as their birthright*. Most religions recognize individuals that have access to divine wisdom as having been in some way anointed by god. For example, Catholics that follow the Pope are compelled to believe, insofar as they are good Catholics, that the Pope is somehow divinely chosen. All Christians believe that Jesus, the saints, had access to divine truth and were therefore not equal to all others. If you believe that some beings are brought into this world and chosen by destiny, fate, god, or whatever, as somehow being special, then Kant's moral philosophy cannot proceed.\n\nBut, if all people are born into the state of nature as equals, then the categorical imperative says that you should act according to the maxim that your action would become universal law. In other words, this means that since you are equal to everyone else, if you murder, then by the categorical imperative you are asserting that everyone *should murder you* under the same circumstances as you murder another.\n\nUnder this maxim, Kant believes that you will conclude on your own, using your faculties of reason, that your right to murder is not as important as your right to not be murdered, so you give up the former in order to preserve the latter. In doing so, you have identified a moral law prohibiting murder. Moreover, he goes on to say that pure reason ties together all thinking beings, and therefore all thinking beings will conclude the same. In arriving at this same conclusion, and by giving up the right to murder, these thinking beings enter a mutual state of society.\n\nIn Kant's ideal society, then, all reasoning beings agree on moral law, and form a government that enacts law (civil law, I mean) to match. The goal of this state of being is to maximize freedom. Of course, real governments are not ideal, so there is a mismatch between moral law and law.\n\nNotice the origin of governmental sovereignty. It comes from people using reason in order to willingly give up certain rights. Thus government is vested with power, but only by the will of the people.\n\nFor Kant, what it means to be free is to live according to moral law, but not because you would be punished if you violate it, but rather because through reason, you would author the law yourself and subjugate yourself to it in order to maximize your freedom. So, once again, we arrive at a paradox of Kant's moral philosophy. If you behave according to your inclinations (wants, desires, needs, etc), most people would call this freedom, but for Kant it is only when you act out of a sense of duty to moral law *against* your inclinations that you are truly free.\n\nIf you want a much deeper discussion of Kant and moral philosophy, check out these Harvard lectures - _URL_0_"
]
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[],
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"http://www.youtube.com/course?list=EC30C13C91CFFEFEA6"
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76t8d2 | how long does someone elses dna last inside an individual who received donated blood? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/76t8d2/eli5_how_long_does_someone_elses_dna_last_inside/ | {
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"Generally speaking, you're not getting any DNA in donor blood.\n\nRed blood cells don't contain DNA (overly-simplified, they technically have some), and the donation process filters out proteins and other stuff dissolved in the blood. Plus, you don't really have free DNA floating around in your serum, either.\n\nWhen you receive packed red cells, you're just getting mature red cells, which lost their nuclei before leaving your bone marrow."
]
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[]
] |
||
jvtsz | what happens when making an international call. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jvtsz/eli5_what_happens_when_making_an_international/ | {
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"There is a cable under the ocean that goes to the other country.\n\n_URL_0_",
"The phone switch listens for key press tones, looks at the number you dialled, then works out where it needs to connect you to. It might be the same exchange, or it might go upstream to another exchange. It's the same physically as the Internet after that point. Phone switches used to be mechanical (in fact, the telephone switch was invented by an undertaker who thought one of the local operators was connecting potential customers to a rival undertaker they were related to), but it's now all digital apart from some really remote places.\n\nCramming multiple connections into a single physical wire is called multiplexing. Those multiplexed connections between exchanges are called trunks, because the network is hierarchical, i.e. a tree structure.\n\nSo your exchange figures out that you're trying to call New Zealand, then tries to figure out the \"best\" (by quality, cost, or a balance, depending on how money-grubbing they are) route through the network, hopping through different exchanges to get there.\n\nThe actual physical connection might be an undersea cable, microwaves or a satellite. Satellites are rarely used because they're expensive and there's more latency because the signal has to go to space and back.\n\nThen it connects to the New Zealand phone system and the process happens in reverse, where it tries to find the best route to get from the central office to the exchange the person you're calling is connected to.",
"There is a cable under the ocean that goes to the other country.\n\n_URL_0_",
"The phone switch listens for key press tones, looks at the number you dialled, then works out where it needs to connect you to. It might be the same exchange, or it might go upstream to another exchange. It's the same physically as the Internet after that point. Phone switches used to be mechanical (in fact, the telephone switch was invented by an undertaker who thought one of the local operators was connecting potential customers to a rival undertaker they were related to), but it's now all digital apart from some really remote places.\n\nCramming multiple connections into a single physical wire is called multiplexing. Those multiplexed connections between exchanges are called trunks, because the network is hierarchical, i.e. a tree structure.\n\nSo your exchange figures out that you're trying to call New Zealand, then tries to figure out the \"best\" (by quality, cost, or a balance, depending on how money-grubbing they are) route through the network, hopping through different exchanges to get there.\n\nThe actual physical connection might be an undersea cable, microwaves or a satellite. Satellites are rarely used because they're expensive and there's more latency because the signal has to go to space and back.\n\nThen it connects to the New Zealand phone system and the process happens in reverse, where it tries to find the best route to get from the central office to the exchange the person you're calling is connected to."
]
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[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_international_submarine_communications_cables"
],
[],
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"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_international_submarine_communications_cables"
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||
d5el4l | why does electricity move along a wire ? | What causes it to travel along the wire? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d5el4l/eli5_why_does_electricity_move_along_a_wire/ | {
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"Electrons are negatively charged and attracted to a positive charge. If you stick a positive charge at one end they slowly drift towards it bumping into to everything along the way",
"Electricity is just electrons carrying current. Metals conduct because they have free electrons which can move around. The electrons are negatively charged and so will move towards a positive charge. When we introduce a battery, they all start to move towards it as it contains a positive charge. (when we discovered electricity we didn't know this and got it wrong, so we say it flows from positive to negative, even though that's the wrong way around) these electrons all move along the wire with their charge, and so the electricity flows along the wire."
]
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21d42h | how does my pc know where my monitors are relative to each other? | _URL_0_
When I click detect, Control Panel automatically figures out where my two monitors are, so that the mouse moves between them properly.
Any clues? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/21d42h/eli5_how_does_my_pc_know_where_my_monitors_are/ | {
"a_id": [
"cgbvdyk"
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"score": [
12
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"text": [
"you did that, and it remembered it while you didn't. "
]
} | [] | [
"http://i.imgur.com/dXNeG7u.png"
] | [
[]
] |
|
1e3ey1 | why the benghazi whistleblowers are being silenced by the government? | I understand the need for national security but why are various government entities are trying to silence Benghazi "whistleblowers"? Shouldn't the American people know the truth?
| explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1e3ey1/eli5_why_the_benghazi_whistleblowers_are_being/ | {
"a_id": [
"c9wemej"
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"score": [
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"text": [
"No government entity has tried to silence Benghazi whistleblowers."
]
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[]
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|
1w6smn | how does sugar-free gum prevent cavities? | I know that it is meant to neutralise plaque acids, but I don't understand how.... | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1w6smn/eli5how_does_sugarfree_gum_prevent_cavities/ | {
"a_id": [
"cez7tbe",
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"text": [
"There are bacteria on your teeth that consume sugar and produce acids as a by-product. The acid then damages your teeth.\n\nTake away the sugar, stop the bacteria.",
"The pH level in your mouth should be around a neutral 7. When you eat sugary or starchy foods, it decreases and your enamel is vulnerable to that acidity (acidity softens enamel, which makes it edible to bacteria...this is also why you shouldn't brush your teeth right after eating as your enamel can wear down). Chewing sugarfree gum helps increase saliva flow which brings your pH level back up to neutral. It would do so eventually on its own but chewing gum speeds up the process. Also, the nature of sugar alcohols in sugarfree gum, particularly xylitol, help inhibit bacterial growh. "
]
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[],
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|
3o5gae | why are american and european semi-trucks so different? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3o5gae/eli5why_are_american_and_european_semitrucks_so/ | {
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"text": [
"In Europe, truck length is limited by the entire vehicle -- tractor (cab) and trailer combined. In America, the cab and trailers have their own separate size requirements. So American cabs can be larger. If Europe used those larger cabs, it would mean shorter trailers, meaning less cargo, meaning less money per run.",
"European trucks have to be shorter overall due to the design of their roads and cities. They have smaller cabs in order maximize cargo capacity with these shorter standards. ",
"* European cities often have narrower roads, and need smaller trucks\n* European laws usually limit the size of the entire vehicle, while US laws apply to the truck and trailer separately, leading to different design considerations"
]
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b996vs | leaving aside medical conditions like alzheimer's, is there any proof that so called "memory pills" actually have any benefit? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b996vs/eli5_leaving_aside_medical_conditions_like/ | {
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"ek33jw0"
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"text": [
"Nope. There are a bunch of such products and basically no research indicating that they are effective at all. You will find this doesn't dissuade gullible people who will buy them anyway."
]
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[]
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||
2kfepy | why do humans naturally like 4 bar music rhythms? | Why not 5 bars, or 7? Is there something fundamentally "right" about the number 4 that makes it musically appealing? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2kfepy/eli5_why_do_humans_naturally_like_4_bar_music/ | {
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"text": [
"i believe in some cultures 4/4 isn't so much the norm as it is in the western world. I don't have examples but i play the drums and remember it coming up during a lesson years ago.",
"Because people know how to dance to 4 or 3, dancing to prime numbers is much more difficult because of how asymmetrical they are. At least as far as western culture goes.\n",
"I read something a while back about people liking familiarity, which is why a lot of popular music (and also things like movie plots) Follow a similar structure. Each is different enough to not bore us however familiar in a way people find comfortable. Think about the number of songs with the same 4/4 4 chord progression structure. People eat that up! "
]
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95l4ot | hypotheses and t-tests | Hey guys -
I'm currently trying to figure out how to use my t-tests to accept or reject my hypotheses, but I am at a total loss.
I've got a bunch of numbers, but I don't know what they actually mean.
Is anyone here an expert on t-tests and can explain it to a dummy like me?
H2.
Exposure to a company’s socially responsible behavior (UNGC) will increase positive assessment of CSR.
H3.
Individuals would have a positive orientation towards CSR as a result of being told the company was UNGC compliant (“bluewashing”).
[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)
Which numbers am I supposed to look at here? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/95l4ot/eli5_hypotheses_and_ttests/ | {
"a_id": [
"e3th68o"
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"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"Most important is the p-value. If its below the significance level you reject it. Normally the significance level is 5%. So any p value below 0.05 is rejected"
]
} | [] | [
"https://imgur.com/a/A0Dbmbx"
] | [
[]
] |
|
368jyb | what's so bad about invasive species? weren't all species invasive at some point? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/368jyb/eli5_whats_so_bad_about_invasive_species_werent/ | {
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"Up until a few hundred years ago, invasive species were very rare. Every ecosystem on the planet was populated mostly by species that had anywhere form many millions of years to at least several hundred thousand years to adapt to that particular environment. As a result of sharing the same environment over such a long time, a healthy balance among species would have developed. New species found their way into an ecosystem, but there would be so few at a time, with large time gaps between, that the ecosystem had time to adapt to them and they to it.\n\nNow, with so much world trade and giant ocean freighters dumping bilge water thousands of miles from its source, there is a constant flow of invasive species. Many will be ill suited to their new environment and not survive. Others will find themselves in unique situations where they have no natural predators and only weak competition for resources. They will thrive and out compete the native species for food and habitat, sometimes driving them to extinction. This is true of both plants and animals.\n\nBut it’s not just one species replacing another. The old species had adapted not only to the local conditions and climate, but to all its individual extremes as well. They had to or they would not be here. Although the invading species might have found itself with an advantage upon arrival, it is possible that after they have driven native populations down to precarious numbers, an extreme environmental event will occur (drought, flood, extreme snowfall or heatwaves) that they are not equipped to survive. The native species would have been able to weather it, but they have been driven to such small numbers that their chances are poor. What we are left with is a barren or impoverished landscape where the flora and fauna are not in balance.\n\nAnother problem happens when the invaders compete with local farm crops, or fish and wild plants that local people rely on as a food source."
]
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||
4wo0y5 | definition of a hypercube | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4wo0y5/eli5definition_of_a_hypercube/ | {
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"To make a square you take a line and 'stretch it' in a new direction (a direction so that you don't just end up with a longer line). To make a cube, you take a square and stretch it in a new direction. \n\nThis is where it gets more complicated. Imagine you could take a cube and stretch it in a direction so that none of the cube's sides get longer, then you'd have a hypercube. This is obviously impossible in the real world and very hard to imagine, but this operation is mathematically allowed. ",
"A line is 1 dimensional. If you take 2 lines and connect the corresponding end points(vertices) you get a square which is 2 dimensional. If you take 2 squares and connect the corresponding corners you get a cube which is 3 dimensional. If you take 2 cubes and connect the corners you get a hyper cube which is 4 dimensional.\n\nYou can't actually make a hyper cube because it needs 4 dimensions to exist but you can get an understanding of it in that way. Just like you can draw a cube on paper but it's not really a cube because it's only in 2 dimensions."
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2345hh | if organs and other body parts regenerate every few years, how does the body handle the difference in dna of transplanted organs? | If the human body replaces certain cells with new ones every so often (I know that this is different for each organ), and the organ that is generating new cells is a transplanted organ from a donor, how does the body handle this? Do the new cells contain the DNA of the donor organ or the host? Is there a risk of rejection of newly generated cells because of DNA difference or a difference in expression of proteins?
When I tried to find the answer on Google, I found this _URL_0_
which states that the average 25 year old replaces 1% of his heart muscle in a year and it only confused me more as to how this would work. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2345hh/eli5_if_organs_and_other_body_parts_regenerate/ | {
"a_id": [
"cgt84nw"
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"score": [
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"text": [
"The cells are \"replaced\" from the existing cells of the organ, for the most part. So they would have the donor's genes."
]
} | [] | [
"http://www.nih.gov/researchmatters/april2009/04132009heartcells.htm"
] | [
[]
] |
|
4zg86w | why are (most) sheriffs elected officials? | Other areas of law enforcement you need to pass training and tests just to get in the door let alone get promoted, why is it that with Sheriffs they elect the head of the local law enforcement agency instead of it being based on skill/experience/performance/etc?
What's to stop the people from electing an incompetent shithead as sheriff? What kind of tests/qualifications do sheriffs need to have (I'm sure that varies state to state).
Not everyone thinks this is a good idea since some counties have made them an appointed, not elected, official. In NYC the sheriff is appointed by the Mayor, for example. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4zg86w/eli5_why_are_most_sheriffs_elected_officials/ | {
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"text": [
"Nothing is to stop people from electing an incompetent shithead. Just ask the fine people of Maricopa County, Arizona. ",
"When most states enacted their constitutions there was no such thing as professional police forces, certification, training, etc. You elected the guy who seemed trustworthy and competent, just like you do for governor or president or mayor.",
"Elected or appointed officials are on charge of every department. This should be a good thing because it means the people have control over the department.\n\n",
"The sheriff is more like the chief of police - he runs the department rather than running around enforcing the law personally.\n\nIn a city, the chief of police has to answer to the mayor (or the city council). If the public is unhappy with the police department, they can demand that the mayor replace the chief. If the mayor refuses, **he** can be voted out of office and replaced with somebody that will fix the police.\n\nSheriffs don't work under such a system. Since they don't really have an elected \"boss\", we elect them directly."
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49hkar | why do some words and names sound 'funny' whilst others don't? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/49hkar/eli5_why_do_some_words_and_names_sound_funny/ | {
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"d0ruvie"
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"THere are two reasons a word/name sounds funny to you.\n\nThe first reason is the cultural norm. A name like Jake for an American sounds perfectly normal since its really compatible with English and is commonly used so you're use to hearing the name and there is a standardized way of pronouncing the name. A name like Phuc can have multiple pronunciation because there is no standardized way of pronouncing it in the U.S. (but there is in Vietnamese) and you don't commonly hear it. \n\nThe second reason is that the word/name is not compatible with the language. Some words just cannot be adapted to the correct pronunciation in English so there is compensation which sounds 'funny' to the ear. Vietnamese is a tonal language so its almost impossible to have the name Phuc pronounced correctly in English, a language with little tonal requirements. \n\nedit: Nguyen is a better example of how it is impossible for it to be pronounced correctly in English. "
]
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[]
] |
||
4nyby7 | how can a person be arrested for resisting arrest and that be the only charge? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4nyby7/eli5_how_can_a_person_be_arrested_for_resisting/ | {
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"It is completely legal for police to temporarily detain someone under certain circumstances. This detention may not lead to being arrested.\n\nThe crime of \"resisting arrest\" also includes resisting such detentions. So, when that's the only charge, it means that someone fought the police, was forcibly detained, and then the police didn't find any evidence of whatever they suspected.\n\nWhich means that the person was the **dumbest** guy around.",
"Because you can be arrested and not charged at all. If a Cop tries to arrest you, you may not have done anything illegal YET. But resisting arrest is illegal whether you've done something or not. The way the law is SUPPOSED to, is that you let the cops check you out and they let you go. Doesn't always work out that way though.\n\nGeneral rule: Just don't fight back.",
"Because you can be detained even without committing a crime. The police can keep you there for a certain amount of time before they determine whether you have committed a crime or not. If you resist, try to run, fight, etc, you're committing a crime whether or not you actually committed one in the first place.",
"1) Resisting Arrest applies differently in different states.\n2) Resisting Arrest has different names in different states.\n\nIn NY you cannot be arrested only for resisting -your own- arrest. But you can be charged with resisting arrest if you keep someone else from being arrested (or try to). So if you try to pull your friend away from the police, you are resisting arrest. In CA apparently they call that Lynching (last week or so a Black Lives Matter activist was found guilty of Lynching in CA for pulling someone away from the police.)\n\nSo like most legal questions lots of different rules in lots of different places.",
"The law is also deliberately vague. They can and do, use it when you refuse to answer questions, won't \"back up far enough\" while filming them, refuse to \"roll down your window\" etc. It usually does not stick, meaning once it gets to a DA, they go \"Nope, there was no reason to detain him, so no crime\". Look up \"disorderly conduct\" it's another vague crime, \"cops get to decide\" and then arrest you, if you are \"committing\" it. I had a friend got hit with it for blowing soap bubbles, not \"in the cops face\", just in public, \"disorderly conduct\" not resisting. The real issue is the amount of leeway police are given, with charging you. Then the amount of immunity, they have for any and all crimes they commit, in dealing/arresting you. I mean, they rarely receive even a reprimand, for crimes up to and including murder. The reality is, mouthing off, or being a pain in the ass, is not illegal, HOWEVER they can and do, beat, arrest, charge and in some instances kill you. Until cops fear prosecution for committing crimes \"under the banner\" of law, this won't change.",
"It is fairly easy, I personally got arrested and was only formally charged with resisting arrest. The reason for it was that I was originally charged with assault and resisting but the assault was dropped.\nBack story: I got really drunk and punched a guy then wrestled with a cop, mind you by really drunk I mean blacked out..... To this day I don't remember any of it, only what my friends have told me.",
"To piggyback on this, at what point does it become resisting arrest? Do the police need to verbally announce they are arresting you first? If someone just runs away at the first sight of police and end up getting caught, is that resisting arrest? \n\nSeems kinda arbitrary and ripe for abuse (of course we all know the police would never do that...)",
"In some states, you can be charged with resisting another person's arrest. Two guys go out drinking, they get in the car to drive home and are stopped by the police, who place the driver under arrest. His buddy says \"your not taking my friend to jail!\" and tries to physically stop the officer from handcuffing his friend and placing him in the patrol car. He is then arrested himself, for resisting his friends arrest, and it is the only charge. In some states this would be considered obstructing or interfering with police but some states this is the best way to deal with that particular situation.",
"I got arrested for resisting arrest. Cop asked if I wanted to go to jail I said do it(was drunk yes, did I physically harm the office or threaten him in anyway, no). And charged with resisting. Being poor got a shit city lawyer who said the case was bs but didn't know enough to get it dismissed. Had to do community service.",
"A lot of the responses I'm seeing are close, but not quite correct.\n\nThis varies state to state, but typically 'resisting arrest' is the title of a charge which describes any action which intentionally prevents or attempts to prevent a peace officer from performing an action which is part of their duty.\n\nIt's grown to be kind of a catch-all for not cooperating with the police. For example, if the request to see your ID and you question them on it (and you're not in a positive identification state which legally requires you to show your ID upon request), you are hindering an investigation and might get cited for 'resisting arrest'.\n\nFight back when they're putting the cuffs on you and it might be 'resisting arrest'. It might also be 'felony assault on a peace officer'.\n\nThe life protip to take away here is that telling a cop what he can and cannot do or trying to litigate your case during a stop or investigation is just going to irritate them and end with you having a 'resisting arrest' charge. If there's a legitimate grievance, follow procedure. File the paperwork, take them to court, and be prepared to prove you shit.",
"This strikes me as something for the 2 cops from Futurama\n\n\nHey, you're under arrest!\n\n\nWhat!? For what possible reason?\n\n\nNone whatsoever \n\n\nI didn't do anything, you can't arrest me\n\n\nHe's resisting arrest! Get him!",
"Pretty much all of the people defending such arrests on account of fleeing, suspicious behavior, \"fought the police\", etc... should try to defend the actions of the police here when Public Defender Jami Tillotson was arrested for resisting arrest because she was doing her job...\n\n_URL_0_\n\n",
"Former prosecutor here, I usually threw those charges away when they showed up on my desk. I charged a couple when it was really blatant or violent, but a lot of them came in that just looked like the officer wanted to arrest the guy for something. That's the easiest charge because it's the cops word vs the perp. "
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9d3vtc | why do solar panels stop working? | According to a recent BBC article, after 30 years or so solar panels are end-of-life and the scrap is no good for anything but landfill.
What stops them working? What makes the scrap unusable? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9d3vtc/eli5_why_do_solar_panels_stop_working/ | {
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"The panels on the voyager space probes worked for longer than 30 years. Higher tier panels in residential solar degrade at half percent a year and should still be at 90% of their output at year 20. Even if that curve is off a bit, that's still around 80-85% at year 30. Unless the article is looking at polycrystaline panels made 30 years ago? I must be missing some detail(s). Can you link the article? ",
"A quick search on the BBC website reveals no such article, do you have a source?\n\nYou might be interested to hear that [a solar panel recycling plant has opened in France](_URL_0_), so your statement that \"the scrap is no good for anything but landfill\" seems to be false. According to the Reuters article \"The robots in Veolia’s new plant dissemble (sic) the panels to recuperate glass, silicon, plastics, copper and silver, which are crushed into granulates that can used to make new panels.\" and \"Veolia said it aims to recycle all decommissioned PV panels in France\".",
"-resistance increase due to contamination over time \n\n-temperature differences causing extension/contraction resulting in decaying micro-structures\n\n-like in batteries, over time metal ions will diffuse to their respective opposite electrode\n\n-mechanical panel issues\n \n"
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9xdzd0 | why is it that when objects reach a certain speed, we can no longer see them with our eyes? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9xdzd0/eli5_why_is_it_that_when_objects_reach_a_certain/ | {
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"Our eyes are constantly receiving and processing photons from the environment, but the image formed is based on the amount of photons received. If you look in a given direction and an object is only there for a tiny fraction of a second, then the amount of photons coming from that direction will be a tiny proportion of those that reach the eye.\n\nThe result of this is that we start to see the object as a blur as well as mostly seeing the background behind the object (as most photons reaching our eyes are from the background and not the object).",
"You can see object that travel at high speed. Just look at other object that orbit the sun.\n\nThe orbital speed of earth is 30km/s. Venus have a speed of 35km/s and Jupiter 13km/s and Saturn 9.6km/s. So you can see object that move at a speed of 20 km/s relative yo you with you own eyes. So speed is not the only relevant factor as a bullet is a lot slower but we can not see it.\n\nSo just the speed is not what is important. What is important is how fast they move in our field of view there relative size and the amount of light the emit and the background. \n\n\n\nThe field of view change be a bit har to understand but you can observe it next time you are in a car. If you drive along road and look at the ground at the edge of the road. It is clear and sharp some distance in front but if you look at it directly beside you is is a blur. That is a change how fast it move in you field of view. The speed of the ground relative to you is constant but if it close to you it change position faster in your field of view\n\n\nA small object like a bullet that move fast can be hard to see because it reflect relative little light and even it if was stationary in the air it would be hard to see at relative close distance. If you add a light source like a tracer you can see it without any problem.\n\nThe movement in your field of view will determine how long time the object can emit light that hit you eye from on location. So a tracer bullet that passed directly in front of your eye is a lot harder to see then if it is far away from you.\n\nThe background is also important. You can in fact see artillery and mortar shells that are fired and the do not have any tracers without any problem. If you are close behind the gun and it is fired at a high angle you can see the shell when it move away again the clear sky. It you are behind it move primary away from you and are relative still in your field of view. \n\nYou can even do that will regular small caliber bullets in the right condition. If it is a bright day and you have a uniform bacground you can spot bullers from a angle and is is easier if you are behind the shooter. Is all depend on the amound of light the emmit so a bright sunny day helps and if you are behind it it move slow in your fied of view.\n\n"
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168sz1 | how can you tell if a suit is high quality? why are some suits so ridiculously expensive? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/168sz1/eli5_how_can_you_tell_if_a_suit_is_high_quality/ | {
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"The price of almost everything you can buy is mostly determined by two main components: material cost (what it's made out of) and man hours (how long did it take to make it). \n\nIf you make a suit out of cotton (a common clothing material) it will cost less than one made of silk. Since silk is so thin and lightweight, you also require more silk to get the job done. If it were possible, you could imagine that a suit made of diamonds would be even more than the silk suit. (More awesome, too.) \n\nThat's one part. Now the other part is just how long it takes to make. A seamstress in a sweatshop may be able to crank out a budget level cotton suit in 2 hours (for the sake of explanation). If she's able to do the silk one in the exact same amount of time, the silk suit will still cost more due to the material cost, as we talked about before. However, if you're going to be making silk suits, you probably want to have a higher quality product. So rather than having a Bangladesh sweat shop make it, you would have it done by a respected seamstress in Naples. This seamstress charges more for her work and it takes her longer to make the suit, because she takes more time to make sure everything is done carefully and precisely. \n\nThe cotton suit could be made in 2 hours by very cheap labor. The silk suit takes 10 hours to be made by a highly skilled laborer. You can see the silk suit is going to cost more due to it having a higher quality material and a longer manufacturing time. \n\nThere are more factors at play, but this should suffice for the ELI5 explanation. "
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408awy | in high profile cases, why do we rely on 12 peers of the community that have no law profession background? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/408awy/eli5_in_high_profile_cases_why_do_we_rely_on_12/ | {
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"We do. Why do you think the Supreme Court is for?\n\nThough they generally do not deal with criminal cases, if they are \"guilty beyond a reasonable doubt,\" it should not matter who judges them as long as they are sane.",
"It's a trade-off. We're more afraid of having a group of people getting lobbied (like our Congressional representatives do) than we are of having undereducated juries do the wrong thing. We consider it a protection that we have a large random jury pool of people like us rather than some elite group of people out of touch with normal folks or bought by corporations or pressured by the government to give certain verdicts. ",
"The fundamental purpose of a jury is to act as a barrier to oppressive law. If you cannot explain the law convincingly enough so that 12 average people feel comfortable punishing the accused, then it's probably a bad law.\n\nHowever, it should be noted that this principle is severely comprised by the aura of authority we vest in judges and prosecutors, where jury members often just go along with people they presume are wiser than them - especially given that prosecutors work very hard to ensure that people confident in their opinions on such matters are excluded from the jury pool.",
"Because a jury doesn't need to have a law background. Now, someone does. He or she is called the \"judge\".\n\nJuries don't decide matters of law -- that's what we pay the judge for. Juries decide matters of fact. So a juror doesn't have to know the ins and outs of the law. What they have to determine is what actually happened.\n\nThe judge will go through the law and write jury instructions. They might go something like this:\n\n(1) Did the defendant shoot the victim? (2) Was the defendant in reasonable fear of his life? If you answer \"yes\" to 1, and \"no\" to 2, you must find the defendant guilty, otherwise, you must find him not guilty.\n\nBecause of the jury instructions, these 12 peers don't have to know the law.",
"Any qualifications would require laws to define those requirements.\n\nLaws would be determined by a political process, and that process would be subject to bias.\n\nAfter the Civil War, southern states used voter qualification law to prevent blacks from voting. Jury qualification laws could be used in the same way.",
"Because they are told the law that they need to be deciding on.\n\nOne if the most basic arguments used is to say \"The law defines *insert crime* as *insert act*. You the jury will decide whether the defendant committed that crime\""
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9syvan | how does the checks-and-balances system keep any one branch of the us government from becoming too powerful? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9syvan/eli5_how_does_the_checksandbalances_system_keep/ | {
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"There are quite a few ways. I'll list a partial set of examples.\n\nThe president can sign a bill into law or veto it, giving control over the legislative branch. The legislative branch can also override a veto with a super-majority vote.\n\nThe president nominates supreme Court justices, and the Senate confirms them.\n\nThe supreme Court can interpret the Constitution and strike down laws as unconstitutional if challenged in a court case. \n"
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2zkrax | i've just had 2 cm of floating cartilage removed from my knee and i don't have much left...why can't surgeons just glue it back in place? | I'm 35 and it hurts to walk after 30+ years of soccer and 5 knee surgeries on both knees...having that last piece removed made me sad knowing I don't have much left and by my logic all would be better if we could just shove some back where it goes... | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2zkrax/eli5_ive_just_had_2_cm_of_floating_cartilage/ | {
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"Off the top of my head... I'd guess there is not an adhesive strong enough (and tolerable to your body) to hold that chunk in place over long periods of time. The pressures involved on the sliding surfaces of the knee joint are HUGE. Any lip/seam where that chunk joins with the rest of the sliding in the knee would have to be very, very smooth. The slightest bump gives you clicking, and leads to irritation, which leads to inflammation.\n\nIt's likely the only real option is to pull that piece out, and grind the resulting edges of the cartilaginous surface down so they are smooth-ish with respects to the kneecap sliding over them.\n\nOther areas of tissue in you will heal. Cut? Sew it up, it'll knit back together in short order. Cartilage does not have a blood supply, and takes an extremely long time to heal even the smallest tear. A huge flap/chunk like the one you're talking about... is simply unlikely to get re-attached by your body. It's effectively dead plastic. :(\n\nSource: I have a tear in my meniscus. It flaps back and forth in the joint, occasionally causing locking. Options are to scope the knee and cut it out, or just deal with it. It won't fix itself, short of MAYBE not using the knee at ALL for several months. Have a look at the wikipedia page for Cartilage for more info. Cool stuff.",
"Bone is alive. It has bone marrow that helps to produce white blood cells, the blood cells that are integral to your immune system. EDIT: I missed the cartilage part; Even though it may not produce WBCs it is nevertheless alive.\n\nGluing the dead/damaged pieces back would only harm you as the bone may decay and damage surrounding tissue.\n\nAn alternative could be that you opt for an implant, I've head of kneecaps being replaced by polymer pieces, which obviously doesn't degrade and damage surrounding tissue."
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1xnl5d | how did the american work ethic come to be, and how is it perpetuated? | Any kind of perspective - personal, economic, historical, behavioral economics - is welcome.
(Non-American here who has worked in California and elsewhere. The difference is mind-blowing.) | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1xnl5d/eli5_how_did_the_american_work_ethic_come_to_be/ | {
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"\"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.\"\n\n- John Steinbeck\n\nBasically, the American Dream is to succeed as a result of your own efforts. People who ask for help from sources like the government are often considered \"not working hard enough.\" However, this work ethic gives power to the employer as they can dangle a carrot (raise, bonus, or promotion) in front of their employees and say \"You can get it if you try hard enough! If you don't try hard enough, there are other people who can!\"",
"Sometimes ELI5 questions really sound like college students that need to write a paper.",
"My professor argues that the American work ethic originates from Puritan beliefs, strong incentives, and the immigrant culture.\n\nA major Puritan belief, that set them apart from Western European Christianity, was that salvation did not come from simply come from believing and worshipping God, but actually doing good things. \"Deeds versus creeds\". This emphasized work. You could make money, as long as you were generous. In contrast, at the time it was believed that focusing on money was greedy and sinful. \n\nAt the same time, for most people in other cultures, for much of history until the past 50 years, the social and class structures, and by extension the structures of wealth, were rigid and had the weight of history. There was little upward mobility, only the wealthy owned land because it had already been taken, and thus there was little incentive to work hard. In contrast, most of America was land that was open for the taking (native Americans notwithstanding) and you were working land that you yourself owned. Without the weight of history, there was far more upward social mobility. Therefore, you have more incentive to work hard. \n\nFinally, it is true that America is a nation of immigrants. Think of the mindset of these immigrants. Most spent everything they had, leaving behind family and friends and the safety of home, in hope of a better life. A rather idealized view, but true for the most part. These were the people desperate or crazy enough to leave the relative comfort and stability of home for a distant, foreign world. If you risked and gave up that much, wouldn't you work hard to make sure it went well? And wouldn't you do your best to instill these hard work values to your children, so that they may have a better life than you, and that they don't squander this opportunity?\n\nTLDR: Religious roots say it's okay to make money (as long as you're generous). Lack of deep rooted social classes and individual ownership of land both incentivize work. And the people who came over here had risked a lot."
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wyv1v | the israeli situation, and why half of reddit seems anti-israel | Title.
Brought to my attention by the circlejerk off of a 2010 article on r/worldnews | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/wyv1v/eli5_the_israeli_situation_and_why_half_of_reddit/ | {
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"Israel was founded in 1948, and in the process Jews pushed Palestinians off of land that (in some cases) they'd held for centuries (including Jerusalem, which is a holy site to all three major faiths).\n\nMost people in the Middle East are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, and a good many would like to see Israel destroyed. They've even tried, most notably in the [Six-Day War](_URL_0_).\n\nSince then Israel has succeeded in becoming a stable first-world democracy, but Palestinians have become increasingly marginalized.\n\nThe US helped to found Israel and has a large Jewish community—and not inconsequentially, a large evangelical Christian community which believes that the Jews must occupy Jerusalem for certain Biblical prophecies to come to fruition. As a result, the US continues to provide a great deal of financial, military, and political support.\n\nMeanwhile the more extreme Palestinians have resorted to terrorism, to which Israel has responded harshly, and in the process claimed even more Palestinian land. Adding insult to injury, Israelis are actually building permanent settlements ON that land.\n\nThroughout all of this, many (perhaps most) Israelis and Palestinians hate each other with a fiery, racist passion.\n\nSo a pro-Israeli person would say the Israelis are battling against murderous thugs and terrorists and ensuring their own security. Meanwhile a pro-Palestinian person would say the Israelis are slowly but surely marginalizing the Palestinians and pushing them into a ghetto-type situation.\n\nI think. Maybe somebody can clarify or correct some of the points above.",
"So here's the thing with Israel. Right now *everyone* involved is behaving like a child to some extent or another.\n\nBoth sides have been wronged by the other, and neither is going to give it up until the other does first. \n\nThe problem actually started, like so many problems in the world, with colonialism. Instead of granting Palestine a charter of a free, democratic state, The British Crown (that is to say, the government of the United Kingdom, acting under the authority of Parliament, blah blah blah british government stuff) granted it to (mostly) the Jews to ensure something like the holocaust didn't happen again. People felt sorry for the Jews, because they realized what happened in Germany wasn't all that different than some of the sentiment expressed in their own country. Before WW2, Jews weren't just hated in Germany, they were hated world wide. Even in the states & UK there was a distinctly anti-jew sentiment.\n\nSo, for a little while everything went *okay*, but the Arab neighbors of Palestine rightly didn't like that a foreign entity was interfering in what they perceived as regional politics (it'd be like the USA redistricting Germany after the fall of the iron curtain, and granting a portion of it to the English). So they attacked Israel.\n\nMany people who lived in Israel fled, but mostly non-jews (though by no means did most non-jews flee). They were afraid, they thought to themselves \"This isn't my war, this isn't my country. I'm from here, but I'll come back when the fighting is done.\" Many of them assumed the allied Arab states, being much larger than Israel, would kill everyone/evict everyone and set things back to the way they were before the creation of a Jewish state (whether or not that would have actually happened is not part of this). Israel ended up not just winning, but thoroughly trouncing the attackers. A big part of this was simply supply chains. The attackers didn't bring sufficient water (1L/soldier/day, versus Israel's 1L/Soldier/Hour or something), and Israel used tactics that made this issue worse for the attackers by stretching their supplylines. \n\nThe government of Israel didn't like that, so anyone who left had to stay gone. Israel took the property of those who fled, and gave it to Jews. Israel, because of its formation as a Jewish State has a discriminatory immigration policy (Jew? Yer In!), I don't use discriminatory as judgmental, just observational. \n\nSo basically, you have a state that discriminates based on immigration policy and took land from the natives. The problem is, no one else wanted these now displaced natives. So they're in small areas, and they're disenfranchised. So they attacked. Not as a state, but as organizations. \n\nThis wasn't war, this was retaliation for wrong doing. So Israel got PISSED. Palestinians used suicide bombers, they launched rockets which were inherently low tech, etc. Israel got REALLY PISSED, and went in with their military to root them out. This made the palestinians get more pissed, and back and forth and back forth.\n\nIsrael cracks down on the Palestinians as a whole because of some stuff that some of them do, and Palestinians retaliate because of the Israeli militaries actions, it's a vicious cycle.\n\nBecause of the perception in Israel that many Palestinians just want war, the religious fringe that believes Israel as a whole (not just the lands in their control now) belongs to the Jews, there isn't sufficient political willpower to stop the \"Settlers\" from taking even **more** land. This further enflames the issue.\n\n\nMe? I think they're both idiots and the most reasonable solution is a secular state. At this point, the people in Israel are 2nd generation, and the people in palestine are 2nd generation, and no one has a (in my opinion) a legit claim to being on the wrong side. Only an argument about who's the bigger cocksucker. ",
"The simplest explanation: \n\nBoth sides have made, and continue to make, terrible decisions that ruin and destroy the lives of (usually) innocent men, women and children. However, the conflict has now reached a point where neither side is willing to forgive the past, and continues to attack the other, thus provoking a fresh wave of revenge.\n\n\"Half\" of Reddit chooses to magnify the violence in the decisions and actions of Israel, because they feel that the only reason Israel \"gets away\" with their actions is because the US is backing them up. They are not wrong to point out the atrocities.\n\nBasically, humans are really poor at long term decisions, and would rather lash out in revenge ( I myself have an internal conflict over a similar question ) because they think it'll somehow cure the pain of what they've lost. Sadly, nothing can bring the dead back.\n\nIf everyone was willing to put aside their short term hatred and realize that killing families won't solve this conflict, maybe we'd have flying cars by now.",
"This is a super layman explanation but it goes like this. \n\nJewish and Muslim people have been living around Israel/Palestine for a very long time. Up until the end of World War 2 it had belonged to the British. After/during the war a whole bunch of European Jews moved to Israel, tipping the balance of Islamic and Jewish people upsetting a lot of Islamic people. \n\nAs the British/Islamic/Jewish leaders struggled over Israel the British withdrew on the condition that the Jews and Islamic people sorted it out among themselves, which didn't end up happening. The British wanted separate Arab (Islamic) and Jewish countries sharing Jerusalem. The Arab League (Syria, Iraq, Egypt and Jordan) blocked the plans, set up strikes and eventually a civil war inside Israel broke out. Israel was supposed to become a Jewish country but the Arab League and Palestine wouldn't have it. Eventually Israel came under Jewish control and thousands of Palestinian/Arab/Islamic people were kicked into Palestine. Palestine and the Arab countries were grumpy over the situation and to make matters worse the UN allowed Israel into the UN, slapping them in the face. \nFrom then on they have been going back and forth between peace treaties, cease fires and open warfare. \n\n**TL:DR Arabs and Palestinians were kicked out of Israel after the Second World War to make room for all the Jews. They weren't happy and the situation continues.**",
"As to your second question, more than half of the world is probably anti-Israel in the sense that they don't believe that it's current policies against the Palestinians in its territories is justified and should be continued. Support for current Israeli actions mostly comes from the US and Israel itself, as well as a minority of support from other nations.\n\nI'm sorry that I can't provide sources as I'm on my phone, but opinion polls in most of Europe and virtually all of the Middle East have shown majority feelings of support for the Palestinians. In the USA, support is much higher for Israel.",
"You've got some good starts at understanding here, so I won't try to explain it. I just wanting to add a good rule of thumb. In general, the more one-sided a person is on this issue, the less they actually know about it. It's so convoluted and complicated, rooted in so much history and so many unfamiliar cultural idiosyncrasies, that it's almost impossible to understand what's going and come down decidedly on one side or the other. Basically, it's a clusterfuck. I've spent a lot of time in the Middle East (in both Israel and Arab countries), and I think I only know enough to know that I don't really get it.",
"This has been answered in this sub Reddit many times before, here is a copy paste of my previous answer:\n\nA group of people called Jews lived in a neighborhood called Judah. They have been living in the neighborhood for a thousand years and they built most of the homes in the neighborhood.\n\nA group of people called Romans takes over the neighborhood by force. They allow the Jews to stay as long as they follow laws set up by the Romans. The Jews find the laws very oppressive and rebel. The Romans crush the rebellion and make up even harsher laws. The Jews rebel again and are crushed again. This goes on several times until the Romans finally decide to kill most of the Jews and enslave the rest. They kick all of them out of the neighborhood and rename the neighborhood after a very old enemy of the Jews that was defeated by them many hundreds years ago and no longer exist. The new name of the neighborhood is Palestine.\n\nAfter many long years the Romans are defeated by a different group and that group takes over the neighborhood. Some of the Jews return, but they are still very weak and there are very few of them. Most of the Jews remain in lands previously occupied by the Romans and are treated very badly there. They suffer constantly from discrimination, violence and killing. All this time the Jews hope to get stronger and get back to their old neighborhood and reestablish themselves there.\n\nThe neighborhood changes hands several times over the next one and a half thousand years. Meanwhile a new Idea rises amongst the people in the world. According to this idea every group of people should have the right to their own neighborhood and they should not be ruled by a different group of people. Many groups follow this Idea and establish their own neighborhoods. The Jews see this and establish a movement that will allow them to get back to their neighborhood. They call it Zionism.\n\nDuring this time there is a war between one group called the British and another group called the Turks. The Turks currently control Palestine. The Jews offer their help to the British and the British promise to allow them to live in the neighborhood in exchange for the help, if they win. The British win the war and get control of the area that also includes Palestine. They allow the Jews to come live in Palestine.\n\nThe people who currently live in Palestine are called Palestinians. They have been living in the neighborhood for a very long time, probably more then a thousand years. While they never owned the neighborhood they paid rent to those people who did.\n\nThe Palestinians do not wish to share their neighborhood with the Jews. They attack the Jews. The Jews attack back. The British see there is violence in their neighborhood and decide to stop allowing Jews to come to the neighborhood.\n\nMeanwhile, a group of people called Germans decide they hate the Jews and want to kill them all. They start killing millions of Jews. The Jews in Palestine beg the British to allow their friends from europe to come to Palestine to escape the Germans but the British allow for only a small and insignificant number to come. The Germans succeed in killing about a half of the entire Jewish population.\n\nThe other groups of people see what happened to the Jews and decide that the Jews need to get their own country to be safe. They put pressure on the British until they agree. They send people into the neighborhood to decide how to divide the neighborhood between the Jews and the Palestinians. The Jews meet with those people, but the Palestinians don't even agree to meet with them. The Palestinians say that this land is entirely theirs and the Jews should go away.\n\nThe world then decide the neighborhood should be divided between the Jews and the Palestinians. The Jews agree with the decision even though they get much less of the neighborhood then the Palestinians. The Palestinians however are very angry and are not willing to agree with anything. They call their friends from other places and attack the Jews trying to completely kick them out of the neighborhood. However the Jews win and even take parts of the neighborhood that were supposed to go to the Palestinians.\n\nThe Palestinians and their friends constantly attack the Jews. The Jews also attack the Palestinians. The Palestinians then convince their friends to start a very large attack on the Jews, however, before the attack is ready the Jews attack and take they rest of the neighborhood for themselves. This is called the 6 days war.\n\nThe Jews now control the entire neighborhood. They take more and more land that was supposed to go to Palestine. The Palestinians attack the Jews but they are now very weak while the Jews became very strong. Their friends are not willing to take the risk and help them. The Jews then attack the Palestinians back and kill many of them. They also build a large wall around the Palestinian houses and not allow the Palestinians to get through the wall.\n\nThe Palestinians see that asking the Jews to leave the neighborhood completely will never achieve anything. So the Palestinians ask the Jews to give them the parts of the neighborhood the Jews took in the 6 days war, and then they will have peace with the Jews.\n\nThe Jews are not willing to give the Palestinians all the land taken in the 6 days war. The Jews are only willing to give the Palestinians a small part of the land. They say it is the Palestinians fault for not agreeing with them earlier. The Palestinians are angry about that answer and so they attack the Jews again and again, and the Jews strike back at them every time. Also, the Jews put a lot of their people in houses they build on the land the Palestinians want.\n\nThe world is tired of the Jews and Palestinians killing each other for so long. They just want peace and quite. They want the Jews to agree to give the Palestinians the land they took in the war. However there are a lot of Jews now living on that land and the Jews are not willing to give large areas of it back. They tell the Palestinians that if they want peace they should agree to have a small part of that area. However the Palestinians don't agree with this and say they want the entire area taken in the war.",
"To be honest, I'm willing to bet that over half the people on reddit don't understand the Israel Situation at all. It's far more complicated and dates back thousands of years. But, Reddit is staunchly anti-America, and since Israel gets tied up with the States a lot, Reddit is anti-Israel.",
"Edit: **This isn't intended to be fair. It is intended to show WHY people are mad at Israel.**\n\nIsrael was created 60 years ago INSIDE another country. By use of terrorism. Then it expanded by being richer than everyone else and having bigger guns. They abused the sympathy garnered by the Holocaust to get people to look the other way while they crushed another group.\n\nIn the last 30 years:\n\nThey have repeatedly and intentionally violated every attempt at peace that has been made. They start peace talks and bomb a country at the same time. They target civilians and infrastructure. Their leaders repeatedly talk about kill:death ratios as if it were a positive thing. Their leaders talk about expanding Israel. They actually take land from countries or obliterate a neighbor every decade or so. They oppose their neighbors getting much needed aid. They are 100x as powerful as all of their neighbors combined. They have the support of the US. They ignore the UN which repeatedly condemns their actions. They've been known to bomb hospitals and power plants. They don't sign the geneva conventions because it would stop them from using chemical weapons on civilian populations. It would also stop them from using cluster bombs which act as minefields. They have bombed UN installations a number of times. They apologized to the US for embarrassing them by violating peace talks while US politicians were visiting. NOT apologizing for violating the peace talks themselves. They don't care about civilians of other nations and often brand all palestinians as terrorists or simply all males. And they FREQUENTLY steal land. Build cities on palestinian land and then bomb whoever complains about it. The border is ever expanding and is unlikely to stop. Their reasoning for why all of this is OK? Is religion. They are a religious state which you know... generally we are opposed to.",
" > \n > ELI5: The Israeli situation, and why half of Reddit seems anti-israel\n\nBecause of hypocrisy, trendy politics, ignoring what is inconvenient and confirmation bias. You'll learn about those words more as you grow up.",
"Half? More like 99%.",
"I got banned from /r/askreddit for saying the PLO was a terrorist organization. I had NO idea it wasn't...or it used to be but now isn't or something. I went back and did a ~~strikethrough~~ to correct my words. Still got banned. \n\nI had wondered why reddit seemed a little skewed. Still don't know. ",
"Half of Reddit is not \"Anti-Israel,\" but rather opposes Israeli *policies*. Oftentimes, as a straw man argument, Israelis will accuse people of being anti-Semitic if they speak out against what they perceive to be Israel's abusive policies. This label effectively halts any discussion on the topic, because anything that comes out of the mouth of the newly-branded anti-Semite is just an anti-Semitic statement. \n\nTL;DR It is important to note the distinction between \"Anti-Israel\" and opposing some Israeli policies.",
"Caveats: \n\nIf someone is explaining the founding of Israel and they omit: \n\n1) The 1st, 2nd, and 3rd aliyah, The UN partition, and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem...they are biased against Israelis\n\n2) Deir Yessin, Lehi and the Irgun-they are biased against Palestinians. \n\nAny explanation leaving out any of those shouldn't be trusted.",
"As an American, I am critical of some of the things The American Government does.\n\nThis does not make me an anti-American \n\nIf I am critical of a particular actions another countries government takes, I am not, anti-(that country) either\n\nHowever, If I am critical of some of the things The Israeli Government does, I am most often labeled anti-Israel or even more absurd, an anti semite.\n\nThis unjust and unfair reaction can cause fear, frustration and anger among others who find themselves in the same situation. \n\nNo Country is acting perfectly, especially in a longstanding conflict. \n\nSo it is normal and natural for half of a global internet forum (like reddit) to lean towards one side, and half to lean on the other.\n\nHowever, to call everyone on one side anti-Israel will not help matters at all. \n\nI am choosing to ignore the extremist views from both sides who might have true hatred for the other. \n",
"Mommy (Israel) and Daddy (Palestine) have some valid, deeply rooted trust issues. They've decided to separate and share custody of the kids (water rights, resources, infrastructure) but can't help but throw punches at each other and at their children. Not only are they throwing punches, but they're poisoning each other and booby-trapping the house, vandalizing each other's goods. It would be very nice if they could each take a vacation on opposite sides of the world to get some space from each other and do some healing, but that's not likely to happen as they are currently caged in an area the size of New Jersey surrounded by neighbors who won't even have them over for dinner.",
"Israel and Palestine are fighting over the same couple hundred square miles of barely-habitable desert. It's not the sort of place anybody would choose to live, let alone fight to the death over, but they've been fighting over it for a really long time and both sides are too stubborn to quit.\n\nBoth sides are being childish dicks, but Isreal is doing it with tanks and rockets, while Palestine is doing it with stones and the occasional homemade bomb. This is mainly due to the [$2.5 billion in military aid](_URL_0_) the US gives to Israel every year. The reason half of reddit doesn't like Israel is a combination of not liking all that money being pissed away on a petty feud and detesting the way Israel is acting - specifically the killing of civilians and horrendous human rights abuses.\n\n**TL;DR** - Israel is the NY Yankees. Nobody likes them because they buy their wins and act like dicks about it.",
"Basically, this is a very emotional issue, and so people who care about it tend to take extreme positions. \n\nThus, everybody involved is either a jackbooted expansionist fascist neo-con nazi zionist thug, or a terrorist-loving, naive, far-left, anti-semitic apologist palestinian supporter. \n\nSo the truth, which is somewhere in the middle, gets lost, and people just get pissed off at each other instead. \n\n",
"We can't even agree on how to explain it to a 5 year old. This will surely go on another thousand years. "
]
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71epyy | why is it that our minds can blindly know where all the keys are on a key board, making us able to type fast, yet if you were to ask someone to draw out and label a keyboard, they would likely have a hard time doing it? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/71epyy/eli5_why_is_it_that_our_minds_can_blindly_know/ | {
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"So learning to type depends a lot on muscle memory. That is- when you repeat a motion many times your nervous system adjusts and gets used to that pattern so you can do it again quickly. So more so than learning the position of each letter on the keyboard, you're really learning the movements you have to make with your hands to type a certain character. Drawing and labelling a picture of a keyboard requires a better visual concept of the keyboard, which isn't as well developed in many typists. "
]
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|
29kmqc | how does laser tag work? | I kind of get it, but kind of don't. I understand a gun shoots out a laser, and there's some sort of sensor on the vest that detects the laser (hence, detecting a shot). But my main questions are:
* How do indoor (dark) arenas work vs day time ones? Or rather, what's different about the technology used in the day time laser tag gear that allows it to be played in the bright, light-saturated outdoors?
* How do they keep track of scoring (like who made the shot, and who got shot)? Does the laser send that information (pulse encoding or something)? Are there other ways to keep track of that information?
Sorry if this wasn't the right sub to ask (please let me know where I should ask)! I'll make appropriate changes where necessary. Thanks! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/29kmqc/eli5_how_does_laser_tag_work/ | {
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"1) The arenas are typically dark so you can see the visible laser. The equipment would likely work just as well in a bright, lit area, but you wouldn't be able to see your little red dot nearly as well.\n\n2) Each vest has a unique identifier. The laser sends the signal (much like a tv remote), and if it hits a sensor, the vest that was hit will transmit to the main computer of the hit.\n\nOh, and in case you didn't know, the handset fires two lasers simultaneously. One is visible but contains no information. It's used so you can see where you're firing. The second is infrared (and thus invisible) and sends the information used to determine hits. They should fire parallel to each other though so it theoretically should be transparent to the player."
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tvtbt | how does one go about creating and then successfully marketing an app for let's say, an iphone? | What programs are used? How does an idea for an app become a reality? Are there basic steps? Or is the creation a free for all? I'm not personally interested in creating apps, just very curious. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/tvtbt/eli5_how_does_one_go_about_creating_and_then/ | {
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"Almost all Iphone apps are made in Xcode. It's basically free with a mac and is their version of Visual Studio (Microsoft makes this one, it's a program to make other program.)\n\nThe stages are basically.\n\n1.) Idea\n2.) Design\n3.) Programming\n4.) Certification\n5.) On the Iphone store.\n\n1.) Come up with the idea.\n\n2.) Design the interface and what it's going to look like.\n\n3.) Program the application using Objective-C (This is often called Apple C as it's was developed at NEXT which was the company Steven Jobs formed when he left Apple.)\n\n4.) Send you program to Apple to make sure they'll let you put it on the app store.\n\n5.) Your now on the store.\n\nIt cost 100 dollar to get a developers certificate to get application on the iPhone. But you only needs that if you want to test on a device or put it into a store. You can do everything up to that for free.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n"
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1u8au7 | why do people feel the need to say iphone or android is better than the other when their both good in there own way? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1u8au7/eli5why_do_people_feel_the_need_to_say_iphone_or/ | {
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"Human nature. We are hardwired for Us vs. Them.",
"I believe you're referring to [fanboyism](_URL_2_)\n > You prefer the things you own because you rationalize your past choices to protect your sense of self.\n\nIt's the same thing as some people being at seemingly unimportant stuff: \"happy holidays instead of merry Christmas\", calling your language Serbo-Croatian(personal example).\n\nI remember from my days of studying sociology there are a few parts of identity most of us incorporate: gender, humanity...\nThat's why if you want to break a person you attack his identity, you try to diminish him as a part of the society, you don't treat them like a human, make him prance around in a dress etc.\n\n2 examples I gave aren't so commonly incorporated: Religion and Ethnicity, but in more modern times I can see people appending certain brand to their core *structure*\n\nSometimes people's\n > decisions are tainted by the emotional investments *they* accumulate, and the more *they* invest in something the harder it becomes to abandon it.\n\nThis is called [The Sunk Cost Fallacy](_URL_0_)\n\nMost of us think that people don't give a fuck about logical arguments and that opposing views have no effect on the holder of said belief however the argument often [backfires](_URL_1_), that is to say that\n > When your deepest convictions are challenged by contradictory evidence, your beliefs get stronger.\n\nFeel free to check out other posts from the site I linked, they make for an interesting read."
]
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[],
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"http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/03/25/the-sunk-cost-fallacy/",
"http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/06/10/the-backfire-effect/",
"http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/05/19/fanboyism-and-brand-loyalty/"
]
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||
4z7t4g | why is hypothesis part of the scientific method? | I understand that you are typically trying to disprove the hypothesis, but I'm just curious as to why it's necessary as it seems like something that could create bias. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4z7t4g/eli5_why_is_hypothesis_part_of_the_scientific/ | {
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"Hypothesis is \"the reason\" you're doing the science in the first place (to prove it true or false)",
"It is possible to gather data with no hypothesis, and then create a hypothesis (based on looking at the data) and then test it (using numerical analysis of the data against the hypothesis).\n\nHowever, most a hypothesis is needed to tell you *what data to gather.* For example, if I have a hypothesis that protein in the diet affects the fertility of crows, then I need to gather a population of crows, divide them into at least two groups, and ensure that the groups get diets with differing amounts of protein. With no hypothesis, I would never have considered doing that.",
"Science is really all about prediction. Through countless years of study, we are able to relatively easily predict how fast an apple will fall from a tree once it falls. We can even predict whether or not it will bounce.\n\nIt's these predictions that less us go on to further use the scientific method to describe why and how it all happens.\n\nHypotheses are predictions about what will happen, and without a good prediction, we can't really test if the prediction is accurate or not. We didn't split the atom by poking around and guessing, we made predictions based on our current understanding and tried to use those predictions as a way to create an experiment.",
"If you don't have a hypothesis, then what are you testing? The hypothesis comes about from having learned about something unexplained and then trying to figure out what could explain it. It's the \"That's weird, I wonder what caused it? Could it be < hypothesis > ?\" part of scientific inquiry."
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3zf3jg | in movies, such as lord of the rings and gladiator, the speaker or commander of a massive army will be standing right at the front and giving a speech to the whole army/crowd. how was his voice heard by all? | Besides the fact that it was a movie, how were messages conveyed in those war times? I can picture motivation speeches losing their impact if it had to be relayed down the lines. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3zf3jg/eli5_in_movies_such_as_lord_of_the_rings_and/ | {
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"Because it's a movie... I don't think combat worked like that in ancient times. Commanders would be on a hill signalling with flags, for example.",
"In the movies, it works because Hollywood wants it to work. In actual combat, it didn't happen. That is why armies had things like banners, horns, drums and messengers. \n\nWell, except for Gladiator, the Colosseum is designed in such a way to be able to hear him speak. "
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5p0cy9 | what makes the "enlightenment" or "divine revelation" feel when taking some psychoactive drugs? | I personnaly have never done drugs but I often heard that some drugs when taken make you feel a sort of revelation, like you just have discovered the meaning of the universe, what causes that? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5p0cy9/eli5_what_makes_the_enlightenment_or_divine/ | {
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"The quick release of neurotransmitters such as dopamine (for MDMA/ecstasy) when you 'come up' cause you to feel those emotions. Similarly this is why you 'come down' when the drug wears off, as dopamine levels in the body are so low. "
]
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4qycnr | why do various fruits/vegetables have bright colors if they want animals to eat them? | So you have animals like the [Poison dart frog](_URL_0_) which use a technique called Aposematism to use bright colors to indicate to animals that they are poisonous and they should not approach or attack.
However you also have plants like tomatoes and strawberries that have bright red colors on their fruits, but want animals to eat them so they ingest the seeds.
How can 2 organisms use the same color for 2 completely different purposes?
| explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4qycnr/eli5_why_do_various_fruitsvegetables_have_bright/ | {
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"They both evolve to be visible for the same reason of wanting to be easily seen. They just want to be easily seen for different reasons. Keep in mind that they're also evolving to attract notice from different species. For the most part a fruit eating species isn't going to be hunting animals and vice versa. A predator knows to look for food that's not easily spotted and too avoid food that is, a fruit eater does the opposite.",
"Modern fruits & veggies that you buy in a grocery store look nothing like their wild equivalent. A wild tomato would have been a small berry sized fruit, and probably purplish or yellowish. By the time Europeans saw tomatoes, Native Americans had already domesticated them for about 2000 years. The bright red we see now, is the result of about another 600 years of domestication and selective breeding by people all over the world. The biggest credit for the modern tomato probably goes to Andrew Livingston who hybridized many tomatoes in the 1870s.\n\nRemember plants have no more choice in their colors than you had in your skin color. So even with wild plants, the bright colors made animals see the fruit. Plant eaters learned to recognize and see bright fruit and learn that is food. So the fruits of those plants got eaten first, and their seeds most likely to be spread."
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"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0e/Blue-poison.dart.frog.and.Yellow-banded.dart.frog.arp.jpg/220px-Blue-poison.dart.frog.and.Yellow-banded.dart.frog.arp.jpg"
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2asrfq | do i really need to change my oil every 3000 miles? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2asrfq/eli5do_i_really_need_to_change_my_oil_every_3000/ | {
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"Read your car's manual and go by the mileage that it says. If it's under warranty, then absolutely yes if you want it to keep being under warranty. It also depends on the type of oil that you use, what kind of driving conditions you commonly encounter, and how aggressively you drive.\n\nThat said, I typically change both oil and filter every 5,000 miles or so.",
"Ignore what the oil companies tell you, go by your cars instruction manual. For a newer car, it's probably 6-12k depending on how you drive and whether you use synthetic oil or not. ",
"The oil change places would love your business every 3k miles. The mfgr engineering spec is 10k or more. ",
"[It's such a myth there's a dedicated Wikipedia page for it.](_URL_0_) Refer to your owners manual for guidelines.\n\nI recommend that if you drive regularly (you commute 5 days a week), get your oil tested. Google an oil testing or analysis lab, some of them will give you your first kit free. They'll tell you a whole lot about how your engine is operating, and if it's time to get your oil changed. Use that as a guideline for your use case.\n\nI know that some cars combined with synthetics don't get an oil change for 10k to 15k miles. The rule of thumb now days is closer to 7k miles, even with petroleum oil."
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e5zngu | why did credit score go down when making purchases then paying it off fully? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e5zngu/eli5_why_did_credit_score_go_down_when_making/ | {
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"This is better in r/personalfinance."
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9o4vq0 | why do some programs, after downloading or changing a setting, need a restart? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9o4vq0/eli5_why_do_some_programs_after_downloading_or/ | {
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"When a program starts it stores a load of information on your computers memory, that makes it more efficient than constantly reading from the program files. When there is an update, the code of the program changes and some of the configuration as well, this means the memory on your computer needs to get all of this information again to be able to function properly. ",
"Well, some programs prefer a clear environment to run again, also sometimes it's about laziness \n\nExample a game, you can make your renderer change textures size on the fly, this might cause several problems like freezing and memory allocation issues, but if you restart the game, you don't need to worry about those problems at all\n\nMost unity3d games doesn't require restart to see changes, what about requiring pc restart? There are 2 kinds of this message, the ones you can ignore and run on your own risks\n\nAnd the other ones that won't load at all, every program is different, but that's because there might be changes in system that might require to reload the library or files it changed, and doing it trying to modify it while it's already loaded it's not recommended or not consistent "
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1nuoxw | will prices rise forever? | I always hear how long ago, a piece of candy used to cost 5¢, a hamburger was a quarter, and so on. Will prices of goods continue to rise forever, or is it possible for them to stabilize? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1nuoxw/will_prices_rise_forever/ | {
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"In theory, yes. As more people are born and enter thework force and as more money is created in various ways, this leads to inflation which is why prices rise over time.\n\nThe rise isn't always linear and there are periods of deflation. For example, home prices are still lower now than they were in 2007."
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aes04k | why are seedless fruits called, well, "seedless fruits" even though they still have seeds? | I know """seedless fruits""" can't grow mature seeds, but they still have baby seeds. Kind of a misleading name if you ask me.
And yes I did write this question while I was high on smarties. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aes04k/eli5_why_are_seedless_fruits_called_well_seedless/ | {
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"I'm no professional botanist or biologist but I'm guessing it's because you don't actually eat any hard seeds that are noticible. ",
".\n\nyeah it's not completely technically accurate, but the people buying them don't care so much for the fine points of biology , they just want to cook with them. and compared to the usual kind, the seedless kind lets you not deal with the seeds."
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8erhsu | why do movies and popcorn go together? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8erhsu/eli5_why_do_movies_and_popcorn_go_together/ | {
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"I'm sure it has a lot to do with the fact that popcorn is just about the easiest, cheapest snack for the theaters to make (except for maybe cotton candy which is too messy for indoors), and they can mark it up to ridiculous profit margins. The theaters actually make most of their profit from concessions sales, not the movie tickets. A lot of the ticket price goes right to the film distributor."
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4dmkek | in court, why do we swear on the bible, and what do atheists do? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4dmkek/eli5_in_court_why_do_we_swear_on_the_bible_and/ | {
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"In most states, you're not asked to swear on a Bible. And even in places where that's still done, it's never required to be able to testify. You can still swear or affirm that your testimony will be truthful with or without any specific book.",
"IIRC, you are not required anymore to swear on a Bible or to God. you simply swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and that's it.",
"You do not necessarily have to swear on the Bible. It used to be customary, yes, but nowadays even most Christians don't assign any special significance to putting their hand on one. What the court really requires is that witnesses acknowledge that there is an greater-than-usual obligation to tell the whole truth, and that they will be committing perjury if they lie. The theater of it- bibles, raising your hand, reciting a pledge about the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth- is just that: theater.",
"I want to go to court and affirm my obligation to tell the truth by reciting, with my hand laid reverently over a block of parmesan cheese:\n\nI swear by the glory of His holy tomato sauce and at risk of punishment by His omnipotent noodly appendage, to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Ramen."
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4iz5lm | the technological singularity and ray kurzweils 2045 deadline? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4iz5lm/eli5_the_technological_singularity_and_ray/ | {
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"Singularity is just what happens when computers finally become smarter than us. It's called that because we have no idea what will happen after it, sort of like it's impossible to see anything beyond the event horizon of a black hole (also called a singularity). There are a ton of competing opinions on what will happen and when it will happen. Kurzweil is quite optimistic and thinks we will all essentially become immortal, mostly omnipotent gods spending now until the heat death of the universe doing whatever we want. Others, like Eliezer Yudkowsky, recognize potential dangers. Like accidentally designing a superintelligent AI which only wants to make paperclips, which then proceeds to transform all matter in the observable universe into paperclips in a sphere expanding at near light speed.\n\nSingularity could be the best thing to ever possibly happen or the worst, and we can't really know until it happens.",
" > What is the singularity...\n\nIt depends who you ask. Different people define it differently. The one common thread is that it's a time when the rate at which technology is advancing becomes so fast that it renders even the relatively near future so unpredictable that conventional planning becomes useless.\n\nThe idea stems from the historical observation that technology has been advancing faster and faster in more recent times. Thousands of years ago, it *took* thousands of years for society to see any major technological advances, but progress has sped up a great deal, and now we see them constantly. In particular, since the invention of electronic computers, the capacity of those computers (measured in such ways as 'the number of single-bit operations a typical chip can perform every second' or 'the number of bits that can be stored on a $100 hard drive') has increased exponentially, doubling every two years or so. This is known as [Moore's Law.](_URL_0_) It is widely assumed that, following this trend, computers will not only become as powerful as the human brain within only a few decades (thus allowing the creation of artificial intelligence equal to the intelligence level of humans), but will then rapidly shoot *past* that point, resulting in a relatively sudden jump from 'mere' human-level AI to *superhuman* AI. The thoughts and actions of a super AI would be inherently beyond our ability to predict or control, just as our thoughts and actions are beyond the ability of a monkey to predict or control. (It's also just as possible that super-level intelligence will be achieved by augmenting human brains rather than building fully artificial minds, but either way the result is the same: You end up with a world populated by ridiculously smart beings, at which point, from our current perspective, all bets are off.)\n\nThe more extreme scenarios for how the technological singularity might play out are known as 'hard takeoff' scenarios, where superhuman intelligence (of whatever form) applies its new reasoning ability to finding more ways of upgrading itself, bringing about accelerating increases in intelligence compared to which even the surprisingly fast progress of our own time is utterly insignificant. The most extreme version proposes intelligence, knowledge and technological capability becoming *infinite* within a finite span of time- but even if that is impossible, the difference between 'literally asymptotic' and 'just really insanely fast' might not be very meaningful as far as our ability to comprehend it is concerned.\n\nOn the other hand, things might go much more slowly. We might hit serious limitations to the possibility of making ever-faster computers, perhaps imposed by quantum physics, or simply the amount of available energy we have to work with, or even some metaphysical barrier to how much intelligence any being can actually possess. Alternatively, it may be that intelligence *can* progress forever and without limit, but with a diminishing-returns effect where each additional upgrade is vastly harder to create than the previous one and takes a considerable amount of time and resources to bring about. These sorts of scenarios don't really leave us with an obvious 'singularity' moment at all, which is where the discrepancies between various definitions come into play. For instance, some people define the moment when superhuman intelligence is created as the 'singularity', even if it turns out that's not a particularly momentous occasion in the sense of creating any obvious difference in the course of history immediately before and after.\n\nWhen the concept of a technological singularity was first being taken seriously back around the 1980s, a lot of the statistical estimates at the time pointed to the year 2030 as a likely date for some sort of significant thresholds in technology to be reached. However, recent estimates, based on various successes and failures in AI, computer hardware and so on since the 1980s, tend to put it somewhat further in the future. Critics of the idea of a singularity (and of strong AI in general) like to suggest that its proponents will keep pushing their dates farther and farther back each time the reality fails to live up to their predictions, drawing a disparaging comparison with religious end-time 'prophets'.\n\n > And what impacts will it have all over the world?\n\nWe have no idea. That's the whole point.",
"The whole definition of 'being smarter than us' has very fuzzy meaning. For example we already have computer programs that are smarter than anything humanly possible in certain areas (like chess programs, or some Japan metro maintenance AI). On the other hand, when computer-derived AIs become more and more knowledgeable and intelligent, it will still count as just very sophisticated Big Data processing combined with weighted experience-based decision making. Nothing unexpected here, except they will be with very high probability very accurate from the beginning. It's more of a psychological answer of humans to such level of expertise. Also it's very improbable, that in incoming century someone will attempt to create such an AI with focus on 'general life'. It's insanely expensive, so I expect early birds will emerge where the money is: financial entities. Imagine predicting emerging environment for arbitrage in stock trading in real time, and taking all the steps to exploit one. Such AIs will probably be single-goal oriented - until some overpaid university decides to make one specializing in psychology and gets terrified on its cryptic answers.\n\nAIs modeled in form of virtual brain are different story. 'Smart as a cat', or 'smart as a bee', we heard it. Will take years, and still we will end up with a blank mind, that will be different to ours. Many papers will be written in the subject of teaching such entity, errors will be made, failures will emerge, and ultimately we will end up with arbitrarily biased being, capable of mimicking human emotional states (or not), with access to vast calculational power, great at guessing and with questionable moral spine backing its decisions. That's fine, until we stick this AI into a walking piece of armor and give it a gun, which is sadly very probable way of how it will happen, given current state of the world.\n\nAlso, if you think about it, it's almost impossible to create something vastly more intelligent than yourself. Only slightly smarter - mainly because we have no idea, how 'much more intelligent' looks like. It's like a fish has absolutely no idea about human psychology.\n\nAnd, last but not least, AIs are designed and trained by most intelligent people on the world, and without any doubt, they are vastly more intelligent than average human, not even to mention less intelligent crowds (there are countries with *average* IQ of 70). Even if the resulting AIs are slightly stupider than their designers, they may be more intelligent than average human at some point.\n\nTL;DR It's not going to happen, until it's economically feasible, and most of AIs will be goal oriented, until someone gives them guns. Then, probably catastrophe will happen, maybe not Skynet-like, but still catastrophe (and it if AIs won't shoot, humans will, because AIs didn't)."
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b1vyit | does keeping the windows open increase an air conditioner’s power consumption even when it’s set to a fixed setting? | Fixed to cool at certain degrees (not the automatic setting which I totally don’t understand). Do ACs sense and maintain at the temperature or do they just constantly blow out air at that temperature?
Thank You. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b1vyit/eli5_does_keeping_the_windows_open_increase_an/ | {
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"It depends on the outside temperature. \n\nAir conditioners are stupid. They are either on or off depending on the thermostat setting. If it is warmer than the set temperature the unit will come on and blow out the coldest air it can. It will do this until the temperature falls below wherever the thermostat is set. At which pount it will go off, and stay off until the temperature rises back above the thermostat setting.",
"The AC cools all air that flows past it. The temperature switch then simply controls a valve which determines the cold air/ hot air mixture. \n\nSo the answer is no it does not increase the power consumption. \n\nWith the more elaborate climate control systems it could make a difference, because when the computer sees the temperature is too far above the requested temp it can turn up the fan, which will cause the AC to require more power to remain at operating pressure.\n\nAlso, turning on air recirculation should decrease power consumption.",
"The thermostat senses the temperature and turns the A/C on or off. It doesn't decide how cold the air coming out of the vent is. \n\nPower consumption is mostly constant while the machine is running, but it will have to run longer/more frequently if you're letting hot air into the house. \n\nHowever if it's cooler outside than in(maybe you're cooking a big meal or something, and the A/C can't keep up), opening a window will help."
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l19vj | purpose of tax refunds | I know we all look forward to getting that check, but seriously - why take away the money if we're just going to get it back? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/l19vj/eli5_purpose_of_tax_refunds/ | {
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"I'm not sure if you've ever been employed full time (probably not since you're five), but that would be helpful in understanding tax refunds, so I'll start from there. \n \nWhen you get a job at say, $20,000/year, your base salary is probably around $400/week. However, you don't actually get that much in your weekly paychecks. When you're hired, you are required to estimate how much you're supposed to pay in taxes based on your annual income of $20,000 per year, and they *reduce* your weekly paychecks by that amount. So you'll probably only end up getting around $360 per week, or a tax rate of $40. \n \nThis means that, by the end of the year, you'll have pre-paid around $2000 in taxes. But since your tax deductions were basically estimates to begin with, you need to fill out a tax return in order to figure out *exactly* what you were *supposed* to pay during the year. Let's say you overestimated your taxes, and you were really only supposed to pay $1860 in taxes for the year. This means you'll get a refund of $140. \n \nThere are lots of reasons that the initial tax estimates are imprecise. For example, you may have switched jobs, you might have income that doesn't come from just your job, or maybe you get a bonus at the end of the year that depends on how well you did, so you don't exactly know how much you'll be making. Because people's situations can change so much in a year, we are all required to do tax returns.",
"I'm not sure if you've ever been employed full time (probably not since you're five), but that would be helpful in understanding tax refunds, so I'll start from there. \n \nWhen you get a job at say, $20,000/year, your base salary is probably around $400/week. However, you don't actually get that much in your weekly paychecks. When you're hired, you are required to estimate how much you're supposed to pay in taxes based on your annual income of $20,000 per year, and they *reduce* your weekly paychecks by that amount. So you'll probably only end up getting around $360 per week, or a tax rate of $40. \n \nThis means that, by the end of the year, you'll have pre-paid around $2000 in taxes. But since your tax deductions were basically estimates to begin with, you need to fill out a tax return in order to figure out *exactly* what you were *supposed* to pay during the year. Let's say you overestimated your taxes, and you were really only supposed to pay $1860 in taxes for the year. This means you'll get a refund of $140. \n \nThere are lots of reasons that the initial tax estimates are imprecise. For example, you may have switched jobs, you might have income that doesn't come from just your job, or maybe you get a bonus at the end of the year that depends on how well you did, so you don't exactly know how much you'll be making. Because people's situations can change so much in a year, we are all required to do tax returns."
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5rbhcb | why are many members of congress (us) so rich? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5rbhcb/eli5why_are_many_members_of_congress_us_so_rich/ | {
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"Because rich people are the ones with enough money to spend years trying to get a job that pays (for them) so little.",
"because the campaigns to get elected are expensive, it is a job with not much job security, not the highest income but high prestige. so it attracts people that have more money than they need and look for other forms of power/attention.",
"It can take 10-20 years of lower level elected positions before you reach the US congress. Most don't pay very well, a state rep might make $35K a year, some a lot less. On top of that, if you lose an election, you might spend a year or two before you find another elected position. And there is a good chance you'll have to put up some of your own money to get elected at first.\n\nFor everyone who goes through all of this and makes it to congress, there are probably ten who fail. This makes for a fairly uncertain career path for someone who needs a job to pay the rent and put their kids through college. You either need a good fallback plan, like being rich, or be very, very committed.",
"Because they are immune from insider trading laws. Easy to get rich when you can pick winners.",
"A lot of it has to do with their multiple revenue streams. Sure a congressman doesn't make a lot of money but they can get paid for doing other things such as giving a speech or writing a book. There are laws that prevent out right bribery but nothing prevents a company from paying you 100K for a 30 minute speech and buying 10,000 copies of your book that nobody wants to read. In addition they can legally insider trade, so if they know which way a bill is going to effect an industry or company they can trade stock appropriately. Finally you can legislate in your own best interests, for example Republican Speaker of the house and child molester Dennis Haster advocated for years for a highway in Illinois [it just so happened that he owned the land that that highway was going to be built upon](_URL_0_). You see if you are creative enough you can fill your pockets with other peoples money. If you have two hours kick back and watch \"The Distinguished Gentleman\" with Eddy Murphy for an entertaining look at how to make money in government.",
"Poor people don't have the money to afford to live while having a campaign to get into office.\n\nOnly rich people have the time because they are not working any regular job while doing this.\n\nLater on many illegal things like insider-trading are also somehow legally OK or never looked at for members of Congress and lots of money can be made doing this."
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2cnb5b | if animals must be the same species to reproduce does that mean all dog breeds are the same species? what about lions and tigers? | I heard that species is the most specific category for defining an animal (after family, kingdom, class and whatever) is "breed" more specific? And are lions and tigers in the same species since we have bred Ligers? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2cnb5b/eli5_if_animals_must_be_the_same_species_to/ | {
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"You're not entirely right there. In order to be the same species, they must produce *offspring capable of reproduction*. The liger is not, hence they are different species.\n\n\"Breed\" is a much more vague term, with no distinct classification. They are just groups of genetically similar individuals, though, when you get down to it, taxonomy in general is a lot less definite than we'd like it to be.\n\nAnd yes, all dogs can (theoretically) produce fertile offspring.",
"Typically, species are able to make fertile offspring. Ligers are not fertile so tigers and lions are different species. \r\rBreed is more specific than a species too, but its not part of the typical taxonomy. \r\rAlso, species is really tough to define already. For instance, there is an artic tern that has about 6 breeds across the northern hemisphere. Each breed can male offspring that are fertile with their neighboring breed, but not the breed two steps away. So A and B can make babies, and B and C too, but not A and C. Are they all one species?",
"You're just a little off on the definition we use for \"species.\"\n\nTwo members belong to the same species if they can produce *fertile offspring.* \n\nBy this definition, dog breeds do belong to the same species, *canis familiaris*, since we have plenty of mutts running around.\n\nMale ligers, on the other hand, are infertile. I believe that some females are fertile, but can only breed with tiger males. This is called Haldane's rule, and is an indicator of non-speciation.\n\nHonestly, the definition is, in some cases, fuzzy and difficult to prove. Like with some dog breeds that are physically incapable of mating with each other, but can be artificially inseminated. \n\nSince evolution is a gradual shift, it's tough to say when a species ends and another begins. At what point did the non-chicken lay an egg that we called a chicken? It's similar to saying \"At what point did the Latin-speaking mother give birth to a French-speaking child?\" It was a gradual shift in language, just as the speciation was a gradual shift.\n",
"The first thing to remember is that words are people's attempt to label the world and universe - the world isn't actually constrained by them.\n\nThe word \"species\" is one of the situations where the real world is a lot more complicated than any basic definition of the word species can encompass. In general, two creatures are different species if they cannot breed to produce fertile offspring or do not in nature interbreed - by that definition, lions and tigers are different species (as they are naturally on different continents, they do not naturally interbreed, though they can produce fertile offspring (_URL_1_) if they are brought together) \n\nRing species are one of the concepts that bust our naive concept of species - essentially, a population A can breed with B which can breed with C which can breed with D, but A and D cannot breed. How many species are there? _URL_0_ for more info.\n\nAnd, of course, ALL species are ring species if looked at through time instead of through distance - every child could (theoretically) breed with its parents, but ultimately, over time, populations change enough to diverge species and ultimately families and even ultimately kingdoms...\n\nThere isn't really a simple definition of species that works in all situations - the natural world is more complex than we would necessarily like. _URL_2_\n\n"
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26lvu7 | exactly why do dark colors absorb more light? | My actual 5-year-old asked this question: We all know that a black t-shirt will absorb more light and heat than a white t-shirt. Can you teach me and my 5-year-old why? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/26lvu7/eli5_exactly_why_do_dark_colors_absorb_more_light/ | {
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"The words light and dark are defined based on their absorption of light. Whatever color, that absorbs light is defined dark.\n\nThis stems from the language and not the physical property. The black t-shirt absorbs more light because the dye used on it has that property. The dye used, if any, on a white t-shirt is reflective. It makes us perceive it as bright.",
"It's something of a tautology. When you \"see color\" what you are seeing is the light that comes from the environment, strikes that object, and bounces off to hit your eyes.\n\nThus, a red object appears red, in fact, because it is strongly *Rejecting* red light. The red light that hits it is bouncing off and hitting you.\n\nA darker/blacker object appears darker/blacker because less light is bouncing off to reach your eyes.\n\nThink of it this way, if *all* of the light that fell onto an object was absorbed, none would bounce off and strike your retina. Thus, the object would look pitch black as no light would come from that part of your field of view. ",
"Think about it the other direction instead. An object appears dark BECAUSE it absorbs all the light, and thus there is none left to bounce back to you."
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3c4qdn | why does england use lions on a lot of stuff representing them/their history? | If no lions exist in the UK, it seems odd. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3c4qdn/eli5_why_does_england_use_lions_on_a_lot_of_stuff/ | {
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"They're a symbol of potency / virility and of power. The use of lions to represent power goes back millennia, especially for rulers / royalty. \n\ne.g., _URL_0_\n\n",
"Lions used to exist in Europe. They were hunted to extinction, but there is [ample archaeological evidence](_URL_0_) of their existence. Likely they were hunted to extinction for their fur by prehistoric peoples shortly before the rise of writing, as statues in the area of lions date back well before Romans could have encountered them in travel - their likenesses would have been known first hand, even if no written record exists. \n\nThe most recent fossil we have of the European Lion is from 3000BC, when bronze tools [and art](_URL_1_) were several hundred years old.",
"Others have explained about the importance of lions in European heraldry in general.\n\nSpecifically for England, the three lions passant were the personal coat of arms of the Plantagenet family (originally from Anjou, western France), who were among the most powerful rulers of Medieval Europe and in particular a branch of the family comprised the English royal family for over 300 years.\n\nEven after the fall of the Plantagenet dynasty, many further rulers of England continued to incorporate the three lions into their coat of arms to try to portray continuity of the royal line."
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2z7nwp | how do i know that things in the distance are far away and not just tiny and close up? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2z7nwp/eli5_how_do_i_know_that_things_in_the_distance/ | {
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"Ah, father Dougal struggled with this one. I'd say it's down to depth perception, context and prior experience. Your brain is super efficient as it automates so much, especially based on experience. So, if you see a tiny cow, your brain instantly assumes it must be far away, as that's what makes sense bearing in mind your brain is used to cows being, well, cow-size. Our binocular vision gives us functional depth perception too. The visual context, lighting and atmospheric haze will all help too, of course. "
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dam6kq | how can something be zero net calories but have a glycemic index above zero? | I've seen this with sugar alcohols. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dam6kq/eli5_how_can_something_be_zero_net_calories_but/ | {
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"I don't believe that's possible. Sugar alcohols are just carbohydrates with an added -OH group, which reduces their absorption in the gut. But they still provide calories. Sorbitol, maltitol and xylitol are all nutritive sweeteners, meaning they provide calories. Erythritol is sometimes called \"zero-calorie\", but that's technically incorrect since it provides a small number of calories.",
"\"Zero net calories\" sounds like a marketing term. Read the label, specifically the ingredients. It most likely contains some type of carbohydrate.",
"Likely because the serving size DOES have calories, but it's under 5. When a serving is under 5, they're allowed to round it down to 0 on the label."
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11uz8w | the terminator series of movies | I understand the basic plot lines to the terminator series of movies:
The Terminator
T2: Judgment Day
T3: Rise of the Machines
T4: Salvation
But when trying to explain these to my son, I couldn't quite get the correct series of events through my brain and out of my mouth. Can I get some help please? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/11uz8w/eli5_the_terminator_series_of_movies/ | {
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"I'll give it a go. \n \n**Prequel)** So, at the beginning of the first movie, the basic premise is that humanity, led by John Connor, has won the war against the machines. Skynet sends a single T-800 (Arnie) back in time as a last, desperate attempt to change history by killing Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) before John Connor is born. John personally assigns Kyle Reese the mission to be sent back to stop the T-800. \n \n**1)** During the events of The Terminator, Kyle Reese stops the T-800 and becomes John Connor's father before dying. The impression at the end of the film is that all this was supposed to happen - that John knew exactly what he was doing when he chose Kyle to be the one to go back. \n \n**2)** In T2, we basically learn that the day Skynet achieved sentience and launched its war on mankind is known as Judgement Day, and that the future was changed to a certain extent. Skynet is somehow able to send back a 2nd terminator back from the future, the 'advanced prototype' T-1000 (Robert Patrick), this time to kill John Connor as a child (Edward Furlong). Humanity sends back a reprogrammed T-800 (Arnie again) to stop the T-1000. \n \nDuring the movie we learn that Cyberdyne Systems is using the wreckage of the T-800 from the first movie (just a single arm) as the basis for a new type of computer chip - the one that will eventually end up in the T-800. The movie ends with John and Sarah alive, but the T-1000, the Cyberdyne Systems building, the arm, and the second T-800 all destroyed. We are led to assume that shutting down Cyberdyne's research, and destroying all other possible sources for it, should prevent Judgement Day. \n \n**3)** In T3, the movie starts after Judgement Day should have happened. Sarah Connor lived to see the day come and go, but later died of leukemia. Johh Connor is living 'off the grid', hoping that the future really has been saved, but being careful so that Skynet cannot trace him if the worse does come to pass. Which of course it does. We learn during the movie that Judgement Day is inevitable, and that it was merely postponed by the events of T2. \n \nSince Skynet cannot find John Connor, the T-X (Kristanna Loken), an 'anti-terminator terminator' is sent back to find and kill John Connor's highest lieutenants before the war starts. Again, a reprogrammed T-800 (Older Arnie) is sent back to help John Connor and his future wife Kate (Claire Danes). Kate's father is a military man, and it turns out he is in charge of the US Cyber Warfare Division, developing a military AI known as Skynet. \n \nWe learn that the future has been changed again, and that this T-800 was sent back by Kate Connor in the future, because John Connor had already died before the war was won. John and Kate believe during the whole film that the T-800 is supposed to be helping them to avert Judgement Day, but it is later revealed that he is merely helping to make sure they survive it. The film ends with John Connor professing himself to be in command of the underground military bunker where he and Kate are holed up, with military chiefs talking to him on a radio as nuclear bombs fall over the world. \n \n**4)** I'll leave most of T4 to somebody else, because frankly I don't recall it as vividly as I do the other three films. But basically the war is under way and Skynet is harvesting humans to use their tissue/blood in the production of the T-800s, the first prototype of which is just about to roll off the production lines."
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zspy2 | ip, dns, gateway, and subnet mask | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/zspy2/eli5_ip_dns_gateway_and_subnet_mask/ | {
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"IP (Internet Protocol) = A logical set of rules and standards for transferring information on a network\n\nIP Address = A computer's numerical address on a network\n\nDNS (Domain Name Service) = A server that equates an IP address to a plain text name (i.e. _URL_0_ = 184.84.222.67\n\nGateway = A router that connects two networks together\n\nSubnet Mask = Identifies what network you on given an IP address. There are entire chapters written on this so I wont go into too much detail.\n\n",
"Let's dust off the old postal system analogy.\n\nYour street address (IP address) uniquely identifies your house, so mail goes to the right place.\n\nYour street (Subnet mask) identifies a block of related houses. The mailperson might put all the mail for one street in a crate, to keep it separate and make delivery more efficient.\n\nYour house might have a name (\"The Gables\"), but this can be just a label, a name that represents a street number. The mapping between the name and the street number allows people to address mail to either. This is like DNS.\n\nSuppose you live in a gated community, and people can't just get in to the street. Mail is dropped off at the security hut by the gate. The mail is then disseminated from there. The hut/gate is your gateway - a way in and out."
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dpj9cp | where is universe expanding? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dpj9cp/eli5_where_is_universe_expanding/ | {
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"Everywhere, all at once. The universe does not have a center. It's not like an explosion moving outward from a central point. Instead, think of it as the surface of a balloon. As you inflate it, the surface stretches out, and all points get farther away from each other."
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3pwevt | how does facebook know my real name? what is facebook trying to accomplish with their users verifying their identities? how do they verify it? | My Facebook name is my real name, so I'm assuming that's why they still haven't locked down my profile. But a bunch of my friends have had to give out their identities, only then they could continue using it as a social networking website. Why? How? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3pwevt/eli5_how_does_facebook_know_my_real_name_what_is/ | {
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"Because you're less likely to troll, spam or do things that others may find annoying if you have your real name. You're not anonymous so you have to be more careful about what you say. Also - it keeps spammers off the site because they'd have to identify who they are. It also helps to reduce catfishing or fake accounts being created. Your activities are attached to your real name, so you'll be more careful with what you post and say and thus make a better user experience for everyone on it. \nNot saying I agree with it - that just seems to be the policy. You can read more about it here: _URL_0_",
"The main reason is that Facebook's revenue is based on knowing things about it's users so that it can sell advertisements. The problem here is that if people are creating fake profiles, that damages facebooks ability to make money. \n\nIn addition, facebook wants to look like it's doing something about online harassment, and fake profiles are a big part of that.\n\n > my friends have had to give out their identities, only then they could continue using it as a social networking website. Why? How?\n\nYour friends are using a product, Facebook, that they are not paying for. By using fake identities they have bypassed Facebook's revenue model. Facebook is no longer interested in providing it's free service to those individuals who are fucking with it's revenue stream. "
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2u6438 | what would happen if there was a material that absorbed 100% light? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2u6438/eli5_what_would_happen_if_there_was_a_material/ | {
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"It would look really black. No light would reflect to your eyes.",
"If a material absorbed 100% of light that hit it, that means that nothing would be reflected back into the photosensitive cells inside your eye. That means you wouldn't be able to discern any detail about the object. Imagine being in a completely dark room - you wouldn't be able to make out an object right in front of you because no light would be reflecting off of it.",
"The only thing that would tip you off to the fact that the object was there, is that there would be light all around it, and an abrupt blackness where the object is. You wouldn't see an object, just an area of complete blackness. Blacker than anything you've ever experienced.",
"The Vantablack video shows what it would look like pretty well. You would still be able to see it, since it would essentially cast a shadow on your retina, but you wouldn't be able to discern the object's topography besides its general outline. It would quite literally look like a silhouette.",
"There already exists such a thing. Black holes!\n\nIn the interest of fun sci-fi materials, though, it would be a spectacular battery. Store energy in said material (probably in the form of heat). Put as much as energy in as you can and stop before it burns itself up. The most efficient solar panels ever *drool\n\nI'm assuming you mean 100% of light in the *visible* part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Otherwise there wouldn't be a way to get the energy back out and it would suck as a battery!",
"Event horizons absorb 100% of light but for different reasons.",
"I thought this had been created before in some fashion whether it be paint, material or otherwise.... I remember reading about something similar and how it was unsettling for humans to look at",
"Imagine having a 100km squared cubic room with black walls, completely sealed, with nothing inside.\nDrill a hole through a wall.\nLook at the hole from the outside of the room: that's what 0% reflection looks like.",
"Does anyone care to explain [back-body radiation](_URL_0_)?",
"When teaching pilots about IR theory we use a hypothetical object called \"The perfect black body\". It is an example of how you could lose an object in a FLIR image. The perfect black body has the following for properties, Reflectance, Absorbtion, Transmittance, and Emissivity. It is an interesting tool to use as a reference on what kind of FLIR picture you will have for a set of conditions and we used it as a tool to teach pilots how to optimize their FLIR image.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nAt the time we started teaching we also used the analogy of a perfect black body, Whitney Houston, now this was in the late 80's and she really did have a beautiful body. ",
"wow if you were coated in that you would look 2d",
"I think Vantablack does a pretty good job representing what the material would look like, just - if you can imagine - it would be darker. Just very very black. As black as black can black.\n\nIt wouldn't resemble a black hole like you see in movies like 'Interstellar' because black holes also have gravitational distortion that makes them have all that mirror-looking stuff around it.",
"Here's a quick project I threw together in Unity that shows the concept, sort of: _URL_0_\n\nMove your mouse left and right to rotate the objects. Left one has a normal texture, right one a 100% unlit black one. I added a sphere on the right for a little more detail.\n\n(I was in a rush and used textures I found randomly, don't sue me D:)",
"About time I get a window curtain that fits my sleeping lifestyle; zero light, zero sound, just comfy sheets.",
"Something that (I think) wasn't mentioned before is that since **no** light would be reflected, it would be so black you wouldn't even be able to tell its texture or shape (except the outline).",
"It would be black. The blackest black. It would probably be so black that it would stand out as black in a deep shadow. You wouldn't be able to make out any details on it, because it would be so black. It would appear like a 2-dimensional black shape, like a hole in your vision.\n\nI imagine there must be some other interesting properties/behaviours associated with such a material, such as heat absorption, but I only know for sure that it would be black.",
"Women would always look skinnier then they really are",
"You could paint what appeared to be a tunnel on the side of a mountain and certain ground-walking birds might run through it."
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b0fhhq | how is it that new phone battery can last in stock for "long" periods but once used it will degrade much faster if not properly charged often? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b0fhhq/eli5how_is_it_that_new_phone_battery_can_last_in/ | {
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"Leave your phone at a 40% charge and turn it off, and it will last almost as well as when it was in stock storage.",
"In terms of storage, at both ends of the level of charge a battery can have in it, you're pushing the battery chemistry into places that the battery doesn't like spending a long time in.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThere's differences of literally *thousands of times* more discharge cycles between going 10-90 daily vs 20-80 or even 30-70, although there's diminishing returns. "
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1qax7t | stocks and shares, what is their function, why were they invented, how do they benefit corporations? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1qax7t/eli5_stocks_and_shares_what_is_their_function_why/ | {
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" > what is their function\n\nImagine you want to have 2 owners of something, that's pretty easy to sort out right. Even if one party has 86.348721% and the other guy has everything else it's still easy to sort out.\n\nNow imagine you want to have 2000 owners of a company. How do you even keep track of it, and how do those owners sell/transfer all or part of their ownership of the company? You make shares.\n\n\n > why were they invented\n\nCollective risk, and managing a large number of owners. Lets say someone wants to send a ship to indonesia from amsterdam. Well, if you try and back just 1 ship you can easily go broke, that 1 ship could sink, get pirated, or just have a crook as a captain. But you could also buy 1% of 100 ships, and odds are most of them will return profitably. \n\n > how do they benefit corporations? \n\nCorporations are people my friend. \n\nJoking aside - and quite seriously, that's pretty much it. You don't want all of your money tied up in a single company, and companies need a way of knowing who owns their company, they need a way to buy and sell shares in those companies etc. \n\n\n\n"
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63k9jm | why is dick a name and a "bad" word at the same time? | As far as i know Dick means penis but there are also some men that are called like this, ¿is there some sort for correlation between the two meanings of the word?
| explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/63k9jm/eli5why_is_dick_a_name_and_a_bad_word_at_the_same/ | {
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"Richard\nRick\nDick\n\nRobert\nRob\nBob\n\nWilliam\nWill\nBill\n\nFor some reason in the English language we have this odd trend of making nicknames by shortening the full name and changing the first letter *as seen above*\n",
"Dick was a mostly common short name long before it was used to describe penis. We have a cultural obsession with giving pet names to our penis however, and one of the most common names happened to be Dick or Willie. Now even the word Wiener is rarely used to describe the food and is more of a school level joke.",
"It's the other way around: the slang name for \"penis\" comes from the men's nickname, because it's calling the penis a little man. It's not that Richard is being called Penis (by being called Dick); it's that penises are being called Richard ... or William (willy), or Peter, John Thomas, etc."
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3bxpbp | how do automated text summarizers know what text is important? | saw vidcrunch today on YSK, and it works by taking captions and finding the important parts of the video from that. I know of others like Free SUmmarizer that just takes the text and finds the important parts. How do these programs understand what the important parts of text are? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3bxpbp/eli5how_do_automated_text_summarizers_know_what/ | {
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"It's possible to determine, algorithmically, the amount of information in human language. Choose the words (or, more likely, short strings of words) that have the highest information content.\n\nLY5, information content is the number of yes or no questions you would have to ask about the situation in order to determine what word to use. You wouldn't have to ask very many questions to know whether or not you should say \"the\" or \"and\", but you might have to ask a lot of questions (obtain a lot of information) before you could know that you should say \"giraffe ride\""
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1ra7mt | why do scientists commonly say that a planet cannot support life, if we don't know what type of life we're looking for? | When people say that a planet cannot support life, it's interpreted that it's human life that can't exist, but if we were truly looking for alien life then surely we don't know what conditions are required, so we could be overlooking planets that could posses life. Is it just a method of searching for life based on what we already know, or something else?
Edit: There have been some great answers and explanations, Many thanks to everyone! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ra7mt/eli5_why_do_scientists_commonly_say_that_a_planet/ | {
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" > Is it just a method of searching for life based on what we already know\n\nPretty much. Our understanding of the development of life on Earth is that it required the presence of liquid water (and some other relatively common trace elements). Although forms of life exist which live outside of environments with liquid water, they all originated from the first cell. They are also almost exclusively small and boring (and their cell is still water filled).\n\nGiven that we don't know of any other way life could start, we discount planets which orbit either too far or too close to their host star for liquid water to exist on their surface. We also focus on rocky planets, although a gas giant in the \"habitable zone\" would almost certainly have some rocky moons which might have water. There is a growing number of candidate planets which are in, or on the edge of, the habitable zone. With a suitable greenhouse effect, there could well be liquid water on some of them (the habitable zone is therefore a somewhat fluid term).\n\nThere's no reason that life couldn't originate elsewhere as you said, but we don't know what to look for so we don't make any assumptions/statements about planets out of the hospitable zone being capable of supporting life.",
"Can not support life as we know it.",
"As far as we know either Carbon or Silicon is needed for all life. If we know a planet can't possibly contain carbon then we assume life can't exist on it. It's a shitty method but it's true.\n\nEDIT: I was being Sillycon. ",
"It's like a company who's got 1000 applicants for one job. You can't read all of their resumes, it isn't efficient, so you discard those of which you know don't possess certain qualities, you filter the options. This doesn't mean that, just because they don't have these qualities they aren't the right man for the job, its that there are much more options available with the qualities we know we need, that are much more likely to be the right man. ",
"/u/JohnSmith1800 said it perfectly. \n\nWhen extreme proximity of a planet to its star leads to temperatures beyond what even tube worms living on scalding hot deep-sea hydrothermal vents can endure, (temperatures of more than 750^o F, 400^o C) the planet is predicted to be outside of a potentially habitable zone. Conversely, being far enough away from its star that even with extreme greenhouse effects a planet could not be capable of sustaining temperatures above freezing, it also gets written off as being predictably outside of a habitable zone. ",
"You bring up a good point: life has no uniting characteristic in its definition, especially if we assume that it might not be carbon based like Earth's. \n\nThe best indicator of whether or not life is present is a planet which is out of chemical equilibrium when taking into account abiotic processes only.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n(Sorry for weird website, the text comes from a nature article but I couldn't find it on my phone)\n\n\n",
"Basically we have a VERY good understanding of what chemical processes can generate energy for life to consume. \n\nThere first must be some way to be able to generate a differential in energy. \n\nNext comes the chemical complexity necessary to support the development.\n\nAfter that comes the external source and the replenishment of resource.\n\n\nIf an environment stops every form of any of these three, it is LITERALLY unable to support life - immaterial to the form of life in question.\n\nPlanets close enough to stars to cause metals like aluminum and copper to vaporize.\n\nPlanets too far enough away from heat that their temperature oscillates above and below the superconductive point.\n\nPlanets with thick atmospheres and massive gravity which impede energy transfer. (these also tend to have insane amounts of radiation)\n\n----------------------------------------------------------\n\nOn the other side of the argument we have exceptionally good ideas about what planets may harbor life.\nWhile much of this is based on our \"Goldilocks Zone\" theories, there are several things necessary for bio-diversity.\n\nA large moon or heavy tidal force that keeps the core molten and thus through vulcanism replenishes the surface minerals.\n\nA complex atmosphere containing a wide range of gasses in mixture.\n\nBoth a day-night cycle AND some kind of mild yearly variance in weather due to tilt. \n\nA star with stable output.\n\n\nSo these second sets of conditions, when all met, will almost certainly result in development of some level of life on their planet. Notice I didn't mention liquid water or weather that oscillates around a freezing point of a liquid! These are NOT necessary. The bacteria growing in the Chernobil reactor room don't appear to need liquid water at all and they're not exposed to a large variation in temperature! They do however have a stable energy source, a complex atmosphere, replenishment of mineral resource and a daily/yearly weather variance.\n",
"I believe it's just a recognition of our own inability to truly recognize other forms of life. There may be sentient, organized, intelligent gasses on Jupiter...but how could we possible identify that? Perhaps some sort of conscious magma puddles on Mercury would qualify as life, but how can we know?",
"Because they are assuming that life has to be carbon based earth-type life. They assume this because we have never recognized any other type. I deliberately say 'recognized' because we may well have seen it and not understood it.\n",
"I think Neil Tyson put it best in this video. Answered this same question for me.\n_URL_0_\n\nTL;DW\n\nwe are made of the most abundant chemicals in the universe with carbon being the most reactive chemical known. It makes sense that other life would also have similarities to \"known\" life due to the sheer abundance of these same chemicals/elements.",
"Think of it like this.\n\nSomeone asks you to find a certain item for them. Lets just use a digital camera. But, you've never seen a digtal camera before in your life, you don't know what that is. How and where are you going to find it? The only thing you know is that its a new type of camera, so you're going to look for places that sell cameras.\n\nThe same deal applies here. There are BILLIONS of planets, so instead of looking for an offshoot of life, they're going to be looking for what they know. Aka, us and others like us.",
"Because life is chemistry within set conditions, these conditions are universal. Just because it isnt on Earth, doesn't mean the chemistry required will be any different.",
"The Drake Equation.",
" > then surely we don't know what conditions are required, so we could be overlooking planets that could posses life.\n\nThat's the Science Fiction author's premise. Life exists in a star's atmosphere, on the surface of Jupiter, or in Hyperspace (whatever you think \"Hyperspace\" means).\n\nThese are all neat ideas, and we do have examples of extremeophiles that exist here on Earth. \n\nThink of it as a bell curve. Extreme life would live at the edges of that curve, in extreme environments that are difficult to explore even when they are right here on Earth!\n\nThe majority of life would happen where living is easy, so looking for those types of environment is a better bet. Hey, this is expensive stuff we're doing!\n\nIt's possible that we could find [Tardigrades](_URL_0_) floating around in space, but how would we know we found them? In space they would seem like less than a dust particle, and would certainly not look \"alive\" in our telescopes. It would be easier to detect a far off Earth like planet that exhibits oxygen with traces of methane.",
"/u/prjindingo in this post [above](_URL_0_) offers a great explanation. To build on this: \n\nWe are currently looking for these kinds of planets outside our solar system which lie in Safe (Habitable) zones. There are lists of [Habitable Planets](_URL_1_) around the internet. These lists are continually growing (as well as the list of planets outside our solar system grows, in general).\n\nDue to complexity of other elements, and the larger amount of carbon & oxygen compared to these other more complex elements, we expect that life is most probable to be carbon, oxygen, and water based -- We assume that since it is the simplest, and most abundant choice that it is most likely to occur.\n\nThat aside, we can in fact see if a planet has an atmosphere. We have seen atmospheres before. Here is a bit of an explanation on that: [Link](_URL_2_). \n\nIt can be tricky to see it, but the easiest way in which we can detect an atmosphere on another planet is when a planet passes in front of it's own star. We see the outline of the planet, and with that, we also see the light coming from the star that passes through the atmosphere. \n\nNow, every gas has it's own signature it gives off when light passes through it, and by looking at this signature we can tell what gasses are present in the atmosphere. \n\nOxygen is particularly unstable and reactive by itself. Over long periods of time, it will interact with other elements, changing both itself and them (think rust on metals, but this occurs with a lot of elements and compounds). By itself, in nature, Oxygen is so unstable that pure oxygen in the atmosphere of a planet is so unlikely that on a very large time scale it becomes impossible for an exoplanet's atmosphere to contain it.\n\nImpossible unless you have a source of Oxygen renewal. Think of Earth. Animals use oxygen and make CO2. Plants, however, use CO2 and make oxygen. Without plants, we would run out of Oxygen in Earth's atmosphere.\n\nFor this reason if there is a significant amount of oxygen in the atmosphere of a planet outside of our solar system, it is a very good indication that there may be some form of life on that planet.\n\nEDIT: However, keep in mind that a lot of these things *are* assumptions. They may be highly informed & educated assumptions, but they are still just that. It is most likely that life will occur under similar conditions with similar chemical elements and compounds. This is not, however to say, that it must. To answer your question: In some sense, we don't entirely know what form life might take. But we've made really good guesses.",
"Because they're looking for liquid water. ",
"Life as we know it, Captain.",
"The shortest answer is that when a scientist makes a statement like this they frequently say life-as-we-know-it and if they don't it is implied. Generally, we are searching for similar, potentially intelligent life we would recognize as such.",
"Carbon based life.",
"Also scientist dont say that a planet \"cannot support life\", journalists do. Scientist say either \"life as we know it\" or \"carbon based life\"",
"prjindigo gives a great response. I agree with what he wrote.\n\nOne principle I did not see is much of it is due to the the inherent qualities of chemicals, for the actual \"being.\" There are only so many chemicals that can be used. We are carbon based, because carbon is extremely extremely easy to create chemical bonds with other atoms. It would be very difficult to create a being with inert noble gases, like Argon, Neon. Those atoms do not combine with anything - their outer shell of valence electrons is considered to be \"full\". So really, one needs to eliminate or assign a value to each *atom* relative to carbon. That way, one can get a \"standard\" probability or likelihood of combining to get life. \n\nAlso, carbon is the 15th most abundant element in the Earth's crust, and the fourth most abundant element in the universe by mass after hydrogen, helium, and oxygen. So ubiquity has something to do with what life forms can be made from. It would be difficult to create life with an extremely rare atom, just because of scarcity.\n\nHydrogen makes up 74% of the Milky Way Disk, and helium makes up 24%. This ratio is from the Big Bang. The rest of the Milky Way - 2% - is made of heavier atoms, which are generated from stellar nucleosynthesis, ie, we are all stardust, even other \"types\" of beings.\n\nThen, you have to look at the relative abundance of atoms, and their combinatorial likelihoods. This has to do with what atom combines easily with another, *and* the relative abundance of each. And again, we are talking about 2% of the galaxy mass (non black matter). For example, glycolaldehyde. It is a key ingredient for life. It helps to build Ribonucleic acid (RNA), which is thought to be the central molecule involved in the origin of life on Earth. Glycolaldehyde is a monosaccharide sugar, the basic unit of carbohydrates. It can react with the chemical propenal to form ribose, the building block of RNA. It would be nice if that shit were naturally occurring, right? Well, it is. It was spotted in a large star-forming area of space around 26,000 light-years from Earth in the less-chaotic outer regions of the Milky Way. The finding, was made with the IRAM radio telescope in France, is published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.\n\nAgain, I am more concerned with the atomic level of life creation. All the other parts, like a planet being in a \"life supporting band\" is interesting. But ultimately, it depends on the atomic level - wether it can even happen with relative abundances and valances of atoms.\n\nIt would be interesting to find out how the energy would be generated. Here on earth, all beings, as far as I know, use the [Citric acid (Krebs) Cycle](_URL_0_) It is just atoms. For example, the citrate is C6H5O3−7. Six Carbons, five Hydrogens, and seven Oxygen atoms. I bring this up, because bringing in energy, through some kind of energy source (food) is necessary if a being works and expends energy.\n\nSo the point is that there are actual physics limitations that determine what *actually* can happen, and the probability of it happening. So rather than creating a *theoretical model* of what is *possible* (habitable zone, presence of liquid water, etc) it is much better to create a 100% known information of what can happen, based on our actual knowledge of what *is.*\n\n**TLDR: stuff, stuff, stuff.**\n",
"Life as we know it. ",
"It has been explained this way: We look for life rather on the principle that when you've lost your keys, even if you didn't lose them under the lamppost, you look under the lamppost because it's the only place where there's any light to find them.",
"When we say planets cannot support life, we mean **similar** life. Carbon based and requires water. We cannot say whether or not other lifeforms can exist on that planet because we don't know. There are also energy issues. Where would we/aliens get energy on that planet. ",
"So we're pretty much saying that all life has to exists around the liquid form of water? Doesn't it make sense that if a planet were to be a different combination of size/distance from its sun, maybe a different liquid would be prevalent, and perhaps life could have evolved in the same way, mechanism wise, but on a different scale? perhaps a heavier or lighter form of water....or is water the only liquid element with such versatility?",
"Part of it to is not \"if\" you find life. It is also \"what kind\" if you happen to find it. For example, Mercury is to much of a toaster for anything. But Venus could have something. I doubt it will have complex creatures, but it could have bacteria and simple single cell or just cellular life of some sort. And that would be cool and all if we spent billions of dollars to find out there were bacteria on Venus. But it would be really cool is if we found complex creatures on a Titan or a similar body. Think of it like mining. Is it worth selling everything and moving west to mine for iron? Course not. But is it worth mining for gold or gems? Quite possibly so. \nSo it's not just finding life. It's finding the kind of life you want to find. ",
"Life that we call life requires:\n\n- A solvent that is liquid within a given pressure and temperature range. Otherwise chemistry is just too slow for life.\n\n- An environment that is covering against destructive radiation.\n\n- A stable moderate environment that does not destroy everything in it too often and that has a constant energy source. Jupiter trapped a lot of incoming meteors not to hit other planets.\n\nThese 3 already limit planets to have a given range of atmospheric density, size and volcanic activity. Most planets are too large or lack atmosphere (that we could see), and mars is an example of a planet that lacks volcanic activity, and without that you lose your radiation protection and atmosphere.",
"The real ELI5 answer is that since we know a lot about life in an environment with water, and nothing about life without water, we're looking for life with water.\n",
"Life as we know it. It can't support life, as we know it.",
"You answered your own question: \n\n > if we were truly looking for alien life then surely we don't know what conditions are required\n\nWe cannot find something if we don't know what we're looking for.\n",
"Two words: Carbon Chauvinism ",
"We only know of carbon based lifeforms, so wasting time looking for others would just slow down the search."
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"http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ra7mt/eli5_why_do_scientists_commonly_say_that_a_planet/cdl7e56",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_potential_habitable_exoplanets",
"http://astrobites.org/2012/11/11/detecting-exoplanet-atmospheres-from-the-ground/"
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3jt1hh | why are quarterbacks, halfbacks, and fullbacks named that? | The Fullback is in between the quarterback and halfback. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3jt1hh/eli5_why_are_quarterbacks_halfbacks_and_fullbacks/ | {
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"In early football they'd often line up in a position sort of like\n\n TE OL OL OL OL OL TE \n QB\n HB HB\n\n FB\n\nThe quarterback is a quarter of a yard back, the halfbacks are half a yard back, and the fullback is a full yard back.\n\nAs the game evolved to be more passing-oriented the player who used to play fullback (who was generally larger) started lining up closer to the line to help pass blocking. Early on you would run on nearly every play and the fullback's job was either to swing out and assist the tight ends as lead blockers for the smaller halfbacks or to run it himself. Being lined up farther back gives him more time to pick up momentum by the time he's at the line."
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2od5zv | why are vehicles built that under and/or oversteer? | Why do they do this if they go through such rigorous testing/prototyping by the manufacturer before release? Is this not a factor tested? Is it a design issue that just can't be factored until end produce or prototype?
Edit: Thank you for the replies all! Starting to make sense. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2od5zv/eli5_why_are_vehicles_built_that_under_andor/ | {
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"most vehicles don't oversteer from the factory, that's a dangerous thing for the average driver\n\nundersteer makes the driver realize they are going too fast and they react by slowing down, especially with audible feedback from the tires. for an average driver understeer is much safer and easier to control",
"A 'neutral' car where all four wheels lose traction at the same time all the time is impossible. The balance between front and rear grip is a constantly changing equation, depending on how tight the corner is (cars want to understeer more at low speed than at high speed) and on whether or not you're accelerating (press the gas and weight shifts to the back of the car, decreasing front grip. braking shifts weight forward, increasing front grip). \n\nOversteer is NOT fun if you're not expecting it. It's useful on the track because it rotates a car into a corner, but it's extremely dangerous on the street. For the average driver, the result of oversteer is the car spinning off the road sideways. Going off the road sideways is about 100 times more dangerous than doing it in a straight line, because your tires will likely dig into soft earth and you'll roll over. Or you'll hit a tree sideways. Or the car will snap back around and put you back onto the street suddenly and you'll get hit in the side by traffic in the next lane. Trust me, you'd rather hit a tree or another car dead on than with the driver's door.\n\nSince you never want that to happen, manufacturers bake in a ton of understeer so that inducing oversteer is extremely difficult. Not impossible (I could drift my wife's Accord just fine) but difficult. That understeer is really just a function of front and rear spring rates and alignment specs.\n\nOddly enough, cars are a lot more oversteer-prone today than they were 10 years ago. Because you can control oversteer very easily with stability control, cars have inched closer to being neutral. ",
"There's no such thing as generic understeer or oversteer.\n\nWhen people say a car has understeer what they really mean is that it has understeer *under certain conditions* - usually going fast round a track.\n\nGenerally speaking said car probably hasn't been designed for those conditions - it's been designed for going to the supermarket, or taking the kids to school, where cornering ability at speed isn't as important as how many seats it has, or how fuel efficient the engine is.\n\nOr if it has been designed for those conditions, the manufacturer has had to make design compromises which contribute to understeer, like making it cheaper.",
"N3rdi is correct. There is no car that doesnt do one of these, infact all can be suseptable to both. AWD cars actually have pretty bad understeer, however new technologies make them often times a bit better than RWD or FWD.",
"If you could create a car that has 100% perfect traction 100% the time, you've won yourself the adoration of every manufacturer and race team except Formula D.\n\nThey do the next best thing, make a car that predictably does one thing or the other when it loses grip.",
"_URL_0_ \nQuality is terrible but the logic, well that is flawless."
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8dt66n | why do spray paint cans get colder when you shake them? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8dt66n/eli5_why_do_spray_paint_cans_get_colder_when_you/ | {
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"The can feels colder when you shake it because you're circulating the liquid inside the can, helping to draw heat away from the steel under your hand.",
"I'm not sure they get much colder when you shake them any more so than any other liquid in a steel can. Just like other poster said the can conducts heat well and after you hold it for a moment your hand has warmed a small collection of the fluid around your hand. Then when you shake it the warmed fluid mixes away and colder fluid takes it's place.\n\nBut when you spray them they get very cold.That happens because there is a gas in the can which is used to pressurize it so that it will spray out with force. When you spray it you make more room in the can for the gas. the gas has grown accustomed to the space that it had and when it is given more space it still want to fill it all so it must absorb heat in order to get enough energy to expand to fill the space. It sucks the heat right out of the steel and air surrounding the can.",
"When you spray you lower the tempature by way of lowering the pressure in the can and that causes cooling like an air conditioner system does. "
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2ogscv | why is casting for acting or modelling jobs exempt from non discrimination laws? | I was just curious why it's okay when casting for a television show or an advertisement to say "we're looking for a black woman in her 40s" You can't (legally) do that in other hiring situations. Hows that work? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ogscv/eli5_why_is_casting_for_acting_or_modelling_jobs/ | {
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"If you are mcdonalds you put out job openings based on service requirements. if you are a casting agency you put out job openings based on service requirements.\n\nThe requirements at mcdonalds have nothing to do with physical appearance. The requirements for modeling/acting have EVERYTHING to do with physical appearance.",
"Because in most other hiring situations being black, white, man, woman, straight, jewish, whatever, has literally no bearing or impact on the ability to perform the required tasks of the job. Things like modeling and acting however, they can have 'essential requirements'. All jobs have 'essential requirements'--you can't exactly have a job serving as a cashier if you can't speak the language of the area, so you're allowed to have 'Must Speak English' as a job requirement without somebody harping on you for discriminating against Latinos.\n\nIf you can demonstrate that the job requires a person to be a woman in order to fulfill the tasks and duties of that job, you can put 'Must be a woman' in the job application requirements without being hit with a discrimination suit. It's why you can't have a guy go up to Hooter's and get made that they won't hire him as a waiter--the store has it as an essential requirement as its part of their business model to have an all-female wait staff.",
"It's called a *bona fide occupational qualification.* Employers are allowed to express and act on preferences that are actually related to doing the job, even if those preferences tend to rule out, say, women more often than men. The usual kind of BFOQ is something like, \"this job involves standing for up to eight hours per day,\" or \"involves frequent lifting of weights up 60 pounds.\"\n\nAs long as those requirements are actually part of the job and you're consistent about applying them, the fact that pregnant women can't meet them doesn't make them discriminatory.\n\nIn the case of acting and modelling, physical appearance, including apparent race, is obviously an important part of the job. After all, your task is \"let people imagine that they're actually watching Brutus stab Caesar,\" and the illusion is hurt (in some productions, at least) by having Brutus be jet-black in his toga.",
"Because the job is different. In acting the job is to play a character. That character has certain traits to be matched. At a fast food place e job is to ring up sales and make food. Your gender, race etc have zero effect on whether you can do the job. \n\nAnd even in acting some of those details don't matter. They might start off saying a black woman but the can't find someone they feel has the right chemistry so they go for a white, an Asian etc. and they actually don't look at age, they can't. That is illegal outside of are you 16, 18, 25 for certain legal requirements. They can't ask me my age but they can ask me if I'm a legal adult or if I'm legal to work with alcohol (you have to be 25 to be in alcohol related ads in most states). All I have to say is yes and be able to prove it to payroll. After I get cast. It's the age you look that matters. That's why if you look at a show like Pretty Little Liars or Red Band Society all those 14-17 year old characters are played by 20-25 year olds. Work rules drop at 18. Younger than that and there's mandatory on set school time, when and how long breaks have to be etc. older than that and it's basically only meal breaks and turn around rules you have to worry about. "
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1k60bl | why cant we communicate with computers with plain english instead of code? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1k60bl/eli5_why_cant_we_communicate_with_computers_with/ | {
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"One big point is ambiguity. You can say one thing and there are several meanings for that thing. A person can (in most cases) decide which one is the 'correct' meaning for this case, but a computer isn't able to do that. So we need a language which doesn't have ambiguities, just clear instructions which can't be interpreted at more than 1 way.",
"The biggest reason is because plain language is ambiguous.\n\n\"See the table there, with the book on it? Pick it up.\"\n\nDid you just pick up the book? Or the table? You know that I most likely meant for you to pick up the book, because it's more rare to pick up tables. But what I said would have been perfectly correct English if I meant you to pick up the table too. You used your life experience to determine that although the language I used could have meant for you to pick up the table, that was less likely than picking up the book.\n\nThe problem is that computers don't have life experiences to be able to make these decisions. And even if they did, the consequences of them making the wrong choice could be quite severe.\n\nTL;DR - It's very important that computer languages are unambiguous. Natural languages are not unambiguous.",
"Because English is filled with ambiguities, and computers don't deal with that very well. Any figurative speech, any puns or jokes, any exaggerations would all be interpreted literally by a computer. No matter how hungry you are, you don't actually want a ton of French fries.\n\nYou *could* program a computer to understand English, but you would have to use so much structure that it's more effective just to use code.\n",
"Computers need instructions that are completely clear. They don't know how to think for themselves, they just do what they're told, so there can't be any ambiguity. English, however, is full of ambiguity. We're used to it, and we can infer and use context to figure things out, but a computer can't.\n\nFor example, here is a very simple algorithm:\n\n1. Lather\n2. Rinse\n3. Repeat\n\nYou know what to do. It's very simple. A computer, though, is *extremely* literal. It will repeat steps 1 and 2 over and over and over until the end of time (or it's turned off).\n\nThe reason you're fine with those instructions is that you *inferred* that the last step is really \"repeat until you're clean,\" not just \"repeat.\" A computer can't figure that out on its own.\n\nNow, you can write English in such a way that it leaves no room for inference or interpretation. That's how types of writing like legal documents are supposed to be. If you've ever tried to read a legal document, though, they take about a paragraph to say what you could normally condense into a sentence, because they have to do all sorts of hedging so that it's *absolutely* clear.\n\nIt's much more elegant and efficient to just make a new language (ie code) to interface with computers."
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7c8avh | why is it bad to leave the door/window open when the a/c is on? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7c8avh/eli5_why_is_it_bad_to_leave_the_doorwindow_open/ | {
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"The whole point of air conditioning is it circulates the air in the room. If that air has an escape there is no circulation."
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4jpg4m | how cruise liners and aircraft carriers are built? | I can't imagine something transporting an aircraft carrier, so is it just built on the water? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4jpg4m/eli5_how_cruise_liners_and_aircraft_carriers_are/ | {
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"Ships of this size are built in a dry dock, which is effectively an area next to a river or ocean large enough to contain the ship, but which is separated from the water by a wall or gate. Once the ship has been built they slowly allow water to fill the dock until it's at the same level as the water outside, at which point they open the gate (or demolish the wall) and allow the ship to sail out.\n\n*Edit* I found a video which shows the process perfectly: _URL_0_. You can see where they start flooding the dock at around 4:43."
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1hhht2 | how does a condenser microphone work? | Please explain | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1hhht2/eli5how_does_a_condenser_microphone_work/ | {
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"The condenser microphone (also known as a capacitor mic) uses two metal plates - one fixed in place and one freely moving (this is essentially what a capacitor is). \n\nThe front plate of the capacitor (the diaphragm) is not fixed and therefor vibrates when it comes into contact with sound energy. The resulting variance in the distance between the fixed plate and the diaphragm causes the voltage in the capacitor to fluctuate. \n\nThis fluctuation of voltage is interpreted as a digital representation of the sound energy it received, allowing the recorded sound to be replicated. \n\nIt should be noted that unlike a dynamic microphone, a condenser mic requires a power source (usually supplied through the mixing desk). "
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2qx22l | what does it mean to liquidate someones asset? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2qx22l/eli5what_does_it_mean_to_liquidate_someones_asset/ | {
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"To sell it. Basically all liquidating means is turning into cash. It gets the name because cash is very fluid in how you can use it so thus you are taking someones hard assets like a house and \"liquidating\" them into a much more fluid asset...Cash.",
"Basically it means selling any assets you have, such as your property or business. If I was a farmer and I liquidated all my assets, I would sell my land, equipment, livestock, and any stored harvested crops.\n\nEdit: changed \"all my\"",
"It means to sell off any property of value for money. Assets being the valuable property. And liquid being money.",
"Thanks for the fast reply! :D",
"Liquidity is a term for describing how easy it is to use the value of something. Cash is very liquid because you can trade it for other things very easily. Money in a money market is less liquid because before you can trade it for other goods you have to first get it out of the money market. Money in a bond is even less liquid because you have to wait for the bond to mature, or sell the bond early in order to get value from the money. Value in a house is also not very liquid as you have to sell the house before you can use the value in the house.\n\nWhen you say liquidate someones assets, it means to take their non-liquid assets (like bonds, stocks, house etc.) and turning them into liquid assets (cash). This is typically to pay off debts or to distribute money from a will.\n\n"
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3zqo3b | what is oculus rift, what does it do, and why is it $599? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3zqo3b/eli5_what_is_oculus_rift_what_does_it_do_and_why/ | {
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"[this video is a little old](_URL_0_) but should demonstrate the unit.\n\nIt's $599 because they believe that's what people will pay to get it."
]
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8xy9gz | why is it that i feel more rested waking up after my rem stage in a 3-hour sleep than waking up in the middle of nrem stages in a 7+-hour sleep? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8xy9gz/eli5_why_is_it_that_i_feel_more_rested_waking_up/ | {
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"In rem, your body is getting used to getting back up while in nrem your body is still repairing and resting",
"REM phases are short, and during these, you can't really move your body. Your muscles are sort of 'turned off' in REM. When this phase ends, your muscles wake up again and usually this leads to tiny convulsions and spasms or to more general movement during the sleep (e.g. turning around, stretching etc.). Thus shortly after REM, your brain is very close to waking up. You might even wake up fully after REM phases but only for very short moments. Like when you wake up in the middle of the night after a strange or intense dream - you most likely wake up because your muscles are 'turned on' again, and you can remember the dream because it was so shortly after REM, not because of what you dreamed. \n\nWhen you wake up normally - without an alarm - you usually wake up shortly after a REM. In non-REM phases, your brain is actually in a deeper resting mode, while it is pretty active during the REM phases. This is why you feel dizzy and weird if you wake up in the middle of NREM. "
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7b8ayz | can be the brain be programmed or coded, and if so what the entity be human or computer? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7b8ayz/eli5_can_be_the_brain_be_programmed_or_coded_and/ | {
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"I studied brain science in university.\n\nNo. The brain is not a computer, and there is no such thing as \"programming\" it."
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98fdqf | why does the cia use the polygraph when recruiting if it isn’t even accurate? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/98fdqf/eli5_why_does_the_cia_use_the_polygraph_when/ | {
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"It's used as an intimidation factor. They can call things out saying the detector said you're lying just come clean and some people do such as \"have you ever done drugs? Even once?\" It's an effective weeding tool.",
"Even if it isn't great at determining whether or not a person is lying, it is really great at determining how a person behaves under stress, which is an incredibly important tool for a law enforcement agency. No one wants stressed out CIA agents, who know sensitive information, wandering the globe who can't handle a few pressing questions.",
"* there is a cult-like belief within some law enforcement circles that polygraphs actually work\n* more cynically, some in law enforcement don't care whether they work, they like having a scientific-looking test they can interpret however they want to reach the conclusions the want\n* people had more faith in polygraphs in the past, and government agencies are slow to change their policies",
"The thing about polygraph tests is that they can indicate trends. The CIA doesn’t just do one polygraph session and call it good. Their polygraph session lasts for *three days*. Yeah. You’ll get asked the same questions as variants, repeatedly, for three days. It doesn’t have to be accurate, it just has to be consistent. ",
"Accurate enough to be admissible in court in a criminal trial, where the burden of proof is beyond all reasonable doubt.\n\n**VS**\n\nAccurate enough to give you a sense of whether you want to have this person working for you.\n\nThat's the distinction."
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1jq2wd | how come i can focus my eyes on the floaters on my cornea, but not my finger when it's almost touching it? | I was lying on a trampoline looking at the sky today and I could focus my eyes to pretty clearly see a couple floaters and I just wondered. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1jq2wd/eli5_how_come_i_can_focus_my_eyes_on_the_floaters/ | {
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"Your eye isn't really focusing on the floater, as it's behind the cornea. It's more like having dust on the film, it gets sent directly to the brain as is.\n\nYour finger you actually do need to focus on.\n\n"
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1iqrit | timezones and international travel | When flying west, at what point does it stop getting earlier? When flying east, at what point does it stop getting later? It's obvious you can only gain or lose a maximum of 24 hours, regardless of travel speed, but how does that work? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1iqrit/eli5_timezones_and_international_travel/ | {
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"There is something called the International Date Line, and it runs in a North/South direction through the Pacific Ocean; it is pretty much lined up between Alaska and Eastern Russia. If you cross the date going east, then you gain an hour, but lose a day, so the net change is going back 23 hours. If you travel going west, you lose an hour, but gain a day, which means you add 23 hours.",
"Fun little fact, while the maximum amount of hours in a day is 24 there are timezones from -12 UTC to +14 UTC meaning there are always 2 \"days\" occurring on earth and you can skip an entire day crossing the date line due to the difference of 26 hours. "
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bnzzoo | why does food from chain restaurants contain so much sodium? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bnzzoo/eli5_why_does_food_from_chain_restaurants_contain/ | {
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"Partly to preserve the food until preparing. Partly because we as a society are overaddicted to sodium and its to get our fix. Just like how a lot of things unnecessarily contain too much sugar.",
"Partially for flavor, partially because it’s an excellent preservative. You’ll find that, even in grocery store products, food that can be stored for extended periods of time (ie. Pre-made frozen foods, canned soup, etc.) have a very high level of sodium. As far as most chain restaurants go, like said before it *is* used for flavor, but a lot of the food is also frozen or pre-made and just heated up, so it needs to have a good amount of preservative in it to keep it from going bad."
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4oipky | why is it that we're angry, we resist laughing or being cheered up and 'want' to be angry? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4oipky/eli5_why_is_it_that_were_angry_we_resist_laughing/ | {
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"If I had to toss a guess out there..\n\nAnger usually comes from being hurt, which makes one feel less significant. Sometimes being angry is the only way you can fight back. \n\nOr maybe if you laugh easily through it, you might think, that those around you might think you're insincere or something?\n\nShit man, people be weird. I know I am.\n Also, looking forward to other responses.",
"It comes across as an attempt to diminish or deny the anger as being valid. It sends the message that someone's anger is irrational, when it may be quite rational and justified. ",
"Presumably you are angry because of something. To be cheered up without addressing what upset you delegitimizes you being upset in the first place. So you would resist being cheered to retain the integrity of you being upset."
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5cwwjt | why in the world would people on ebay bid more than a gift card's value? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5cwwjt/eli5_why_in_the_world_would_people_on_ebay_bid/ | {
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"Most likely they are fraudulent bids to try to scam the seller out of the gift cards value. It's also possible they are laundering money. ",
"A few reasons that I have heard. Buyer bids high on gift card with stolen credit card. This way they are ensured to be the winning bid, and they just converted the \"risky\" stolen card to a legit gift card.\n\nOther reason I have heard is that the buyer bids this above value amount, receives the card, and then just charges the seller back (essentially getting it for free, but would only work on sellers that didnt protect themselves)",
"If it's just a little bit over it could be that they through various cash back programs gets back enough money that they still save money.\n\nAnother reason you sometimes see this behaviour on gift cards when people from other countries want access to things they do normally can't get, never seen that for amazon tho, mainly for things like US iTunes gift cards. \n\nOther than that probably a scam (stolen card) or some kind of money laundry.\n\n ",
"1) a massive fuck up in an ebay sale. I am guilty of this. You don't want to delete it because of ... reasons... so you create an alt and bid it up over what it will sell for. \n\n(actually I can remember doing this with something that I had 'sellers remorse' with after the auction started. I don't remember my reasoning for creating the alt, over bidding and costing myself money. As opposed to just ending the auction. I can be weird sometimes)\n\n2) Money laundering. You know, drugs and all that. \n\nPersonally I would stay away from gift cards on ebay. Too many ways for that to get ugly for the buyer.",
"Some people also get auction fever...getting caught up in the moment and bid to win regardless of price",
"They forget to refresh the bidding. Surprisingly a lot people will place a bid at the last moment without refreshing their screen. In a sense of panic, they will place a bid above the current showing bid often without realizing that the price of the bid is higher than the worth of the gift card.\n\nSource: I sold a halo zune and some guy bid double the worth of the item only to message me after he won to explain how he got caught up in the moment.",
"I bought an i-tunes gift card. To set up and buy music from a contry because the songs where not sold in mine. I meen how hard are you making it for me to give you money. This is the reson people start pirating stuff.",
"Could be using a stolen credit card. \n\nYou swap 531 stolen dollars for 500 clean ones, and since it's a gift card it's a lot harder to track. (employees are \"supposed\" to note the number of the card they give out, and they're \"supposed\" to check this number when they cash it, but neither of those ever happen)\n",
"You can pay with a credit card and then sell the gift card for cash.\n\nThey're going to take a hit on it anyway but the cash is what they're after. ",
"Besides scams, a legitimate reason is where the bidder has ebay bucks to use or lose. For people who do not use ebay, ebay bucks are like credit you earn for buying/selling on the site. For instance, if I purchase an item, ebay might credit me with \"$10\" ebay bucks as a reward to use on another auction. I may decide to then bid on a gift card worth $10 and it won't cost me anything out of pocket but the gift card itself will be worth $10.00",
"These cards are less traceable because they didn't buy them directly although generally they'd buy prevaid visa cards on the darknet over TOR or a similar system I think. This is important if they want to buy a burner laptop for doing hacking or similar criminal or spy stuff or want to buy illegal goods.",
"It's frequently for drugs, with various code-words in the title or item description to convey exactly what substance and how much of it they're selling.\n\nThis is also why you see frequent listings for old, lousy furniture for hundreds of dollars on craigslist and other sites. No one is actually paying for $150 for a broken folding chair, they use the listing as a way to advertise their product and prices.",
"Ebay bucks, sometimes they pay less that the actual final bid price. \n\nAlso promotions where you get × amount off a purchase, where the final price is still less than face value. \n\nSometimes cards like Costco run a premium because you do not need a membership to use the card.\n\nAlso fraud.\n",
"Aside from all the scams detailed in this thread, a more \"honest\" reason is that people have funds in a method available to ebay (ie paypal) but maybe don't have the bank account or credit card they need to buy stuff at the store. This way they can convert the PayPal credit to something they can spend in the \"real world\" very easily. ",
"There are also promotions where ebay gives 5% back in ebay dollars, so they could still come out on top.",
"It is probably a fraudulent bid where the bidder has no intention of paying after the auction ends. I've had this happen to me several times while selling on eBay. \n\nI haven't confirmed this, but I have a feeling people make fake accounts and place high bids on competing items to indirectly raise the \"market price\" and directly stop bidders from buying items priced lower than their own. \n\nUsually when the auction ends the fake bidder never pays and the seller has to spend 2 weeks going through eBay's policies for handling non paying bidders before being able to relist the item.",
"A big reason for buying an Amazon gift card on eBay is that Amazon doesn't accept PayPal, so it makes it easier especially for people without credit/debit cards.",
"1. Stolen credit cards. 2. (and probably the biggest one) So people dont have to drive to a store and buy one.",
"To your specific example, I have no idea. But my wife routinely sells current use coins and a little paper currency for higher than face value. If I go to Brazil and return with $22 worth of Reals, she has no problem selling it for a few dollars more, plus shipping. Someone bought some Norwegian Krones from her at one point and asked if she could rush ship them because they were leaving for NO in a few days. It was less than $10 USD value. Some people just don't think things through.",
"I used to work for eBay. There are people who consistently sell cards for more than their value and they aren't getting scammed. People will buy them for reward points, because they are foreign and get a better deal online, to avoid transfer or conversion fees, or sometimes to launder or hide money. There's a high risk that the sellers could be laundering money so eBay limits the number of listings and card values they can put up at once. "
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6qwz2e | how are animals able to retain such muscle mass with a restricted diet yet humans need a constant amount of protein and nutrients to maintain much less muscle? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6qwz2e/eli5_how_are_animals_able_to_retain_such_muscle/ | {
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"Herbivores are capable of digesting cellulose and so can extract protein from it. They can also extract other nutrients or synthesize them via gut bacteria or enzymes from plants. \n\nCarnivores are able to synthesis or extract all nutrients needed from meat. \n\nBeing omnivores we have the advantage of being able to eat a wide variety of foods, but it is a trade off in not being able to get as much out of the foods due to not being specialized in extracting nutrients from them. We cannot synthesize as much from meats as carnivores, and we cannot digest cellulose at all unlike herbivores. We are less likely to run out of food due to being omnivores, but we may become deficient in something due to not being as efficient. ",
"Because human brains eat up such a huge % of our calories compared to other animals. A human brain is about 2% of the body's weight but uses 20% of the calories.\n\nGoogle turned up [this article](_URL_0_) which includes this statement:\n\n > We do not expect BMR [basal metabolic rate] variability to explain a large amount of brain size variation, as there are other possibilities for maintaining an enlarged brain. Animals could reduce the size of other expensive tissues in the body (Expensive Tissue Hypothesis, Aiello & Wheeler 1995), or reduce energy allocation to locomotion or reproduction (Energy Trade-off Hypothesis, Isler & van Schaik 2006). \n\nIt's saying that to feed our big brains, we have to increase our calorie intake (increased BMR), *sacrifice other tissues (i.e. muscles)*, be lazy to save calories, or some combination of the three.",
"The other factor at play in attaining and retaining muscles is myostatin. Myostatin is a protein (also called GDF-8) which inables/inhibits muscle growth depending on how much of it is present in muscle tissues. For example, Gorillas produce very little myostatin and, as such, are extraordinarily muscular without the need for extensive exercise. Humans, on the other hand, produce much more myostatin and so are less muscular and require regular strenuous exercise to attain significant muscle mass. This is due largely to our ancestors being very well adapted to running long distances. Our less muscular frame makes prolonged exertion possible as we're not burdened by a large amount of excess weight that additional muscle mass would add. A Gorilla is very quick over a short distance but it can't chase you for very long.",
"It's all down to the hormones and proteins in our body. We produce a protein called myostatin. This actively works to prevent the formation of muscle cells. We have a lot more of this than other animals that are considerably more muscular. In essence, our body biologically does not want to be muscular and tries to prevent it. We need to give it a strong need to be through a form of progressive overload coupled with the diet. So even if we had a gorilla's digestive ability and ate all the same food, we'd never naturally get as muscular because of our myostatin production.",
"Ill try to provide a very basic explanation from an evolutionary perspective. \n\nIt is possible that the development of large muscles vs the development of larger brains were unable to occur together in our ancestors due to nutritional limitations.\n\nAs our predecessors began to evolve greater intelligence, we began to discover and use tools that enable us to perform survival tasks without requiring a lot of muscle strength. \n\nTherefore, even those pre-humans who did not carry the trait for a lot of muscle development could survive long enough to have children and pass that trait down. Over time, the ones who had larger brains could reproduce even better than the larger muscled pre-humans.\n\n",
"\n**Humans:** Evolved as endurance hunters and foragers of high calorie fruits, nuts, and roots. Additionally our ancestor's primary survival tactic was climbing a tree (or wading into water if you believe in the amphibious ape hypothesis). Collecting this kind of food and in this way does not require a lot of muscle and uses mostly slow twitch muscle fibers (the less bulky of the two). So having a lot muscle is unnecessary and a calorie sink. Same applies to our way primary way of avoiding being eaten. Extra muscle just means there is less tree for you use avoid being eaten. Furthermore, humans have been using intelligence to supplement for muscle for a long time.\n\n**Typical Predator:** Most of these predators evolved as ambush and short sprint hunters. For them having a lot of muscle and of the fast twitch variety allowed them to succeed at the ambush. Ambush is a popular strategy among predators regardless of species because herbivores can easily pick where they are going to eat since their food is everywhere. So if an herbivore knows you want to eat them, they will not come anywhere near you if they can avoid it. \n\n**Typical Large Herbivore:** Large herbivores will quickly find themselves in an arms race with predators. The smallest of their numbers will typically be attacked and successfully killed before larger and stronger members of their species. This sometimes gets further reinforced by sexual selection strategies that enforce it further such as now cloven animals will have heading butting contests over control of a harem. Those that don't try to compete purely by muscle advantage will turn to some other strategy (speed, agility, herds, packs, etc.) to survive and get smaller as a consequence.\n\n**Small Herbivores** You are probably indulging in a selective bias in regards to these animals so you forgot about them. They use a very wide variety of hunting and predator avoidance techniques. As such they are not as likely to use enhanced and enduring muscle to survive. ",
"I would challenge the premise that we need constant protein and nutrients. There are plenty of people just on Reddit that work out, are muscular, and fast for days. Head over to r/fasting and see for yourself. There's lot of studies showing how hgh and testosterone are boosted during periods of fasting. Dr Jason Fung deals with this stuff a lot but fair warning there is controversy around some of his claims. ",
"Yer not alone in askin', and kind strangers have explained:\n\n1. [ELI5: Why can horses and cows eat grass alone yet still pack on muscles while humans need more than just vegetables to bulk up? ](_URL_3_)\n1. [ELI5: how are cows and rabbits able to eat grass and turn it into muscle mass, but humans have to eat cows and rabbits to do the same thing? ](_URL_0_)\n1. [ELI5: How do horses grow such large muscles off of a diet consisting mostly of grasses? ](_URL_2_)\n1. [ELI5: How do vegetarian animals get the protein necessary to build and maintain muscle? ](_URL_5_)\n1. [ELI5: How do cows get so big eating grass alone? ](_URL_1_)\n1. [ELI5: How do large and muscular animals like rhinos, brontosaurus, and gorillas manage to get enough protein to maintain their muscles on a primarily vegetarian diet? ](_URL_4_)\n1. [ELI5:How horses are vegetarian and can convert that into muscle but I need to eat meat to build muscle? ](_URL_6_)\n",
"Side note, all protein originally comes from plant based foods. Any protein you get via meat is caused by said animals diet."
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"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/617zbk/eli5_how_are_cows_and_rabbits_able_to_eat_grass/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/126jfc/eli5_how_do_cows_get_so_big_eating_grass_alone/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1sh5xx/eli5_how_do_horses_grow_such_large_muscles_off_of/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/27ep7m/eli5_why_can_horses_and_cows_eat_grass_alone_yet/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3nqd93/eli5_how_do_large_and_muscular_animals_like/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/35lg09/eli5_how_do_vegetarian_animals_get_the_protein/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2c8ynz/eli5how_horses_are_vegetarian_and_can_convert/"
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107jnr | why do debit cards have the option to use credit? wouldn't this make them a credit card? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/107jnr/eli5_why_do_debit_cards_have_the_option_to_use/ | {
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"In addition to what **pencer** said, there are differences in the way the transactions are processed. The biggest one is that a credit card transaction can be legitimate with just a swipe (the reader reads the black strip on the card). A debit transaction needs to report a PIN (the number you type into the keypad), and won't work if you can't provide one.\n\nLastly there is quite often a fee assessed [to the merchant] on credit card transactions. It's charged by the card issuer (Visa, Mastercard, *etc*). Debit transactions usually don't. So if you have the option, and you like the company you're buying something from, use debit.",
"Protip: If you have a Visa debit card, sign up for [Visa Extras](_URL_0_). You won't be swimming in free loot, but you might as well get points for what you were buying anyway. As a side note, you need the transaction to go through as credit (when you don't enter a pin) to get the points"
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6j3fhb | why do older cars jolt a bit forward or backward after being put in park? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6j3fhb/eli5_why_do_older_cars_jolt_a_bit_forward_or/ | {
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"In my understanding, putting the car in park locks the transmission but does nothing to the wheels directly. So when you park the car and let off the brakes, it lurches as the mechanical \"slack\" comes out of the drive train. That is, the wheels can move a bit before being stopped by the locked transmission. You can avoid this by applying the parking brake before releasing the brakes, as this locks the wheels directly.",
"Putting the trans in park just inserts a locking pin. The car jerks because it's the weight of the vehicle taking the slack out of the drive-train until the locking pin bear the weight of the vehicle.\n\nI've seen this pin break 4 times, and I live in the flat Midwest. It can happen to you. When that happens, nothing is holding the car in place. My father had a truck like this. We'd park it in one spot and find it across the parking lot when we came back to it. This is why you should always ALWAYS use the parking brake. It *IS NOT* the emergency brake - it's a mechanical brake on your back tires that is meant to bear the weight of the vehicle and keep it in place. It'll also keep your locking pin from breaking. It is utterly useless in an emergency as your front wheels do 80% of your braking, typically more. If your brakes fail and you need to stop, this will just lock up your back tires and put you into an oversteering skid. Now you have two problems."
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13cg1m | when people say they "broke the seal" after urinating while drinking alcohol, does it really cause one to urinate more thereafter? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/13cg1m/eli5_when_people_say_they_broke_the_seal_after/ | {
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"\"Breaking the seal\" marks the beginning of increased urine production due to alcohol consumption, so it doesn't _cause_ one to urinate more. It is the _result_.",
"mental_floss has a detailed answer to this: [The Science of “Breaking the Seal”](_URL_0_)",
"Side note: has anyone actually attended a drinking event at a bar where they gather a group (15-20?) who pay an amount of money and then they can keep drinking beer until someone has to use the restroom?"
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e8kscy | how come even a mild breeze can cause such loud noise on an outdoor phone call or video? | Can the mic be designed to eliminate it? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e8kscy/eli5_how_come_even_a_mild_breeze_can_cause_such/ | {
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"The microphone cavity creates turbulence. If you just had an exposed microphone it would be much better.",
"Best way to explain it is like you’re blowing at the top of an empty glass bottle. You’re not putting much effort in the breath but the sound it makes is five times louder. \n\nThe same thing happens with a cellphone’s microphone, there is a shallow cavity the air rolls over, the cavity catches it, making that awful tearing sound the other person in the other end of the phone call hears. \n\nThe best bet to eliminate that noise is to use an omnidirectional mic and deadcat or a windscreen."
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7wzlno | why does drinking water at body temperature feel so weird? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7wzlno/eli5_why_does_drinking_water_at_body_temperature/ | {
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],
"score": [
7
],
"text": [
"Evolutionary instincts perhaps. Adaptation has taught most animals that lukewarm water is more likely to come from stagnant puddles that are breeding grounds for diseases, while the cool running water in a river is a lot safer to drink. Hot water is usually raised to a temperature that kills diseases, and we add other stuff to it to make drinking it pleasurable. (Reasonably) hot water hasn't really killed anyone, at least not to the point that only those who genetically averted from hot water survive."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
3ptxtt | why is brown bread considered healthier than white bread? is it healthier? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ptxtt/eli5why_is_brown_bread_considered_healthier_than/ | {
"a_id": [
"cw9e9bn"
],
"score": [
6
],
"text": [
"White bread is heavily processed, and isn't very good for you. Brown bread varies, some are essentially dyed white bread but the kind with all the seeds in it are very good for you. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
6u7ex8 | why do most airplane engines have a swirl on the front of them? | The swirl on the engine looks like its on the middle bearing, so it swirls in a hypnotic way while the engines are on. Can some explain why these exist? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6u7ex8/eli5_why_do_most_airplane_engines_have_a_swirl_on/ | {
"a_id": [
"dlqj8vd"
],
"score": [
32
],
"text": [
"It provides a visual indicator as to whether the engine is turning or not. Very useful for ground crews and maintenance people."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
7pt6fb | in video games, do the developers program actual bullets in the game and projectile it or just fake it with invisible lasers that can shoot across the map? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7pt6fb/eli5_in_video_games_do_the_developers_program/ | {
"a_id": [
"dsjv20k",
"dsjvbtj"
],
"score": [
2,
2
],
"text": [
"A bit of both. Some games use what is known as \"hitscan\", which means when you click your mouse button, the game essentially stops the clock, calculates the invisible laser in a straight line from your character's gun, and then looks at whether the laser passes through an enemy to give you a hit, and then start the clock again, all in a tiny fraction of a second so you don't notice. This means even at long distances, if your enemy was in your sights at the exact moment you pull the trigger, even if they moved out of the way immediately, they'll still get hit.\n\nOther games will create a new projectile object at the barrel of your gun and move it through the live environment, scoring a hit if it collides with an enemy. This means if you shoot at a where a moving target is, by the time the projectile gets to the target, they might have moved and you'll miss even if you had them in your sights when you fired.\n\nYou can also have games that do both - in Overwatch, Soldier 76, Widowmaker, and McCree all use hitscan firing. Mei, Hanzo, Reinhardt's Firestrike, Junkrat and Pharah all use projectile firing.",
"The \"invisible laser\" is referred to has hit scan, and actual projectiles are called projectiles. It really depends on the game, but many games have a combination of the two. COD uses scan for guns, but projectiles for grenades and rockets. Halo:CE secretly had projectiles for nearly every gun as I recall, but all of them since 2 have been scan, unless there was a visible projectile (i.e. rockets, plasma bolts, not the \"tracer\" rounds most guns had). Battlefield uses projectiles, exclusively, which is why you have to lead, zero gun sights, and compensate for your sight zeroing being out of whack/slightly off. Counterstrike is entirely scan. \n\nOverwatch is an interesting game in that the different characters have different styles of shots. Genji, Zenyatta, Orisa, and Hanzo all have projectiles, and Soldier, McCree, Tracer, and Widowmaker are scan. They game has a pretty even mix of the two. Ana, a ranged sniper healer, has projectile shots from the hip, and scan while ADS. \n\nTo answer your question, it's often a mix, and a stylistic choice by the designers to lean one way or the other. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
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