q_id
stringlengths 5
6
| title
stringlengths 3
296
| selftext
stringlengths 0
34k
| document
stringclasses 1
value | subreddit
stringclasses 1
value | url
stringlengths 4
110
| answers
dict | title_urls
sequence | selftext_urls
sequence | answers_urls
sequence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
kfhlx | why is it so difficult to translate different languages? and why can't poetry, speeches, and other types of literature be translated easily? | I took an English class and we looked at a German poem and the professor said that the translation was the best he had, but had fundamental differences. Why is this? Doesn't have to be an ELI5 about literature, just translation overall. Thanks! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/kfhlx/eli5_why_is_it_so_difficult_to_translate/ | {
"a_id": [
"c2ju58k",
"c2ju7zc",
"c2judir",
"c2jv6ex",
"c2jw7np",
"c2jwbnb",
"c2ju58k",
"c2ju7zc",
"c2judir",
"c2jv6ex",
"c2jw7np",
"c2jwbnb"
],
"score": [
12,
5,
3,
2,
2,
2,
12,
5,
3,
2,
2,
2
],
"text": [
"Well because we don't say things the same way in differet languages. Even the different kinds of English are spoken differently.\n\nFor example, I'm American. I might say something like.\n\n\"I have a hard time finding time to go gym each day.\"\n\nWell that sentence transliterated (that is translated word for word) into another language wouldn't make much sense because the person would wonder why I was using gym as a verb and maybe how one \"finds time\". \n\nSo a translator's job is difficult because they have to find a good way to express the different undertones of a sentence into another language and keep those undertones.\n\nEDIT: A mistake in my example sentence. ",
"There are connotative meanings, especially in literature that when translated literally do not make any sense for example take the American English Saying \"I am going to kick your ass\". To us it means I am going to beat you up but if you translate that to Arabic literally and say it they will look at you funny as if to say \"Why would you want to kick someone in the ass?\"\n\nAlso when it comes to poetry there are rhymes that may not be able to translate so you have to pick something close that rhymes. In many cases you get \"fundamental differences'.\n\nFor example, translate:\n\nListen my children and you shall hear \n\nOf the midnight ride of Paul Revere, \n\nOn the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five; \n\nHardly a man is now alive \n\nWho remembers that famous day and year.\n\nIn German literally:\n\nHören Sie meine Kinder, und ihr werdet hören \n\nVon den nächtlichen Ritt von Paul Revere, \n\nAm achtzehnten April, in Fünfundsiebzig; \n\nKaum ein Mensch ist nun lebendig \n\nWer erinnert sich, dass berühmte Tages-und Jahreszeit.\n\n\n\n\nLoses quite a bit of it's zing.\n",
"Let's take English for example. In British English the phrase \"Can I bum a fag off of you.\" would mean \"Can you give me a cigarette.\" Now keep in mind the first statement is still English but the words \"bum\" and \"fag\" have different meanings and people wouldn't generally know what your talking about in the USA. \n\nWhen you have different languages this can get even more complicated because languages may not actually have a word that may exist in English. For example Jayus is a Indonesian word meaning “A joke so poorly told and so unfunny that one cannot help but laugh.” There is no word in English with a meaning that is the same so you'd probably have to change the meaning of the sentence to translate it.\n\nLastly word mean different thing when placed together. So for example \"awesome sauce\" means \"This thing that we were speaking about it is extremely good.\" but the word individually do not have that meaning. If you were to translate \"Awesome Sauce\" to German for example the combined word wouldn't have the same meaning. ",
"**Sorry this is long, and isn't quite for a 5 year old, but I love this subject so I'm going to speak my mind fully!\n\nThe other responses here so far explain what you want to know very clearly. I would, however, like to try to give a much more far-reaching and inclusive answer.\n\nEvery language is different from the other. This does not stop, however, at connotative meanings, or colloquialisms, or slang, or anything like that. The very roots, the fundamental assumptions that each language takes as its starting point, are different for every language. Now, some of these languages, yes, are more similar to other ones and more different to other ones. But the very syntax, grammar, etc., of a particular language forms the thoughts and ideas that the people who speak that language have. Try to realize that our language actually filters the ideas and thoughts we have; we do not make our language to fit our thoughts.\n\nI've had some experience studying French, Latin, and English is my mother tongue (I mention this only as fact, and not to brag.) I studied Latin and English for quite a long time, and so can speak to the differences between these languages. If you go back and read Latin authors (Catullus, Vergil, Livy), they all thought very similarly. Written Latin is a very mathematical, logical language; everything fits where it should go. There is a rational proportion and symmetry to every sentence, even in poetry. Every tiny little thing when expressing a thought is explained and expressed (at least alluded to, in the case of poetry) thoroughly. Nothing is out of place.\n\nNow, compare English. English flourishes because it is, in some ways, the opposite. We have no problem incorporating words from other languages (Arabic, Sanskrit, along with Greek, Latin, and any romance language). English always changes to fit the need of the speaker at the moment. It has no problem with the transformation or mutation of grammatical constructions in one way or another. This is why it is considered today by many to be a universal language.\n\nWhat I'm trying to say is that these qualitative differences between these languages (and every other) shapes the very thought of the speaker. Because you speak English (or whatever language), there are *truly* certain thoughts that you simply cannot have. (As an example, certain languages don't have time tenses at all; others don't have singular pronouns; others are whistled; some have a female way of speaking for women and a male way of speaking for guys - how could you possibly represent these in English?) So when you try to express those thoughts that are quite natural in one language in another language, such as through translation, you are bound to run into problems. That is why particular translations of poetry or books are regarded as an interpretation in themselves. A translation of Tolstoy into English will never be regarded as canonical, because it will never be exact. The translator introduces his own interpretation of how to express Russian ideas in English.\n\nI think that is what your teaching was talking about. Good question!",
"Because language is cultural. Language is tied to history. Language has sets of \"inside jokes\". A lot like reddit. Certain things in reddit don't make sense outside of reddit. Same with the rest of the world and countries. Events and history have a huge impact on language. Language is a view into a culture. It's more than just words and meanings. It defines a lot about culture.",
"The first line of Kafka's \"The Trial\" is this:\n\n\"Jemand musste Josef K. verleumdet haben, denn ohne dass er etwas Boeses getan haette, wurde er eines Morgens verhaftet.\"\n\nIf we run this through a word for word translation, we get the following:\n\n\"Someone must Josef K slandered have, because without that he something evil done had, was he one morning arrested.\"\n\nIn order to get this into something someone would want to read in English, we have to at very least rearrange the words into proper grammar. Plus, there's the matter of word choice. I used the word \"evil\" for \"Boese,\" but \"wrong\" or \"bad\" could have been used without being incorrect. \n\nHere's a blog post someone wrote critiquing five different translations of that one sentence:\n\n_URL_0_\n",
"Well because we don't say things the same way in differet languages. Even the different kinds of English are spoken differently.\n\nFor example, I'm American. I might say something like.\n\n\"I have a hard time finding time to go gym each day.\"\n\nWell that sentence transliterated (that is translated word for word) into another language wouldn't make much sense because the person would wonder why I was using gym as a verb and maybe how one \"finds time\". \n\nSo a translator's job is difficult because they have to find a good way to express the different undertones of a sentence into another language and keep those undertones.\n\nEDIT: A mistake in my example sentence. ",
"There are connotative meanings, especially in literature that when translated literally do not make any sense for example take the American English Saying \"I am going to kick your ass\". To us it means I am going to beat you up but if you translate that to Arabic literally and say it they will look at you funny as if to say \"Why would you want to kick someone in the ass?\"\n\nAlso when it comes to poetry there are rhymes that may not be able to translate so you have to pick something close that rhymes. In many cases you get \"fundamental differences'.\n\nFor example, translate:\n\nListen my children and you shall hear \n\nOf the midnight ride of Paul Revere, \n\nOn the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five; \n\nHardly a man is now alive \n\nWho remembers that famous day and year.\n\nIn German literally:\n\nHören Sie meine Kinder, und ihr werdet hören \n\nVon den nächtlichen Ritt von Paul Revere, \n\nAm achtzehnten April, in Fünfundsiebzig; \n\nKaum ein Mensch ist nun lebendig \n\nWer erinnert sich, dass berühmte Tages-und Jahreszeit.\n\n\n\n\nLoses quite a bit of it's zing.\n",
"Let's take English for example. In British English the phrase \"Can I bum a fag off of you.\" would mean \"Can you give me a cigarette.\" Now keep in mind the first statement is still English but the words \"bum\" and \"fag\" have different meanings and people wouldn't generally know what your talking about in the USA. \n\nWhen you have different languages this can get even more complicated because languages may not actually have a word that may exist in English. For example Jayus is a Indonesian word meaning “A joke so poorly told and so unfunny that one cannot help but laugh.” There is no word in English with a meaning that is the same so you'd probably have to change the meaning of the sentence to translate it.\n\nLastly word mean different thing when placed together. So for example \"awesome sauce\" means \"This thing that we were speaking about it is extremely good.\" but the word individually do not have that meaning. If you were to translate \"Awesome Sauce\" to German for example the combined word wouldn't have the same meaning. ",
"**Sorry this is long, and isn't quite for a 5 year old, but I love this subject so I'm going to speak my mind fully!\n\nThe other responses here so far explain what you want to know very clearly. I would, however, like to try to give a much more far-reaching and inclusive answer.\n\nEvery language is different from the other. This does not stop, however, at connotative meanings, or colloquialisms, or slang, or anything like that. The very roots, the fundamental assumptions that each language takes as its starting point, are different for every language. Now, some of these languages, yes, are more similar to other ones and more different to other ones. But the very syntax, grammar, etc., of a particular language forms the thoughts and ideas that the people who speak that language have. Try to realize that our language actually filters the ideas and thoughts we have; we do not make our language to fit our thoughts.\n\nI've had some experience studying French, Latin, and English is my mother tongue (I mention this only as fact, and not to brag.) I studied Latin and English for quite a long time, and so can speak to the differences between these languages. If you go back and read Latin authors (Catullus, Vergil, Livy), they all thought very similarly. Written Latin is a very mathematical, logical language; everything fits where it should go. There is a rational proportion and symmetry to every sentence, even in poetry. Every tiny little thing when expressing a thought is explained and expressed (at least alluded to, in the case of poetry) thoroughly. Nothing is out of place.\n\nNow, compare English. English flourishes because it is, in some ways, the opposite. We have no problem incorporating words from other languages (Arabic, Sanskrit, along with Greek, Latin, and any romance language). English always changes to fit the need of the speaker at the moment. It has no problem with the transformation or mutation of grammatical constructions in one way or another. This is why it is considered today by many to be a universal language.\n\nWhat I'm trying to say is that these qualitative differences between these languages (and every other) shapes the very thought of the speaker. Because you speak English (or whatever language), there are *truly* certain thoughts that you simply cannot have. (As an example, certain languages don't have time tenses at all; others don't have singular pronouns; others are whistled; some have a female way of speaking for women and a male way of speaking for guys - how could you possibly represent these in English?) So when you try to express those thoughts that are quite natural in one language in another language, such as through translation, you are bound to run into problems. That is why particular translations of poetry or books are regarded as an interpretation in themselves. A translation of Tolstoy into English will never be regarded as canonical, because it will never be exact. The translator introduces his own interpretation of how to express Russian ideas in English.\n\nI think that is what your teaching was talking about. Good question!",
"Because language is cultural. Language is tied to history. Language has sets of \"inside jokes\". A lot like reddit. Certain things in reddit don't make sense outside of reddit. Same with the rest of the world and countries. Events and history have a huge impact on language. Language is a view into a culture. It's more than just words and meanings. It defines a lot about culture.",
"The first line of Kafka's \"The Trial\" is this:\n\n\"Jemand musste Josef K. verleumdet haben, denn ohne dass er etwas Boeses getan haette, wurde er eines Morgens verhaftet.\"\n\nIf we run this through a word for word translation, we get the following:\n\n\"Someone must Josef K slandered have, because without that he something evil done had, was he one morning arrested.\"\n\nIn order to get this into something someone would want to read in English, we have to at very least rearrange the words into proper grammar. Plus, there's the matter of word choice. I used the word \"evil\" for \"Boese,\" but \"wrong\" or \"bad\" could have been used without being incorrect. \n\nHere's a blog post someone wrote critiquing five different translations of that one sentence:\n\n_URL_0_\n"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[
"http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/culture/jameshiggs/4758383/Trial_and_Sentence/"
],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[
"http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/culture/jameshiggs/4758383/Trial_and_Sentence/"
]
] |
|
63kehy | what's the difference between a startup and a small business? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/63kehy/eli5whats_the_difference_between_a_startup_and_a/ | {
"a_id": [
"dfusyot",
"dfv6cwz"
],
"score": [
6,
6
],
"text": [
"A startup is a new company which aims to expand rapidly, whereas a small business is simply a company with few employees. For example, a car repair shop with a hand full of employees would be a small business.\n\nSo a startup typically starts as a small business, but grows into something bigger if it's successful.",
"If you're creating a new car rental shop, you're creating a small business.\n\nIf you're creating Uber to change the way we rent cars, you're creating a startup.\n\nThe idea of a \"startup\" is to make a big, bold bet that you can change the way an industry does business (\"disruption\"). Usually a startup's a relatively small company, often startups have very little money at first. And usually a startup's plan is to find some new way to build technology.\n\nIn the past, new business types that have arisen due to technology have been very expensive. For example it required huge amounts of money to create a new railroad when the technology became available. Likewise it required huge amounts of money to build steel mills or car factories in the early 1900's.\n\nWith computer technology, the Internet, and mobile, there are many stories of a few people with the right ideas, the right team, and the right leadership who managed to execute their business successfully, changed the world and made piles of money. Starting a company in today's high-tech sector is very cheap compared to starting a railroad (which was basically the high-tech sector of ~150 years ago). So even though there's lots of opportunities, there's also lots of talented people looking for successful, fulfilling and lucrative careers, and lots of guys with money trying to use this environment to build businesses that will make them lots more money.\n"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
||
4ejp25 | how do the arrests of democracy spring protesters in washington not violate their first amendment right to protest? | _URL_0_
They were arrested for crowding, obstructing and incommoding.
The First Amendment gives citizens "the right of the people...to petition the Government for a redress of grievances"
EDIT: The title probably should read 'right to petition' instead of 'right to protest'.
| explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ejp25/eli5_how_do_the_arrests_of_democracy_spring/ | {
"a_id": [
"d20pt1p",
"d20q1u6",
"d20s0k5"
],
"score": [
8,
4,
7
],
"text": [
"The First Amendment is subject to certain limitations. One type of broadly acceptable limitation is known as a \"time, place, and manner restriction.\" Basically, the government may impose reasonable limits on when, where, and how you can exercise your First Amendment rights; that's why I can't set up shop on your street and shout about my political ideas through a bullhorn at 1 AM. It also includes rules like \"no obstructing entrances or sidewalks unless you get a permit and let people prepare for them.\"",
"\"Freedom of assembly\" doesn't mean you get a free pass to do whatever you want just because you're holding a picket sign.\n\nYou're still subject to laws and ordinances.\n\nThey're not being arrested because of thier *message* or beliefs.",
"The protestors will not face repurcussions for the ideas they are promoting or complaining about.\n\nTheir charges will be for blocking non-protestors from places they have a reasonable expectation to access, such as a public building, parking lot, etc.\n\nThey may also be charged with vandalism (damaging property that is not theirs) or some other thing.\n\nOften, protests will intentionally pursue an activity with minor/no real damage but that will result in them being arrested; blocking a right-of-way is one common method. Being arrested achieves two goals: 1) attracts attention of the general public and/or the media, and 2) demonstrates their willingness to endure hardship for their cause which may boost their profile in one way or another.\n\nOther times there is a normal non-arrest related protest that has a few people on the side who are either unrelated or break-off the group who go and do arresty type stuff.\n\nEdit: looters who vandalize/steal often take advantage of the huge crowds and limited oversight to do terrible things. They may complain that they were protestors, but protesting or not you can't expect to get away with a crime just because you had a picket sign."
]
} | [] | [
"http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/11/politics/democracy-spring-arrests-protests-washington/"
] | [
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
9zf7a3 | how does temperature changing nail polish work? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9zf7a3/eli5_how_does_temperature_changing_nail_polish/ | {
"a_id": [
"ea8prdj"
],
"score": [
4
],
"text": [
"It works the same way other temperature change things work. It needs 3 things. \n\n1) there is reversible a chemical reaction that is near the equilibrium point.\n\n2) small changes in temperature have a large effect on the reaction. So when its warm, one product is produced, and when its cold, another product is produced. \n\n3) one of the products on each side of the equation is colored. \n\nSo you'd have an equation like \n\n[red compound] + [other compound] -- > [blue compound]\n\nWhatever you have more of in this particular reaction is dependant on the temperature, and it will turn from red to blue as the reaction progresses (moves left to right). What determines which direction the reaction moves with temperature is whether or not the reaction absorbs or gives off heat. If the reaction gives off heat as it takes place, then adding heat would drive the reaction towards red. If it absorbs heat, then adding heat would drive the reaction towards blue. \n\nIncidentally, there will be a tiny temperature window where the red and the blue will be equally balanced, and it'll look more purple. By manipulating the reaction so that that temperature window is large, you can create a 3 color reaction, where it might be blue when very cold, purple when warm, and red when hot. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
2p077w | if there was an earth shattering disaster, would iss astronauts flee the station, or wait until supplies ended and die? | I'm talking about like if WW3 broke out and the whole planet was nuked, no way another supply mission could go up there. Or, even if a disease wiped out 95% of the population. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2p077w/eli5_if_there_was_an_earth_shattering_disaster/ | {
"a_id": [
"cms40pl"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"Unless an ISS astronaut is reading this thread, the only answers you can possibly get are pure speculation of equal quality to yours.\n\nSo pick one. We don't know."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
250h2n | why does the president fly in to major airports? | It would seem like less of a hassle to fly into private airports instead of major ones. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/250h2n/eli5_why_does_the_president_fly_in_to_major/ | {
"a_id": [
"chcg5bb",
"chcg7z8",
"chcghnu"
],
"score": [
2,
2,
2
],
"text": [
"Private airports are too small for commercial jets. Commercial airports are usually close to big city's that can help with security, and major points of interest are in bigger city's than rural towns.",
"Also, the President only eats high quality airport food, not those crappy little airport venders. ",
"The President flies in a B747 and also a C-17 which carries his motorcade. He flies into airfields that have 6,000'+ runways to accommodate aircraft of this scale, and have locations on the tarmac where these aircraft can be stored during his visit. \n\nIt is also important that the President fly into the closest practical airport as traveling on the ground is far more of a security problem than flying."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
9345my | why does your forehead get sweaty before all other face parts? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9345my/eli5_why_does_your_forehead_get_sweaty_before_all/ | {
"a_id": [
"e3afd36",
"e3aftdd"
],
"score": [
5,
2
],
"text": [
"We sweat to cool us down, which happens when the sweat evaporate. Your brain is the most vital part of you, which is why you do not want to heat it unnecesarily up, so its the first to get cooled down.",
"Sweating is a way to comply with rising body temperatures.\n\nBrain is the most important organ in human body, so it's prioritized when it comes to keeping your body temperature at stable levels.\n\nForehead is the best place to sweat when body needs to cool down its brain."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
||
372911 | why would google chrome get rid of all support for java? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/372911/eli5_why_would_google_chrome_get_rid_of_all/ | {
"a_id": [
"crj2ml6",
"crj2tv7",
"crj4mqu",
"crj512t"
],
"score": [
21,
11,
8,
9
],
"text": [
"Who uses it? I'm sure some folk do, but I and everybody I know can't recall using it at all in the past few years.\n\nJava has been the subject of a large list of security issues and phishing attempts, and for the average user it's doing nothing for them. \n\nIt generally makes more sense to take any current browser-based Java and either remake it into a desktop application or else rewrite it in the browser's native JavaScript.",
"[Here](_URL_0_) is a list of some of the security vulnerabilities found in Java in the last few years. It turns out that letting arbitrary code run in the browser is a major security problem. Since HTML5 lets people write web apps without needing an insecure plug-in, all of the major browser vendors decided to drop support for the old plug-ins. Microsoft's Edge browser won't support it either. ",
"It isn't just Java. Chrome is actually removing the NPAPI from the browser, which is an antiquated cross-platform API used by plugins such as Java and Silverlight. The API is currently disabled by default and soon (this fall), will be removed from the browser entirely. In my opinion, Microsoft is taking an intelligent approach to browser modernization by keeping IE around for those who need legacy support and introducing a fresh, new browser for cutting edge technologies. On the other hand, I give Google props for forcing the hands of many companies (such as my own employer, in fact) to get with the times. The next few years will be pretty exciting for those in the web development world.",
"* To simplify Google Chrome.\n* To push Google technologies as replacements.\n* To reduce future security vulnerabilities (by reducing the attack surface, i.e. the number of things that could possibly have vulnerabilities).\n\nOf course, it's only possible now that Java applets are no longer widely used."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[
"https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=Oracle+Java"
],
[],
[]
] |
||
1z5iva | why does the president hold veto power in a democracy? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1z5iva/eli5_why_does_the_president_hold_veto_power_in_a/ | {
"a_id": [
"cfqpfcc",
"cfqpgxh",
"cfqphfe"
],
"score": [
2,
5,
4
],
"text": [
"Because to some extent the founders realized that simple majorities are a bit dangerous. A veto requires reconsideration and a 2/3rds vote to override.",
"Because people in large groups can be terrifyingly stupid from time to time.",
"Checks and balances. Each branch of government is able to check (restrain) the power of the other branches by the powers vested to that particular branch. So if congress passes a bill that the president disagrees with or thinks is unconstitutional, he can say \"no, I won't sign this into law.\" That is a veto. A veto can be overridden by another vote in congress in which a 2/3 majority votes to override the veto & pass the bill. This is (one of) congress's checks against the executive branch."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
d83i6k | what’s the difference between lotion and skin moisturizing creme? | Boyfriend got a few samples from the dermatologist and there’s a sample for “lite” lotion and a sample for moisturizing skin creme as though lotion is not a creme that moisturizes skin.
Send help. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d83i6k/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_lotion_and_skin/ | {
"a_id": [
"f16w83q"
],
"score": [
5
],
"text": [
"Lotion is lighter and hydrates the skin temporarily, it may be used on the the entire body. Moisturisers are of thicker consistency and are intended to hydrate and keep skin moisturised for longer. They are primarily for hands and face and neck."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
2r2q42 | why does google need pole access to further expand their fiber? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2r2q42/eli5_why_does_google_need_pole_access_to_further/ | {
"a_id": [
"cnbwuig"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text": [
"Because digging up an entire city (or the entire country) to lay down new fiber is extremely expensive- it's the reason that there aren't a lot more companies rolling out fast fiber. It's much easier (and cheaper) to attach the fiber to the existing poles."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
1kh0af | how come the same computer that runs a complex game like battlefield 3 at high fps can lag when using simple programs like itunes? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1kh0af/eli5_how_come_the_same_computer_that_runs_a/ | {
"a_id": [
"cbou9rn",
"cbouaxg",
"cboxntk"
],
"score": [
46,
6,
2
],
"text": [
"Game Developer here -- Your computer is made up of many parts, and different programs do very different things. Your video card's GPU has nothing to do with your hard-drive, and people who make video games avoid reading from the hard drive as much as possible as thats generally the slowest possible operation on a computer.\n\nAn application like iTunes may read from your hard drive, make slow (blocking) network calls, connect with other devices etc. It may be doing \"less complex\" things but its doing it with different hardware. \n\nAlso, some programs are written better than others :)",
"Different programs require different use of the computer hardware. \n\nBattlefield 3, for instance, requires intensive use of the graphics card. iTunes, however, makes very little use of the video card, but on the other hand, makes intense use of your hard drive because it is purging all of your audio/media files onto your screen for ready access. Meaning if you have a slow hard drive, it will take quite a bit of time to load/access your music library.",
"Well, imagine you're building a race car. You'd pick out all the fastest pieces and get some smart people to put them together in such a way that they're all performing optimally. You make sure to optimize and most importantly to leave all the junk behind. Every piece of metal on a sports car better have a purpose because otherwise the car would be heavier or lighter than it needs to be or throw off its shape which would interfere with aerodynamics, etc. ... Some parts even have to make sure the car doesn't lift off.\n\nNow compare this to your average family car, it's big and clunky, hardly something you'd take on a race track. You also don't need engineers to put it together, once they figured out how to make one, it's relatively standard to make a million of them.\n\n\nUnfortunately I can't think of a better analogy so I'll give a little more detail to the bigger kids. Basically a game uses some different resources (GPU) as others have mentioned but there's more to it than that. A video game is built to perform and over the years different 'patterns' (I don't want to get into a fight over terminology guys) have emerged. Yes you can build video games in 'standard' object-oriented ways but most of the time it gets in the way more than it helps. When it comes to games they are heavily optimized towards performance which may sometimes excuse some messy code if it helps shave off a few milliseconds of frame render time.\n\nNow lets look at business software. The main focus of a product like itunes is to get it out the door fast spending as little money as possible so the margins become higher (while technically video games have the same focus, you can't ship a game that doesn't perform, the reviews would tank your game and it'd be a flop, a game is only 'new' for so long). This means for software like this they use as many shortcuts as possible while still keeping the code as 'clean' as possible. Where a game programmer asks the OS for memory and makes sure to clean it up for example (not always completely true but even smart pointers don't constitute a full memory management system), most programs written for the desktop these days are written in some language that has memory management and you don't even have to really worry about it any more. A lot of things have been automated which take away a bit of control but offer a way of doing things a lot faster and usually you don't have to worry too much about the low level stuff. Unfortunately these systems aren't truly intelligent, they are based on 80-20 rules and as long as you don't mess around too much you will get decent results. 50 ms response time on clicking a button is not a big deal in most programs.\n\nNow sometimes these programs have some requirements that make it impossible for them to perform decently but especially programs like itunes have another problem: the programmers themselves. They clearly don't understand the systems they are working on or they don't get enough/take enough time to work out the kinks. Whether they really are monkeys or pressure from management is too high to deliver a decent product, it's clear that they have not taken the time to clean things up and that tends to result in a big ball of mud (yes, I'm assuming all of this but itunes is clearly not optimized so I think it's fair to assume it's not easy to optimize and that can only be because their code base is a mess). Honestly if you don't need itunes for you i-product I'd find an alternative, hell even windows media player performs better."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
d8ie09 | how do billionaire multinational corporations go under suddenly? and what are the signs that a big company is about to go bankrupt? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d8ie09/eli5_how_do_billionaire_multinational/ | {
"a_id": [
"f1aq1j3"
],
"score": [
7
],
"text": [
"They don’t, it just seems sudden to the average person who doesn’t follow financial news. Investors, board members, and mid to upper level employees are aware of the entire ride down. It takes companies such as Sears and Toys R Us years or even decades of poor management and declining revenue to go under."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
a7l9dj | how do fast food places with multiple drive-thrus that merge into one keep track of who ordered what? | For example, you have Lane A and Lane B.
In lane A, you have person C and person D.
In lane B you have person E (myself)
Person C orders first. Right after that person E (me) orders. Then person D orders. Logically, Person C then E then D should pull up. But person D cuts person E off. How does this not mix the orders up? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a7l9dj/eli5_how_do_fast_food_places_with_multiple/ | {
"a_id": [
"ec3sthd",
"ec3t8cr",
"ec40oz2",
"ec4iwqs"
],
"score": [
7,
2,
2,
3
],
"text": [
"They take a picture of your car, then it’s attached to your order on the screen at the first window where you pay. Then the order you pay in is the order your second window is given so they give you the right food. ",
"The payment window and the order window are usually on a one track system, so they fill out your order based on who paid first.",
"When I worked at a drive through like that we had cameras looking at the drive through lane. We stuck a bit of tape onto the screen at the till and we didn’t confirm the order until the car was past the tape. Also, there was a camera at the point of order that took a photo of the driver which we could see at the till. People still make mistakes though so it wasn’t perfect by any means. \n\nJust because the orders go through the system in a certain, well, order, that doesn’t mean they have to be paid in that order. We could call up the order which was waiting to pay even if they were taken in a different order. (There has to be a better way of saying that but I can’t think of the right synonym)",
"Chic-filet has this system and they get around it by taking everyone's name and attach it to their order. I got up to the window and they asked me if I was \"Person A\", I said no and said I was \" Person B\" and so they simply told whoever was putting the meals together that they needed Person B's meal."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
1dum6p | what happens to dead homeless people? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1dum6p/eli5what_happens_to_dead_homeless_people/ | {
"a_id": [
"c9u014b",
"c9u526v",
"c9u8irm"
],
"score": [
21,
5,
3
],
"text": [
"Assuming they died on the street, their corpse would likely lie there until someone called 911, at which point an ambulance would arrive and bring them to a hospital to be pronounced dead, after which the doctors or office staff would attempt to contact family. If that is unsuccessful, or the person has no ID, as they're homeless and not in the system, I assume the hospital would burn/cremate the body as their dirty unclean corpse is a bio-hazard, and I doubt the government has any interest in paying to bury the homeless.",
"I was once on my boat in City Island, Bronx, NY, when I heard on my marine radio that a body had been found floating in the East River, about a quarter of a mile from wher I was. I watched in binoculars as 10 or so police cars arrived and finally left. I couldn't see much detail. The next day I could find no article in the NY Times about this body finding, so I called the Times and asked about it. The person I talked to said that \"a floater\" was found in NY waters every day, so the Times didn't report them. \n\nI am very curious as to what happened to that \"floater's\" body. I guess he was not in the system.",
"A lot of places have what is called [Potter's Fields](_URL_0_) which are plots of land provided for burying poor/homeless dead."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potter%27s_field"
]
] |
||
cnhunw | why do our human noses decide to randomly close up or congest for weeks/months even when the person isn’t sick? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cnhunw/eli5_why_do_our_human_noses_decide_to_randomly/ | {
"a_id": [
"eward1j",
"ewarmjc",
"ewasqkj",
"ewaujun",
"ewb08sk",
"ewb4r6x",
"ewbgi0s",
"ewbitbm"
],
"score": [
7,
25,
83,
15,
3,
3,
2,
3
],
"text": [
"Our sinuses are monstrously complex so they are prone to clogging and all sorts of other problems, or so I've been told.",
"I’m a doctor, and I’ve never heard of this. You may want to check in with your doctor. Perhaps your symptoms are due to a physiologic abnormality that may require further evaluation.",
"It's not random. Your nasal passages are swollen, either from allergens or infection. If it lasts more than a few days, it's an infection, go see a doctor.",
"You are sick your nose just isn't runny. You Nasal Cavity might be swollen due to bacteria.\n\nVisit your nearest ENT, you might have a crooked septum like me. It's where your inner nose is slightly crooked hence causing bacteria to get trapped inside.",
"Are you overweight? Fatty tissue surrounding the nasal cavity can swell as your body fat increases narrowing the passageways, making them easier to clog if you ,say, had a post nasal drip or allergies.",
"They don’t... see a doctor maybe? Might be allergies?",
"They normally don't. You should see an ENT. May have a deviated septum or some other issue if it's not allergies.",
"This was definitely written by a dog because humans don’t need to specify that those are “our human” noses"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
2weheu | does extreme cold (close to absolute zero) slow down radioactive decay? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2weheu/eli5_does_extreme_cold_close_to_absolute_zero/ | {
"a_id": [
"coq75ts"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"No, radioactive decay is independent of temperature for all intents and purposes (except maybe a tiny difference in the rate of electron capture)."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
3ljqbn | why are we supposed to put our heads between our legs during a plane crash? wouldn't it be better to be strapped to the seat tightly? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ljqbn/eli5_why_are_we_supposed_to_put_our_heads_between/ | {
"a_id": [
"cv6uaqx",
"cv6ud00",
"cv6y7jg",
"cv6yak8",
"cv71e8s",
"cv7b5cb"
],
"score": [
2,
9,
3,
12,
68,
3
],
"text": [
"My guess is so you don't break your neck from luggage falling and flying around during the crash maybe? ",
"There's a mythbusters episode about this actually. It prevents more injuries than you would think.",
"To keep your head from SNAPPING downward due to heavy turbulence or... shiiiiiiit... Impact.",
"You allow the seat to absorb more of the impact. This prevents more serious injuries such as spinal injuries and holding onto your ankles or seat in front reduces the risk of broken arms etc \nSource: Mythbusters did an episode about it",
"A big part of the brace position is putting the head up against the thing it's most likely to hit when suddenly accelerated from below: the back of the seat ahead of you (if you're tall) or your own legs (if you're short). Putting the head there before the crash helps prevent it from slamming into it during the crash.\n\nIf you can put your head between your knees, it also helps keep your head from flailing around and hitting something else, like another passenger or other parts of the aircraft structure.\n\nBeing bent over also reduces the risk of \"submarining\" or sliding under the seat belt, and it can shift the seat belt's restraining force to the parts of the pelvis that are strongest.\n\nKeeping your feet behind your knees minimizes the risk of breaking a leg bone, which is important if you're going to get out of the airplane after it crashes, but before you burn to death in the post-crash fire.\n\nBasically, there are three kinds of airplane crashes: those that are survivable without bracing (we call those \"landings\"), those that are totally unsurvivable, and the ones in the middle where you have a chance of surviving if you (a) don't stun yourself or die by bashing your head against something hard, (b) don't force your upper vertebrae into your skull and sever your spinal column during the crash, and (c) don't break your legs or feet so badly that you can't get out after the crash but before the post-crash fire.\n\nSource: private pilot who is also a worry-wort.\n\nActual sources: _URL_0_\n_URL_1_",
"##In case of emergency or crash landing\n\n- Fasten your seatbelt\n\n- Tuck your feet behind your knees\n\n- Tuck your head between your legs, and kiss your ass goodbye"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[
"http://flightsafety.org/ccs/ccs_nov_dec95.pdf",
"http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a344504.pdf"
],
[]
] |
||
175byb | is it really harmful to swallow chewing gum? i've heard that all of my life and just assumed it was some old wives tale, like it takes five years to digest and it sticks to the sides of your stomach. i really don't believe that and always swallow my gum but my sister is really adamant about it. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/175byb/is_it_really_harmful_to_swallow_chewing_gum_ive/ | {
"a_id": [
"c82cfad",
"c82crgz"
],
"score": [
7,
2
],
"text": [
"There's no reason to swallow gum, as it has no nutritive value, but at the same time, your body can pass it through the digestive system pretty easily.\n\nThe only issue that could arise is if you eat a huge amount in a short time it could block up one of your intestines.",
"It won't dissolve in your stomach acid and will be pooped out more or less as it was before swallowing. However, things that can't be easily digested carry a risk of getting impacted in your intestines, which means pain, infection and urgent need of getting it out somehow."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
||
4ae280 | why do some batteries "re-charge" themselves a little bit after they already died and you wait for a while? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ae280/eli5_why_do_some_batteries_recharge_themselves_a/ | {
"a_id": [
"d0zki7e",
"d0zljyr"
],
"score": [
21,
2
],
"text": [
"Batteries create electrical charge off of a chemical reaction occurring within the case. However as the reactants are not gaseous, it is very hard (teetering on impossible) to react all of the stuff together on the first go. Meaning, if you mix two liquid reactants together by pouring one into another, it is impossible to tell when the reaction is fully finished and there could be \"holdouts\" or clumps of reactants that have yet to come into contact with anything to react with.\n\nBatteries \"regain\" charge because there is still some holdout reactants within the case.",
"Most batteries work because they have chemicals that interact with metal plates, which create more electrons on one plate and less on the other creating an electrical imbalance. These plates are connected to the battery terminals. When you connect a wire to the terminals, the electrons flow through the wires to the other side, balancing the equation. When you discharge the battery, the chemicals near the plates get used up and don't create electrons anymore. If you leave the battery alone for a while, it's possible that still active chemicals can float around nearer the plates and produce more electrons. You can try to speed this up by rotating or shaking or swinging the batteries around your head, which probably won't do anything to help but will give you an excuse to tell people how batteries work when they ask you what you're doing.\n\nThis is part of the reason why \"take the batteries out and put them back in\" will sometimes work to revive a dead device. The other part is that when you move the batteries around you're scuffing up the ends of the batteries and the contacts on the devices. If there is corrosion or other gunk keeping the battery from making a good connection, this might scrape it off."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
||
dj9g3s | why the romans left britain in the early 5th century | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dj9g3s/eli5_why_the_romans_left_britain_in_the_early_5th/ | {
"a_id": [
"f42jlsw"
],
"score": [
4
],
"text": [
"Because Rome was falling to pieces. Britain was far flung and isolated. It took up a lot of their resources to hold it, resources that were better spent elsewhere at the time. \n\nThink of it this way: the United States sets up a base on the moon. People live there for years. Then a new Great Depression hits. The US can no longer afford to keep sending supplies up there to those folks, and there is a lot of use you could put those scientists and such to down here to help fix the problems were having. \n\nSo they close down the base and leave, maybe even thinking one day they can come back. \n\nOf course, Rome never got to come back."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
6r85g6 | why disc brakes stop better then rim brakes on bicycles. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6r85g6/eli5_why_disc_brakes_stop_better_then_rim_brakes/ | {
"a_id": [
"dl320lw",
"dl32qag",
"dl334mi",
"dl39702"
],
"score": [
2,
3,
2,
2
],
"text": [
"Disc brakes have a larger contact area between the disc and the pad than rim brakes do between the pad and the rim. More contact equals more friction, and more friction means greater stopping power.",
"Depends on what you mean by \"better\". Any front brake that is strong enough to lift the back wheel or any rear brake that can skid (lock up) the rear wheel has reached its limit of usefulness. \n\nRim brakes are often degraded by water on the rim. This is less of a factor on disc brakes.\n\nThe braking flat on a rim can wear down and lead to wheel failure. \n\nDisc brakes are often touted as having better modulation or \"feel\". This is hard to measure so largely subjective and therefore very popular with journalists who like to say they can detect the limit of adhesion more easily with disc brakes. Not everyone believes everything they write.\n\nI have hydraulic discs on my mountain bike and cable operated rim brakes on my road bikes. They all work.",
"Also, the calipers for disc brakes are often more robust and have more grip to them, lending to more stopping power. ",
"The disc on a disc brake serves no other purpose than to stop your bike. You can design it however you like, grip as are as you want, and make them out of whatever material is best for the task.\n\nRim brakes grip the tire or rim, which serve other purposes on the bike. You have to work around how they are made, and do the best you can.\n\n"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
3oc314 | what are evolutionary benefits from pains accompanying menstruation? | We can be very tolerant for pain if it help our survival, menstrual pains clearly doesn't help in surviving, and are not caused by external factors, why our brain didn't learn to turn pain off in those situations? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3oc314/eli5_what_are_evolutionary_benefits_from_pains/ | {
"a_id": [
"cvvtvuz",
"cvw38ec"
],
"score": [
5,
3
],
"text": [
"Those pains are a necessary side effect of the menstruation process, the entire purpose of which is to birth new members of our species. Pretty much the most important thing for evolution to keep going. ",
"Most females during most of history didn't experience menstrual pain -- because they were either pregnant, breastfeeding, malnourished or underage. Therefore, there was never much evolutionary pressure to have little menstrual pain."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
|
1q6evm | how come heat seeking missiles don't go straight to the sun? | It is the thing with most heat? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1q6evm/how_come_heat_seeking_missiles_dont_go_straight/ | {
"a_id": [
"cd9nbwo",
"cd9q36d",
"cd9quny",
"cd9rk2d"
],
"score": [
10,
31,
4,
18
],
"text": [
"The field of vision on a heat seeking missile is generally pretty narrow so that it doesn't go after the wrong target. If it can't see the Sun it can't switch targets and lock onto the Sun. Plus more modern heat seekers are \"smarter\" than older heat seekers and are less likely to get confused by other heat sources. ",
"This question makes me smile. ",
"Heat seeking missiles have a very narrow field of view in their heat (infrared radiation) sensor. They can pivot the sensor though.\n\nWhen a missile is not tracking yet, it is scanning an area in front with that sensor for potential heat sources it could go after. This is why it takes some time for a missile to lock on. Modern missiles tracking heads can be pointed at a heat source that is off the center line, and lock on.\n\nOnce locked on, the tracking head is pointing at the heat source, and tries to navigate the missile in a way that it can keep looking at the heat source.\n\nThere's two ways to get a heat seeking missile break the lock. \n\nOne is if the missile can not manoeuvre enough to keep the tracking head looking at the target. If the target is out of sight, the missile will just do random stuff (as in keep going straight until the fuel is depleted or the missile self-destructs)\n\nThe other one is to present the heat sensor a more attractive target...there's a lot of theory to it, but on older missiles it boils down to: something hotter in sight. This can be a magnesium flare dropped by the target, it can as well be the Sun.\n\nAlso, if you point your missile at the Sun, or if your target is close to the Sun from the missile's image sensor's point of view, it will happily lock on to the Sun instead of the less hot actual target.\n\nModern missile tracking systems avoid this issue by using imaging infrared. They don't simply go after the hottest thing around, but instead take an infrared video and match the temperatures and shapes of objects. \n\nWhile the Sun or a magnesium flare basically looks like a hot circle on the image, an aircraft looks very much different. There's cones of hot to warm air behind the engines, there's the engines themselves in front of the cones, there's electronics around the pilot and there's also the leading edges of the wings and stabilizers that heat up by friction.",
"Older versions of the AIM-9 Sidewinder did routinely lock on to the Sun or clouds, sending them ballistic. Newer versions have corrected this by adding optical filters to the sensor to only allow certain bands of infrared energy into the sensor for detection. This same system is used to help defeat flare countermeasures."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
en0mqx | what is 'cultural imperialism'? | Dictionary definition didn't really help.
Thanks in advance! | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/en0mqx/eli5_what_is_cultural_imperialism/ | {
"a_id": [
"fdspm4w"
],
"score": [
6
],
"text": [
"It is the subjugating of a native population buy dissassociating them from their cultural heritage.\n\nBest exemplified by discouraging native language and practice of native religion.\n\nCanada and Alaska have a long history of educating 'heathen' natives in their schools and preventing them from using their language. Forced Assimilation, as it were.\n\n[Or, in the case of Ireland.](_URL_0_)"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"https://www.reddit.com/r/rareinsults/comments/cj7tpa/credits_ushantanu011_on_rmurdered_by_words/"
]
] |
|
59rhtd | why do people tell you to not mix alcohols? i've always been told that if i've started with vodka, i should stick with vodka for the rest of the night and am not sure why. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/59rhtd/eli5_why_do_people_tell_you_to_not_mix_alcohols/ | {
"a_id": [
"d9arbzs",
"d9arnlj",
"d9at1r0",
"d9autrk",
"d9b2x85"
],
"score": [
28,
8,
6,
7,
3
],
"text": [
"It is a myth. But if you stick to one kind of drink you may be better able to judge how much you have consumed. It takes a loading dose of alcohol to saturate the alcohol modifying enzymes. Go over this and you begin to get intoxicated.",
"It's a lie or a mistake. I think it might mostly just be that the nights where you drink different types of alcohol are the nights where you are drinking a lot. \n\nHaving different drinks may increase your chance of vomiting. e.g. if you have some Bailey's shots then chase or with a beer, but this had nothing to do with how drunk you are",
"Myth, to be sure.\n\nWhile it may be slightly easier to judge how much you are drinking if you stick with one drink, if you are drinking mixed drinks it really doesn't matter as different bartenders pour different strength drinks.\n\nReally, the myth evolved from the old adage \"Liquor before beer, have no fear. Beer before liquor, never been sicker\". Which really does hold merit, if you start drinking liquor after you are already buzzing from beer, you are going to be more likely to misjudge your tolerance. ",
"If you switch to something of a higher alcohol content then there's a risk you will drink it as fast as what you were drinking before.",
"It is a myth. But mostly when you start to mix you drink much faster and more in the same time. That give you more chance of hangover so people tend to blame the mixing instead of just blaming themselves for drinking to much. It's like saying \"ohhh that last beer must have been expired, because after the first 16 i got no hangover\""
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
3uztif | how is apple conveniently the only company exempted from the requirement that all phones use a standard (non-proprietary) usb charger? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3uztif/eli5_how_is_apple_conveniently_the_only_company/ | {
"a_id": [
"cxj2kz0",
"cxj3lcq",
"cxj4e3v",
"cxj64t1",
"cxj7p4q",
"cxj7q2t"
],
"score": [
322,
26,
154,
9,
6,
14
],
"text": [
"They have a micro-USB to lightning adapter that ~~is~~ **will likely be** included in all EU purchased phones after the law goes into effect in 2017. You can buy them on Amazon...\n\n***edit - sorry, I posted this from 2017 when the law is in effect.**",
"The EU has a history of being favorable to Apple. See [Microsoft being forced to offer multiple web browsers,](_URL_0_) while Apple gets a free pass.",
"There is no such requirement in the US. Apple is a US based company and so the EU laws do not really apply to them (import requirement laws apply instead). They are required to provide an adapter if they wish to sell in the EU and they do so. It should also be noted that the law is not in effect yet. ",
"Could be wrong but I believe the EU directive is around having a common charging standard. By shipping a usb charger with all their phones, Apple adheres to this, you can use their charger with any other phone manufacturer as long as they have a usb cable.",
"Whatever the laws are, it would be unfortunate if Apple was mandated to use micro-USB. Lighting adapter is simply superior to microUSB, at least for its ability to insert the cable in either direction.",
"Lots of wrong answers here. The answer is because they arent required to. No one is. Compliance is [voluntary](_URL_0_)."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[
"http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/mar/02/microsoft"
],
[],
[],
[],
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_external_power_supply"
]
] |
||
1vgk3j | what limitations on the nsa did obama actually propose today? | I understand he talked a lot about telephone metadata but did he actually say anything pertaining to the PRISM program and spying on internet activity etc? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1vgk3j/eli5_what_limitations_on_the_nsa_did_obama/ | {
"a_id": [
"ces20fu",
"ces51yl",
"ces571i",
"ces7qjh",
"ces7x4v",
"ces842j",
"ces9cvq",
"cesb7dw",
"cesc8ju",
"cescqsh",
"cesdlm6",
"cesdz2u",
"cesdzv6",
"ceseg4j",
"ceseg9v",
"ceseu1f",
"cesfkb8",
"cesfr6z",
"cesfw85",
"cesghh2",
"cesgnc5",
"cesgqx7",
"ceshdka",
"ceshusl",
"cesi46c",
"cesinho",
"cesiq98",
"cesj6y1"
],
"score": [
74,
310,
18,
18,
8,
4,
2,
15,
7,
5,
2,
3,
4,
2,
4,
5,
3,
3,
4,
2,
2,
4,
3,
2,
5,
3,
2,
3
],
"text": [
"Yikes, these responses so far are shit. I'm guessing no one actually listened to the address and are just going off of cynical imaginings of what he said. \n\nThis [New York Times article](_URL_0_) gives a pretty easy-to-follow summary of what he said.",
"* NSA analysts will have to get permission from the Foreign Intelligance Court (FISA) before they can get information from the database. \n\n* The database may or may not be moved out of government control (3rd party storage or require phone companies to store it).\n\n* ~~The NSA can only receive information specific to the phone number requested. For example, they can request information about your cell phone, but not get information about your land line.~~\n\nEdit: I blew this one. The NSA can look at a phone number, then a phone number connected to the first # and then make one more connection. Before they could make a third jump.\n\n* What he talked about today was ONLY for phone metadata. This does not affect PRISM(gathering information from tech giants such as Facebook and Google) at all.\n\nEdit2: I'd just like to add since some people seem to think that this applies to all spying programs. When you listen to his speech or read the transcript, Obama mentions the phone metadata collection specifically several times and even gives examples from it about the 9/11 bombers. The only possible mention about PRISM is an upcoming \"comprehensive review of big data and privacy... with business leaders.\" \n\nTL;DR Light restrictions on phone metadata collection, no real talk about PRISM restrictions.\n",
"I watched it, but it is pretty dense and I haven't been able to parse it fully yet. This list isn't exhaustive, but I think it covers what was asked in the question. (if you're a WONK you can see the the policy document [here] (_URL_0_) or read the full speech [here] (_URL_1_))\n\n1) Targeting must be for a specific target which falls into one of the following: counter-terrorism, counter-intelligence, cyber-security, military intelligence (he calls it \"force protection\"), and combating organized crime (both state-sponsored or otherwise)\n\n2) The Attorney General has to review the program that collects metadata (s. 215) so that Congress has a more clear understanding of what is to be collected.\n\n3) They will explore the possibility of having a third party store the bulk data and establish a quick process to allow the government to access it when necessary\n\n4) Companies who are compelled to give the information over will no longer be subject to an indefinite gag order, will be allowed to inform the suspects after a set period of time, and will be given greater powers to report the volume of these requests to the public. \n\n5) The biggest change in my opinion is President Obama went on record to state that he intends to scale back surveillance of foreign individuals. Instead, they will try to work with the local agency and ask them to look into their citizens. \n\n-There is obviously much much more because the speech was almost an hour long. If you are interested in watching I suggest you start at about the :35 min mark to see him directly address the issues. ",
"Only one microwave at a time",
"Basically, from now on, they'll have full transparency on everything that they feel isn't a security risk.\n\nSo, you know, problem solved.",
"LMAO....people are SUCKERS. ",
"it honestly doesnt matter. whatever safeguards or new rules he talked about today will either never happen or the NSA will simply ignore them. ",
"If someone could explain to me how the Boston Marathon bombings happened well after they began all this spying that'd be great.",
"None.\n\ntl,dr: none.",
"[Everything you need to know about Obama’s NSA reforms, in plain English](_URL_0_)",
"In my mind I imagined that Obama would be pulled from his podium and taken by an angry mob, kicking and screaming, to be burned at the stake for saying or doing anything that wasn't a full and systematic dismantling of the NSA.\n\nI have a dream....",
"The same committee that is closing Gitmo is on the case. Hope and change. The big news is Michelle is 50. Pay attention to the important stuff.",
"Calling it, they put privacy and piracy laws on the same bill and it passes because people value privacy over internet restrictions. I must remember this for future karma. ",
"I owe someone $200. I thought it would be a task force or a new Czar.",
"ELI5? This is in two words: damage control. The typical Obama response in damage control situations goes something like this: There is a problem we desperately need the president to solve. The presidents popularity numbers go down because he is not solving it. Eventually the president takes a momentary break from his golf game to deliver a speech that is one of two things:\n\n1) A denial that there is a problem to begin with (for example: \"there is no domestic spying program\").\n\nor if he can't get away with that:\n\n2) A long complicated list of promises that include no specific details so that he can't be held accountable to actually do any of it. (i.e. today's speech)\n\nThe general public eats it up, and the poll numbers go back up. Then it is back to the golf course for another eighteen holes. Problem solved.",
"Nothing of significance, business as usual. \n\nIgnore the mouthpiece. \n\nPay attention to The Guardian. \n\nSpread the word and protest accordingly.",
"Haha! He said words, nothing has changed. \n\nIf you think anything will happen differently you're probably mistaken.",
"Absolutely nothing that would make it any less illegal. Besides, who cares what he said? If you believe anything that comes out of his (or really anyone in the government for that matter) mouth, you're a damn fool.",
"When I voted for Obama in 08' I thought he was going to be different. Sadly, I was incorrect.",
"Nothing as usual",
"Don't get caught again",
"Reddit's love affair with Obama slowly dying as they're forced to see reality has been a very amusing event.",
"Smoke and mirrors people. Smoke and mirrors. ",
"it was nothing more than PR fluff \n\nThe talking heads on tv will use soundbites from his speech to try and downplay the [untouched] dragnet mass surveillance efforts. People will think the stuff is true because it's the official story -- anyone who questions the official story will still be treated as a conspiracy theorist.",
"If you're an American citizen, then you should understand that, whatever the president says, essentially, means nothing. We are are being spied upon. Even though it isn't an effective means of counterterrorism, it happens bc public opinion demeans freedom when there is an attack. ",
"None. Every sentence ended wit ... \"Unless we need to for national security. Obama foes whatever he wants because ... \"Secret laws\"",
"What a political facade.",
"Nothing has changed. We're still being spied on for reasons of \"national security\" and they can't disclose what they're looking at for reasons of \"national security\". But don't fret. Our \"national security\" is secured because the secret courts will be mindful to watch what our domestic spying program is up to. Of course what it is up to is a matter of \"national security\" and will eventually be disclosed in about 50 years or so; as long as it doesn't affect our \"national security\".\n\n\nNational security.\n"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/18/us/politics/obama-to-balance-privacy-and-security-concerns-in-speech-on-surveillance-aides-say.html?_r=0"
],
[],
[
"http://cdn1.sbnation.com/assets/3876095/presidentialsurveillancedirective.pdf",
"http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/01/17/remarks-president-review-signals-intelligence"
],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[
"http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/01/17/everything-you-need-to-know-about-obamas-nsa-reforms-in-plain-english/"
],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
2uzfjv | the process of being tested for "mental illnesses" | The issue of mental health organisations keeps cropping up in the news and it got me wondering about what actually happens.
How do you find out you have a mental illness, what's the process of confirming it and what happens next? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2uzfjv/eli5_the_process_of_being_tested_for_mental/ | {
"a_id": [
"cod22kt",
"cod3oae"
],
"score": [
2,
5
],
"text": [
"The [DSM](_URL_0_) is a publication that outlines the standard criteria for diagnosing a mental illness. ",
"I can answer this for you :)\n\nPsychologists and Psychiatrists use something called the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 5th edition) This book contains all known/accepted mental disorders. Each disorder is listed with a number of symptoms that need to be met in order for it to be classified as a mental disorder.\n\nFor example:\nMajor Depressive Disorder and depressive episodes would have something like:\n\n• Depressed mood or a loss of interest or pleasure in daily activities for more than two weeks.\n\n• Mood represents a change from the person's baseline.\n\n• Impaired function: social, occupational, educational.\n\n• Specific symptoms, at least 5 of these 9, present nearly every day:\n\n1. Depressed mood or irritable most of the day, nearly every day, as indicated by either subjective report\n(e.g., feels sad or empty) or observation made by others (e.g., appears tearful).\n2. Decreased interest or pleasure in most activities, most of each day\n3. Significant weight change (5%) or change in appetite\n4. Change in sleep: Insomnia or hypersomnia\n5. Change in activity: Psychomotor agitation or retardation\n6. Fatigue or loss of energy\n7. Guilt/worthlessness: Feelings of worthlessness or excessive or inappropriate guilt\n8. Concentration: diminished ability to think or concentrate, or more indecisiveness\n9. Suicidality: Thoughts of death or suicide, or has suicide plan \n\nFurther information is also supplied so that the clinician can diagnose the degree/seriousness of the disorder. For example there may be a table with certain symptoms in a few boxes. Mild cases will have a certain number from one box, moderate a certain number from other boxes and so forth.\n\nI hope that sufficiently explains it to you\n\nSource: Psychology student working toward becoming a Clinical Psychologist"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manual_of_Mental_Disorders"
],
[]
] |
|
79a7g6 | how is insomnia different from having a bad sleep schedule or just plain restlessness? how is insomnia diagnosed? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/79a7g6/eli5_how_is_insomnia_different_from_having_a_bad/ | {
"a_id": [
"dp0bnud",
"dp0fj4d",
"dp0j6yd",
"dp1n1d5"
],
"score": [
2,
13,
8,
2
],
"text": [
"A bad sleep schedule or restlessness represents an expected shift in an otherwise healthy circadian rhythm (your internal clock). \n\nInsomnia is a catchall for any medically diagnosed issue falling or staying asleep. Medically diagnosed being the key here. If there is something properly messed up about your body that is messing with some aspect of your circadian rhythm or general sleep hormone activity, it's insomnia.",
"Insomnia literally means \"want of sleep.\" It's a general term for any sleep disturbance, not a specific diagnosis in itself.\n\nInsomnia can be caused by a bad sleep schedule. Not sure exactly what you mean by restlessness, but if you're talking about a night of bad sleep, that's pretty much the definition of insomnia. \n\nThere are thousands of different things that can affect sleep. It's normal to have a couple of nights of weird sleep in a month, but if you often can't sleep well, talk to your doctor to get to the bottom of your situation.",
"Insomnia is a catch-all generic term for not being able to sleep long enough at the normal time of day.\n\nThere's a dozen or so different *types* of insomnia. Some unlucky souls (me) have a natural circadian rythem involving 20 hours of wake time and 12 hours of sleep. Others have great difficulty shutting their brains down *ever* until they are completely exhausted. Others are wired to naturally sleep during the daytime and stay awake at night.\n\nSometimes insomnia is just a bad sleep schedule that a person is having difficulty fixing on their own. Or temporary because of a life event.\n\nIt can be almost anything that causes a person to have trouble getting enough sleep when they are supposed to sleep.",
"Lots to do with sleeping however many hours (could be 2, could be 13) but never feeling rested. Like you never slept at all"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
4ljp5c | why does it take so long for tree logs to decompose when other plant materiasl decompose faster? | trying to compost material , and larger tree like substances like branches and roots are decomposing more slowly , but why do they decompose slower? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ljp5c/eli5_why_does_it_take_so_long_for_tree_logs_to/ | {
"a_id": [
"d3nxw4y"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"Not all organic material is the same. It's common to talk about *labile* or *volatile* organic matter (weaker, less stable chemical structures that are easier for decomposers to decay) and *refractory* organic matter (strong, stable chemical structures that are strongly polymerised and cross-linked so much harder to decay). Trees contain *lignin* which is a highly refractory substance and is much less vulnerable to decay than \"ordinary\" plant matter, such as cellulose. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
1reug0 | why do some words use "un" as their opposite meaning while other use "a" and "in" ? | For example: **Un**intentional / Intentional. **A**symmetric / symmetric. **In**competent / competent.
I've yet to find out why other than "it sounds wrong" and "that's just how we do it". I'm hoping there's an explanation somewhere other than those. Thanks! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1reug0/eli5_why_do_some_words_use_un_as_their_opposite/ | {
"a_id": [
"cdmjd31",
"cdmjhwu",
"cdmkak7",
"cdmpgx7"
],
"score": [
4,
4,
8,
2
],
"text": [
"Etymology. Various words in English come from different languages. As such we use their prefixes to change the meaning of the words.",
"I *believe* it's to do with etymology - English is famous for rifling through other languages' vocabularies for things to steal and affixes like these tend to follow along. IIRC a- is typically used for Greek-derived words and in- is typically used for Latin-derived words (both languages use(d) these themselves). It's the same reason some people object to \"polyamory\" and prefer \"multiamory\" (all Latin-derived) or \"polyphilia\" (all Greek-derived). ",
"**Because English is a bastard language that is the product of a long line of linguistic rape**. For example, Latin raped native British-Celtic, Old Saxon raped this Latin-Celtic, Danish raped Old Saxon then Old Saxon raped Danish back creating Old English, then Norman French raped Old English and created Middle English.\n\nThen the English raped Middle English by incorporating new vocabulary as they conquered the planet.\n\nSomething like that.",
"Very broadly speaking:\n\n* Words coming from Ancient Greek use *a-* because Ancient Greek used alpha, its equivalent of the letter 'a', to make negatives. Examples: *amorphous*, *apolitical*, *achromatic*\n* Words coming from Latin use *in-* (becoming *im-* before *m*, *b* and *p* and *il-* before *l*) because this is how Latin forms negatives. Examples: *inaccurate*, *ineffective*, *immature*, *immodest*, *imbalance*, *impure*, *impatient*, *improper*, *illegal*, *illicit*\n* Words coming from Old English use *un-* because that's how Old English does it. *Un-* is also a catch-all for many words, whatever their origins."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
96llcc | how does gallup poll methodology represent the "pulse of america" when they only interview 1500 people a week (78,000 a year) and only by phone? | Off the top of my head (all assumptions)
* Its a very small sample size. I'm 30, since I've been of voting age Gallup has interviewed less than 1 million people.
* Poorer Americans are less likely to have a land line or cell phone.
* Poorer Americans are less likely to answer unknown numbers (source: am poor, bill collectors exist), especially when working as blue collar work does not typically condone or allow for cell phone use on the job.
| explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/96llcc/eli5_how_does_gallup_poll_methodology_represent/ | {
"a_id": [
"e41e8k2",
"e41egt0",
"e41gopb"
],
"score": [
2,
3,
4
],
"text": [
"An outstanding amount of accuracy can be extrapolated through 1,500 people to millions of people. Everything you stated has been accounted for mathematically, they will tell you the % error expected in their polling. I believe 1,000 randomly selected people will represent 1,000,000 with like 99.9% accuracy but I don’t remember that well.",
"So basically all the things that you’ve mentioned are in fact credible issues with polling, however their goal is not to say that exactly this many Americans say this or that but to provide a general estimate. So basically they call a lot of people and then use the information about said people and demographic information to estimate public opinion.",
"Okay, I understand that polling larger numbers of people is more difficult and possibly unnecessary. What I'd really like to know is how polls like Gallup translate 1500 people's opinions to represent 325 million on a weekly basis. \n\nIt FEELS like (that's why I'm asking) there are too many demographics to even get a slice of true public opinion when interviewing 0.00046154% of the total. \n\nEach demographic question can have more than half a dozen divisions.\n\n* Gender\n* Race\n* Age\n* Individual income\n* Household income\n* # in household\n* Home ownership\n* Location\n* Health and disabilities\n* Education\n* Employment status and type\n* Children\n* Marital status\n\n How does the math work? It seems impossible to even come up with meaningful best guesses with such a small sample. \n"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
5g42sl | wireless power. | I envision a day where power cords and outlets are a thing of the past. That ones house will be powered wirelessly requiring a encrypted password much like Wifi today.
How does wireless power work and what will it mean for the future of technology? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5g42sl/eli5_wireless_power/ | {
"a_id": [
"dapa4gd",
"dapb7yl"
],
"score": [
4,
3
],
"text": [
"Unfortunately, long-range wireless electricity is REALLY tough based on our current understanding of electricity. Electricity doesn't behave like radio waves so we can't just build something that acts like wifi.\n\nThere's a couple ways to do it.\n\nThe first is near-field/non radiative. Wireless phone chargers use \"inductive charging\" where a wire coil generates a magnetic field. This magnetic field gets the electrons in another wire coil (inside the phone) to start moving, generating a current that can charge the battery. The problem? It's not very efficient, you waste a lot of energy generating the magnetic field. Furthermore it takes exponentially more power to go further (so beyond a few centimeters you run into trouble) and even if you did build one capable of charging devices several feet away, it would be physically dangerous to be close to the device itself.\n\n\nThe other method to wirelessly send power is targeted methods, by aiming a beam of light (aka a laser) or microwaves. The issue with this method is not only do you need to aim your sending device, you need to aim your *recieving* device. And you can't walk in front of the beam or your device stops charging.",
"There's one problem with wireless power. Efficiency. Problem is laws of physics. Electrical field strength decreases by the square of the distance. Move 2ft away, strength decreases by 4. Move 3ft away, decrease by 9. 4 ft away decrease by 16. \n\nWireless charging maximizes around 70% efficiency while most consumer levels are hovering around 60%. So for every watt you pump in, a good chunk is wasted."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
|
a14ekd | why do animals die without oxygen? why can’t we go into some kind of sleep mode when there is not enough oxygen? | Update: I meant “go to sleep and by that survive” | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a14ekd/eli5_why_do_animals_die_without_oxygen_why_cant/ | {
"a_id": [
"eamo8nq",
"eamr462",
"ean08cz"
],
"score": [
5,
6,
2
],
"text": [
"We actually do. If you have slowly increasing oxygen deprivation, you will feel tired and then fall asleep and then die. That is what happens with carbon-monoxyde poisoning.",
"Every process in your body that's keeping you alive uses energy. To extract energy from molecules like sugar or fat, our bodies need oxygen. So without oxygen, there is no energy, and without energy, there is no life (for animals like us). \n\nSome microorganisms can survive even when you stop every process happening inside them (by freezing them, for example), and then \"boot them back up again\" (by thawing them). Essentially, you could say they can die and come back to life. If humans and other animals could go through a \"reversible death\" like this, that would work as the kind of \"sleep mode\" you were imagining, and could get you through a long period without any oxygen. But we can't, because some of the things that happen inside our bodies can't be stopped (for very long) or else our bodies are damaged so badly that they cannot work anymore. At most, animals can slow their metabolism somewhat when oxygen levels are low (basically stopping or slowing down non-essential processes), but below a certain level, it kills them. ",
"Oxygen is required for all the processes that happen in our bodies that occur to make us what we call alive (one of these processes that separates what we call life from mere existence is the ability of self maintainence and repair). \n\nThink of yourself as a cell phone. As you run lower on energy (oxygen) it is possible to go into low power mode (sleep) and continue to operate. When you go too low on energy (oxygen) eventually you can’t operate any more. Now a cell phone can be dead for a while and get charged up again. Life on the other hand, when it dies losses the ability to maintain itself so that if left to long without oxygen degenerates to a point where it cannot restart itself even when given power (oxygen) again. \n\nThis is the idea/theory behind cryogenics, stop the degeneration of the body (by freezing it) until such time as whatever killed you can be cured and your body can be restarted (since it hasn’t degenerated. This hasn’t worked. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
xscnd | how do rockets move | My brother asked this "How do rockets move with fire? " | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/xscnd/how_do_rockets_move/ | {
"a_id": [
"c5p5oda"
],
"score": [
6
],
"text": [
"The rocket moves by propulsion. In a nutshell, when you push burning fuel out the back of the rocket, you are exerting a force backward.\n\nThe laws of physics dictate that every force must have an equal and opposite reaction, so the rocket is propelled forward in the opposite direction that the force is applied. This is why the flames come out the back, and the rocket accelerates forward."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
334ult | why is immigration such a hot button topic in uk politics at the moment? what effects are immigration having on the economy right now? | It seems most political debates at the moment seem to keep coming back to this discussion on immigration with the right (UKIP, Tory) and the left (Labour and Lib Dem) pushing the issue into the spotlight repeatedly. Why is everyone so mad or worked up over immigration? How is it negatively affecting our country? Is the UK actually becoming overpopulated?
I'm only asking because to me where I live in the rural North East, it seems like such a non-issue to me, but everybody around here still goes on about it too, so it can't just be a regional thing. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/334ult/eli5_why_is_immigration_such_a_hot_button_topic/ | {
"a_id": [
"cqhj6c0",
"cqhlefq"
],
"score": [
3,
2
],
"text": [
"Mostly, it's a non-issue. However, trying to remove freedom of movement is an effective way for parties to appeal to their more authoritarian supporters.",
"London and the Home Counties really are very densely populated: flying over that area at night is a real eye-opener.\n\nBut it's an issue for a number of complex reasons, most of which I think must be cultural. I'd cite the fact that Britain is an island so not used to large-scale immigration were it not for the fact that there has been large-scale immigration since at least the 1950s. Still, I do wonder if there isn't some kind of island mentality at work here.\n\nA few things that might be worth considering:\n\n* The economic crisis led to the coalition government's policy of austerity measures to get spending under control and cut the deficit. This has, as these measures always do, disproportionately affected those on low incomes. It's very easy to make scapegoats of immigrants or people who look like immigrants: \"They're getting benefits, I've been a taxpayer all my life and my benefits are being cut, if we send all the immigrants back, there'll be more benefits for us.\"\n* Britain's relationship with the EU has always been difficult and unpopular; this facilitated the rise of UKIP, a movement that was originally about simply leaving the EU, but which has additionally been pushing a very hardline anti-immigration message. They, aided by the tabloid press, have successfully scared people into thinking that EU membership means uncontrolled immigration from countries like Romania and Bulgaria, whose citizens are taking advantage of Britain's benefits system. The Tories meanwhile have lost a lot of voters and sometimes even members to UKIP, and is desperately trying to win them back (which is why the strongest anti-UKIP rhetoric is actually coming from the Tories, not, as you might expect, more left-wing parties).\n* The rise of extremist Islamic terrorism, which has included some very disturbing and horrific murders, has fuelled Islamophobia. People are basically scared that anyone who attends Friday Prayers might one day walk into a bus station with a bomb strapped to himself.\n* It's worth pointing out that anti-immigration sentiment tends to be higher in parts of the country with relatively little immigration."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
|
24m7u7 | why is the number "6" is the upside down version of "9" or vice versa? | I realise it is a dumb question but I really want to know. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/24m7u7/eli5why_is_the_number_6_is_the_upside_down/ | {
"a_id": [
"ch8h0e9",
"ch8h0ix",
"ch8ny8e"
],
"score": [
12,
2,
2
],
"text": [
"Coincidence. They evolved from an old writing system used by the Hindus (we call them \"Arabic\" numerals, but this is inaccurate) over many centuries, and started off looking very different.\n\nHere's how the number 6 evolved: _URL_0_\n\nHere's how the number 9 evolved: _URL_1_",
"Why is the number 0 just a letter O?",
"The Latin alphabet and the related numerals have deliberately been refined over thousands of years to contain repetitive forms. This gives the body copy of a page a homogenous look so that readers are not distracted by the appearance of individual letters and numbers as they read."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8e/Evolution6glyph.png",
"http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/05/Evo9glyph.svg"
],
[],
[]
] |
|
2qr6q5 | how do telescope cameras take long-exposure photos of extremely far away things? wouldn't the rotation of the earth/ earth' orbit screw up the focus of the picture? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2qr6q5/eli5_how_do_telescope_cameras_take_longexposure/ | {
"a_id": [
"cn8q90f",
"cn8sbkg"
],
"score": [
8,
2
],
"text": [
"The aim of the telescopes is adjusted in real time to match the rotation of the planet, using electric motors.",
"Most telescopes have a computer and motor for this purpose. You need to align the telescope first based position of the telescope (GPS for instance) and time and when that is complete you can basically tell the computer the coordinates of the sky you want to watch/photograph. Then the computer makes sure that the telescope is tracking the coordinates based on calculations of earth rotations, coordinates or even objects. Its pretty cool actually. You can tell it to track the moon and it will keep the moon completely center of your viewer."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
||
a8vdlv | why is the yolk of a boiled egg crumbly? | Versus poaching, steaming, frying etc.
My one year old kept smashing up the boiled egg on her tray and I couldn’t explain why to my four year old. (ELI4? Lol) | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a8vdlv/eli5_why_is_the_yolk_of_a_boiled_egg_crumbly/ | {
"a_id": [
"ece363b"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"Because it's cooked so long. If you fry an egg for a really long time, the same thing will happen, but for a fried egg, that would just be considered massively overcooked."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
1mbrix | why isn't the draft considered involuntary servitude? | Being forced to serve sure sounds like involuntary servitude to me. I am not trying to argue for or against the draft, but this seems like a major conflict to me. Is the draft given a special exemption? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1mbrix/eli5why_isnt_the_draft_considered_involuntary/ | {
"a_id": [
"cc7odkk",
"cc7pjnw",
"cc7qapu",
"cc7uc0u"
],
"score": [
18,
10,
2,
4
],
"text": [
"The Supreme Court has held, in Butler v. Perry, 240 U.S. 328 (1916), that the Thirteenth Amendment does not prohibit \"enforcement of those duties which individuals owe to the state, such as services in the army, militia, on the jury, etc.\" ",
"Your continued citizenship is considered consent for things like the draft and jury duty. It is expressly laid out in the law that as a citizen you have certain responsibilities. It is similar to having to fulfill responsibilities in a contract you signed. If you didn't want to risk the draft you have to revoke your citizenship. Right or Wrong, that's just how it is right now.",
"It is. It hasn't been used since Vietnam, when the baby boomers came awfully close to going from continual civil insurrection to some thing worse. The Draft is culturally related to fuedal lord levies or naval press gangs, things we wouldn't allow today. It's justified by the logic that our country may face a threat capable of destroying us (see World War 2), so the state must have power to raise an army. This has become much less a part of everyday thinking as we were a superpower for so long, and our main military power today lies in highly sophisticated technology, not mass manpower.",
"But yet women don't have too. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
3mgwxk | why is japan widely known to have a xenophobic culture? is it true and if so where does their xenophobia originate? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3mgwxk/eli5why_is_japan_widely_known_to_have_a/ | {
"a_id": [
"cvetn8x",
"cvettlp",
"cvew5sr",
"cvf6j27",
"cvf9vh1"
],
"score": [
22,
8,
26,
6,
2
],
"text": [
"Well, because Japan is far less open to immigration than most other open, democratic societies. Xenophobia may be a bit of an exaggeration, but the Japanese government certainly heavily restricts who can live and work in Japan.\n\nThis lack of openness to outsiders has deep roots in Japanese culture. For centuries prior to Japan's western-style reforms in the 19th century Japan was all but completely closed to outsiders, particularly Western Christians.",
"They have always been a militaristic country, and since they have no land borders, have always been somewhat isolated.\n\nDue to these, they have invaded most of the countries that surround them and are disliked by them (China, Korea etc) and so tensions are high. Also, the rural areas of japan are likely to have never seen a Caucasian or black person, considering only about 1% of japan's population are foreigners, and almost all of those are Asians from nearby like Thailand. The foreigners that are there and almost always in developed areas like tokyo so almost every person in rural japan will never see a foreign person and are likely to be surprised/suspicious of them due to minimal interactions.\n\nThat said, japan is not as xenophobic as some make it out to be, most people, even in rural areas, will be welcoming of people, surprised but welcoming all the same.",
"There are a number of factors contributing to this. \n\nThe people we now think of as Japanese conquered the country from less-advanced tribes over a period of about 1000 years. Japan had sophisticated neighbors in Korea and China, but oceans prevented much contact from taking place that way. So since these tribes were the outsiders they were most familiar with, Japanese began to believe that *all* outsiders were inferior and barbaric. Later this was reinforced simply because everyone likes to believe his/her own culture is superior. But then the huge empire of the Mongols, who were defeating everyone else, tried to invade Japan twice (1274, 1281), and failed both times. In fact, a storm destroyed the Mongol fleet the second time. So the Japanese concluded that this meant the gods favored Japan, and they were better warriors and the superior race. \n\nIt came as a horrible blow when American ships with rifles and cannons showed up in 1853, and the Japanese were forced to admit that they were catastrophically behind. But the country pulled off an amazing turn-around, built railroads, telegraph lines, factories, and modern armies, and by 1905 they had beaten the two largest countries in the world (China and Russia) in wars. Japan believed it was back on top and better than everyone else. They took over Korea and treated the Koreans like animals, and later did the same to much of China. From their perspective, foreigners were sub-human cowardly war-losers. And the government encouraged this to motivate soldiers to fight in WW2. \n\nThen the country was once more devastated by that war, but yet again turned itself around and became prosperous and modern. It's really a fascinating country. :D ",
"The natural state of people is to be xenophobic; it would take special circumstances to change this. America is not perfect in this area, but we have been helped largely by immigration. ",
"It''s mostly because Japan is an island, which makes isolation simple and convenient. What more, Japan is an island that always has had a singular dominant culture and a single dominant state (that in periods, most notably the Sengoku Jidai, was extremely split, but officially still obeyed the Emperor and the Shogun) which has made this stronger. Britain was certainly an island as well, but it was an island that was conquered by different cultures and had a multitude of cultures around them. Iceland was not an independant state, but first norwegian and then danish. Thus they had contact forced upon them. Japan never had that, Japan has never been conquered and annexed. The closest thing since the Ainu were driven away was the american one after the second world war - which led to one of the most foreign friendly periods in japanese history.\n\nThe questions is also not a 100% correct. The early japanese had a serious hard-on for anything chinese, especially confucianism. It's not certain, but there are even claims that Japan was matriarchal or at least less male-dominated before confucianism, but gradually changed after they began emulating the chinese. But the chinese themselves were in what they called \"splendid isolation\", ans saw the japanese as barbarians, meaning it was not so much a cultural exhange as there were admiration. This admiration slowly grew to negativity from about the 16th century onward, but japanese views on the chinese has always been mixed."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
208fhq | why cant we figure out how to restore hair? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/208fhq/eli5_why_cant_we_figure_out_how_to_restore_hair/ | {
"a_id": [
"cg0w4k7"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"Because we haven't figured out how to revive dead things."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
46s153 | why is it always so windy when the weather gets suddenly warm? | This week it went from 30s to 50s F, and the first few days were 40mph+ winds. Is it the wind that brings the heat? Where's it come from? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/46s153/eli5_why_is_it_always_so_windy_when_the_weather/ | {
"a_id": [
"d07i2a2"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"Warm moist air is less dense than cold dry air. So, there is a pressure difference. You are now in a low pressure area and the air from the surrounding area is blowing in to fill the vacuum."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
ajpfuw | how eating fibre reduces the risk of anal fissures? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ajpfuw/eli5_how_eating_fibre_reduces_the_risk_of_anal/ | {
"a_id": [
"eexgw99"
],
"score": [
4
],
"text": [
"fiber changes the structure of your poo. It makes if flow through you easier. it makes wiping easier. With enough fiber you really don't even need to wipe. Poo is very toxic, so you don't want that stuff hanging out on your skin any longer then it needs to. Fiber helps with all that."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
2gebet | why are the dallas cowboys in the nfc east, when texas is known as a southwestern place? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2gebet/eli5_why_are_the_dallas_cowboys_in_the_nfc_east/ | {
"a_id": [
"ckibr3p"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"The main reason the cowboys werent moved out of the nfc east is they have very strong rivalries with several of the teams in the east. Rivalries are important in football. A team with out rivalries is a boring team to be a fan of."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
audfr5 | why a wall on americas southern border will/ will not work. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/audfr5/eli5_why_a_wall_on_americas_southern_border_will/ | {
"a_id": [
"eh7e8vg"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text": [
"This is my personal view on the situation.\n\nWhy it would work - Extra border protection (a wall) would it make it harder for immigrants to just run past the border with no effort, think of it as an extra barrier to keep them from getting through if they can't climb or don't have the necessary equipment. Cameras would also increase the reach of Border Patrol's vision and help them catch out people more.\n\nWhy it wouldn't work - This is already sort of a thing and while Border Patrol is struggling part of that is attributed to that they're understaffed and don't have the resources necessary to hold back the masses (not just a wall). Adding a physical border in this view wouldn't do much since the # of Border Patrolmen and their equipment would remain around the same, not to mention that once the wall starts to break down over time that people would find ways in or even go full suicidal and tunnel under the thing. \n\nSo long story short: It'd work because it's another barrier people would have a hard time passing, but it wouldn't work because we already have one to a degree and that isn't the issue, the issue is the lack of other resources Border Patrol has."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
26adjb | why do web pages sometimes not load the formatting of a web page, but all the content loads? | All the content of the page loads, but in a single, vertical column with no color to it. Why? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/26adjb/eli5_why_do_web_pages_sometimes_not_load_the/ | {
"a_id": [
"chp5cwi"
],
"score": [
5
],
"text": [
"Because most of the time, the style is contained in a different file than the content. \n\nYour browser loads the content. Inside the content file, there's a line of code that says to the browser to load the style file.\n\nIf the browser can't reach it, you'll see the content anyway, just without color/correct font/etc.\n\nThe problem is usually that while trying to load it there was a problem (connection or similar), or the \"style\" file couldn't be found where it was supposed to be (which is a mistake on the developer's part)."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
2k6v4d | why do people moan when stretching? | Something that has always got me thinking. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2k6v4d/eli5_why_do_people_moan_when_stretching/ | {
"a_id": [
"clig7mz",
"cligufs",
"cligzts",
"clihfgi",
"clivbcs"
],
"score": [
7,
8,
30,
2,
3
],
"text": [
"People don't always. It's more of an exhale/sigh after the stretch.",
"I personally do it because it seems to allow me to get deeper into a stretch. You know how dogs and cats will yawn when they stretch? It's like that.",
"Lungs are controlled by a belly muscle.\nYou stretch, your belly muscle moves, your lungs move and air comes out yer' gob, Couple this with the chance that your necks moving for a stretch and the air out yer gob is gonne make a noise.",
"I think when you hold your breath, then release it a the peak of your stretch, you are essentially getting two versions of the stretch for ir one. ",
"Because my muscles are tight as shit and that release is about the closest thing to an orgasm other than an orgasm."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
1s0b5b | code compiling | I just don't understand how a compiler can make even a complex program into binary code that can be interpreted by a computer. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1s0b5b/eli5_code_compiling/ | {
"a_id": [
"cdsnmb5",
"cdsnot8",
"cdsnp0d",
"cdsnpsm"
],
"score": [
2,
2,
2,
5
],
"text": [
"This is too large a topic for a simple explanation, but I'll try.\n\nComputers understand only very simple instructions in machine language. Humans generally only understand very complex human languages like English. There needs to be some translation between human-language commands like \"draw this picture on the screen\" and the equivalent instructions in machine language. So, we have the concept of \"programming languages\", like C++ or Java or what have you. These loosely resemble English and are fairly easy for a human to learn (very simply syntax, very limited vocabulary, etc), but they are rigidly defined and therefore easy to translate into machine language. So, a human being learns a programming language and enters in a series of instructions. Then, the compiler comes along and translates that programming language into machine language that a computer can actually understand. \n",
"Okay, so the binary code represents the smallest unit of \"instructions\" a computer can handle on its own. We're talking maybe 16 or 32 bits per instruction, about enough to say \"x := x + 1\" in binary speak. The job of the compiler is to take all your loops and objects and convert them back to gotos and pointers. The idea is that the compiler \"understands\" the code and translates complex ideas (like \"loop while x = true\") to simpler ideas (like \"IF X == 0 THEN GOTO LOOP\").\n\nIt's a little like trying to convert a complex sentence in modern english into an absurdly limited dialect like newspeak. Or, to show you what I mean, it is the same as if you have a thought in a word set that has a lot of words with more than one word part and you have to say the same thought with a set of words that have just one word part each. This is what a compiler does.",
"complex programs aren't much different than simple ones, it's a matter of quantity than quality, so compiler would need maybe more memory and time, but the logic to compile is the same for all programs.",
"In my opinion, the best way of grasping this concept is by understanding the concept of abstraction (although people may disagree with me here). There's no good definition I can give for abstraction that isn't really confusing, so let's illustrate with an example. Imagine you and your kid are packing up to go on a vacation. When you're packing up, you make sure your family packs everything in a bunch of suitcases. Now, after you arrive at your destination, you head over to the baggage claim carousel, and get all your suitcases. You count up your suitcases, realize you have all of them, and you're confident that, because of that, you have everything you packed. Now, let's take a step back and look at that again - when you get all your luggage, you aren't actually concerned as to whether or not you got your suitcases back - the stuff inside the suitcases is more important. But, since you already know that all your stuff is inside your suitcases, all you have to do to make sure you have all your stuff is to make sure you have all your suitcases. So that's kind of how abstraction works - you can make a \"high-level\" concept if you know that low-level stuff works.\n\nAnd this is kind of applicable to compiling too. If you can translate the statement \"int i = 0\" to binary, then you know, no matter what the context is, that this statement will work. It doesn't matter if it's in an if statement, or a loop, or wherever - the combination of binary that it translates to will always work. So, now, you just have to translate all the different statements you have in a programming language to the appropriate binary (or to another language that can be broken down into binary), and, if you did everything correctly, it should work.\n\nIt's kind of a hard topic to really grasp, but hopefully this helped you at least a little!"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
8qi8p2 | why do unreleased cars get tested with the black wrap all over them? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8qi8p2/eli5_why_do_unreleased_cars_get_tested_with_the/ | {
"a_id": [
"e0jbvk0"
],
"score": [
5
],
"text": [
"The manufacturer doesn't want their competitors or their customers to know exactly what they are developing until the product is actually released. It takes years to develop a product like a new car. If Chrysler were to know how the 2021 Corvette was designed they might borrow from that to make their own sports car. And if the public knows too much about what's coming out in the future they might not buy what you're trying to sell right now. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
6yw3oe | if the germans in wwii were so technologically advanced/had better weaponry, why didn't they win? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6yw3oe/eli5_if_the_germans_in_wwii_were_so/ | {
"a_id": [
"dmqkyke",
"dmqlgua",
"dmqlh11",
"dmqlv0p",
"dmqmr3y",
"dmqps1l",
"dmqptv5",
"dmqrrfu",
"dmquk01"
],
"score": [
5,
4,
2,
12,
46,
3,
5,
7,
2
],
"text": [
"They were technically advanced and did have better weaponry. The problem was the Germany also lacked resources of material which is one reason why when they attacked Russia, they split armies and sent one south to the Caucus region to secure Russia's oil reserves.",
"In the Battle of Britain the UK massively outperformed the Germans in building planes and ammunition. ",
"They didn't have a bigger Army, and they didn't have a big enough Army to occupy all the places they needed to conquer. It turns out that it's probably impossible to conquer the world, mostly due to size constraints.",
"There are a lot of factors. German engineering was likely able to design the most advanced and best weaponry. However they had issues with manufacturing. Most of their machinists were stationed on the eastern front. They did try to change their designs to allow for more tolerances and to increase production but this only went so far. However in the Allied countries they had a different approach to design which integrated the manufacturing capabilities on an early stage. We all know about the famous Spitfire and the Me 109e. They were the best fighter aircrafts of the war. However none of these had the most kills during the battle of Britain. That title went to the Hurricane which were a lesser wooden and canvas aircraft produced at every piano factory and lumber yard in Britain. The Germans did not have such mass production of a \"sufficient\" weapon. So an ordinary dogfight were not three Me 109 versus three Spitfires. It was three Me 109 versus one or two Spitfires and seven Hurricanes. You see a similar thing with tanks as well. For every German Tiger and Panzer on the battlefield in 1944 there were ten Shirmans. There is a debate about exactly how much better the different German tanks were compared to the different variants of the Allied tanks but with the numerical advantage the Allied had this does not really matter.\n\nThere is of course a lot of different aspects of the war then just the quality and number of weapons. It is not the only reason the Germans lost the war. You mention intelligence which is another aspect. The allied had the best weather forecasts for example as they naturally had more weather observation stations and were able to give their generals much better weather predictions which did play a big role in most of the big battles. For example D-day where the Germans though it was impossible to conduct a beach landing in Normandy due to the weather, but just as the allied had predicted the weather turned to the better just minutes before the operation was launched. And the Allied had Polish mathematicians who had broken the Enigma before the war and they worked with the British mathematicians to stay one step ahead of the Germans attempt at strengthening the Enigma. So the British were reading most encrypted radio transmissions in Germany and even as the German generals were switching over to the Lorentz cypher it too was broken and the British high command were reading Hitlers orders before they reached their intended recipients.",
"Their tanks were *not* more advanced than everyone else's. Russian tanks were more advanced in many ways than Germany's. Germany certainly had better tanks than us: our Sherman tanks could barely penetrate the Panzer's front armor, if at all. However, we could produce and mobilize several Shermans for each of their Panzer, and because the Shermans were so light they could drive around a Panzer almost faster than the Panzer's turret could track the Sherman. The conventional wisdom was that two or three Shermans would attack a single Panzer, we would lose one tank, and the other two would get behind the Panzer and shoot its rear armor before it could aim and fire again. And then we would make three more Shermans to replace the one while Germany made one more Panzer.\n\nAnother problem was the practicality of their technology. The Shermans were much better suited for urban combat since they could maneuver better through the small, tight streets of European cities, while the Panzer could only fit through bigger thoroughfares. The German King Tiger tank was all but impossible for the Shermans to defeat, but it could barely get into a city *at all*, so it wasn't very useful for urban combat. \n\nThen you have things like the German [railway guns](_URL_2_): stupidly large and powerful, with an emphasis on *stupid*. They required a train engine to move, with all the resources that a train engine requires, and could only be mobilized to areas where there were rails. And once allies destroyed the rails around them, they were stuck. Which makes the likes of [Gustav](_URL_0_) even more ridiculous, as it required *two* parallel sets of rails to move and had to fire in line with the rails. It also required a huge number of soldiers to support it, which meant a high ranking officer to run the regiment, which meant a *colonel* was in charge of *one single gun*. That's an extreme example, of course, since IIRC only two of those monstrosities were built. Still, many of the German innovations were wastes of time and money.\n\nTake the infamous V2 missiles. Sure, they were kind of existentially terrifying, but they were also horribly inefficient. Their aim was garbage and their payload was garbage. Their bombs were much smaller than what a plane could carry, and they could only be aimed \"somewhere in the general vicinity of London, probably\", which made them useless for strategic bombing. They were purely a weapon of terror, and they arrived far too late to make a difference, even as Germany poured money and time in to developing them.\n\nWhich brings me to another point: the timing of the technological advancements. Had Germany developed weapons like the [ME-262](_URL_3_) fighter early in the war, it would almost certainly have gone much differently. But the ME262 came very late in the war. That's not to say that the [ME109](_URL_1_)'s weren't formidable, but we had planes - and more importantly, *pilots*, that could handle them. When the ME262 arrived on the battlefield, Germany was hurting for skilled pilots. The USA was cranking out ace pilots all the time, and protecting them, while Germany was already on the downward end of the war and losing their best pilots as we introduced the major workhorses like our P51 Mustang, which very much evened the playing field against the ME109. At the end of the war, our P51s couldn't come close to taking out the ME262, but our ace pilots could outmaneuver their rookie pilots. Taking on a 262 was still a bad idea, and our pilots rarely did, but by then it was too late in the war to make a difference.\n\nIncidentally, the 262 could have been ready much sooner in the war, but Hitler demanded it be fitted for ~~dogfighting~~ rather than ~~strategic bombing~~ [correction: the other way around]. The plane was practically ready for combat as a fighter, they had to be redesigned to be outfitted as a bomber. What should be evident by now is that Germany (and especially Hitler) made a lot of poor decisions about how to develop and deploy their technological advantages and wasted resources developing \"more advanced technology\" that either never saw combat, came too late to make a difference, or was too over-engineered and ineffective.\n\nAs far as I'm aware, their intelligence operations weren't significantly better than anyone else's. Arguably, the allies were much better at it because we utilized new technology like radar and computers before they did. More importantly, we *dumped* resources into projects that we wanted to succeed. Famously, when Germany learned that the US was developing nuclear weapons, they predicted that it would take us some months or years to develop a working prototype - a prediction based on the size of the team working in Germany. In reality, we did it in a fraction of the time because we assigned *many times* the number of scientists on the project, completing our nuclear bombs before Germany could, much to their surprise. Similarly, they believed that their Enigma code was unbreakable, and it probably would have been if we had not had Alan Turing and his Turing Machine to do it. Straight up breaking the Enigma code was a *huge* contribution to our war efforts, and Germany never really knew we did it, even if they suspected.\n\nAll of that is to say nothing of the military decisions that went into the war. All the best technology on the planet will get you nowhere if you have incompetent leadership. Germany had some very capable generals but Hitler was an idiot. Some of their generals were, too, and even their best made mistakes. They diverted resources to bad ideas like wasting trains to move Jewish prisoners to the concentration camps that would have been better served moving military resources. And that's also to say nothing of the tenacity of the allied soldiers, like the millions of Russians that ran screaming into gunfire. Or the French resistance that harassed the German forces occupying France during the war, diverting soldiers and resources to hold France that would otherwise have gone to fighting allied soldiers. And of course, things outside of anyone's control, like the Russian winter that no invading army other than the Huns has been able to withstand.\n\n*I am not a historian, please correct me if I've gotten anything wrong. EDIT: Made some corrections.*\n\nEDIT: I am aware of what a Turing Machine is.",
"I wouldn't say that the Germans were that advanced compared to the Allies. Their main infantry rifle was a bolt-action throughout the war, when the US and USSR fielded superior semi-automatic rifles. In 1939, the core of the German tank force were Czechoslovakian designs. German tank and anti-tank guns struggled to penetrate the armor of the heaviest Allied tanks during the invasion of France. And so on. \n\nIntel-wise, the Germans were in a bad way. They had fine tactical intelligence, but they rarely knew what was going on on the larger level. The British penetrated the German spy network in Britain completely and turned agents kept sending back false reports that the V2 rockets were hitting London when they were landing out in the sticks. \n\nSuperior tactics explain and Allied blunders explain a lot of the German successes. For instance, the German air force had taken part in the Spanish Civil War where they developed the \"Finger-four\" fighter formation (lead pilot protected by wing man, protected by a second pair of fighters) that was superior to the Allied \"Vic\" formation (three planes in a tight \"V\" to maximize firepower against bomber formations). \n\nThere were a few areas were the Germans were better technologically. \nRocketry: the V1 and V2 programs looked impressive but were militarily useless. The Panzerfaust and Panzerschreck anti-tank weapons were not so effective and were developed because Allied air superiority made it hard to deploy proper anti-tank guns. \nMe 262 jet fighter: too little to late, and the Allied Meteor was not far behind. \nNerve gas: the Allies had nothing like it, but it was never used so was of no importance. (The Germans falsely believed the Allies also had nerve gas to retaliate with so they never deployed it.) \nAssault rifle: the StG 44 was the future but it complicated logistics to introduce a new cartridge in to the supply lines.",
"They were no more advanced. (or, at least, not by a significant enough margin to make a big difference)\n\nThe thing about Germany's military technology is that they did things very precisely and were always striving to improve their designs. Normally this is good, but it caused two significant problems during the war.\n\n1: The weapons of war took a lot of time and resources. The thing that exemplifies this for me is a captured tank from a tank factory that was only partially complete at the time of its capture. The allied soldiers that captured the factory actually went ahead and finished its construction- side by side on that tank are two chains for retaining pins- one that was precision made, several man hours went in to it- a beautiful piece of craftsmanship, and one that was just loops of wire hastily twisted together. Both equally suited to the task of keeping the pin from being lost, but hugely different amounts of time and materials spent on making each.\n\n2: Since the designs were constantly changing, tanks from the beginning of a run of a model often used different parts compared to tanks made towards the end of the model. This meant you could have two identical model tanks running side by side that could not share replacement parts- rather than being able to scavenge one tank to keep the other running if both were damaged, you could end up with two non-functional tanks. By comparison, Russia's military command specifically banned their tank factories from implementing improvements to their tanks, preferring to be able to quickly produce identical tanks across the entire run of a model.\n\nIn addition to this(and, arguably, the most important factor in the outcome of the wat), the Axis did not have the means to target the production capacity of the United States, which was producing weapons not only for the US soldiers but for all the allies, whereas the allies sent hundreds of bombers and dropped thousands of tons of bombs on German factories and infrastructure, which meant that, while the tech of the Germans might have been advanced, the resources to build them were spread thin, and many projects that could have given a significant advantage to the Axis powers had to be abandoned.",
"- They weren't more advanced than anyone else. At the beginning of the war they had worst tank. The french had superior tanks and the soviet too at the beginning of Barbarossa. This myth come mostly from the Tiger, which was a formidable opponent, but was super heavy, broke down often and wasn't produced in high quantity, but it was super impressive you faced one in battle. It was not until the end of the war with the Panthers, the 7.5cm Panzer IV and such that the german tank become some of the best. But this was mostly because of 3-4 years learning from fighting the war.\n\n- Another reason why people think that the German were more advanced is the experimental prototype like jet fighters and V2 Rockets which would become two powerful weapons after the war. But those weren't very good during the war. They were still prototype and the German pushed them out in the battlefield way too early when those technology weren't ready yet. It was more out of desperation than technology advancement.\n\n- The Nazi though they were the master race and as such, they wanted the very best military equipment in the world. That's why they put so much effort on advanced technology even if those were ready yet. They pushed for rockets, jet fighter, top of the line tank. But advanced technology that isn't ready for battle doesn't help you win wars. Forcing their engineering to develop those technology was a disadvantage for the German. It slow down mass production by a lot. While the German were wasting resources on developing new tanks and aircraft, the allies and the soviet union mass produced more conservative technology like the Sherman or the T-34 (well the T-34 was a really advanced design, but not advanced technology). The Nazi fielded advanced technology out of desperation, but those advanced technology faced far too superior numbers.\n\n- Their way of receiving intelligence with the enigma machine was indeed pretty advance. But the German though enigma impossible to break and that was a big mistake. They kept enigma for the whole war with minimal improvement and spread it's use to all the branches of their military. The Allies broke enigma and the German had insecure communication for a big part of the war.\n\n- The way of battling like you said, that is true. The German had more experience in combat than most other nations for a part of the war. When the american first fought the German in Africa, they were simply outmatched. Officers and soldiers without combat experience faced veteran on the German side. Same at the start of Barbarossa, the experienced German army faced the Soviet that were rebuilding after the purge a couple of years prior. The problem is that the German were facing two country with a lot more population and combat give you experience rather quickly. The American and Soviet learn the hard way against the Germans and were able to replenish theirs losses. The German couldn't do that so they slowly lost their veteran over the course of the war, replacing them with people of conquered land that didn't always wanted to fight for the German. The need for manpower was too big to let recruit train as much on the German side. The German pilot had a fraction of the training of the American pilot's had for example. The German started as a veteran army, but by the end of the war it was the Soviet and American that had the better trained and experience army.",
"They really weren't nearly as technologically advanced as people claim, *especially* where it really counts. What the Germans did a lot of is sending essentially prototypes into war. Unlike in movies where the prototype is super-advanced and smashes the enemy, in real life there are damn good reasons not to do that. A lot of German equipment was notorious for unreliability; a Tiger tank had a lot of armor and a big gun, but when your tank breaks down before getting to the battle it's kind of irrelevant. They fielded jet fighters first, but the Allies also had those in development; it was just that the Allies didn't feel the need to field unreliable prototypes when their existing planes were winning the war. And it's not like the Allies were slouching on technology. The Germans spent a similar amount on the V-2 project as the Americans did on the Manhattan Project. One produced a weapon that caused more deaths among people making it than it ever killed in action. The other produced the atomic bomb.\n\nOne of the biggest downside of prototypes is poor reliability, and another German technique only added to this. When the Germans came up with an improvement, they often put it in place immediately. Sounds good, but you end up with a logistical *nightmare* from incompatible parts. Even if German tanks *did* outclass US tanks (and that's a lot less true than pop culture would have you believe), those tanks are useless when they break down 100 miles from the battle.\n\nAs far as intelligence: The German intelligence apparatus *sucked*, at least against the West. Their agents were good at two things: surrendering to the British, and getting discovered and captures. Literally *every German agent in Britain* was found and either turned or jailed. The Brits ran the German spy network in the UK, and made use of that to feed faulty information. On the other hand, the Allies achieved one of the biggest intelligence coups of all time: they broke basically all the enemy codes and routinely read what their enemy was saying.\n\n-------\n\nEven if Germany really *did* have advanced technology and good intelligence, they had a huge disadvantage in industrial capacity and logistics. War is largely a matter of logistics: with a handful of exceptions (see \"atomic bomb,\" and even that was basically an industrial problem), building a smallish number of advanced weapons doesn't change the outcome. What changes the outcome in an industrial war is producing weapons and troops on an industrial scale and getting them where they're needed, when they're needed.\n\nThe Germans were bad at this. Their army was largely horse-drawn, their industrial capacity was limited, and their access to raw resources was limited. Their opponents (particularly the United States) had an immense ability to produce weapons, ammunition, food, medicine, spare parts, fuel, etc. That was a major factor in the war. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[
"http://i.imgur.com/nP3hkcw.gif",
"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/37/Bundesarchiv_Bild_101I-337-0036-02A%2C_Im_Westen%2C_Feldflugplatz_mit_Me_109.jpg/220px-Bundesarchiv_Bild_101I-337-0036-02A%2C_Im_Westen%2C_Feldflugplatz_mit_Me_109.jpg",
"https://i.pinimg.com/736x/9e/0f/9a/9e0f9ab3b9c78e572a9d3ee6772bb2e9--railway-gun-big-guns.jpg",
"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Messerschmitt_Me_262_Schwable.jpg"
],
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
5x42yk | what is actually going on in our mouth to produce the intense tingling sensation from eating sichuan peppercorns? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5x42yk/eli5_what_is_actually_going_on_in_our_mouth_to/ | {
"a_id": [
"def1bgu"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text": [
"normal chili peppers have a chemical called capsaicin that makes the \"hot\" \n\nblack peppercorns have a chemical called piperine that makes them \"hot\"\n\nsichuan peppercorns have a chemical Hydroxy-alpha sanshool which reacts with your skin's nerves to produce that tingly sensation. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
8d25ha | which hormones control romance as opposed to sexual attraction? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8d25ha/eli5_which_hormones_control_romance_as_opposed_to/ | {
"a_id": [
"dxjomzx",
"dxk2jyu"
],
"score": [
3,
2
],
"text": [
"Hormones aren't binary. It's not like a hormonal switch gets flipped and suddenly we can turn on romance and turn off sexual drive. \n\nThe best we can do is to conclude that \"hormone XYZ is linked to feelings of sexual/romantic/whatever\" in that we notice elevated levels of these chemicals in people experiencing a certain state.\n\nI'd also discourage you from locking yourself into thinking about these issues in terms like asexual, demisexual, aromantic, etc. The relevant literature is probably going to use phrases like \"heightened libido/sex drive\"",
"Echoing (a bit) what others have said, it’s a bit too reductionist to try and find a hormonal formula for romance vs sexual attraction. The ELI5 way to put this is that romance and sexual attraction are a biological thing mixed with a cognitive thing. You have a chemical reaction to the sensory input, but the meaning you make of how you feel in your head is just as important. There are probably slightly different hormonal reactions when presented with someone you’d like to settle down with vs someone you’d just want to sleep with, but on some level, either conscious or subconscious, you’re deciding what is appealing about them and whatever those things are guide your determination of if you’re feeling romance, sexual attraction, or both. \n\n(For a negative example, think of how someone working through sexual trauma may have to try and recognize both their natural arousal response and their trauma response of stress and dread associated with those feelings)"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
||
1nsxfk | why is walter white's meth blue in breaking bad? | edit: in S5 E7 he says that his competitors were just "adding blue dye" to their product to emulate his, which is what I thought he had been doing all along but it would appear there's something different that Walt does while cooking to give his meth the blue color. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1nsxfk/eli5_why_is_walter_whites_meth_blue_in_breaking/ | {
"a_id": [
"cclpkue",
"cclpnl4",
"cclppb5",
"cclrid1"
],
"score": [
5,
2,
10,
3
],
"text": [
"In order to make it easy for viewers to distinguish between his meth and other meth. There's no scientific reason it would be that way, unless he added blue dye or something.",
"it's just a liberty the crew took to distinguish his from others and make it an easily identifiable commodity. that said, the reasoning is because of the method used to cook(p2p) and the purity is what does it.",
" > Walt's methamphetamine becomes blue when he switches from pseudoephedrine reduction to reductive amination. **The blue color is apparently a plot device, introduced by the show's writers to make Walt's product visually identifiable.** \n\n > Although blue methamphetamine, sometimes called \"smurf dope,\" exists in the real world, 100% pure methamphetamine would appear as colorless/white crystals. The blue color might result from impurities formed during the reaction, but despite its light blue coloration, Walt's product is highly pure. \n\n > The episode \"Box Cutter\" opens with flashback to Gale giddily setting up equipment in the laundromat super-lab. He tells Gus that he has the sample he asked him to analyze saying it is “quite good.” He then lets us know it was Walt’s product: “I can not as of yet account for the blue color.” Gale goes on to guarantee Gus a purity of 96 percent for his own product. Walt’s sample was 99 percent pure and “maybe even a touch beyond that.”\n\n\n_URL_0_",
"There is no _explicit_ explanation on why it is blue. It is implied that the method he devised, when he first increased production and changed from pseudoephedrine to phenylacetone as the starting material, ends up changing the colour.\n\nIn a [behind the scenes look at the lab](_URL_0_), the producers show there is a special purification step at the end (the \"Walter White\" step), and that's presumably what gives the blue colour."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[
"http://breakingbad.wikia.com/wiki/Blue_Sky"
],
[
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUaUFIPYzUQ"
]
] |
|
fee2ti | how can animals such as rabbits breed amongst themselves from the same litter without any genetical issues, but humans can not? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fee2ti/eli5_how_can_animals_such_as_rabbits_breed/ | {
"a_id": [
"fjndm3p",
"fjneek7",
"fjnegvm",
"fjngexc",
"fjngq6s"
],
"score": [
11,
7,
2,
3,
2
],
"text": [
"They can’t. Rabbits just have large enough litters that if a few kits end up sickly, it doesn’t matter that much. They can always make more.",
"Animals have huge genetic issues from selective inbreeding. Dalmatians have incredibly high risk of hereditary disease and pugs can't breathe properly because they're bred for appearance.",
"Don't know about rabbits, but each kitten a queen gives birth to in the same litter can have a different father, as each egg is fertilised separately.",
"If two sibling rabbits breed, the offspring will necessarily have **genetical** issues. However, there are so many in the brood that enough of them will survive to bear the next generation. They will still have **genetical** issues but from an outsiders perspective like yourself, it will be hard to tell what those **genetical** issues are.",
"An airport I worked at (big airport) had a bunch of rabbits that were 90% deformed from the rate of inbreeding they went through"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
33ckuo | how to ankle monitors work? | What happens if a person leaves the location where he is restricted to?
Couldn't the person remove the ankle monitor and go wherever?
EDIT: Why are people appointed ankle bracelets by court? What are some reasons? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/33ckuo/eli5how_to_ankle_monitors_work/ | {
"a_id": [
"cqjkkxd",
"cqjkogs",
"cqjrc3a"
],
"score": [
3,
3,
2
],
"text": [
"Monitors are an alternative to being in jail. People who remove them, or leave their assigned place, are visited by the police and taken back to jail. People ask for them because living at home is nicer than being in jail.",
"1. If they were to leave the designated area for a certain amount of time the monitor would signal the police that they are no longer within the specified zone. \n\n2. While they are made to be un removable there are people that do risk removing with heavy equipment which is foolish because once its removed it also signals the authorities. \n3. Usually they are appointed to house arrest for minor crimes or a pending crime and the authorities need to ensure they stay in one place until the case can be solved. \nOf course this is just an over view of its purpose but i think you have the main idea. ",
"I can answer this question from authority. I spent 3 years wearing them.\n\nMy specific reasons were that I was charged and convicted of a sex crime. I am a registered sex offender. As part of my probation I was required to wear one to monitor where I go. Crazy enough, my only restriction was the state. I was not allowed to leave the state. Other courts may impose other restrictions, not allowed within a certain distance of an address, only allowed to take certain routes...etc. The specific restrictions vary by court case. \n\nIf you leave the designated areas, a report is sent to the monitoring agency and then a report is sent to the Parole officer, and then the report may be sent to the police. This process can be done in seconds, or may take a few hours. Every system is different.\n\nWhy do they have ankle monitors? Many reasons. Jail over crowding being one. Feel Good politicians is another. Defence attorneys..etc.\n\n\nCan the person remove it? Legally, no. Technically, with a little knowledge yes. I wont admit to removing mine. But lets just say it can be done if you know a bit about cell phone technology."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
3ajqjr | what exactly is going on with the conflicts in syria, iraq and afghanistan in the fight against isis and other extremist groups? | More specifically, what are the U.S. missions, who are we targeting, and what is the overall goal of being in these countries fighting? I just want to learn as much as I can about the conflicts. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ajqjr/eli5_what_exactly_is_going_on_with_the_conflicts/ | {
"a_id": [
"csd8ypf"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"We're trying to kill high value targets (\"HVTs\") (leaders and battlefield commanders) of ISIS to make it less effective and cohesive. We are paying to train and equip local troops to fight it. We're sharing intelligence data with other countries so they can understand and react to ISIS' actions. We're \"weakening it\" which we believe will make it easier for forces in the region to shrink it and hopefully destroy it.\n\nThe United States has a security interest in seeing that oil from the middle east flows at market prices without interruption. We have a social interest in seeing that Israel continues to exist. In the furtherance of those interests the United States stations troops and material in many countries in the region and has military agreements with others to provide support under various contingencies. We are using those resources and those relationships to advance the mission of killing the HVT ISIS figures we can track and localize.\n\nThe overall goal is to keep ISIS from becoming larger and more powerful under the theory that the bigger it gets the more chaotic the middle east will become and the higher the odds are that the flow of oil at market prices will become interrupted or that Israel will face existential threats from its neighbors."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
3eql4i | my toilet has 2 buttons for flushing. i push both and then by themselves. it seems the same. | One has one water droplet and the other has two. My roommate said one for shit and one for piss, but i tried them one by one and then together; all seem the same. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3eql4i/eli5_my_toilet_has_2_buttons_for_flushing_i_push/ | {
"a_id": [
"cthgofc"
],
"score": [
6
],
"text": [
"Your roommate is right. One button will use more water to flush than the other, which is good for moving solid waste. Unless you're very good at estimating water flows by eye, you won't easily observe the difference."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
3c6595 | how did america become the country that it is today in only 139 years? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3c6595/eli5_how_did_america_become_the_country_that_it/ | {
"a_id": [
"cssl9hr",
"cssli0q",
"cssmk56"
],
"score": [
2,
2,
2
],
"text": [
"an extremely advantageous natural geographical insulator from conflict.\n\nAlso a clean slate with no aging infrastructure and pretty good natural resources.\n\nbut seriously, alot of our gains can be traced to wartime, sitting back while other countries destroyed each other, we often stepped in late in the game to clean up and took relatively less losses and nearly zero damage to the homeland.",
"Firstly, you're off by 100 years. But, still...there are many advantages for the U.S.\n\n1. it was able to learn from european development, but not sit atop the burdens of it. It was a tabla rasa of sorts, allowing a leapfrog.\n\n2. it had an absurd amount of natural resources, and these resources become immensely important during the industrial revolution. \n\n3. The aforementioned natural resources were uncontested. Compared to other geographies, the U.S. spent a remarkable little energy securing borders, haggling and fighting over who owned what resources etc. This is partly because of the military advantage over native americans and partly because of the distance from other militaries who might otherwise have been able to contest ownership of said resources.\n\n",
"1. Oceans to protect us from enemies.\n\n2. Weak neighbors. Neither Canada nor Mexico pose any threat to us.\n\n3. Substantial natural resources, especially coal.\n\n4. Independence. We were free to develop our economy during the 19th century while most other countries were under colonial rule and not in control of their own economies.\n\n5. Never losing a significant war at home and being destroyed. We came out of WW2 as the unparalleled world power, with an economy worth *50%* of world GDP and not being utterly destroyed by bombs like Japan, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, China and the USSR are were. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
ullmx | why don't video games use images of humans? | so you create a character and you map it out so that it you can control it. why cant you just do that with a model of a real looking human? it must be possible, no? would the life-likery be too much for a console to handle? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ullmx/eli5_why_dont_video_games_use_images_of_humans/ | {
"a_id": [
"c4wfxyc",
"c4whfpm",
"c4wu6ky",
"c4x85gq",
"c4xdefh"
],
"score": [
4,
2,
2,
2,
2
],
"text": [
"You mean a 3d scan of a person? First of all, yes, this would probably be too dense of a mesh to be handled by real-time scanline rendering. You might also have some issues with mapping the rig and (optionally) motion capture data to a scan of a person, since the topology (layout of the polygon mesh that makes up the shape) is probably a bit of a mess. \n\nAlthough, IIRC several films have used body scans of actors, so it is something you can do with enough rendering horsepower. I assume they just retopo the scanned mesh like you would a computer-sculpted one. (retopo is short for retopology, it refers to the process of building a lower-detail or more easily deformed mesh from a detailed but hi-res and messy starting mesh)\n\nHowever, for all of that, it probably wouldn't look that much more realistic. The tricky part with 3D characters is getting them to display emotion and avoid the whole uncanny valley thing. A scan would only get anatomy basically right, and a skilled character modeler can get you that far anyway. Hopefully said character modeler also has the skills to give the character realistic expressions.\n\n\nOn another note, motion-capture is basically this concept applied to movements rather than the shape of characters. It has proved itself to be quite useful in both games and film. It's still not a perfect solution though, usually the motion-capture data has to be tweaked a bit to fit the final character rig, you don't just record the actor, import the dataset, and go.\n\n\nIf you are interested in what would make games far more life-like than they are now, look into ray-tracing (and path-tracing, which is a slower but more realistic subset of ray-tracing).",
"The simple answer is yes. It's to much for pretty much any computer to handle too. ",
"LA Noir uses the scanned faces of real actors for the models in game. I think the result looks good, but it could definitely use some higher res textures. Also another problem is that they just paste the head onto a body model rather than scan the whole person. Compared with the relatively realistic looking faces the bodies look like stiff robots, despite being mo-capped.",
"Mortal Kombat 1, 2 and 3 all used images of humans, and that was in the early to mid 1990's.",
"Because you would have to have a picture of every single character in every single possible position at every single camera angle. This is way too much trouble to make a game, really, especially in today's games in 3D, with up to 60 frames per second. The reason Mortal Kombat games, for example, were able to do this, is because they were in 2D (only one camera angle was ever needed) and because the action was actually rather stiffly animated (at much less than 60 fps)."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
1jckql | why does data in a harddrive degrade over time? | I've heard figures anywhere from 5-35 years. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1jckql/eli5_why_does_data_in_a_harddrive_degrade_over/ | {
"a_id": [
"cbdbfl6"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text": [
"The data on an HDD is stored in very tiny magnetic \"domains\", which are regions where the molecules are aligned magnetically one direction or the other. There are a couple of factors that tend to make them slowly become misaligned. \n \nOne is that they are right next to each other, so the ones pointing one direction are constantly tugging on the adjacent ones pointing the opposite way. The other factor is random thermal motion. The molecules are constantly vibrating and bumping against each other just by virtue of their temperature (just like everything else does). Occasionally a molecule will get enough energy through this to change its orientation. \n \nOver time, these two mechanisms work together to slowly degrade how many molecules are pointed the \"right\" direction in each domain. Eventually there are too few for the read head to reliably pick up the correct signal. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
xr3wk | guns, germs, and steel | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/xr3wk/eli5_guns_germs_and_steel/ | {
"a_id": [
"c5ov79x",
"c5oyx11"
],
"score": [
2,
3
],
"text": [
"One shoots, one gets you sick, and one is very hard.\n\n\n(ETA: Maybe if someone actually takes the time to answer this in more depth, they could pass the link along to Mitt Romney. Because apparently, [he missed the entire point.](_URL_0_)",
"It's a book by Jared Diamond that sets out to answer a question purportedly asked of Diamond by a native of Papua New Guinea while Diamond was doing other research there. The question basically boiled down to \"why is it that your people have all the cool stuff?\"\n\nHe was asking why it was Diamond's people who had airplanes and cell phones and could go to the moon while his people had never come up with any of that stuff. Diamond set out to work out why it was Europeans who largely created the modern world and conquered pretty much all of it as opposed to some other culture.\n\nDiamond recognized that it wasn't just because white Europeans were smarter - the New Guineans he knew were at least as smart as he was, smarter in some areas. So if it wasn't that the people were just better, then it had to be something different about the places they lived in. He examined all kinds of different cultures and discovered that there were geographic factors that gave some peoples starting advantages when building civilizations. \n\nA key one was the presence of useful animals that could be domesticated. The Americas, for example, didn't really have anything as amazingly useful as the horse (until it was introduced by the Spanish and changed *everything* in North America, creating entire horse-based cultures). \n\nAnother is just the fact that Europe and Asia are laid out horizontally on the map while the Americas are oriented vertically. This doesn't seem all that important until you realize that it means that Europe and Northern Asia are all pretty much at the same latitude. That, in turn, means that agriculture could work pretty much the same way all over the place and developments could spread from east to west pretty rapidly. On the other hand, go a couple hundred miles in South America, for example, and you're in a whole different climate band. The same plants don't grow as well.\n\nBasically, it's worth reading the book because he goes into a lot of detail about a lot of different, things. But the short version is that there are things having to do with climate, geography, and availability of natural resources that explain why some civilizations only rose to a certain level and then either got stuck there or fell, while other civilizations were able to keep on going and achieve things the others couldn't."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"http://hnn.us/articles/jared-diamond-romney-hasn%E2%80%99t-done-his-homework"
],
[]
] |
||
6kohev | why do we sometimes black out or have no recollection from times of being extremely angry? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6kohev/eli5_why_do_we_sometimes_black_out_or_have_no/ | {
"a_id": [
"djnmn2b",
"djnn1nb",
"djnnbre",
"djnngwm",
"djnnjh7",
"djnnzq8",
"djnof4d",
"djnojwo",
"djnta0o"
],
"score": [
3,
38,
10,
4,
24,
6,
2,
2,
2
],
"text": [
"I'm interested in this too. I haven't had this happen in a long while, because I don't like how I act when I'm angry and I've worked to better control myself when I'm angry. Though sometimes when I get really angry, I can't see straight. It's not exactly like my vision wobbles, but my eyes don't focus correctly for a few seconds and occasionally I \"see red\" which tends to be more like those weird colors you get if you close your eyes and push on your eye lids than literal color red. ",
"The general idea is that we use two systems when encoding memory: the \"cool\" hippocampal memory system which \"records in an unemotional manner, well-elaborated autobiographical events, complete with their spatial-temporal context\", and the \"hot\" amygdala system which \"responds to unintegrated fragmentary fear-provoking features of events, which become hooked directly to fear responses.\" Furthermore, \"The hot system is direct, quick, highly emotional, inflexible, and fragmentary. The cool system is cognitive and complex, informationally neutral, subject to control processes, and integrated.\" Presumedly, the hot system takes over during moments of extreme emotion and what gets encoded is a feeling of discomfort or anger rather than specific details about what happened. :)\n_URL_0_",
"This happens to a lot of people in the military when experiencing combat. The basic way to explain it is that when your brain goes into fight or flight mode it stops wasting energy on recording memories correctly and focuses completely on keeping you alive. You may have a rather intense fight or flight instinct that sets it off even when not in danger of death. No sources just direct experience and training. ",
"In my purely anecdotal experiences speaking to people who suffer from it, PTSD can (and often does) cause this kind of dissociative episode. \n\nIt might be wise to speak to a professional about it, that kind of blackout anger can be dangerous: any condition that causes you to lose control is problematic but when anger is involved, it's probably a good idea to get it checked out sooner rather than later.",
"You are talking about [dissociative amnesia](_URL_0_). This happens so that your mind can reconcile your normal, non-violent life with a circumstance that is radically different - it just \"edits out\" the unpleasant bits. \n\nFor many people, the longer you live, the less dissociative fugues will happen - provided that you continue to grow as a person and examine your own life plainly, dealing with the unpleasant parts of yourself in a responsible way. Until you no longer notice these symptoms when you are in a highly aroused state, please avoid physical conflicts with others. Your mind is currently conditioned to acting without consequence. It might end badly for all involved parties.",
"I have had this happen to me. It is very scary. I was in a club and remember some guy slapping my sister in the face. Next thing I remember, I was being dragged outside by the bouncers with people screaming at me \"why did you have to smash his teeth out?!\". Apparently I had mounted him and was dropping elbows and headbutts straight into his face. I had attended street self defence classes before and from the stories it would appear my brain used the drills used in training to full effect. The lad was outside with no front teeth covered in blood. I had zero recollection of doing any of it. I am a non-violent person normally and always avoid confrontation so was terrified when people were telling me what I had done. It's the only big fight I've ever been in in my life and I can't even remember any of it.\n\nThe only way I can explain it to myself is that the brain enters the fight or flight response and cuts out your short term memory due to adrenaline.",
"Repression is a self defense mechanism, could have something to do with it. People can hit something hard enough to break their hands, but for lost people there bodies prevent them from activity that is damaging to their bodies. Another example is super strength during an adrenaline rush, a persons body wouldn't be able to lift X of a person, but in that emergency situation, that part of the brain doesn't interfere. So while in your \"rage\" when u don't know what happens, your body represses it so bc it's not something it would regularly do.",
"Do you mean anger or could you mean stress / panic attack?",
"Psychologist here. If this get you into trouble a lot of the time I would recommend seeking professional help. My experience is that these kind of problems aren't easily fixed by intellectually knowing the rationale for them, but rather requires some dedicated work with a therapist. It is a fairly common thing to experience, but may have serious consequences. That being said, if you just want to satisfy your curiosity here is my 2 cents as to what may be happening:\n\nHaving certain reactions when angry is normal and different people have different reactions under different circumstances. Some people may shut off the anger all together and have more of an intellectual reaction, trying to make sense of the situation by analysing it or assigning blame. Folks that are prone to depression may turn the anger inwards and end up being angry with themselves, hopeless and self-blaming. Others still may be overwhelmed by anxiety when angry, and instead of being able to have access to the feeling of anger itself, they have anxiety symptoms like blurred vision, tunnel vision, dizziness, ringing in the ears, and/or varying degrees of impairment of other executive cognitive functions such as lapses in attention, clouded thinking, slow thought processes and in the extreme end dissociation and memory loss. This can lead to impulsive action and blackouts and might be akin to what you are experiencing?\n\nWhy would this last scenario happen to anyone? The explanation would go a something like this: Anger triggers (for some unknown reason) a sharp rise of anxiety in the person. You might call it an affect phobia of some kind. Some are afraid of snakes or heights, some are terrified by their own emotions. If the nervous system of this person is particularly reactive the anxiety response might be difficult to regulate down. This fast activation o the lower brain regions can \"switch off\" the higher brain regions that are responsible for lowering the bodily arousal and in turn create a nasty downwards spiral of highly unregulated anxiety. Now, without getting too technical, the body under stress produces a lot of hormones that are adaptive in the short term (adrenaline for focused attention and cortisol for fight and flight response). However, these hormones are poison to the brain structures, in high concentrations, and will knock out executive functions like attention, memory and even thinking. This may account for experiencing blackouts, not remembering, impulsivity and not thinking straight when this happens. \n\ntl;dr: anger sets of anxiety - > excessive and unregulated anxiety messes with the brains executive functions - > blackouts, impulsivity and memory loss after situations that sets of anger. \n\n"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[
"http://www.columbia.edu/cu/psychology/metcalfe/PDFs/Metcalfe%20Jacobs%201996.pdf"
],
[],
[],
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugue_state"
],
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
5dyi5a | how does a customer service satisfaction survey where "a 10 is my only passing score" contain any reliable data, or help a company improve anything? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5dyi5a/eli5_how_does_a_customer_service_satisfaction/ | {
"a_id": [
"da8826g",
"da8981d",
"da8a4tw",
"da8ak27",
"da8bvo0",
"da8c9sc",
"da8ca7v",
"da8d4we",
"da8dv1n",
"da8dy1n",
"da8evs2",
"da8f1y1",
"da8g621",
"da8gdap",
"da8gsxk",
"da8gvhb",
"da8h0b6",
"da8h7p0",
"da8hgx1",
"da8hi5x",
"da8ht1k",
"da8i5nd",
"da8im1p",
"da8iwt9",
"da8j826",
"da8jnm3",
"da8jz98",
"da8k4g5",
"da8kaa3",
"da8kb89",
"da8kjys",
"da8kk0h",
"da8lgs5",
"da8ljeo",
"da8lzxb",
"da8mhlt",
"da8mquy",
"da8mu2w",
"da8n6yj",
"da8ndow",
"da8nei6",
"da8nfdy",
"da8nn6d",
"da8nv09",
"da8nxvs",
"da8ohz0",
"da8oiif",
"da8oocs",
"da8oout",
"da8outp",
"da8ow6k",
"da8owaw",
"da8pc0k",
"da8piok",
"da8ptam",
"da8q667",
"da8qcjx",
"da8qjdn",
"da8qkez",
"da8qxcb",
"da8r2ec",
"da8r3gx",
"da8rjnu",
"da8rskt",
"da8so8y",
"da8sqs7",
"da8st06",
"da8suyp",
"da8tm59",
"da8tpmd",
"da8u4rp",
"da8ubv8",
"da8ugp7",
"da8unmz",
"da8uopt",
"da8v47b",
"da8vhfd",
"da8vilz"
],
"score": [
1109,
4,
1606,
120,
3,
2,
19,
148,
5,
15,
4,
25,
345,
141,
2,
16,
44,
2,
20,
9,
17,
2,
27,
12,
35,
59,
6,
3,
3,
4,
2,
2,
2,
2,
2,
3,
3,
3,
4,
2,
81,
3,
2,
3,
3,
4,
4,
2,
3,
2,
7,
5,
2,
3,
3,
3,
6,
5,
5,
3,
4,
2,
2,
2,
2,
2,
2,
2,
2,
2,
2,
3,
2,
2,
2,
3,
2,
10
],
"text": [
"_URL_0_\n\nBecause most companies use NPS scoring to measure satisfaction, a system where only 9 and 10 are considered positive scores, 7-8 are just passive and anything belove is negative. ",
"Essentially what companies are trying to do is create loyalty and word mouth customers. That is your job. If you just give a met my needs level of service you are not creating loyalty and word of mouth advertising. Another way to look at it is your job isn't to not suck, it's to be excellent exceeding customers expectations so they return. That's why only a 10 gives you credit.",
"This is compounded by the fact that people will generally not bother with a survey/rating unless they feel wronged.",
"It is a fear tactic companies use against their employees. They make employees afraid of losing their jobs in the hopes that they will provide exceptional service 100% of the time. ",
"I worked for a company that had surveys and anytime there was all ones or all tens that survey was disqualified. ",
"tens trigger bonuses for the rep asking for it. anything below 10 is a signiciantly smaller bonus, or can cause a negative bonus if too low. Example, service advisor at my work gets $50 bonus for 10, $25 for 8.5 plus and -25 for below 3., zero inbetween.",
"The companies don't care about improving or changing anything. If you don't get a 10, you fucked something up and should've done better. And if they have little patience you're out of there. They hire somebody else and see if they can get perfect ratings.",
"Customer surveys aren't just about getting feedback to improve service. They are about convincing the customer they got better service than they did.\n\nHow does that work?\n\nMost people don't want to complain about little things. It is confrontational, impolite, and often it just isn't worth the effort. The hotel gives you two shampoos instead of a shampoo and a conditioner, the inconvenience of going without is less than the inconvenience of trying to get them to fix it for you.\n\nThese surveys almost always ask whether you complained. If you didn't complain, it must not of been so bad, so you'd be a jerk to give them a low score for something you didn't give them a chance to fix. They take your desire to be nice and use it against you to try to make you agree you had a better experience than you did.",
"My old company had everything rated 1-5. They found that people who gave 5's spent more money. That's why they wanted 5's. Obviously people with 4's had a pretty good experience, but if that didn't translate into more revenue than the 1-3 range, they didn't care.",
"I work in car sales where at least 10-20% of my income depend on having a customer satisfaction index score of something in the high 90%. \n\nAfter I sell a car I always ask my customer if my care & service was exceptional enough to ask for the right to have the 10/10. This means I need to respect and take care of them from the time I meet them until the time they drive off the lot. It's not always an easy task especially when I need to focus on so many other aspects of the sale. \n\nIf you are pretty mediocre or kind of just a passive sales rep, you will not earn the 10's, but maybe a few 10's and a few 9's. In that case your overall CSI score for that customer may drop down to 92% (for example). Anything below 90% is pretty much considered bad in car sales.\n\nI do get bonuses for each perfect 10 survey I get, so the perfect survey is always in my head throughout the whole sale process. To make it harder, I am the only one who gets scored based on the survey, so if the customer thinks the dealership looks messy, or if the finance manager filing paperwork was rude, and gives a 5/10 for each of those areas while giving me a 10/10, well then my score drops down to something like 7/10 which is considered horrible and could even take my bonuses for the next 3 months away.\n\nSince the sales rep is the one who spends the most time with the customer, they have to make sure they are giving first class treatment. If I was rewarded for a 7/10 or 8/10 I probably wouldn't try to suck up to the customer so much. \n\nTherefore, converting a 1-10 scale survey into a pass or fail nature would mean there is almost no room for error, so while the data might be biased it really affects the interpersonal communication and service from company representatives rather than the overall company or brand itself.",
"I work for a call center that will not be named, but one of the good ones. I will say if a survey comes back as a 0 we do have a supervisor call the customer back asking what that can do to fix it. Unfortunately most of the time the rep is doing everything correctly, according to policy, and bad surveys can be the difference of 100's of dollars off a bonus check. But outside the supervisor level these are not looked at. So if the rep you talked to was bad rate a 0, if you are having an issue with the company just talk to a supervisor. The rep you are speaking to may not agree with policy but can't do anything about it but still has bills to pay.",
"Worked for one of the largest auto insurers in the US. Surveys are (changing tense because this is the way it still is done) given to rate your experience throughout the claims process. Goal for every adjuster/investigator is at least 85%. If you fall under that, your road to termination begins (and rarely turns around). Problem is that most files, while assigned to John Q Adjuster, are never even seen by John. Call queues allow that you will reach any one of literally thousands of representatives throughout the claim life and never get the same person twice. Regardless of experience, John gets the rating, and John never even knew you existed. \n\nEdit: grammar",
"Because the NPS system is antiquated and relies on pop-psychology. If a customer has to call a customer service helpline, then defacto they are not too happy with some aspect of a product or service. \n\nNow if they leave that interaction feeling that although the situation was negative, but the adviser they spoke with had at least put in an effort to improve the situation or find a resolution. They may be tempted to put a middling score. This will result in low NPS for the adviser.\n\nA place I used to work at, actually \"promoted\" and \"educated\" customers to the surveys we sent and even in situations actively asked for 9-10 scores. I disagreed heavily with this, because you're not getting an organic/genuine answer from the customer.\n\nThe closest I came to promotion or education, was advising the customer that the survey they would receive was based on my performance, not the companies. This I still felt was disingenuous, but we were given targets to meet or risk being fired. ",
"I'd think the fact that many people know that low scores are used to punish staff (cut bonuses, threats of firing) would also taint the data they customers provide.\n\nYou may have had an 8/10 experience, but you feel obliged to rate it 10/10 out of guilt about the risk of penalizing your CSR. As more people are aware of this, I'd expect to see scores drift higher without any actual improvements in service.\n\nThe other thing I don't get is that it provides nowhere in the band for \"above and beyond expectations.\" IMO, meets-expectations stuff like \"store not obviously dirty, products in stock\" should be 7/10 or 8/10. I should be wowed in some way for 10/10. (Before you break out the pitchforks, I rarely, if ever fill out these surveys because I know full well they're not interested in my feedback on an actionable level).\n\nIf I said 10/10 for everything that meets expectations, what do I say when they exceed it?",
"This is how Wells Fargo rates their bank employees but on 1-5. About 5-10 questions on how well they served you etc and anything but 5 is a failure to the employee. \n\n\nIt's used as a tool for firing people who aren't doing anything wrong but not on a track they want",
"Because the feedback isn't their only goal... or may not be their goal at all.\n\nThis has more to do with giving the staff a reason to attempt to give \"10\" service at all times. There is am implied threat for anything less.",
"I currently work in retail sales with two different surveys on customer satisfaction on both the only real passing score for me is the top score, honestly I really do get an earful if a customer gives me a 9 out of 10 on either survey even if the problem was not reflective of my service, but of the product I sell.\n\nThey do this for the reason listed below, to cut bonus, as a gateway to fire people, and a control mechanism to make customers feel like they are getting better service than they might actually be getting.\n\nJust last week I recieved a 9 out of 10, I'm the districts top producer with the highest average NPS of a 9.3, however on this particular survey it was stated that I was great, but the product I sells actual service I sell billing department made some mistakes and they had to call to have them corrected. I was scolded by my employer and had to write an e-mail to my higher ups explaining how I would provide better customer service, and educate them better on the survey. \n\nI'm no fan of the NPS for those reasons because we do not get any real data, most surveys that come in are 10's because customers are coached on that and I feel honestly, they the customer do this because they do not want it on their conscience that they caused some one who did an okay job, loose that job",
"they use it as a reason to fuck with employees and a reasonable person will be decent and give 10s unless they fucked up real bad\n\nfor field techs in any company this is held over their head like an axe, believe it.\n",
"I rent a lot of vehicles for my company, like $40k a year worth. I get calls sometimes to rate my experience. I once gave a 4 out of 5 on something and got an awkward call a few hours later from my rep. So not only is the score not accurate, I also know they are seeing it so I just refuse them now. ",
"Since I haven't seen a response that comes out and says it:\nSurveys are bullshit. \nMost people want to have their issue resolved and move on with their day. They don't want to talk to you in the first place. Have you ever called your cable company to tell them what a great job they're doing? \"Just wanted to let you guys know, doing fantastic work! I changed the channel and the next program came on the TV without a hitch. Keep it up!\" No, you haven't and neither has anyone else.\nThey didn't get what they wanted and then had to take time out of their day to call you to fix their problem. Often having to sit through ridiculous hold times. Now that their problem is fixed (or not, depending on their expectations), you're going to ask them to spend additional time filling out your bullshit survey? Now that I've been in customer service, and been evaluated on survey results, I *ABSOLUTELY WILL NOT FILL OUT ANY SURVEYS.*\nLet's assume for a moment I broke this rule and took the additional time to listen to your god-awful IVR questions. There are two possible outcomes. Assuming you fixed my problem, *AND* you were prompt, polite, and professional, you're getting an 8. Tops. Period. My expectations were met anything extra you do will drop that score. We're not friends, and I don't need you to cry all over my issue, I don't want to talk about my personal life, and and I sure as hell don't want to hear about yours. A ten would represent a life changing experience, where all my expectations were exceeded, all my needs were met *AND* I would have had to have received some kind of monetary compensation for having to call in the first place.\nThe other possibility would be that you failed so miserably that I will not be doing business with your company again. I want a call from a manager, and very probably some kind of apology.\nThe idea that any individual representative's surveys would be 9 or above is madness designed to keep employee turn over high. I have no idea what employers derangedly imagine this may do, but employee churn is the primary result.\nI do not waste my time speaking with my friends about the experience I had with so-and-so from ABC Company and I don't know anyone who does. I will never be a \"promoter\" for a company no matter how well they do.",
"They don't-\n\n\nAs noted this is part of a traditional NPS survey. Yet when a dealership or anyone tells you the rules and ask for a specific score you have invalidated the measurement .\n\n\nSo at that point you are right - it is a pointless excersise \n\n",
"No. and I don't buy any of these answers. It's well known that in many companies anything less than a 10 is seen as a negative mark \n\nSo the customer may like the person doing the service,but have some suggestions on improvements,but be pressured to give a 10 cause no one likes being the reason good people get pegged. \n\nAnd anyone who doesn't know may give an 8 or 9 not knowing they are working towards getting a decent person fired because the system is that stupid. ",
"Former DishNetwork and UVerse tech here.\n\nWe were trained to tell customers that, if they were satisfied with our work, give us all 10's, and if there were any suggestions they had or little things they felt could be improved, there would be an open suggestion portion of their survey. No one ever made suggestions, they just constantly gave 7's and 8's thinking it was fine. I saw many techs get fired over that shit, and it's a big part of why I left the industry entirely. It's just not worth the stress.",
" > ELI5: How does a customer service satisfaction survey where \"a 10 is my only passing score\" contain any reliable data, or help a company improve anything?\n\nIt doesn't need to do either of those things.\n\nIt could just be used to make employees jump through more hoops, to weed out people who aren't 100% committed and willing to take whatever abuse/shitty practices the company desires.\n\nIt could also be used to make higher ups look better on paper.",
"I hate hate hate the survey system. I oversee surveys are a car dealership. They are so stringent on both the sales and service side it isn't even funny. 97 for sales and 92 for service. They're also worded really poorly, with an 8 being \"excellent\" but in reality that 8 cost your poor advisor or salesperson a lot of money. I along with the sales management team, service team, and parts team get hefty bonuses quarterly if numbers are hit. For the love of God, if nothing went catastrophically wrong give us 10s or ignore the survey. ",
"It's not for improving things. It serves other purposes. \n\nIt's a placebo for customers: giving them a mechanism to vent, that's easily thrown away and ignored. Plus as others have mentioned it challenges customers to reconsider mildly negative opinions due to the social pressure against making the innocent front line workers look bad. \n\nIt's also a convenient, plausible excuse for getting rid of any employee they want, whenever they feel like it: by setting the standard at \"perfect 10s always, no mistakes ever\" they can make every employee into an at-will employee. Those surveys are not a tool used by companies who value employee retention. \n\nThe only thing they're helping to improve is the [short term] bottom line. ",
"This is not an explanation, but 2 stories of fraud, if you will (regarding these surveys). One is badgering, one is all out fraud. \n\nWhen I first got out of college and was looking for jobs, I started selling new cars just to have a few bucks and have something current on a resume. \n\nWhenever I'd sell a car, there was a routine about the survey. The finance guy would explain that a survey would arrive and they had to give us all 10's or else we would get in trouble with Dodge/Chrysler. Then, as I delivered their car, I was supposed to show them a copy of the survey and explain that they'd have to give us all 10's or I'd look bad. We basically begged them to give all 10's. \n\nWhen I bought my Firehawk at a Pontiac dealer, they didn't just ask me to give them 10's. They told me to bring them the blank survey in exchange for a free oil change. I did. But I got 3 oil changes, a set of new wiper blades, a Pontiac license plate frame, a Pontiac windbreaker, and a Pontiac hat. I asked for a second set of floor mats, too. That's when they politely told me to fuck off about the survey. They got their 10's and I got some swag, but since Pontiac literally lost my car for 3 months (it was special ordered and lost), I figured they still owed me even though they waived my first two payments for the mistake. ",
"It doesn't.\n\nHaving worked in assurance, I can tell you, very simply, it's a mechanic used to penalize and fire people. Any time a manager needs to cut workers, lay people off, reduce compensations, etc. they can just quote \"bad performance\" as the reason to get rid of any personal liability. The numbers don't matter, and no one cares at all (at most places). It's just so that management can do more or less what they want and have an out if anyone asks questions.",
"Had this happen once when I got my bumper repaired. Got a survey from manager and he said if we didn't give him a 10 not to bother to submit at all. We did not submit and instead called their corporate office to complain. It was shady to say the least.",
"It's the product of out-of-touch or simply horribly inept management. \n\nThe only likely outcome is to kill morale and cause frustrated employees to disengage. \n ",
"What's really fun is when your survey is setup to ONLY incorporate answers that fit your specific numerical metric. As a SMS survey after interaction:\n\nOn a scale from 1 to 10 with 1 being the lowest, 10 being the highest, what would you rate your interaction with < employee > ?\n\n#TEN!\n\n*Survey is voided and does not count toward average because it was not* **10**",
"I work at a job where anything below a 10 is a fail.\n\nTo bring it home if i my team doesnt average a 9.4 over 6 month period we are denied our only bonus.\n\nBasically it in humanly impossible to get bonus without cheating the system (throw out emails, bribe clients to put 10s...)\n\nTo make it worse still only half the survey we are scored on is related to our performance, the other half is related to the cost of our product and how it is sold. It should be noted that the people in sales have no bonuses tied to this survey.\n\nSo why the fuck should i care what the surveys say?",
"I was told that “anything less than ‘perfect’ counts as 0,” so when I provide ratings and have been happy with everything, I give the highest score. \n\nIf the employees and store are going to be stupidly penalized for an honest response, instead of being fairly graded on a scale, I will not provide an honest response. I will either give the highest score or will not complete the survey. But I will include comments, both positive and negative.",
"Take Uber for example, a driver can be deactivated (fired) if their rating falls below 4.6. This means that anything below a 5 star rating is basically telling Uber that the driver should not be driving for them anymore",
"Where I work, they use those surveys to score out stores on cleanliness, customer service, and quality. If our customer survey scores drop, then our store standing on the list of stores in our areas goes down and so do our hours and our budget. ",
"Funny, these things make it so that the company performs worse, loses money. They do affect morale (as you can do everything right, but a snotty customer can give you a low score), and some companies like mine have odd ways of rigging the system.\n\nFor example, a neutral CSAT counts as a bad survey. If a customer is out of warranty, they used to leave a survey but it wasnt counted towards you. That changed. The only way to get ahead is to either cheat the system, or do everything possible (bending rules when necessary) to get a positive reaction. \n\nMost people cheat the system. So it makes the employees who do the job correctly bitter. But hey, fuck 'em. We've got world class customer service!",
"My company's survey has 6 questions each on a scale of one to five (five being the best). The company considers a score of 92% or higher to be \"passing\". So even if for example someone gives us a survey with all 4s, that would be an 80 and thus a failing grade. The company claims that we need to give the customer exceptional service, and only a 5 truly represents that. ",
"Its not about improving service, its about saying they have 98% customer satisfaction. ie, comcast, AAA, etc. ",
"Alright! I can contribute! Short answer: they don't. To truly understand customer experience you need to understand qualitative, experimental data about the experience (e.g, comments).\n\nI run a company that does this for hospitals. Here's a short video explaining this further: _URL_0_",
"Because there are plenty of people behind you waiting for your job and they know who to fire based on those scores if you get enough non-10s.",
"It is shite.\n\nYou can be civil, you can offer discounts, you can replace product, you can connect and talk about family, friends and common interests, you can expedite, transfer and jump through every hoop your company offers in their systems and policies and then:\n\n1\n\nThey give you a 1.\n\nNPS at its finest.\n\nIts a classist invention that shifts the unnecessary burden of high-level decisions onto the backs of low level customer service representatives. These reps, LITERALLY, have no control over the interpretation of others' opinions on the consequences of the decisions of a handful of people at the very top of an international, multi-tiered bureaucracy.\n\nTherefore, it tells you that regardless of your service, customers who are humans, are emotional, rational, irrational and finite beings who judge and perceive differences and reactivity in human interaction and satisfaction via deeply held convictions and experiences completely beyond the reach of a capitalist ideal. ",
"What it improves is their advertising claims: \"We scored perfect 10s on all the surveys [we manipulated and controlled]!\".",
"And they say \"kids these days\" expect to get 100% in all their classes because of grade inflation. Well, it's the same old adults who inflated grades who are making less than perfect a fail. ",
"It doesn't. Its a cute way for companies to get around labor laws and refuse their workers decent raises. That is literally all it does--any job with a \"good\" company I had only used NPS as a general guideline to how customer service was doing, but didn't hold over their worker's heads as a \"fix this or your fired\" type situation, conversely, all of the bad jobs I had forced you to reach a \"target NPS score\" or you were action-planned and fired.",
"Because of [Campbell's Law](_URL_0_):\n\n > \"The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.\"\n\nIn other words, companies use Net Promoter Score as a reflection of performance. And to drive better performance, they measure it and dole out rewards (promotions, bonuses, etc.) to managers and stores that do well on this.\n\nThe people at the top of the food chain want real scores -- they're interested in how they're genuinely doing. But the people in the middle -- store managers, district managers, etc. -- don't care about accuracy, they care about high scores. So, they instruct their staff to do what they can to get 10s. And their staff know even less about the purpose -- so they say shit like, \"Please rate us, and you should know, any score less than a 10 is actually like a 0\". \n\nBecause for the real purpose of the score (measuring and promoting performance), obviously a 7, 8, 9, and 10 are all different scores. But to an employee who gets a year-end bonus if they get 95% 10 scores, and nothing if they don't... well, a 10 is great and everything else is shit.",
"It's an insurance policy for the company to terminate your ass based on what they have determined to be reasonable evidence -- if they do this then take it out of their hide and sabotage company property in a way so that it can not be linked back to you.",
"Any rating system where the midway score is considered failure is putting more emphasis and measurement on failure than success. It is negative in nature. If 5 stars is expected it means there is no measurement of truly going above and beyond. You can fail with epic granularity but can't even exceed expectation.",
"Companies don't really care about customer satisfaction or improving anything. Those ratings are more of a means for the company to exert downward pressure on the customer service personnel that the executives probably wish they could eliminate. ",
"Because it's an easy way for corporate america to fuck the people that work for them. I've worked for several company's that pull this shit. I was the \"face\" to the customer -- but, if the customer hated our software licensing, or had a bad encounter with other folks it would be a strike against me. Then come review time it was like oh wellllll you weren't all 10's. Trust me - it's stacking the deck. Also, I've been in management a long time in multiple fortune 500 companies - it always blew my mind how we'd get the quotas for what people had to \"fit in to\" before review time, then we'd have to customize reviews to get the numbers to work. ",
"I know people want to talk about NPS, but in reality it's just one in a long line of systems of fake evaluation meant to encourage bursts of peak performance in a high-turnover industry. Ideally you will work really really earnestly for as long as you can stand it to make sure the customer has a Disney-perfect experience, and then burn out fast and hard so you can be replaced by the next cog. Honestly, it's probably your fault for not working up to one of their dead end fake managerial levels, wherein you get a dollar (a whole dollar!!) raise, and burn out slightly more slowly as you do the human side of managerial tasks, standing in for the people with actual business and math degrees who can't be bothered with it as they manage demand curves and the like.\n \n\nLike most social issues, there is no good short term solution and you kind of just have to live with it, at least until the day when you are willing to engage in a sudden, violent uprising against the bourgeoisie, their blood tide washing away the sins of capitalism and ushering in a beautiful age of enlightenment and egalitarianism.",
"The ratings system has nothing to do with whether the company cares about your costumer satisfaction.\nIt's a way to restrict performance bonuses to lower level employees. The management sets the minimum level for CS employees to somewhere in the 9.0 average knowing full well one difficult or contrarian customer's 1 or 2 rating will have an outsized effect on the average but still create an incentive for the employee to be on their best behavior when it looks like their average is so close to qualifying level.",
"These types of companies don't really care about customer satisfaction. Businesses that truly care about customer experience have more effective ways to understand actual issues.\n\nFor example, having an average rating of 1/5 on Trip Advisor is much less useful than knowing that 20% of your customers' complaints include mentions of the \"front desk\". Then they go through individual mentions to find out what they can change, e.g. \"Ronald at the front desk was completely useless when we asked him how to work the laundry machine\".",
"The surveys serve multiple purposes.\n\nThe scores *do* tell them where they can improve. \n\nBut when it comes to assessing the employees, they can make the expectation so high (9 or 10 out of ten) that it keeps the employees insecure, let's them pay employees less and justify firing them if they feel like it.\n",
"I work for, arguably, the premier hotel brand. Reviews are given at random to guests who are members. A 9 or a 10 is considered a 90 or 100 an 8 or below is considered a 0. \n\nTo me it isn't the best system. For instance if you see an attractive person an 8/10 is pretty solid, and most would be substantially happy with such. An 8/10 on a test is good also. Making that a 0 is weird. However, we are all on the same system so it balances out. Although if you look at the highest rated hotel, it's around a 75/100. A top 10 hotel is low 70s. ",
"Those surveys are more about showing investors \"look at how good we are at customer service!\" Because they are people that rely on numbers. This is also why corporate reps push things like surveys so hard. Any decent manager knows every customer experience counts, not just the weirdo's that actually took the time to fill out a survey.",
"It doesn't. Companies hear what they want to hear and believe that they can simply get the results they want by tweaking things. They can't. Hence why customer/company interaction over the past however long hasn't really changed or improved.",
"Surveys are sometimes a shitty tactic to add incentives to pay scales. Some businesses will base part of the employee compensation on survey ratings. If the survey isn't perfect it will mean they don't get their CSR bonus at the end of the pay period. That means their base pay of minimum wage isn't supplemented to what could equate to 25% per hour more for the week. It can be meaningful when a phone operator actually has some authority or access to the ability to make decisions. When you are the bearer of bad news like \"I'm sorry but the replacement parts aren't available right now, is there anything else I can do?\" - you get screwed over for something you're not responsible for. ",
"I worked for comcast and if we got an average of 7 or less for the month we lost our job. Comping that with a shitty company and guess who wasn't there very long. ",
"The cynic in me thinks it is meant to be a difficult goal to achieve high satisfaction, such that bonuses and promotions can easily be denied. It also makes it easier to do sudden purging of underperforming employees.\n\nSource: former call center agent and analyst",
"You have been to a Sprint store recently, and most probably my own....\n\nIt doesn't. It does however create a bunch of great numbers for us to post. It also ties to 20% of our pay. So we kill ourselves to get you to say it, even if it didn't happen. Though at this store we try to make it happen...",
"My company sends out surveys where only 9-10 is positive, 6-8 is neutral and 5 and below is negative.\n\nWhat's stupid is, my raise/job security is based on 9-10 responses. To add insult my boss tells me I have to ask/beg for 9-10 scores to make me look good, so he looks good.",
"Fyi this is how hospitals get paid now, so any person not bubbling with excitement about their stay hurts the bottom line. In turn, doctors and nurses have incentive to give just make people happy at all cost instead of giving the best care possible.",
"its a form of control, people rate you with this survey then your manager uses it to determine if you get a bonus or not. Essentially so many people know that surveys mess with your metrics in a customer service role, using them is a waste of time.",
"They don't and are eviscerated in management control systems studies for exactly that reason.\n\nOrganizations that interpret their customer satisfactions scores this way are failing in their interpretation of data.",
"The people who say \"10 is my passing score\" are getting paid a bonus for having met a weekly, monthly or quarterly customer satisfaction score. \nThis is purely anecdotal, I spent nearly a decade working in the service center of a major car brand in Australia. The distributor/importer of the vehicles paid dealerships money based on their 'score'. This could mean thousands of dollars in bonuses for site managers. As a service advisor I got $300 before commission tax (40% in Aus) every month when I had a NPS of 85% or higher. The kicker for this brand is, no matter how good or helpful I though I was to my customers. They didn't survey them all. They surveyed 20 customers per month from my department, they might not of all been mine either. This 20 came from the pool of customers and there were two other service advisers who served people. Out of over 800 customers per month who came through our doors. Only 20 were called at random. So my potential bonus could be denied because *two* people were having a bad day when they got the phone call for the survey and they might not have even been my customers. The whole NPS survey program is just a big pile of shit and you get nothing meaningful from it, well not from the brand I worked at anyway. These tight scores and low survey pools lead the other service advisers to coach and groom the customers to give us 10/10 which really isn't the way to improve your business. \n\nMan I was so triggered by your question. So many bad memories about this subject.\n",
"the NPS is a joke! the company could really care less if a customer recommends of fill out the survey like less than 25% even fill it out.\n\njust gives managers something to bitch about and harass employees over.",
"It doesn't. I work for JPM and we have a rolling customer service satisfaction, where the back office calls a random customer that was just in the branch and ask them about their experience. On a scale of 1-10 how was your experience, 10 being best. If we get an 8 with comments such as good service, fast, friendly, we get \"hit\" as in paid less...but a 9 or a 10 with no comment, oh well get paid more...",
"Theyre designed this way to created arbitraty numbers that can be used to deny bonuses and raises. It is all to save the company money at the expense of the front line employees. Walgreens implemented this system and immediately tied it to bonuses and made bank off it too. ",
"It is not meant to give any sort of meaningful data. It is meant to justify negative consequences as cost-saving measures.",
"My chance to rant.\n\nI worked for AT & T who had a similar phone survey that performed on random customers.\n\nIf we didn't get all 10's we could be expected to have to sit through a class and role play with management on how to get 10's. However, nothing can assure you a customer will give 10's, no matter how nice you are, how helpful, how much ass kissing you did. \n\nNot getting perfect scores would also affect you in other ways. If we got one less than perfect score we were required to take a paper survey form to every customers home and have them fill it out in our presence to turn in to our manager. Not many customers will give you low scores when you are sitting there watching them fill it out so they were useless. They could still get a phone survey later and give you lower scores and it pretty much made the paper survey a joke, because it didn't get logged like the phone ones.\n\nSo much stupidity within AT & T management and execs.\n\nAT & T can suck my balls.",
"Most of these surveys are tied to an incentive from the corporation. It's a way to avoid paying out while still dangling a carrot to the frontline employees. Also, when problems occur they can fall back on negative surveys and blame customer service rather than problems within the corporation. I'm using the relationship between automotive manufacturers and the dealerships/service centers that are the link between corporations and consumers. ",
"Because companies know they can hold their employees hostage. Nobody who has worked in customer service ever wants to leave a bad review, because the employee could be fired for it. People just build up the resentment and quit.",
"It doesn't. Simple statistics requires that the average score be ~5 on a 1-10 survey to have any utility at all. If every score is a 10, there is **no information in the survey**. There's nothing \"actionable\" with a uniform score of \"10s\"; there is with scores of 5.\n\nIt's the same Epic Fail as grade inflation. Everybody gets a trophy but you've learned and proved absolutely nothing at all - you don't know who's better (and some absolutely **are** better) and you don't know how they are better.\n\nSame with scoring all 10s - you don't really know anything new about how the company can be improved or even what's wrong with it. The correct thing to do is to change the survey to assure that it's pretty much impossible to honestly pick 10s all the time. This should be a priority for any corporate survey maker if they really care at all about the survey and improving things.e\n\nOf course, your average corporate drone isn't mathematically savvy or business savvy enough to grok this. It doesn't take much to become a corporate drone other than blindly following orders and thinking double-plus-good thoughts. That includes \"seeing all perfect scores\" (i.e. 10s) as a \"positive thing\". If they had a brain they'd be horrified by seeing that!!\n",
"I work retail and our survey ratings range from 1-5. In corporates eyes, 5 is satisfactory, 4 is acceptable, 3 is unacceptable, 2 requires explanation, 1 is a conference call with the DM.",
"It doesn't, but it does help them not pay out bonuses to their call centre employees, who quite often have to have a perfect score to get any payout - \"what's that? Only 99 out the last 100 people you spoke to were satisfied, so no bonus for you\"",
"Companies that utilize their customer service feedback this way get basically nothing out of it at the store level. I worked in retail managed for 10 years, for two companies that had customer service reviews from 1 to 5. Nothing but 5s counted for anything so 1s-4s were basically zeros. The expectation was that 90% or better of responses would be 5s. Unfortunately about 10% of your customers are gonna give 4s or worse for things out of your control (number of employees scheduled*, prices of items, items not carried by the store, companies policies, etc). This sets up a situation where just to hit minimums you have to cheat. You leverage good customers and family members to do as many reviews as possible, make sure you point out reviews to clearly happy customers, avoid mentioning them or straight tearing them off the receipt when customers are upset, basically everything short of having employees do reviews themselves. This defeats the entire point of the reviews since you're artificially manipulating the kind of feedback you get to hit a metric. It makes what should be a feedback tool for adjusting your business into a bragging rights metric, or a metric used to beat the management team over the head with if they aren't as good at cheating as everyone else. \n\n*the company dictates labor hours, so they dictate how many employees are scheduled at any given time",
"Employers like NPS because unattainable goals are a convenient way to always keep your employees just shy of getting a raise. Basically what we saw with Wells Fargo, but with surveys. ",
"Holy shit. It doesn't, just give he people 10's so they don't lose their jobs. \n\nSeriously. If you have a problem, dont be a part of the most ridiculous survey system ever created. Take it up with management and work with them. Get resolution and when that happens still mark all 10s for the poor sod behind the counter. So much is not his/her fault and is still blamed for it all.\n\nI have to average 8.9 or better and if I'm below that I get fired, just like a fully capable friend of mine that did his job well. Next time you fill out a survey with a 2 because your oil change took 30 minutes longer think about the fact that there is a person behind that and you need to relax. If you demand satisfaction, take it up with management, don't get someone fired. \n\nI do my very best and barely ride the cusp. I jump over hoops for people and barely make the grade. I just. This topic hits home so hard. You aren't really screwing the company or telling anything other than getting a service rep fired for some shit, most likely, totally out of their control.\n"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Promoter"
],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[
"https://youtu.be/rXx9ZOPzzIg"
],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell's_law"
],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
b6zc2o | how does creatine become phosphocreatine? | So I’m doing a project on Creatine and I understand how it’s synthesized/ingested and then is transported and gets into the cell and all of that. But if I’m understanding correctly it’s still just Creatine when it enters the cell, not phosphocreatine which is needed for the ATP-CP system. So where/how does it get the phosphate? Is there just free phosphates in the cell for it to attach to once it enters? And if so why can’t ADP just attach to those phosphates instead of Creatine phosphate giving up one of its own? All answers appreciated. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b6zc2o/eli5_how_does_creatine_become_phosphocreatine/ | {
"a_id": [
"ejo3llf"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"straight phosphate that is not connected to anything can be very reactive and difficult to corral into assisting the right reactions, so there isn't usually a lot of it free floating around the cell. creatine/phosphocreatine makes a good semi-stable storage molecule for it. the phosphocreatine usually gets it's phosphate from an ATP that isn't being used at the moment, but can sometimes get it from other molecules. which is useful, because ATP isn't always the most stable of molecules long term. ATP is usually made at a somewhat constant rate, but isn't always needed at the exact time it's made, so the creatine helps \"store\" ATP in a way, for when it would be useful."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
9hkkeq | given the number of “potentially habitable” earth-like planets in the universe, how come those that “may have life” are likely to have only simpler microbe-type life? why not more complex organisms somewhat similar to humans? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9hkkeq/eli5_given_the_number_of_potentially_habitable/ | {
"a_id": [
"e6cnq0v"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"It's hard for us to make estimates on what is likely, given we have a sample size of exactly one. That being said, single cellular \"simpler\" life arose first, so if other life *does* resemble us (if it doesn't, we can't even really speculate), it would likely do so as well. \n\nFor more complex life to arise, single cellular life not only has to survive, but presumably go through a number of hurdles that may or may not be particularly likely. Some may prevent complex life altogether. \n\nSo life that has to go through more hurdles is less likely than life that has to go through fewer. \n"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
8bmoxj | why is it that when both of my eyes are open, i don't really see my nose, but with one open, it becomes far more noticeable? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8bmoxj/eli5_why_is_it_that_when_both_of_my_eyes_are_open/ | {
"a_id": [
"dx7zb6w"
],
"score": [
5
],
"text": [
"You can always see your nose but you don't always *perceive* your nose\n\nYour brain considers it to be useless information that never changes so it ignores it. If you were to paint your nose blue or another color then you'd be acutely aware of it for a while\n\nYour brain does a good job of isolating signal from noise. This is why you don't see your nose, smell constant smells, feel your clothes touching you, or pay attention to how your tongue sits in your mouth. For the most part all of that is just useless distracting information"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
29bn98 | what happens when i make my self burp? | My girlfriend and I were just discussing that she can't make herself burp after I just did.
People tell her that she just needs to swallow air. I know that can't be it. I cant figure out how it works though.
So reddit i turn to you. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/29bn98/eli5_what_happens_when_i_make_my_self_burp/ | {
"a_id": [
"cijbved"
],
"score": [
9
],
"text": [
"Scientifically you reduce your chances of coitus by 35%."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
e6glx3 | why do stores put the front enterance video on a screen so you can see? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e6glx3/eli5_why_do_stores_put_the_front_enterance_video/ | {
"a_id": [
"f9pv8z5",
"f9pvge6",
"f9q0isd"
],
"score": [
17,
2,
2
],
"text": [
"So you know your being recorded, therefore less likely to steal \n\nAlso cuz they think u a cutie",
"It's better to deter people from committing a crime in the first place by showing them your security measures than it is to have them commit a crime and get secretly recorded doing it.",
"To make customers think they're being recorded, so you don't steal.\n\nThough, actually, some stores don't record the video. It just goes directly to the feed."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
35xlj2 | how come when i'm out drinking i can sometimes go for hours without peeing, while other times i need to pee every 10-15 minutes? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/35xlj2/eli5_how_come_when_im_out_drinking_i_can/ | {
"a_id": [
"cr8vcd7",
"cr8vcyi",
"cr8vmsy",
"cr8xr5e",
"cr9ao9i",
"cr9eq34"
],
"score": [
24,
17,
16,
138,
2,
2
],
"text": [
"Are you some kind of wizard? When I'm drinking I have to pee constantly.",
"I'm going to steal Dr Karl's analogy:\n\nThink of your body as a dry sponge. Pour a glass of water on it and it will soak the whole glass up. It might even do this for the first 3-4 glasses.\n\nThen the sponge is kind of full, so as you pour on another glass the sponge can't hold that much water and it starts to over flow\n\nEven if you wring the sponge out its still going to be more wet than when you started",
"you are dehydrated before you start drinking. your liver need the fluids to separate the alcohol from your blood, so it'll take longer for the fluids to get to your bladder. \n\nyou'll have to excuse my shitty english - not my first language... ",
"Every comment in here about \"breaking the seal\" is a myth. There is no physiologic basis behind the idea that urinating once makes you need to urinate more. **Drinking more** makes you need to urinate more. It is true that alcohol suppresses vasopressin -- thereby causing your kidneys to lose more water than usual -- but there is no reason to think that relieving yourself while drinking will doom you to more trips to the bathroom that you otherwise would have avoided. The simple fact is that soon after you start drinking, you'll have to start urinating. You shouldn't be surprised that you go from \"not-having-to-urinate-at-all\" to \"suddenly-needing-to-urinate-frequently\" when you've spent the last half hour drinking a diuretic with large amounts of fluids.\n\nAs to why you feel you don't need to urinate as frequently on some nights, I imagine it's a combination of your underlying hydration status, the amount you're actually drinking, and perhaps differences in perception/memory.",
"If you're doing something that causes you to sweat and are in a generally warmer area you won't have to piss as much. But if it's cold out your muscles are more tense and your bladder is not relaxed . That plus not sweating out all the liquid and salt in your body will make you have to piss like clockwork. \n\nSource: I work construction on the interstate. In the tunnel you pretty much only get extreme temperatures. In the summer I can drink those big bottles of Gatorade all day long, but in the winter I gotta piss all the time even if I don't have a lot to drink.",
"I also believe if you have to take a dump, you have to pee more often... Possibly because the bladder being pressed on by your shit? I dunno since I'm on mobile now and don't have my anatomy text here.."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
3bolon | what is jade helms 15 and should i be concerned? | Can't really find anything that explains everything the government is doing. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3bolon/eli5_what_is_jade_helms_15_and_should_i_be/ | {
"a_id": [
"cso1g3a",
"cso1guf",
"cso1slc",
"cso2h14"
],
"score": [
8,
6,
3,
3
],
"text": [
"It's nothing more than a larger scale military exercise. These exercises happen all the time all over the place. There is no reason to be concerned at all. \n\nThe \"concern\" you hear is nothing more than Fox News BS. These are men and women of the U.S. military and they're absolutely not ever going to round up people and take over towns like some \"news\" stations try and report. It would be an unlawful order which they have to disobey. ",
"The US military is doing training exercises in the American Southwest, since the terrain there is close to that in the middle east. Some people are freaking out that this must mean that Obama is going to try and conquer Texas because he's sending the military there, but really these sorts of training exercises are normal and have been happening for years.\n\nThere's nothing to be concerned about.",
"It's a military exercise. There was one last year. And the year before. And, well, this is the 15th one.\n\nThere are some people who think it's a US government plot to take over Texas. Which is silly for two reasons: the fact that nothing bad happened the last 14 times, and also the fact that the US *already* controls Texas, and has for well over 150 years.",
" > what is jade helms 15\n\nA routine military exercise.\n\n > should I be concerned?\n\nOnly if you are an idiot who think Obama going to stage a coup to stay in office and is using a military exercise to come and take everyone's guns."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
d88ily | how does a company like thomas cook implode? isn’t bankruptcy for large corporations slow and controlled through processes such as chapter 11? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d88ily/eli5_how_does_a_company_like_thomas_cook_implode/ | {
"a_id": [
"f18a4il"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text": [
"Apparently they were trying to get hundreds of millions of dollars to stay open for business but could not do so fast enough. But yes, many people in the company had to know what was happening and they obviously felt it was not a big risk to continue operations. They should have stopped operations months ago."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
53teh0 | why has there been so little action taken by governments against climate change? wouldn't the long term economic repercussions of inaction outweigh the short-term benefits of ignoring it? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/53teh0/eli5_why_has_there_been_so_little_action_taken_by/ | {
"a_id": [
"d7w24wn",
"d7w3wv0",
"d7w4g12",
"d7wizsi"
],
"score": [
2,
8,
2,
2
],
"text": [
"this has less to do with the cost of ignoring or \"doing something\" about the problem, and more to do with \"doing something about the problem within the length of time we're the elected government\". \n\npassing a law that says \" you must cut your co2 output by 10%\" is all well and good, but the companies involved are going to complain. a LOT. because they have to spend money and time and effort to actually cut their output.. and so are going to stop supporting the nasty government that made them do it, and start supporting that other lot who are saying \"support us, and we'll over turn that law\". \n\nso when a government passes a law, rather than pass a law that actually does something, they're going to pass the weakest law they can possibly get away with, so that their industrial friends (who, lets face it, just give politicians silly amounts of money so they WONT pass these pesky environmental laws), wont go over to \"the other lot\". \n\ntl;dr any law that gets passed will only be effective so long as the party that passed it is in power, AND only if companies dont actually have to invest in order to follow it. \n\n",
"Two reasons:\n\nVoters are short termist - what matters to them is that they lost their job due to the car factory closing, not that in 50 years temperature will rise by 2-3 degrees (the effects of which, whilst serious, are incomprehensible to them)\n\nbasic game theory - If no one else cuts as much as you, you still suffer the consequences of climate change whilst also taking the huge economic costs of action. Therefore if you suspect that other countries will not similarly reduce emissions (this might even be justified, see China/India - they have a lot of emissions to increase before they come anywhere close to Europe/US emissions per capita) you might take a fatalistic view of \"fuck it, increase our prosperity so we can better handle the climate change caused by global third parties\"",
"First: No one specific - not a single government, not a single company - wants to pay for something that \"everyone\" has caused together. There is a saying \"If everyone is responsible then no one will be responsible\".\n\nSecond: It is an abstract threat with abstract causes and effects. \"We pollute too much and that will cause the yearly average temperature to rise and that causes issues with the climate which again causes weather to become bad so...\" And here you lost most people.\n\nThird: It is a long term effect and effort. But politicians want to get elected this year or at latest in five and companies want profit this quarter and also next year.\n\nFourth: It is vastly expensive. Combine all the three above and you arrive where we stand now.",
"It is better to pave roads in concrete. It lasts decades and its easy to clean.\n\nBut a) it's uncomfortable to drive on and b) it's expensive.\n\nGovernments often pave roads in asphalt because it is cheap and smooth. By the time it needs repair, there are new leaders in office who inevitably advocate for better roads as a way to earn votes.\n\nPlanning for climate change is paving in concrete, it's expensive and uncomfortable. What vote-hungry political body is going to take it up in a meaningful way?"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
56a3rz | how does the patent process work? what about conflicts between domestic/international patents? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/56a3rz/eli5how_does_the_patent_process_work_what_about/ | {
"a_id": [
"d8hmm7h"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"You write a description of your invention, which has to be detailed enough to let someone reading it be able to make or use your invention. You then write a set of claims which set out what it is you want to be able to stop other people doing. These should only contain the essential parts of your invention and not be limited to the specific example(s) of your description. This is called a patent specification.\n\n\nYou then pay a fee to file this specification at a patent office, this gives you a filing date. A few months later, the patent office will look at your claims and then do a search to see if there is any publicly available disclosure from before your filing date that would fall within these claims (are the claims novel) and if so, is the difference between your claims and the publicly available disclosure an obvious modification (do they have an inventive step). In just about all the major countries in the world, absolute novelty is applied. That is, it does not matter where the prior publication was, in what language it was or if anybody even read it, the hypothetical \"Skilled Person\" just has to have been able to read it if they so wished. As such, there should not be any \"conflicts\" between domestic and international patents as and international patent applications can be referenced as a prior disclosure against your application. I am not fully sure how it worked when the US was a first-to-invent country, as in theory you could have the US first inventor eligible for a US patent, but someone else eligible for the patent everywhere else.\n\nTypically, you will have gone quite broad with the initial claims, and there will be some document cited against your claims that you never thought of. It is then necessary to narrow the claims so that they are novel and inventive over this document. In order to prevent you cheating the system and getting patents for things that weren't in your original document, any amendments that you make to the claims must be from the specification as filed. This is enforced more strictly in Europe than in the US for example.\n\nThis can happen a few times, before hopefully you end up with a set of claims which are considered novel and inventive. You then pay an issue fee and get a granted patent."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
a1wn2w | how exactly did the north sentinelese migrate to their island from africa? | I know very little is known about them and their island is very isolated and close to India. I've read that they migrated from Africa tens of thousands of years ago, but.. how? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a1wn2w/eli5_how_exactly_did_the_north_sentinelese/ | {
"a_id": [
"eate0li",
"eato78w"
],
"score": [
3,
2
],
"text": [
"At one point a group of modern *H. sapiens* walked out of Africa and headed eastward to what we call the Indian subcontinent. From their they presumably rafted their way to the islands and found the area sufficient for their needs. Humans have a tendency to wander and the ability to come up with new ways to wander when otherwise prevented from doing so by terrain.",
"During various glacial maximums, the Andamans either had a land bridge or a very narrow channel separating them from the main body of Asia, which the proto-Andamanese travelled over and then were isolated as the sea level rose, somewhat like the Australian native peoples. At that point, there are several theories as to how the subgroup that are the Sentinelese ended up isolated on the island.\n\n1\\. They are a branch of the Onge, who were the only tribe of the Andamans that had the paddle and inter-island travel, who due to some unknown circumstance chose to isolate themselves. Evidence for:\n\na. Maurice Portman, who explored the island more extensively than anyone else (though hardly seeing the Sentinelese themselves), thought their baskets, weapons and tools were near-identical to the Onge versions. \nb. The Onge had a name for the island and seemed familiar with it.\n\nAgainst: If they paddled to the island it is somewhat surprising that they would lose the technology, as it would have been useful for getting around the deeper part of their lagoons, but Sentinelese have only been seen using poles.\n\n2\\. They are descended from Jarawa or Jangil who were kidnapped by Malay slavers who then wrecked on the island. \n\nFor:\na. It would explain why they couldn't leave again, since they only had shallow-water boat knowledge. \nb. The Jangil language seemed to be related to Jarawa but was mutually incomprehensible, and thus would explain why the Sentinelese understand neither Onge or Jarawa. The Jangil themselves died out within a few years of colonization, so we don't know much about them (can't imagine why the Sentinelese resist...)\n\nAgainst: It's not clear to me whether the pre-contact Jarawas or Jangil had knowledge of outrigger canoes, as opposed to rafts, and the Sentinelese are excellent canoe builders. \n\n3\\. The weird outlier theory is that they got isolated during the last glacial maximum -- the island would have been part of the main Andaman island at that time. This is highly unlikely, as there are at most a few hundred and population math suggests that a group that small would have an extremely high chance of suffering an extinction event over such a long period. But not *completely* impossible. \n"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
|
1u858k | how do i drive in the snow? | Just moved to Northern Ohio from Georgia, I am unsure of the best and safest ways to drive in the snow, Help Me Please!! I have had a little practice in a parking lot and I drive a big truck for work. Thanks Guys! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1u858k/eli5_how_do_i_drive_in_the_snow/ | {
"a_id": [
"ceffc2d",
"ceffftr",
"ceffozc",
"ceffr4a",
"ceffvfv",
"cefh6s8"
],
"score": [
4,
2,
2,
9,
2,
7
],
"text": [
"Winter tires. \n\nAdjust your speed accordingly to accommodate the weather. \n\nBeware of black ice. \n\nProvide sufficient space between yourself and the car in front of you (if they slam their breaks and you have to do the same, snow is likely causing you to slide much further than you're used to). \n\nDon't be an idiot. Know your limits and your abilities. If you don't have to be on the roads in poor weather, don't risk it. Otherwise, good luck. It's not difficult once you're used to it. ",
"Sound advice thanks man!! ",
"Start slowing down early for lights so you don't get caught needing to use too much brake. Also avoid braking too much going down hills and instead used the lower gears to slow your car. Make sure you have good snow tires and check that you have a good amount of windshield wiper fluid. The salty mixture they use to prevent ice is painfully annoying on your windshield. Lastly, use your lights if there is a lot of snow coming down and try to follow the tail lights of the people in front of you.",
"It's pretty simple once you understand what you need to do. Slow everything down. If you normally start braking about 100 feet from a stop sign (approx.), do it in 200 feet. You might get idiots honking at you, but don't pay them any attention. Until you are completely and 100% sure of how the vehicle handles and how long it takes to stop it, do this.\n\nI'd probably try going kinda fast and braking hard in that parking lot a few times. Just so you know how much you're going to slide around. And always remember to treat the brake pedal like an egg. Step on it too hard and it breaks. Just take everything nice and always give yourself tons and tons of space while behind cars. \n\n\nGood luck.",
"I'm not sure whether ABS is a thing now in USA or not but judging by the ample youtube videos of the last couple of years from that side of the ocean, it seems most of the cars' ABS' aren't working or are not adjusted for snow (if such adjustment even occurs, idk). The thing is, you need traction at all times, including braking. Locked brakes have little traction on snow or ice, unlike on bare tarmac. Which is why you either have to pray your ABS works like it should be (and how it does in Northern Europe) or if it doesn't or you don't have ABS, you should try braking with a stutter - pressing and releasing repeatedly. This gives you the advantage of being able to steer your car while the brakes are in the release position. In some of the stupidest youtube videos, cars are sliding in extreme slow motion into each other because the brakes are locked and the drivers fail to see what more they could do. They could easily pass the objects by releasing the brakes slightly and steering into safety. It's best to try the stutter-brake in a snowy parking lot - it increases traction and gives you the ability to steer the car while braking.",
"In addition to what everyone else has said about driving more slowly, I would add that the key is to do everything more smoothly. Slow is great because it's forcing you to be more deliberate with every move, but being smooth about it all is really the best thing to do. So if you need to stop, do it as smoothly as you can, be focused and deliberate. Don't slam, press. If you have to speed up, take a long time to do that. Driving in a lower gear helps if things are bad because it takes you longer to accelerate. Also because it help you keep a consistent amount of power going to the wheels. In higher gears you're more likely to coast, and then when you have to apply force again...it may be more sudden than you think. And turning, be really committed to it. Do it slowly, but start at a definite time, follow through it, and straighten out. It'll feel like you're 16 and learning to drive again...but that's good, it means you're thinking through every action and controlling it. \n\nIf you start to swing off center, you have to force yourself to not react by trying to forcibly bring the car back into your control, because you'll just go into a fishtail or spin out. Assuming front-wheel drive, relative to the front of the car point the wheels SLIGHTLY back to center and continue to apply a small, controlled, amount of gas. When you start coming back, bring the wheel back to straight. It's all about smooth, controlled, nudges to your car and \"suggestions\" to the snow.\n\nWhen I was in college I used to go to the parking lot at my university at night when it was abandoned and throw my car into a sideways slide, then practice holding the car sideways while moving as long as possible. Eventually at that extreme angle, the back will come around and you'll be facing back at your trail...which is probably not the best position to get into on the road, so by trying to stay sideways until you stop you keep yourself in a better position. Other things, too, just throwing the car into spins and trying to make it do things to feel what it was like. It may be a bit frowned upon, but I was incredibly thankful for the practice the first time I went into a fishtail on the Mass Pike in the middle of a blizzard and nearly wound up backwards in a ditch. Staying calm and collected, doing what I practiced, kept me on course."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
1hgnoa | since the population of the us has doubled in the last 60 years, will it quadruple in the next 60 years? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1hgnoa/eli5since_the_population_of_the_us_has_doubled_in/ | {
"a_id": [
"cau62a3"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"No.\n\nThis is due to a combination of factors. \n\nLooking at the age distribution for the US, there is a big 'swell' around older people - the so called 'baby boomers'. This is similar to the 'youth bulge' discussed in the Arab Spring, with one vital difference- the baby boomers *will not be having more children*.\n\nIn twenty years or so, the US will be dealing with a lot of old people who will start dying faster than the younger people are reproducing, leading to a net loss in population.\n\nIn addition, smarter living has lead to a decrease in the average number of children a couple has. In fact, it is now *below* the 'sustainability threshold' (the minimum average to maintain a constant population) of 2.1. It is now 1.9, meaning 2 people will create on average 1.9 people - not enough to fully replace them when they die. This will also lead to a population decrease.\n\nADDITIONALLY, more access to birth control and healthcare will generally lower birth rates, as less 'unwanted' pregnancies occur.\n\nMake sense?"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
2d3uh7 | why cable companies advertise their services to their own subscribers? | It just doesn't make any sense to me. Is it because of free advertising hoping that people without their service will see by chance? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2d3uh7/eli5_why_cable_companies_advertise_their_services/ | {
"a_id": [
"cjlryks",
"cjls3is",
"cjls9x8"
],
"score": [
11,
6,
2
],
"text": [
"That's a tax write off for selling themselves airtime, and also keeps the supply of commercial spots under control.",
"Unsold advertising in any medium is often filled with ads pushing the company's products. The alternative is a PSA or dead air.\n\nIn the case of a cable company, it's a free ad, and maybe someone has a friend over who is getting tired of their current TV provider and wants to switch.",
"It's a chance to upsell more services like more channels or phone. It also helps to keep the brand to retain customers. It's much cheaper to retain customers than to replace customers."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
4pjh0o | how are scenes recorded where someone stops time, and everyone stops moving except for them? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4pjh0o/eli5_how_are_scenes_recorded_where_someone_stops/ | {
"a_id": [
"d4lg7gk",
"d4lgczx"
],
"score": [
7,
2
],
"text": [
"Composite shots, composite shots everywhere. \n\nBasically they record the people and the scene without the actor, record the actor in a green room or the like. Composite the actor into the shot, cgi in the obligatory drops of water, add some cool effects for fun.",
"it depends on the type of shot, if the camera is moving people can just stand still and it's very hard to notice that they're moving slightly. If the camera is still, they'll crop out one frame of each frozen person and place it in another clean shot."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
|
6rzmz1 | why did chairman mao establish a cult of personality around himself in china? | Was it necessary for Mao to make himself appear godlike to the people in his goal for socialism or was it all misguided? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6rzmz1/eli5_why_did_chairman_mao_establish_a_cult_of/ | {
"a_id": [
"dl8weo0"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text": [
"Crushing dissenters and venerating himself and his role in the revolution were critical to the continuation of his and his government's power.\n\nThat said, while he certainly cultivated the image of himself as a hero who had saved the country and that he was beyond reproach, none of his propaganda portrayed him as a god. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
3hhdml | why aren't double-decker bridges more popular? | It seems like a rather efficient way to double its traffic allowance. Having each traffic direction on their own level also seems safer. I see a lot of traffic ridden bridges but rarely a double decker. What's up with that? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3hhdml/eli5_why_arent_doubledecker_bridges_more_popular/ | {
"a_id": [
"cu7dr2p"
],
"score": [
5
],
"text": [
"Double-decker bridges are far more complex and much (much, much,) more expensive. It's easier to build a wider bridge than it is to build a bridge on top of another bridge, as you'd be adding more weight to the bridge. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
1lre9m | why shouldn't i eat feces? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1lre9m/eli5_why_shouldnt_i_eat_feces/ | {
"a_id": [
"cc1zr3r",
"cc209ox",
"cc2299f"
],
"score": [
10,
3,
2
],
"text": [
"shouldn't? no no no. you misunderstand. You're actually totally supposed to. Eat a lot as quickly as possible and don't contact a doctor at any point for any reason.",
"Maybe because its shit...",
"Because it's all the shit from your food that the body's expelled because it doesn't need it. Plus bacteria."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
2dip9t | why does sound move slower than light if they both have 0 mass? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2dip9t/eli5_why_does_sound_move_slower_than_light_if/ | {
"a_id": [
"cjpuxka",
"cjpuz0w"
],
"score": [
3,
4
],
"text": [
"Hmm, I saw this and can give you a basic answer as I'm just leaving work. \n\nLight is photons that travel as particles, where a sound is the vibration of particles (different to light).\n\nImagine a room full of dominoes, you push one over (the sound) then it bumps into the rest and eventually making it to the other side of the room. This is like how sound travels.\n\nSound travels faster in denser objects, such as water compared to air, as the molecules are closer together. Therefore the dominoes are closer together to hit the next one along faster than if they were further apart. \n\nLight is one person running from the sun to your eyes. Sound is dominoes hitting each other along the way from the source to your ear. \n\nSound is heard by your ear because your ear moves much like a drum. Ear drum....which is pushed by the dominoes.\n\nLight is a particle recognised by the rods and cones in your eye that are sensitive to these particles (photons)\n\nCould probably Google a few better explanations than this. But thought I'd help you out. \n\nEdit: Didn't actually answer your question specifically, but sound and light are...*different*. Sound is the domino effect that requires a medium (matter) to travel within, where as light can travel through space which void of any matter. Sound is a movement or wave moving through matter, where as light is more of a singular particle that can show wave like properties. So you shouldn't really be comparing their weights for their velocity. ",
"Light is (in a basic sense) a massless particle. This allows it to move at C, the famous \"speed limit\" of the universe. While sound is technically massless, it is misleading to say so. It is a compression wave. Waves do not themselves move because they are not made of matter. Instead, they are defined by the movement of the particles in a medium. The \"push\" of the sound wave has to travel from particle to particle like a giant game of telephone. Each of these communications is significantly slower than the speed of light. Thus, a sound wave is slower than the speed of light."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
||
3r3mme | open source software projects | I don't really get how they work. Is it like wikipedia, where anyone can just contribute? If so, is that dangerous?
How does this work? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3r3mme/eli5_open_source_software_projects/ | {
"a_id": [
"cwkkhz4",
"cwkkig2",
"cwkkq22",
"cwkp83o"
],
"score": [
4,
5,
2,
3
],
"text": [
"When you run an application, your computer is executing lines of low level code that was compiled from easier to read high level \"source\" code. Open source projects are ones where the source code is public. It means anyone can edit it or learn how it works, and if they fix problems in it the original host can upload a new update. It seems like it would be dangerous, but in fact open source is great for security because anyone can find and fix the flaws, or at least make it public that there are flaws. ",
"Well, no. The concept of an \"Open Source\" project is that the inner workings are all exposed and publically viewable so that others can tweak or modify the code to their liking. Normally, this code is kept private so, for example in video games, we only get the end result, which is the game your playing. But there's really hundreds if not thousands of command and code lines going into every action and movement you're doing in the game, but you'll never know how they wrote that code or what it looks like because of the way the game is compiled. \n\nThink of it like this, cars are kind of like an Open Source project. You can open the hood, break open the circuit panels and make modifications as you see fit. Tweak the motor, add some cool new things to the outside, paint it, however you like. A typical \"Closed Source\" as you could say, would be as if you bought a car with the Hood welded shut, all the panels were a solid piece that you couldn't get into, and you can't change the color or do any changes to it. You just have to use the car as it was off the lot. If you ever had a problem, you couldn't fix it yourself, you'd HAVE to go to the manufacturer or authorized mechanic and pay their premium to have it fixed. Otherwise on a normal car, if you're a little handy and understand, you can sometimes make tweaks and do your own maintenance and fix it up to your liking. ",
"Not all open source software projects allow third-party contributors to submit their own code into the main distribution stream, that depends on the particular project. So the short answer is, no it's not exactly like Wikipedia.\n\nTechnically open source just means that the source code of the software is published such that it is made available for inspection (allowing anyone to audit the code and see what's happening underneath the hood, so to speak). \n\nIt also means you can compile that source code and produce your own executable so that you know for certain the program you're running is based off the published source code. If you instead use a pre-compiled executable, you're are merely assuming and trusting that the program was compiled from the published source code, but you wouldn't know for sure. So the ability to compile from source is important, especially if privacy and security are a concern.\n\nMost open source projects also come with a license that allows you to modify or 'fork' the software and redistribute the modified copies to other people (sometimes the license requires that you redistribute the modified version under a new and different name/brand as to avoid confusion with the original software).\n\nSome open source projects allow other programmers to contribute their own code and often there will be a defined review process before that code gets approval to be added to the main distribution stream. That way hackers cannot easily add malicious code to a project because presumably reviewers or other contributors will detect the malicious nature of the code before it gets approved to be added to the main distribution.\n\n",
"Open source simply means that the source code is available for anyone to view. It does not necessarily mean that anyone can contribute. For projects that do accept contributions, it is not like Wikipedia where you can just edit the code - you have to submit your changes to the developers on the project, and they will decide if it should be accepted."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
2y7s30 | what makes toilet paper dissolvable and safe for the toilet versus paper towels/kleenex/tampons? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2y7s30/eli5_what_makes_toilet_paper_dissolvable_and_safe/ | {
"a_id": [
"cp7191v"
],
"score": [
4
],
"text": [
"Toilet paper is made with short fibres when compared to facial tissues, paper towels, tampons and even writing paper. The short fibres allows for more rapid decomposition and loss of integrity with the addition of moisture. But companies have to balance between short fibres for decomposition in sewage and longer fibres for strength during use. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
950wix | why do hamburger buns seem to always have a small white floury patch on the bottom of them? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/950wix/eli5_why_do_hamburger_buns_seem_to_always_have_a/ | {
"a_id": [
"e3p5340"
],
"score": [
12
],
"text": [
"The flour is used on the bottom of baking trays to ensure the dough doesn’t stick to the tray. \n\nThis is especially handy when you have to reposition the dough once it has touched the tray.\n\nThe main reason the flour is still present is because once the dough has been proved (left to rest and raise) it doesn’t absorb the flour as easily and as the dough is protecting the flour it lifts with the burgers once they are fully baked."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
4ooxvs | if i'm normally on a 2000 calorie diet, but one day intake 10 000 calories, how many of these calories would my body absorb compared to, say, 3000/5000? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ooxvs/eli5_if_im_normally_on_a_2000_calorie_diet_but/ | {
"a_id": [
"d4eddb3",
"d4efnvy",
"d4efqcs"
],
"score": [
4,
10,
7
],
"text": [
"All of them assuming your metabolism and GI system are healthy. Your body is very good at absorbing all the nutrients available considering for much of human history that was exactly how we ate . 0 calories for a few days or very few, but then after a successful hunt you'd have thousands.",
"The studies I've read say all of them. You have to start getting past 20k before the body can't take them in, but I can't imagine eating 10k calories in a day unless you're like the rock or something let alone 20k ",
"You thinking about Fourth of July barbecues? "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
3klhty | why do businesses open so early in the morning when no one likes setting an alarm and waking up early? | I feel like the easy answer is "places get business at 9:00am" but the only reason most people are awake before 9am is because of THEIR job. Why don't all businesses just open later so everyone in the world can sleep in? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3klhty/eli5_why_do_businesses_open_so_early_in_the/ | {
"a_id": [
"cuyem1e",
"cuyfex3"
],
"score": [
2,
2
],
"text": [
"Wouldn't whatever time it is that people go to work then just become the new \"9:00\"? I go to bed at 11:30 because I need to be at work at 9:00. If I always had to be in at 10:00 I would adjust my sleep schedule and go to bed at 12:30... I'd still be in the exact same boat.\n\nIn many industries you want to start early so you are done before the afternoon heat gets oppressive. \n\nFinally. Most people not still in college aren't up partying 'till 3:00 am and would be up by 7:00 (or whatever) anyway.",
"In construction, they like to start their work at 5 or 6am, so they can finish their job before the peak of the afternoon heat. And probably other jobs where the they work outdoors.\n\nBakeries have to start prepping at 3-4am, so that they have the donuts and pastries ready for the morning commute. If they started work at 9am, they'd have the donuts ready sometime around noon, too late. Gas stations open at 5-6am as well for the same reason, to service the morning commute. \n\nRetail locations have to open early, because customers come early. Most retail shops are fairly quiet from about 6pm - 9pm. \n\nMy job starts at 7:30am, I leave the house at 7am, wake up at 6am. For me, getting to work at 9am would be leisurely. And I'm sure there are thousands of other people who start their work day much earlier than me. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
|
4ijkk1 | if australia is so dangerous how did such a small number of rabbits breed so much so quickly? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ijkk1/eli5_if_australia_is_so_dangerous_how_did_such_a/ | {
"a_id": [
"d2ykcsf",
"d2ykz2h",
"d2ylzke",
"d2ynapx",
"d2yueps",
"d2yvig6",
"d2yvw7b",
"d2z4qmd",
"d2zdvmr",
"d2zil5g"
],
"score": [
143,
65,
20,
5,
5,
5,
2,
4,
2,
2
],
"text": [
"That's what rabbits do, everywhere. It's kind of their thing. They breed like .... rabbits. The are generally considered a pest in most places wherever they exist, though not to the levels of ecological menace that they are in Australia.\n\nTheir success in Australia is attributed to lack of natural predators, evolving into a particularly hardy breed, and mild winters that allow them to essentially breed year-round.",
"They breed more quickly than snakes need to eat, and dingoes would be able to feed more of their pack on a roo than a rabbit.",
"Who said it was so dangerous? All invasive species in Australia are pests (and some natives too) and are not well controlled by the native population.",
"The short answer is that it's not as dangerous as you think, yes there are a lot of poisonous snakes and spiders but only a small number of them are actually likely to inflict a wound on you, or kill you. There's redback spiders, a venomous spider, in most Australians backyards but that doesn't necessarily make your backyard dangerous ",
"Rabbits breed super quickly, and since they're not native to Australia they don't have any natural predators. This pretty much lets their population grow unchecked. Interestingly enough a number of years ago they tried to kill off all the rabbits with myxomatosis, which is a highly contagious usually fatal rabbit disease. It killed off most of the rabbit population, but now almost all the rabbits are immune so the number of rabbits is pretty much the same as it was before.",
"\"Danger\" is not a specific enough term. Australia is full of irritating things that defend themselves, like plants, and ambush predators, like spiders. But, Australia does not have most of the large, rangey predatory mammals that we know to run down rabbits and overpower humans.\n\nThe [Tasmanian Tiger](_URL_0_), (a.k.a. Tasmanian Wolf) was Australia's largest predatory mammal at about 70 pounds until it was declared extinct in 1936. The 40-pound Dingo is most common in the central Outback, but rabbits are perfectly happy living among humans around the coastline. There are no bobcats, wolves, foxes, panthers, and bears in the woods behind the house in Australia, as is the case in much of the rest of the world. I live in a suburb with a \"greenway\" path behind it. We have deer, hawks, and coyote, and there's been a bear sighting between my suburb and its parent city. With all that, I have rabbit poop in my yard.",
"I think your error came in thinking that the Australian rabbit isn't dangerous and planning on eating you...\n\n_URL_0_",
"Your premise is flawed. Australia has many venomous creatures but they are not exactly littering the main street of any given town or city. Australia is not a dangerous place. No one has died from a spider bite in several decades and snake bite deaths are few and far between.",
"how rabbits respond to dangerous situations:\n\nmake a ton of babies. that way 1 will probably survive and pass on the genes.",
"New Zealand had really no predators and the bunnies are everywhere.\n\nThe English brought in the bunnies for sport hunting as NZ had no 4 legged anything."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thylacine"
],
[
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgj3nZWtOfA"
],
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
1oll11 | if i own a private block of land that is secluded, why i can i not build my own house without approval? | I am referring to this article _URL_0_
The house doesn't seem to stand out and the article even states that "most people did not even know it was there because it is so secluded." Yet they are still being forced to tear it down due to not receiving approval. I could understand if it was on the main street and was hot pink but it doesn't look as though people had a problem with it.
| explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1oll11/eli5_if_i_own_a_private_block_of_land_that_is/ | {
"a_id": [
"cct4yuv",
"cct69tk"
],
"score": [
3,
2
],
"text": [
"sadly it's just because that's the law. you cant build a house without official planning permission. if they let it slide once, they set a legal precedent, so you could end up with houses popping up all over the place, without permission. now, they do sometimes let buildings slide when they havent got permission, but when it's all over the press like this one was, they havent really got a choice but to do something about it.",
"It is because it affects other people. The approval is to ensure the house is compliant with building codes. This is to promote safety and minimize risks for present and future inhabitants and other people. \n\nFirefighters shouldn't have to worry about getting through small door frames or whether the roof will hold their weight. Guests and future owners shouldn't have the roof collapses on them because it couldn't handle the weight of the snow. Or even an earthquake.\n\nIn addition, the approval process gets input from the community. Their input at least voices their opinion on impact and provide for a fair and democratic process."
]
} | [] | [
"http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2382684/Charlie-Hague-Megan-Williams-told-pull-hobbit-home-entirely-natural-materials.html"
] | [
[],
[]
] |
|
1u9r48 | why do doctors have to test for reflexes? | Like when they hit your knee with the little hammer? What's it for? What happens if your reflexes are bad? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1u9r48/why_do_doctors_have_to_test_for_reflexes/ | {
"a_id": [
"cefvktj",
"cefvm91"
],
"score": [
2,
3
],
"text": [
"[Lack of that reflex is a sign of neurological illness or damage](_URL_0_).",
"If it doesn't react, there could be nerve damage.\n\nif it reacts and jerks alot more than normal, could be a disease.\n\nFinally, Zombies don't have reflexes..."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westphal%27s_sign"
],
[]
] |
|
67gogd | why does putting one leg on another is so comfortable? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/67gogd/eli5_why_does_putting_one_leg_on_another_is_so/ | {
"a_id": [
"dgqagb3"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text": [
"Your legs are working all the time. Even when you're sitting, with your feet on the floor, your leg muscles are still actively holding some of your body weight. When you cross your legs, or put one on top of the other, you're giving that leg a break, which just feels good."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
284xdf | is there a formula to determine the terminal velocity of an object? why, why not? | e.g. Weight x Newtons + something / something = 50kmph
| explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/284xdf/eli5_is_there_a_formula_to_determine_the_terminal/ | {
"a_id": [
"ci7f4jy",
"ci7f54n"
],
"score": [
2,
7
],
"text": [
"The formula is to set the force due to gravity (mass times the acceleration of gravity on earth, 9.8 m/s/s) equal to the force of wind resistance and solve for velocity. However, wind resistance isn't very straightforward to calculate, it depends on the shape of the object and a lot of other things, and can go proportional to velocity or velocity squared. So you don't see a plain old formula, because wind resistance is complicated. ",
"v = sqrt(2mg/ρAC). v = terminal velocity, m = mass, ρ = density of the fluid (air), C = drag coefficient (based on objects shape), and A the area the object projects onto the ground (describes the objects size). A sphere for example would have the area of the circle at it's middle. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
|
1w9wub | why doesn't youtube load/buffer unless i am on the page and have hit play and why doesn't it stay buffered? what has changed from their old player? | * | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1w9wub/eli5_why_doesnt_youtube_loadbuffer_unless_i_am_on/ | {
"a_id": [
"cf007zm"
],
"score": [
11
],
"text": [
"DASH Playback is the name of the culprit. It stands for Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP and they implemented it a while back.\n\nIn English, that means rather than try and buffer the entire video for you, it breaks it down into bitesize chunks and only buffers the next chunk.\n\nIn theory, this helps people with unstable net or slower connections, as well as saving Youtube lots of bandwidth since they'll no longer have to load the entire video for someone if they're going to close it a few seconds in. In practice, it means it only buffers a few seconds ahead now.\n\nIt's possible to switch back to the old method of buffering full videos, just do a google search for Firefox or Chrome extensions that disable DASH, problem solved."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
3ahd8n | what we know about nutrition and how certain we are about that knowledge. (everything seems to go back and forth, even the food pyramid is outdated?) | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ahd8n/eli5_what_we_know_about_nutrition_and_how_certain/ | {
"a_id": [
"cscncsx",
"cscoe3a",
"cscoeo3"
],
"score": [
5,
4,
3
],
"text": [
"There's been a very large amount of interest group money in nutritional \"research\" over the years. Many, many flawed studies get massive publicity in nutrition as compared with other fields. The ones that come from neutral sources tend to reveal one main thing: \"It's difficult to make conclusive, provable claims about nutrition.\"\n\nThere are some general trends, like eating a varied diet and processed foods generally being a greater risk factor than unprocessed foods, that have been repeatedly shown. The more specific a study's finding is in nutrition, the more skeptical you should be IMO.",
"The main reason that nutritional information is constantly changing and uncertain is that it's very hard to directly measure the effects of different foods and nutrients on the body.\n\nFirst, there are a million possible combinations of food that you could test. Second, there are a million possible effects to measure--blood sugar, tiredness, gallbladder cancer rate, etc. Third, the digestive system is so complex that it's hard to guess what would be important and test that specifically.\n\nAnother aspect of the problem is that it's very hard to get a control group for nutrition research. If you wanted to test whether blueberries lowered blood pressure, how do you give 50 people blueberries and then fake giving blueberries to the other 50 people?\n\nAn even bigger issue is controlling for other factors when testing. Let's say you do a study and find that people who eat cheeseburgers are more likely to have heart attacks. This could mean anything, for example (a) cheeseburgers cause heart attacks, (b) the same gene that causes cheeseburger cravings causes heart attacks, (c) healthy people actively choose not to eat cheeseburgers, (d) eating cheeseburgers gives you heartburn that disrupts your sleep and stresses your heart.\n\nWhen you combine all of these issues, it makes it very hard to draw meaningful conclusions from nutritional studies. Nutrition guides like the food pyramid are put together based on what data they do have, but they are mostly just making an educated guess and frequently find new data that changes their old conclusions.",
"When you study things in living organisms, there are many countless variables that make interpreting and applying the data very difficult. doing so in humans can be even more challenging because it is difficult to morally perform some experiments or pay for some experimental setups that would control for certain variables (as an example, it's really expensive to get a large number of people to all live together under the same conditions in a laboratory setting and receive the same nutrition so we can look at differences between groups).\n\nVery often when you hear about certain things causing health outcomes, this information comes from what is called epidemiological data. This means that scientists will follow large groups of people and use reporting methods to look for associations. An example might be that there is an association between reported sugar consumption and reported weight gain over a given period of time.\n\nIt's very important to note that this type of study does not specifically test an hypothesis - it can only generate one. In the above example, there could be quite literally thousands of potential variables that might affect weight gain, so ideally you would design a study to specifically test a hypothesis, which might be something like \"Excess sugar consumption causes weight gain even under iso-energetic conditions\".\n\nTherefore some popular recommendations you are given based on educated guesses, and some are given based on a hypothesis that has not been thoroughly tested (or in some cases thoroughly refuted but still followed out of ignorance, for example insulin causing fat gain independent of energy intake.)"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
5ux7vs | how was this xkcd comic made? xkcd: self-description | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ux7vs/eli5_how_was_this_xkcd_comic_made_xkcd/ | {
"a_id": [
"ddxkdl3"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"1) Start with the first panel, where the whole circle is white. Place text.\n\n2) Create the second panel, and have the bars empty.\n\n3) Create the third panel, where you literally put the image inside the image.\n\n\nNow, that is not quite right. Measure the black and white pixels on your image and update the first panel. Use this extra info to fill in the bars on the second panel, then update the third panel.\n\nThat's still not quite right though. Re-count all pixels and reupdate the first panel... and so on and so forth. You can make a recursive algorithm that does this recalculation, until the outcome is \"close enough\". Since pixels are finite, at some point your margin of error will be smaller than a single pixel, at which point you are done. Notice how you can't zoom in on the third panel to see recurring detail, so at some point some information/detail is lost.\n\n\nI'm not sure if he used that method or some kind of more fancy equation to do it, but it's a way!"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
zihyv | how does email encryption work? especially the part about keys. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/zihyv/eli5_how_does_email_encryption_work_especially/ | {
"a_id": [
"c64w382",
"c64w3aa"
],
"score": [
3,
2
],
"text": [
"Encryption is the process of taking something that is readable, and making it unreadable unless you have some kind of special knowledge, a key, that can be used to make it readable again. I think what you are referring to is the idea of \"Public Key Encryption\" which is a special kind of encryption where you have one key that is used to scramble information, and a *different* key is used to unscramble it. This is important because it means that you can give the first key -- your public key -- freely to anyone who might want to send you an email (all the key does is scramble the email). If they use it, they will have something that only you can, read because it requires the second key -- your private key -- to unscramble it. This is similar to the physical idea of a public mailbox. Anyone with a letter can walk up to a public mailbox and drop something in, however only the postman has a key and can come through and remove the letters. Even if you want to retrieve your own letter from the mailbox after dropping it in, you can't, just like you would not be able to decrypt a mail that you have encrypted with someone else's public key.",
"There's a very ELI5 answer to this [here](_URL_0_)."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[
"http://www.thebigquestions.com/2012/03/13/uh-oh/"
]
] |
||
6grzm4 | if standing inside with window open, why is it that you can hear people talking, but they can't hear you if you do the same? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6grzm4/eli5_if_standing_inside_with_window_open_why_is/ | {
"a_id": [
"disl49z",
"dismgqk"
],
"score": [
8,
14
],
"text": [
"Basically it is the distance between you and the hole (window) and them and the hole. Once the sound emerges from the hole it diverges and spreads out over a wider area, as is does so the energy/sound weakens. the further it travels from the hole the weaker it gets. So your sound is relatively weaker than their sound.",
"Ambient noise. The sound path through the window is generally about as good in either direction. But there's generally more noise being generated outdoors than indoors. Being indoors sounds like a quieter version of being outdoors because no noise is necessarily added. When you're outdoors, you have all this noise that's louder than it would be indoors, while simultaneously noises from indoors are made quieter. That ends up masking much more noise from indoors. Add to that that people speak more loudly outdoors to overpower the noise.\n\nIt works by a similar principle as a one-way mirror. The mirror works the same way in both directions. It's just that the mirror doesn't transmit all that much light (like a window that's much smaller than the wall), and one side just happens to have much more light on it than the other side."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
||
604fuu | why does rendering gameplay in video editor take significantly more time than recording live gameplay? | If you really think about it, each frame needs to be calculated, drawn and rendered, from scratch during live gameplay and can be recorded at crazy high fps, when compared to rendering the same footage after minor / light editing, when each frame in the video file is already fully drawn out and all the program needs to do is to put the file together again after going through and editing a few frames. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/604fuu/eli5why_does_rendering_gameplay_in_video_editor/ | {
"a_id": [
"df3kyf2"
],
"score": [
6
],
"text": [
"Rendering a video is doing more than just putting images back to back and then creating a video that puts those images on the screen. It also does a lot of compression to the video so that the file size is much smaller and can be transmitted across the internet without using up all of your data limit. \n\nLets do some quick math. There are 1920x1080 pixels in the majority of modern of screens (some people are even moving to 1440p which has even more more pixels). A single 1080p image uncompressed is just over 3 MB. At 25 frames per second you would reach a gigabyte in about 13 seconds of video time. Most videos are much longer than 13 seconds, yet we stream them for only megabytes of data at a time. \n\nThis is where the difference between rendering and real time come into play. An Nvidia 1070 can pump out terrabytes of operations and video every second. But the renderer will take these images and process them down into a file size that's manageable for the internet. A common technique is to take large areas of a similar color/pattern and just say, this area is this color/pattern. By doing this we can save a lot of data. Specifically pertaining to videos, we also try to determine which parts of the video are updated in each frame and only redraw those parts. All of this is expensive and the more compressed the file the more expensive it is.\n\nEdit: Here's a site that you can look at to see how big of a difference compression makes. _URL_0_"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"http://toolstud.io/video/filesize.php?imagewidth=1920&imageheight=1080&framerate=25&timeduration=10&timeunit=seconds"
]
] |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.