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6azerw | the big bang transformed the universe from an infinitesimal bubble that contained all matter and energy in existence into a titanic sized dimension. but where did the matter and energy condensed into singularity before the big bang come from? what actually made it change? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6azerw/eli5_the_big_bang_transformed_the_universe_from/ | {
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"Congratulations, you are now at the forefront of science!\n\nIn other words: we don't know. We're trying to find out, but doing so is somewhere between very hard and actually impossible."
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8djony | if meal delivery kit companies charging $10 per plate are struggling, how do the influx of companies offering $5 per plate expect to survive? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8djony/eli5_if_meal_delivery_kit_companies_charging_10/ | {
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"$10 a plate is a turn off to many people who can spend $3 on a microwave lunch from the grocery store.\n\nLowering price opens sales to a larger group"
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dsjqh2 | freuds oedipus complex | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dsjqh2/eli5_freuds_oedipus_complex/ | {
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"Grown men sexually attracted to their mothers or people very similar to their mothers (or other appropriate gender orientations). Read the Greek Myth Oedipus Rex and you will get a basic understanding.",
"Freud believed all men wanted to kill their father and have sex with their mother so they could have exclusive access to her. They’re jealous of their father. Subsequently, this has been found to not be the human universal that Freud believed it to be—probably just Freud’s own feelings. \n\nFreud was a very good writer and explainer of his ideas. He picked a great name for this phenomenon, which likely made it sound more coherent and universal than it actually is. That is, he called this the Oedipus complex, based on an Ancient Greek myth of Oedipus, a man who unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. The story: a king and queen (Laertes and Jocasta) got a prophecy that their son would kill his father and marry his mother. Therefore they decided on infanticide and put their son out to die of exposure. Instead someone found him and he ended up being raised as a prince in another city, not knowing his origins. Then a prophet told him that he was destined to kill his father and marry his mother. Horrified, he resolved to leave home and never see the people he thought were his biological parents again. While wandering, he met a man on the road and got into a fight and killed him. That man was Laertes, his biological father, though he didn’t know it. Then, he traveled to Thebes, a city currently under siege by a monster—the Sphinx. He who could solve the riddle of the Sphinx could free the city from it. Oedipus solved it, saved Thebes, and in gratitude their widowed queen, Jocasta, his real mother, married him and he became king of Thebes."
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a5vynf | what does over/under mean in terms of gambling, and is there a trick to understanding/calculating odds? | I hear it all the time but don't understand it. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a5vynf/eli5_what_does_overunder_mean_in_terms_of/ | {
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"An over-under bet is one where you bet whether a statistic in a game will be \"over\" or \"under\" a given statistic. For example, if the \"over-under\" number is, say, 4 goals for a soccer game, you bet if the total number of goals scored is over or under 4.\n\nWhen it comes to calculating odds, it depends. I can probably explain the math if you give an exact scenario though.",
"With football as you cite, the over under for a game maybe be 40.\n\nIf you think the combined score is going to be more than 40, you would take the over. vice-versa for the under.\n\n",
"So there's been a good explanation of what an over/under is, but there hasn't been any explanation about odds.\n\nWhen it comes to gambling, there's two parts worth considering. There's the proposition (i.e. what you are betting on to happen) and the odds (how likely it is to happen). An over/under is one of many different types of propositions, where the betting parlor sets a number for the total score in a game, and you can bet on whether the actual result is above or below that. You can also bet on who will win games, who will win games against the spread (a more challenging bet since a favored team can't just win, but has to win by at least a minimum margin), and so on.\n\nThe odds are listed after the proposition, and either take the form of +XXXX or -XXXX, and are considered in comparison to a reference bet of $100. If the odds are, for example, +200, then if you bet $100 you would win $200. If the odds are, for example, -200, then you would have to bet $200 to win $100. These numbers imply the likelihood of the proposition. The first case (+200) implies 2 to 1 odds against the proposition happening (33%). The second case (-200) implies the 2 to 1 odds of the proposition happening (67%)."
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9ormbi | why can't the penis be trained and built up like a bicep? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9ormbi/eli5_why_cant_the_penis_be_trained_and_built_up/ | {
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"Because it’s not a muscle. However, your kegel muscles ARE and can be trained, resulting in a larger and harder erection. ",
"the bicep is a muscle that can be trained, in the training the muscles rip apart and repair it self stronger\n\nthe penis is no muscle it is like a sponge, you can fill it with water as much as you want and drain it afterwards but it won't get more capacity\n",
"Because the penis isn't a muscle. It's full of spongy tissue that fills up with blood when you are aroused, making it erect. ",
"It cannot be built up like a bicep because the penis is not a muscle. As muscles are worked they develop tiny tears in their structure that encourage the growth of more muscle fibers that cause the tissue to become larger and stronger. But the penis is more like a balloon of spongy tissue which is inflated by blood. There is nothing there which can be \"worked out\" in order to cause it to grow larger."
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1j6bbr | why turning on your inside car light makes the angle of your rear view mirror change. | It seems like when I turn on my light in my car, my rear view mirror reflects the light above it and my ceiling, instead of showing behind my car. How does this happen? Please keep it like I'm 5, because mirror physics kind of confuse me. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1j6bbr/eli5_why_turning_on_your_inside_car_light_makes/ | {
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"It's because rear view mirrors have more than one reflecting surface. There is a flat mirror, of course, but in front of it there is also a wedge-shaped prism (just a wedge shaped piece of glass really) that tilts slightly down. This front surface is not that great of a reflector, so you don't notice it during the day. Light goes right through and you get a strong reflection out of the good old mirror.\n\nDuring the night, bright headlights behind you can make it hard to see, so you can tilt the mirror such that the reflection off the prism is what you see (and the mirror instead reflects the light upward so it's not in your eyes). And since the prism is not very good at reflecting, the headlights behind you are dimmer.\n\nI assume you only turn the light on in your car when it is dark outside. Thus, there is a good chance your mirror is tilted in the \"dimmed\" position, where the front (less reflecting) surface is point out the back window, and the mirror is thus pointing toward your ceiling light. Turn the light on, and it reflects off the back surface (mirror) and into your eyes."
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1wb5ln | why is being called an "intellectual" a bad thing? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1wb5ln/why_is_being_called_an_intellectual_a_bad_thing/ | {
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"This post is not asking for a layman-friendly explanation to something complicated or technical, so it doesn't belong here and it's been removed. Entirely subjective questions generally belong in /r/askreddit."
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cec76k | why glass panes in commercial doors have a tiny grid? | Especially in older buildings, doors with glazing often have a grid of tiny squares, about 1cm x 1cm, that appears to be printed or embedded in the glass
For example, older hospitals, schools, offices etc
I can't recall seeing it as often in more modern doors
Anyway, what is the grid for? Google is no help. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cec76k/eli5_why_glass_panes_in_commercial_doors_have_a/ | {
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"The wire grids (embedded in the glass) keep the glass from flying around in case of breakage.",
"It's one way of shatter proofing glass. The wires in the glass prevent the glass from breaking into as many tiny pieces and tends to hold them in place more instead of them flying around freely.",
"It's called wire mesh glass. It's actually weaker than normal glass due to the irregularities that the embedded wires create. It does however help prevent the spread of fire, as the wires help keep the glass in place so that embers and flames cannot pass through. It is not against many building codes to use it because when somebody crashes through the glass, the wires and attached shards of glass act as barbs. This has resulted in many deaths and major injuries.\n\n & #x200B;\n\n [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)"
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3c3wog | if a small child suffers burns over a large portion of his body, will the skin be able to grow as he grows? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3c3wog/eli5_if_a_small_child_suffers_burns_over_a_large/ | {
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"It happened to my brother during a house explosion. \nHe was shirtless at the time of the explosion so all his upper body and face suffered moderate to severe burns. \nThe first few years after the accident, you could tell by the skin tone of the previously burnt areas that something had happened, it was definitely lighter than the rest of his skin, especially in the places he had the most severe burns. \nHowever, growing up all the discolourations gradually faded away and his skin tone is even.\nWhen you burn your skin, it regrows. And it has the same features as your old skin, so it's elastic and it stretches as needed. It takes a while for it to strengthen, but it eventually happens. Especially for young children, who have a much higher cell regeneration rate than adults, the process is faster.\nI'm not an expert, but I've witness something as terrible as this happen to someone dear to me and I've watched the aftermath and the progress closely, so I figured I could be of help."
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4qx6qr | why is it so common to deny genocides? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4qx6qr/eli5_why_is_it_so_common_to_deny_genocides/ | {
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"From a legal standpoint, any admission of guilt can make you liable for damages, and that can get real expensive real quick. If the Turkish government said anything that suggested liability for the Armenian Genocide, the Istanbul airport would need another runway to cater for all those lawyers flying in from around the world. "
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3m1v5o | all of my car windows are foggy early in the morning. my neighbors' are not. why? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3m1v5o/eli5_all_of_my_car_windows_are_foggy_early_in_the/ | {
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"Also why does my windshield get ice on the inside but others' windshields don't?",
"You can reduce fogging with certain chemicals which serve to effectively reduce the dew point at the interface between the glass and the air. You don't have to buy expensive chemicals as saliva or semen will work just as well if wiped on in a thin layer.",
"You have leak. Water is pooled under your carpet somewere or in the boot. It cause the condensation",
"Does you car have a clear view of the sky and the neighbours doesn't? i.e. his is under a tree or something? You'll get a lot more condensation if heat is radiating into space.",
"In an outdoor lot your car might be in shadow in the morning while your neighbor is in light. The light warms the glass and evaporates the fog.",
"What ive seen so far, is that at night, your car still has warm air in it, while the outside temp is getting colder, this creates the condensation. By the time the sun has been out an hour or two, it should dissapear as the outside air is getting closer to the inside air temp.\n\nsolution for me is to open windows late at night to clear the car of warm air (or even just a smidge so it can escape).",
"My last truck allowed me to use my heater with AC on, for some reason this seemed to keep the fog out. I couldn't tell you why though.",
"Your neighbors go to your car windows and breathe all over them with their mouths wide open. ",
"Night-sky radiation. \n\nEverything transfers a bit of energy through radiation. When energy leaves something, it tends to cool down a teeny bit. As the energy radiates away from the surface of the object, a lot of times hits something and bounces back, or there is something else around that is also radiating energy and it absorbs it. \n\nBut not so on a good clear night. Here, your car is radiating a bit of energy upwards, and there is nothing for it to bounce off of, and nothing that is radiating back towards your car. So your car cools a little bit faster than the air around it. When this happens, moisture in the air condenses on your vehicle. It's the same reason why you get frost when it's cold. Same reason why there's dew on the grass in the morning. \n\nYour neighbour may have something covering up their car, such as a tree or carport, while yours is sitting on an open driveway or street. Or, your neighbour may be in the same situation as you, but gets the sun just a little bit earlier and it clears the condensation away. ",
"Maybe the use of Rain-X or other similar products has something to do with it as well?",
"This may not be your exact issue however dirty windows ice and fog faster than clean windows. The ice crystals/moisture cling to the rough surface of the dirt much easier than the extremely smooth glass. Make sure the glass is very clean both inside and out.",
"Well i usually crack a window a tiny bit, that way, the temperature inside, and outside the car become the same a while after parking, and i dont get any form of condenstaion. Fuck off. \nmy neighbours always asked me how i never got condensation and i showed them the trick. It worked for them too. So, always remember to crack a window when you park your car up for the night.",
"There are clearly deeper forces at work here.\n\nI'm no fortune teller, nor a sage. So you should ignore the following:\n\nYour car does not like you.\n\nYour neighbors clearly have a healthy relationship with their vehicle, and it shows.\n\nI don't know what you did to that car- maybe it wasn't your fault you missed the 3,000 mile mark for that oil change. Maybe it was the time you had a bunch of dust on the windshield, and you were like \"oh I'll just use the rinse\" and THERE WASN'T ANY RINSE!!! Or maybe you didn't fill up when your gas gauge hit 1/4 and you stressed your fuel pump. Do you remember the time the check engine light when on, and YOU DIDN'T CHECK THE ENGINE?!?! MAYBE it will turn off by itself. Yeah- MAYBE. Or how about that time you parked on a 3% incline and YOU DIDN'T EVEN TURN THE WHEELS TOWARDS THE CURB. Oh yeah- that time you drove past the Chevron (with Techron) station and bought CHEAPER GASOLINE THAT DOESN'T HAVE ENGINE CLEANING ADDITIVES!!!! Parked in the heat- didn't use SUN VISOR. That narrow street you parked on and DIDN'T EVEN CARE IF THE SIDE VIEW MIRROR GOT KNOCKED OFF. Did you check the forecast before you left the \"moon roof\" open? Have you ever even LOOKED at the moon in your car? I bet you don't even get into your car to look at the moon.\n\nBut besides that, [natha105](_URL_0_) is probably right.",
"It seems like a lot of these posts are failing to address this bit:\n\n > even after I wipe them off, they return to being foggy after only a moment.\n\nCondensation is a result of putting something cold in a (relatively) warm, humid environment. Think about what happens when you take a cold can of your favorite beverage outside on a hot day. Cold air can hold less moisture than warm air. So, the cold thing cools the air, which squeezes the moisture out, which leaves that moisture on the outside of the cold thing.\n\nIf your car is colder than the surrounding air, you get condensation on the outside of the window. If the inside of your car is warmer and more humid than the surrounding air (as would happen from your breath or a big open cup of hot coffee on a cold day), you get condensation on the inside.\n\nIf your neighbors have heated garages, their cars will be warmer. Or, if you live somewhere really warm, if you have an air conditioned garage and your neighbors don't, their cars will be warmer. Warmer cars don't have as much condensation. \n\nDepending on where you park, when you first turn on your car, you could well be blowing very cold air out of the vents and cooling down the window until warm air starts to flow. So, blasting the defroster could, in the short term, actually make the problem worse.\n\nThe easiest fix is to just let your car run for a minute before you take off. I had the same problem. So, a few minutes before it was time for me to leave, I would:\n\n* Start the car\n* turn heater to defrost with high fan\n* clean out any trash in the car and take it to the trash can\n* plug in my phone and start up my podcasting app\n* adjust speakers, mirrors, and seat\n* adjust fan speed to be quieter\n\nThat extra minute became part of my routine. It relaxed me and gave the defogger time to, well, defog.\n"
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52n1kk | why court judges let off obvious criminals with minimal punishment or none at all? | Why do court judges turn a blind eye to criminals that seam obviously guilty to the majority of people following the case? for example: the Brock Turner case, Affluenza teen Ethan Couch case, the George Zimmerman case and many other cases. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/52n1kk/eli5why_court_judges_let_off_obvious_criminals/ | {
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"It's \"obvious\" to an outside observer after a case has been filtered through the media.\n\nThere are facts that the public doesn't see, care about, or understand the importance of that factor into a case.\n\nEvery judge is different and has to make a decision based on the facts at hand, and not what outside influence wants him to.",
"Because judges operate under a rather strict set of rules, standards, and precedents. They don't just take a phone-in vote of TV viewers America's Got Talent style.\n\nWhat you see of a case in the media is only part of what the judge and jury see, and is usually presented to you with a significant bias.",
"The outcome of the Brock Turner case was somewhat baffling to me. However, the other two cases weren't as ridiculous as the media portrayed them.\n\nIn the case of Ethan Couch, his sentence wasn't unusually light. People vastly overestimate the typical sentencing for intoxication manslaughter. It's very normal to serve no jail time for this crime. Add in the fact that Couch was a minor, had no prior felony convictions on his record, and plead guilty, and jail time becomes even less likely.\n\nIn the case of Zimmerman, the prosecution simply failed to prove to the jury that Zimmerman was guilty of the crime he was charged with. That was the jury, not the judge. When the evidence is somewhat ambiguous, juries are instructed to hand down a verdict of not guilty.\n\nMy gut tells me there is also probably some bit of context regarding Brock Turner's trial that I'm unaware of. When these cases are interpreted by media pundits who go on to report on them, a lot of important legal and technical details are either lost or misinterpreted. \n\n",
"There's a difference between \"seeming obviously guilty\" and \"being guilty beyond a reasonable doubt\"."
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1lhxn3 | why jewish ancestry only counts through the mother's side of the family. | I've been told this all throughout growing up, as my father is of Jewish descent. Explain? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1lhxn3/eli5_why_jewish_ancestry_only_counts_through_the/ | {
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"Because you always know who your mother is. ",
"I dont have a source for this, and its probably not true, but I remember reading somewhere that Romans would often attack Jewish settlements and rape women, so the children would be Roman and not Jewish. To counter this, it was decided that Jewish ancestry come from the mother."
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5s5bx6 | why does holding your breath / straining seem to help when performing an action, such as benchpressing, of lifting something heavy? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5s5bx6/eli5_why_does_holding_your_breath_straining_seem/ | {
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"Formers Competitive Powerlifter here- As far as performing a \"big lift\" goes, i.e. benchpress, deadlift, squat, etc: These movements, more when they are performed with heavy weight for either one or a few reps, require body stability, or \"tightness\". When you breathe during a lift, your body shifts, however slightly. This is bad for the end goal of moving the weight. \n So for example, the benchpress. A tense body, especially including the core, legs and shoulders, is extremely helpful in moving the weight. A breath will cause these muscles to temporarily loosen, which can be detrimental to the performer being stable. The slightest shift can cause leverages and the lifter's \"base\" to be much less strong. I myself was taught to take a big gulp of air and hold my breath until the lift was completed. \n It should be known, however, that while this method is effective for moving a weight, it is not healthy in the long-run.",
"I believe what you are looking for is the [Valsalva maneuver](_URL_0_).",
"Yep- a valsava will close the vocal folds, therefore giving you your pelvic floor, diaphragm, and vocal folds for a closed system to increase pressure and therefore build postural stability. ",
"Using the valsalva maneuver increases intra-abdominal pressure, stabilizing your core and protecting your spine. This is another major benefit of this technique, especially as you advance in weight.",
"Holding the breath braces your body by creating intrabdominal pressure. The diagram contracts, moving slightly into the abdominal space. The organs there are shifted and pressed against the lower back and abs. The abs and lower back contract to counter this pressure. This creates a sort of hydraulic support inside you.\n\nOn a squat, I inhale deeply and start the negative as I begin the hold. I hit the bottom of the movement and push off. I then exhale through the \"sticking point,\" that point where the work begins to get difficult. I exhale fully and evenly as I push hard. Exhaling like this adds more tension to the areas that holding the breath tensed and the exhalation increases output.\n\nYou need that hold because there gets a point where your body can't support the weight well because the weight is too heavy unless you do. After a while you'll find you need a belt for very heavy lifts. A good belt increases the intrabdominal pressure by giving the abs and back something to press against during the hold.\n\nI can do about 50% more reps at higher weights (80% 1RM) with a belt than without the belt. This is because my primary movers for the squat are outpacing my ability to support the weight in terms of strength."
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414qki | is it possible for the entire population of a country to be self employed? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/414qki/eli5_is_it_possible_for_the_entire_population_of/ | {
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"Could a country run its economy in such a way there there are no formal \"jobs\"? Certainly. Even today, many positions that appear to be jobs are actually contractor positions. There's no theoretical reason this couldn't be taken to the extreme.",
"Not if you want the country to function. Construction, law enforcement, and government are essential to a country and those fields can not be made up entirely of people who are self employed.\n\nAlso a self employed person will still usually need people to work for them and/or another business to implement their product. You can't start your own catering company without any employees and you can't be a freelance designer without companies buying your work.\n\nAn entire country of self employed people means that no business ever has more than one employee. I don't see how that could be remotely feasible.",
"Sure. In fact, for most of human history, our entire population was self-employed. It was called hunting and gathering. Later many converted to farming.\n\nWhat you seem to be suggesting is, \"If one day all of our products and services are created by some sort of fanciful AI, can everyone still work?\" and of course ,the answer is no - if we did, then not all our products and services would be created by some sort of fanciful AI.\n\nAn easier way to think about this possibility is just another in a long line of efficiently improvements that have reduced the # of humans needed to produce something we want/like/need.\n\nAt every stage, we have a collective opportunity to either a) work less, since less work is required or b) work the same amount but consume more. Note that when I say collective, I'm not implying any sort of political system, I'm simply saying, \"the species as a whole\". How those decisions get made could be one individual at a time, could be a giant committee, a vote, or something in between.\n\nIf we were, through some political mechanism, decide that we were going to work less, instead of consume more, then you've solved your problem."
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b32i7r | how is the umbilical cord connected inside the developing baby, and what happens to those connections (veins/arteries) after the baby is born and the cord is cut? | Also, what's on the other side of the belly button in an adult? Any remnants of the once life-giving connections? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b32i7r/eli5_how_is_the_umbilical_cord_connected_inside/ | {
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"The part of the cord that you see is like the outside rubber sheath of a cable. Inside, there are wires (blood vessels) [that join bigger vessels in the baby's body](_URL_0_). Yes, these [vessels persist- click for \"inside of belly button\" picture](_URL_1_) in adult life but don't contain blood. ",
"As far as I know, the blood vessels in the umbilical cord are connected 5o blood vessels in the lower intestine of the baby. When it's done developing, the blood vessels in the lower intestine connect inside the stomach and the vessels on the outside are no longer needed. After the baby is born and the cord is severed, the cells of the umbilical cord go into apoptosis. I would imagine a similar thing happens to the mother. ",
"The umbilical cord contains one vein and two arteries, the vein Carrie's oxygenated blood from the mother to the fetus and it enters into the fetus' circulation via the ductus venosus that connects to the fetus' liver, this then goes into the inferior vena cava, and into the right heart. Since the lungs arent open to air, the circulation bypasses the fetal lungs via the ductus arteriosus which connects the pulmonary artery (the one right after the right ventricle, heading to the lungs in a person who has access to the atmosphere) to the aorta (the biggest vessel, that the left ventricle flows into) and then to the rest of circulation. Unoxygenated blood is returned from the fetus to the mother via the two umbilical arteries that split off near the illiac arteries (around the groin, top of your femurs area). There is also some blood flow that passes from the right atrium to the left atrium in the fetal heart through something called the foramen ovale. All of these (ductus venosus, ductus arteriosus, and the foramen ovale) close shortly after birth due to exposure to higher levels of oxygen and difference in pressures in the lungs. In like 25% of the population (rough guess but its surprisingly high) the foramen ovale doesnt close ever. The two ductus' keep constricting and I believe they actually turn into some form of connective tissue that helps with structure, but I'm not 100% on that one. It can take anywhere from 24 hours to 7 day for them to close, and in some babies with congenial heart defects, we actually give medications like indomethacin to keep them open until the baby can receive corrective surgery. \n\nHope that answers the question! \n"
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27euw1 | what is the difference between a domesticated animal and a tamed animal? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/27euw1/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_a/ | {
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"A domestic animal has had changes through selective breeding at the genetic level to produce a species that is more compliant or otherwise useful for human needs, and is typically reliant upon humans for survival. \n\nTaming is simply a process of socialization, by which an animal is made tolerant to human presence. The amount of taming possible in an animal can vary from species to species.\n\n",
"Domesticated = the species is not likely to eat you\n\ntamed = an individual is less likely to eat you, its cousin will definitely eat you."
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39unfc | when did "wanted - dead or alive" and a reward were stopped? | And why ofcourse? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/39unfc/eli5_when_did_wanted_dead_or_alive_and_a_reward/ | {
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"Shooting someone based on an ID made off a poster seems like a terrible idea, no?",
"Back when one sheriff might cover a whole county vigilante justice was a good way to help reduce the workload. If a bank robber wandered onto the wrong farm and got shot it was less work the sheriff had to do. Organized modern police forces and the right to a fair trial put a stop to the practice since just randomly shooting people who look like criminals is frowned upon."
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21xeon | why are recipients of big gifts (like cars) taxed? | Why isn't the gifter allowed to pay the tax on it? My Google-fu only gave me results explaining what it is, not the logic behind it. The logic is what confuses me.
Edit: I should clarify. I understood why someone needed to pay taxes on it (to avoid people being paid in stuff and not paying any taxes). What I didn't get was why it had to be the recipient paying. Got some great answers, thanks! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/21xeon/eli5_why_are_recipients_of_big_gifts_like_cars/ | {
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"Lawyer here! In the U.S., if the gift is truly a gift, the donor will pay the gift tax, and the donee will take the gift tax-free.\n\nIf the item is a winning of some sort, then it's income, and the recipient takes the item subject to income tax.\n\nWhether something is taxed as income or as a gift is usually more of a source of anxiety between the parties to the transaction, rather than for the IRS. In most cases, the Service gets its pound of flesh either way. If your friend gives you a car, the difference between income tax you would pay and the gift tax that he would otherwise pay is probably too small to make the IRS want to get in the middle of the fight. In that case, the Service is probably fine with whichever way the parties want to characterize the transaction.",
" > Why isn't the gifter allowed to pay the tax on it?\n\nHe is! But paying someone else's taxes counts as income for the person whose taxes are being paid. So if you win a $15,000 car, and owe, say, $2,000 in taxes on it as a result, if the contest sponsor pays that $2,000. . . you've just increased your income by another $2,000, triggering additional tax liability.\n\nWhat frequently happens is that the contest sponsor gives away not just the car, but enough cash to cover all applicable income taxes, including on the cash. There's an equation you can use--which I can't be arsed to look up at the moment--that will let you calculate just how much you need to give so that the person is effectively left with just the car and no cash after all taxes are paid."
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3bjql7 | how do scandinavian countries rank higher in economic freedom than america. | Why is it that Scandinavian countries have much more economic freedom with all the regulations and government interference? Canada even has a higher ranking in economic freedom than the United States. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3bjql7/eli5_how_do_scandinavian_countries_rank_higher_in/ | {
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"In those countries economic mobility (the ability to become rich or middle class if born poor and stuff like that) is much better than in the US because of, not in spite of, those countries' government regulation and interference in the economy. \n\nMany economists argue that these policies often hurt growth. However, many economists also think that levels of income inequality and wealth such as those seen in the US also hurt growth.",
"First of all, you should cite your source. \n\nBut because this is the Internet, I'll assume I know what you are talking about and respond anyway. Obviously, this is subjective but those countries have a more deliberate commitment to social welfare than the US does. This typically means that the government taxes the bejeezus out of everyone and spends the money on social services. Therefore, much of the things denied to the poor here are provided or guaranteed by the government. I presume the 'economic freedom' metric you are asking about measures the degree to which you are able to 'pursue happiness' without being constrained by financial concerns. The idea of paternity leave (being able to take a year off work and have your job there when you get back) is inconceivable here. ",
"So far none of the answers are accurate. I assume you're referring to the Heritage Economic Freedom Index. You should be aware that taxation and government spending (i.e. a strong social safety net) is considered to be a *negative* according to those rankings, so that is obviously not the reason Heritage ranks them so high.\n\nI'm not sure why that other person mentioned economic mobility, when it's not a factor in the rankings as far as I can tell. [And I'm not even sure Scandinavian countries have better economic mobility, given that there are still some remnants of the feudal/aristocratic past.](_URL_2_)\n\nThere are basically two reasons:\n\n* A culture that emphasizes civic duty.\n* Relatively fewer regulations.\n\nThe first leads to [very low rates of corruption and a respect for the rule of law](_URL_3_), especially property rights, which is very important to the rankings. It also explains why, for example, Norway can have a nationalized oil industry and not fuck it up like Venezuela. Of course, it also probably explains why these countries have such good social safety nets in the first place.\n\nThe second one is fairly self-explanatory, and allows these countries to score high on [Regulatory Efficiency](_URL_0_) and [Open Markets](_URL_1_). The fact that these countries have relatively fewer regulations is probably surprising to most Americans, but there you have it. It's also why anyone who claims social democracies are \"leftist\" or \"socialist\" are idiots and should be ignored, and this includes both the American left and right. \n\nNumbers from the Heritage ranking. Notice how the Scandinavian countries all have worse \"limited government\" scores but generally better rule of law, regulatory (except \"labor freedom\") and open market scores.\n\n\nCountry | Overall Rank | Rule of Law scores (property rights / corruption) | Limited Government scores (government spending / fiscal freedom) | Regulatory Efficiency scores (business freedom / labor freedom / monetary freedom) | Open Market scores (trade freedom / investment freedom / financial freedom)\n-------|----------|----|----|----|-\nDenmark| 11 | 95 / 91 | 1.8 / 39.6 | 97.4 / 92.1 / 87.6 | 88 / 90 / 80\nUS | 12 | 80 / 73 | 51.8 / 66.2 | 88.8 / 98.5 / 76.6 | 87 / 70 / 70\nSweden | 23 | 90 / 89 | 19.2 / 43 | 87.9 / 54 / 85.5 | 88 / 90 / 80\nNorway | 27 | 90 / 86 | 43.8 / 52.1 | 92.1 / 48.2 / 81.7 | 89.4 / 75 / 60\n"
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66rse9 | why is it impossible to swallow rapidly over and over with nothing in your mouth, but chugging water is easy? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/66rse9/eli5_why_is_it_impossible_to_swallow_rapidly_over/ | {
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"Swallowing solids and liquids works slightly differently.\n\nSwallow with an empty mouth and pay attention to what you're doing: The tip of your tongue presses against the roof of your mouth just behind your teeth, then 'rolls' along the roof of your mouth backwards towards your throat.\n\nBasically, it's two actions: You open your throat and your tongue forces your food towards it.\n\nWhen you chug water, you don't do that. There's no need to force the liquid to the back of your mouth, because your head's tipped back and gravity takes care of that for you...basically all you're doing it rhythmically opening and closing your throat.\n\nSo, swallowing with an empty mouth is a complex action, and because you're not swallowing anything but saliva and air, you have to manually 'reset' your tongue between swallows. ",
"Technically, these answers are all a little off the mark. You can indeed swallow similarly to when you chug water. When you take a single, dry swallow (or swallow a bite of food) your voice box (larynx) raises and moves anteriorly to protect your airway (one of several safety mechanisms built into our airway). When you take sequential sips, your larynx remains raised, allowing for small movements and pressure from the bolus (water in this case) to open the muscle at the entrance to your esophagus (upper esophageal sphincter). Try swallowing and keeping your larynx high, then continue swallowing without fully \"resetting\" the system. It's easier to do with water, as swallowing is largely reflexive, but it can be done volitionally as well. ",
"I can. I swallow air. I then get a giant burp. I learned this when I was kid to fake burp. ",
"The first swallow, you're swallowing spit. Second swallow, there's no saliva for your tongue to push into your throat, so the peristalsis reflex (reflex where esophagus squeezes in a wave to push food down) doesnt happen.",
"Am I the only one to try to swallow rapidly over and over just now?",
"Medical speech-language pathologist: swallowing is triggered by sensory receptors in your throat. When performing a 'dry swallow' with no food or liquid in your mouth, there is no material to 'activate' these sensors. The small amount of saliva in your mouth will usually allow you to do it once or twice, but once that is gone, most people are unable to swallow until more saliva is built back up.\n\nThis is also why it is very difficult to prevent yourself from swallowing once food/liquid goes into your throat. Once these sensors detect a bolus, the swallow response is triggered. If, on the other hand, that sensory system is not working as it should, then you may end up with a delayed or absent swallow response. That's when I come to see you. "
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2zqebs | why do a lot of part-time jobs require you to fill out a questionnaire that asks you many questions that are seemingly irrelevant to the job itself? | Edit: The questions Im talking about are the ones that say something and then ask you to say whether you strongly agree or disagree or in between. Examples include "when you look at society, you have hope for mankind", "you are always aware of whether you're in a good mood or bad mood", "your coworkers would describe you as a risk taker". Things like that. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2zqebs/eli5_why_do_a_lot_of_parttime_jobs_require_you_to/ | {
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"What sort of questions do you mean exactly? Usually just because it doesn't look like it is job related, it might very well be, but it will be easier to be more precise in answering your question if you could give some example of the questions you have encountered.",
"To reduce the number of interviews. I was in charge of hiring at McDonald's for a while and we would receive dozens of applications a week. Not enough time to conduct 30 interviews every week so you need to narrow them down somehow.\n\nFun tip: there was a \"perfect score\" on the quiz. I can only speak for our McD's quiz but I suspect this is the case for many jobs. The quizzes are just graded by a computer and there are no honesty points. The questions would be stuff like, \"I always do extra credit work when available: 1(strong disagree) to 5 (strong agree)\". The most clever people stuck to only 1's and 5's responses, answering what was obviously the better answer. When we would set aside blocks of time for the interviews, we would just skim off the top ~10 respondents for that week. The poor saps who answered honestly or modestly didn't make the cut. I suggest that whenever you do these questionnaires, unless it's for a professional position, to fuck being honest and instead just focus on trying to give the best answer that the employer wants to hear. If they ask if you like working in groups, yes you love it. If they ask if you think someone should be fired for stealing a pack of gum, yes you do. These responses will be likely reviewed by a computer, looking to eliminate applicants, and not \"judged\" by a human.",
"Citation? Examples?\n\nYou might not think that asking where you will be in 5 years is relevant to a job you plan to leave at the end of the summer, but they want to know whether you are going to be leaving, or if they should be thinking of you as a potential employee to hire.",
"Behavioral and personality questions. Basically checks to see if you are a complete knob or not and if your questions are not up to snuff you get tossed. Why would I want to waste my time interviewing someone who thinks mankind is doomed, has no clue what their mood is, and co workers think you are a dick? ",
"I had to do this when I worked at Kmart 15 years ago. I had to say that yes, I would call 911 if someone stole a candy bar. And say that I would skip my paid breaks or work unpaid time if the store was busy. Which is illegal. So once I started and they told me I had to skip my break, I would walk away and say \"nope, that's illegal\" and go take my break. The manager was left fuming and I left smiling knowing I would sue their asses if they actually made me skip my break."
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nxbc6 | how do i tell if a diamond is real? | I found a diamond earring while on the bus, but I can't find the owner. Is there some simpe test I can conduct to tell if it is real? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/nxbc6/how_do_i_tell_if_a_diamond_is_real/ | {
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"Go to a jeweler and ask! I learned everything I know about shiny rocks by sitting at a counter and yakking with the jeweler about cuts and grades and inclusions and colors and such while my ex fawned over rocks. It'll take you only a few minutes of your time to learn how to spot a diamond substitute. A counterfeit designed to pass is much harder. \n\nJewelers are often surprisingly chill about letting strangers handle and pour over thousands of dollars of their shinies with a jewelers loop. Which I guess is unsurprising if you consider that many of them are shiny-rock nerds.",
"Xray it. It shouldn't show up because they are radiolucent. If you aren't scheduled for an xray, try jumping off something high. Remember to stow the diamond somewhere first, near the breakage. I suggest your left arm, as it's easy to break and not that useful (in comparison to other bones, e.g. neck, spine etc).\n\nIf that's not OK (you don't live near a hospital for instance), then you can try to measure the refractive index of the stone. It's high, much higher than that of glass or cubic zirconia. To test this, draw a small dot with a pen on a piece of white paper. Place your diamond over the center of the dot. Look directly down on it and if your stone is not a diamond, you will see a circular reflection in the stone. This relies on the diamond not being mounted, and being large enough to see through accurately.\n\nIf you have just returned from hospital and didn't read the second one before your broke your arm, I apologise.",
"Hold it in a flame. If it burns to nothing, it *was* a diamond. :P",
"There is a [machine](_URL_0_) that can test it for you. Most Jewelers will have one.",
"immerse it in corn syrup. if it is glass or cubic zirconia, it will cease to sparkle. if it is a diamond, it will still shine.",
"Diamond is the hardest mineral on earth, as most of us know. It has a 10 on the mohs hardness scale, which is 40x as hard as a 9 (corundum [ruby, etc]). Test the diamond by giving it scratch tests, if it's scratched at all, it's not a diamond.",
"Fair answer - Diamond is the hardest and one of the most stable / unreactive substances known. So, there isn't a simple test. Go to a jewellers.",
"Use UV light to look for flaws. ALL diamonds have flaws. If it doesn't have any flaws it is fake.\n\nBut still, you should really go to a jeweler. If the first one says it is fake go to another. Those guys are shady sometimes... ",
"Just like you test for gold, bite it. Chew it, and if all your teeth breaks, it's definitely diamond. ",
"Try eating it. You can't eat things that aren't real. Plus, your stomach acids will shine it right up!",
"Wait forever. If the stone is still there, it's a diamond.",
"If it gets you oral it was diamond enough.",
"If you go to a jewelry store a gemologist can tell you if it's a diamond usually just by looking. My dad owns a jewelry store and he's GIA certified, and he tends to be able to do this. He also looks with a loupe and usually if there aren't any flaws (carbon) it's a cubic zirconia (fake). He also uses a diamond-scratcher (it looks like a stylus) made out of corundum, which has a hardness of 9, so it will scratch a CZ but glide over the surface of a diamond. If you get one and feel any bite when you test, it's a CZ. \n\nThe simplest test, but I've found it only really works on larger stones, is to breathe on the stone. If it fogs up with your breath, it's not a diamond. ",
"Nice try, diamond thief.",
"Go to a jeweler and ask! I learned everything I know about shiny rocks by sitting at a counter and yakking with the jeweler about cuts and grades and inclusions and colors and such while my ex fawned over rocks. It'll take you only a few minutes of your time to learn how to spot a diamond substitute. A counterfeit designed to pass is much harder. \n\nJewelers are often surprisingly chill about letting strangers handle and pour over thousands of dollars of their shinies with a jewelers loop. Which I guess is unsurprising if you consider that many of them are shiny-rock nerds.",
"Xray it. It shouldn't show up because they are radiolucent. If you aren't scheduled for an xray, try jumping off something high. Remember to stow the diamond somewhere first, near the breakage. I suggest your left arm, as it's easy to break and not that useful (in comparison to other bones, e.g. neck, spine etc).\n\nIf that's not OK (you don't live near a hospital for instance), then you can try to measure the refractive index of the stone. It's high, much higher than that of glass or cubic zirconia. To test this, draw a small dot with a pen on a piece of white paper. Place your diamond over the center of the dot. Look directly down on it and if your stone is not a diamond, you will see a circular reflection in the stone. This relies on the diamond not being mounted, and being large enough to see through accurately.\n\nIf you have just returned from hospital and didn't read the second one before your broke your arm, I apologise.",
"Hold it in a flame. If it burns to nothing, it *was* a diamond. :P",
"There is a [machine](_URL_0_) that can test it for you. Most Jewelers will have one.",
"immerse it in corn syrup. if it is glass or cubic zirconia, it will cease to sparkle. if it is a diamond, it will still shine.",
"Diamond is the hardest mineral on earth, as most of us know. It has a 10 on the mohs hardness scale, which is 40x as hard as a 9 (corundum [ruby, etc]). Test the diamond by giving it scratch tests, if it's scratched at all, it's not a diamond.",
"Fair answer - Diamond is the hardest and one of the most stable / unreactive substances known. So, there isn't a simple test. Go to a jewellers.",
"Use UV light to look for flaws. ALL diamonds have flaws. If it doesn't have any flaws it is fake.\n\nBut still, you should really go to a jeweler. If the first one says it is fake go to another. Those guys are shady sometimes... ",
"Just like you test for gold, bite it. Chew it, and if all your teeth breaks, it's definitely diamond. ",
"Try eating it. You can't eat things that aren't real. Plus, your stomach acids will shine it right up!",
"Wait forever. If the stone is still there, it's a diamond.",
"If it gets you oral it was diamond enough.",
"If you go to a jewelry store a gemologist can tell you if it's a diamond usually just by looking. My dad owns a jewelry store and he's GIA certified, and he tends to be able to do this. He also looks with a loupe and usually if there aren't any flaws (carbon) it's a cubic zirconia (fake). He also uses a diamond-scratcher (it looks like a stylus) made out of corundum, which has a hardness of 9, so it will scratch a CZ but glide over the surface of a diamond. If you get one and feel any bite when you test, it's a CZ. \n\nThe simplest test, but I've found it only really works on larger stones, is to breathe on the stone. If it fogs up with your breath, it's not a diamond. ",
"Nice try, diamond thief."
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7y8byn | what is actually happening with the body when you "catch your breath"? | How does this process differ between a person who is in shape and someone who is not? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7y8byn/eli5_what_is_actually_happening_with_the_body/ | {
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"Being out of breath is caused by high acid levels in the blood: carbonic acid from carbon dioxide (CO2) and lactic acid. Both are produced by strenuous exercise. You catch your breath by exhaling CO2 and inhaling oxygen which is needed to convert lactic acid to water and CO2.\n\nThis process doesn't differ much between people in or out of shape. A person who is in shape may have a higher lung capacity and their muscles may convert lactic acid faster if they're trained."
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zqrku | why does the government care so much about busting athletes who use performance enhancing drugs? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/zqrku/eli5_why_does_the_government_care_so_much_about/ | {
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"I think one part of it is the fact that some of them have lied to Congress, such as Roger Clemens. Perjury is a serious thing, so that's why they went after Clemens. For his lying, not just his steroid use.\n\nAs for why they're interested in performance-enhancing in the first place, I'm not sure.",
"Most of the major sports are government protected monopolies and as monopolies the government has a vested interest in making sure they function in a proper way.",
"All of these answers are very cynical (and I tend to agree), but there must be an actual reason other than showmanship and bullying.",
"[Here's](_URL_0_) a similar post from a few months ago (specifically about baseball) that has some pretty good answers to your question. \n\nI believe the general consensus was that the MLB was a government allowed monopoly, and that, \"while cheating at sports isn't illegal, cheating at business is.\" ",
"Trafficking in controlled substances is illegal, and it makes the gov't look bad when rich and powerful athletes do it with impunity.\n\nAlso, there is a public good issue. For every top athlete using PED's under the supervision of a physician, there are a 100 aspiring athletes who would do anything to get a shot in the pros. You let athletes use PED's, you get a bunch of high school kids buying dodgy drugs in back alleys because that's the only way they think they can make it. "
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"http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/t5lmg/eli5_why_did_congress_even_care_about_steroid_use/"
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9htxrk | why is it so hard to produce an alcohol-free beer that tastes like the real thing? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9htxrk/eli5_why_is_it_so_hard_to_produce_an_alcoholfree/ | {
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"Because your sense of taste is quite sensitive, so it's basically the same as trying to produce a robot or puppet that looks and moves exactly like a live human.\n\nIn addition, if you think about it, you're asking about an alcohol-free beer that tastes like the real thing, but you're implying that it also has to look and foam like a beer, because you're not going to even taste some methylene blue liquid that doesn't even have foam, even though the color and lack of foam may be what's required for it to taste like beer.\n\nSo, basically, alcohol has a certain taste; it's possible to replace it but not well enough to satisfy our impossibly demanding beer-snob standards.",
"Because the methods of removing alcohol change flavor. You can heat distill, which drives off volatile compounds and alters flavor. You can vacuum distill, which provides better results, but requires more equipment and cost. Reverse osmosis can be used, which is much higher cost.\nTwo of them produce pretty decent results, but cost a lot more. There isn't a huge market for expensive beer with no alcohol if you can get an iced tea or soda for half the price. There are some good ones out there, but I'm sure the profit margin is lower."
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4mq70f | what exactly is it that windows can do that my mac (osx) can't? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4mq70f/eli5_what_exactly_is_it_that_windows_can_do_that/ | {
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"It's mostly that there are more games and programs written for Windows only so you can't use those. Windows and Mac use different file types so a dev would have to write in both for you to use it with both Operating systems",
"1. It's incredibly frustrating for little OS differences that users of either system learn as common sense to not hold on the other platform. This is why I and others hate Macs, and therefore never recommend them. It's not a good reason, but it is what it is.\n\n2. They aren't a great price for their specs. \n\n3. Everything is locked down or inaccessible. Apple doesn't like you getting into the nitty-gritty of their OS, it's more like firmware.\n\n4. Everything's pre-built, so you can't swap out parts easily. \n\n5. I'm not fond of the fact that if you need Apple's assistance with anything, you need to pay them. Even their warranty plans only provide a discount for repairs, in a fair number of circumstances.\n\n6. This isn't exactly what you asked, but there are a lot of problems using Macs in a networked-user environment.\n\nEdit: And games, like other users have mentioned. \n\nEdit2: And a smaller user base means less/weaker community support for troubleshooting, compared to windows.\n\nThis is more of an argument against switching from Windows to Macs and vise-versa, you might as well stay with what you know for personal use. Work environment though? Managing a work environment? Fuck Apple.",
"For most people, there just isn't that much difference. Both have browsers, spread-sheets, word processors, photo editors. Both have thousands and thousands of apps.\n\nThere certainly are some apps or games that can run only on one or the other, and if that's true for you, it might be enough to make the difference.\n\nBut for most people, the main difference is that they have used one more than the other, so they are familiar with that one and like it better."
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1xa0cx | why has adobe reader become so slow over the years? | I remember a few years ago I was always delighted to receive documents in PDF format because they would open quickly and I could easily browse through large documents quickly. Also at that time, I positively *dreaded* receiving documents in Word files because it took *forever* to launch Word, load the document, and load new pages and figures as I scrolled through a large doc.
Now it seems to be the opposite, even though Adobe Reader *insists* on updating and forcing me to restart my computer almost once a week! When I open even a simple 1-page doc without figures, Adobe Reader takes forever to open, and once open often freezes for 45-60 seconds, and even scrolling within a single page seems to be a burden for it!
Meanwhile, I can open a 100-page Word doc with color figures and it launches in half the time, doesn't freeze, and I have very little trouble scrolling around.
What happened?! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1xa0cx/eli5_why_has_adobe_reader_become_so_slow_over_the/ | {
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"Adobe software: needs to update and expand frequently because of the opportunity for malicious intrusions to your computer. Adobe is also relatively infamous for making software \"bigger\" than it has to be.\n\nWord software: rarely needs updates, as there are relatively few security concerns.",
"Too many 'security' updates, too many updates for badly made features that most of the people won't use. But most importantly, the team in charge of developing Adobe Reader is doing a terrible job, because even with what I said previously, in no circumstances a simple PDF reader should be THAT slow. Maybe they don't care, maybe they don't want to spend some money to start fresh. Sometime there is no clever explanation... even the best devs can fuck things up. I would simply suggest that you switch to another reader, there are plenty better out there.",
"I recommend something like Sumatara PDF or Foxit Reader instead, significantly faster and less bloated.\n\nI do my best to avoid Adobe software wherever practicable. I'm not a fan of their software bloat, sneaky background processes / constant update pinging, feature creep, and myriad other little annoyances."
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4xbde2 | why does it feel good to move your eyes and look in a certain direction? | Like when you stare off or move your eyes to look at something and it just feels good. Almost like your eyes are relaxing. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4xbde2/eli5_why_does_it_feel_good_to_move_your_eyes_and/ | {
"a_id": [
"d6e7tlk"
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"score": [
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"text": [
"Huh? Well you're eyes a muscle relaxating any muscle is going to feel good. Also looking in a certain direction is flexing your muscle which also feels good."
]
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[]
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|
8vr28x | why will it take months to rescue the thai boys trapped in a cave? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8vr28x/eli5_why_will_it_take_months_to_rescue_the_thai/ | {
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"Waters have risen since they entered the cave, as such they need to scuba dive out. The dive is so perilous in its flooded condition that only special rescue divers have traversed it so far.\nSo you essentially need to train 11 year olds to dive and then line up specialist divers to accompany them. You could probably do one dive per day with one child once they are actually trained."
]
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||
28miqy | why don't empires exist any more? | Also why doesn't a powerful country, such as USA, take over land for resources? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/28miqy/eli5_why_dont_empires_exist_any_more/ | {
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"Have you heard of 'The Middle East'?\n\nEver notice certain atrocities are corrected if there is some profit to be had there? While similar and sometimes worse go unnoticed in areas that wouldn't be as profitable?",
"They still do, just under different titles.",
"They pretty much do exist, just not in the same way as they used to. Look into some of the shady stuff major corporations do to third world countries.... Or the US election system...",
"we even have colonies still...\nand last I checked, across the pond, they still happily refer to themselves as the british empire\n",
"The USA is an empire in everything but name- and don't forget how much of it actually *was* taken over for its resources. The entire Southwest was taken from Mexico from the terms of the treaty to end our war with them. The relatively peaceful annexation of Hawaii was the last gasp of the West being won. But we still took territories- the only reason the Phillippines are an independent nation is because we let them vote on whether to become one or remain a U.S. territory. \n\nNot to mention, the U.S. has enough clout to put a military base in most regions of the world, and anything we want that other countries can produce is something we're economically powerful enough to essentially force them to sell to us. At terms that are completely favorable to us.\n\nWe are an empire. But the term \"Empire\" isn't popular, so we don't call ourselves one. Now, we're not an *Imperium*, that is, a monarchistic government ruled by an Emperor (consipiracy whackjobs notwithstanding), but the people with that kind power nowadays know to call thmselves more humble things, like Chairmen and CEOs. It goes over with us filthy proles better. Like we call propaganda \"Public Relations\", mercenaries are \"security contractors\", and so on.\n\nSo, we're not an \"empire\". We're a Federalist Republic, and a Liberal Democracy, and we just want to help spread Freedom to all the people of the world! They can thank us once they're done loading the trucks.",
"There's a huge amount of reasons, to list a few:\n\n- Empires, technically speaking, rely on the idea of one monarch ruling over multiple peoples or kingdoms. Given the unpopularity of absolute monarchy and ideas of the ethnostate, the idea of empire clearly has lost a lot of appeal\n\n- The idea of large, sprawling empires became very unattractive once it became associated with atrocities such as slavery and genocide, as it did in from the 16th century onward. A modern state would hardly want to associate itself with those things\n\n- Rapid communication across the globe makes it incredibly hard for a nation to invade another without the other nation receiving some sort of foreign support, making empire-building far more costly and difficult than it once would have been\n\n- The Government and/or nobility no longer controls most primary industry in most countries, and after The Wealth of Nations, no one really believes that the wealth of a country is the size of its treasury, so taking land over isn't profitable anymore, but actually a cost in almost all circumstances\n\n- Modern logistics, communication, finance and a lack of piracy means that goods can be traded without the need for monopolies and direct military support\n\n- The heavy tariffs and embargoes of the modern period have fallen out of favour, which previously drove the need for empire as almost all countries are willing to trade at almost all things\n\n- Industrial production and modern agriculture lessen the need to find the sources of particular goods. For example, porcelain and silk can now be produced anywhere",
"They do, they just don't outright say it due to political correctness.\n\nThe US certainly does have a global economic empire in a sense. Russia and China are also building their own regional empires. (ex-Soviet states and Africa respectively).\n\nedit: syntax"
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4r91nx | how does cold water make a watery blur on my glass? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4r91nx/eli5_how_does_cold_water_make_a_watery_blur_on_my/ | {
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"Are you asking about condensation? I'm not sure what kind of \"watery blur\" you mean otherwise.\n\nCondensation occurs when air with water vapor contained in it is cooled to the point where that water can no longer remain in the air (cold air can hold less water than warmer air)."
]
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6rureu | why do so many people think they could be geniuses or very clever if they did put the effort in? | i notice a lot on social media that people say they that they used or be clever and then stuff happened and it stopped them? Or bring up how smart they used to be? Surely not everyone is as clever as they make out they are and the further you go through education the harder the content is and so mustn't people start to differentiate? it really confuses me | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6rureu/eli5_why_do_so_many_people_think_they_could_be/ | {
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"text": [
"I think everyone thinks they're above the average.\nAnd have a selective memory of themselves to show themselves in the best light."
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8dm1gh | when and why did 8 hours of sleep become the standard for a solid night’s rest? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8dm1gh/eli5_when_and_why_did_8_hours_of_sleep_become_the/ | {
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"I don’t know when, but many sleep studies later and they agreed 8 hours is optimal. But that’s for the average person, some need less and some need more. ",
"It is thought that we originally slept in 4 hour increments, and obviously always had to have people tending to a fire for the majority of our existence(Society and everything is relatively recent). \n\nI would think 8 hours of sleep came around the time of post-industrialization, and that it really hasn't been standardized till recently. \n\nFor some people 8 hours is also too much, it really isn't a standard, just a guarantee that you'll get enough.\n\nAs you age you actually need less sleep. \n",
"Eight hours is an average. The expected range for healthy adults is 7-9 hours a night. A very small number of people need slightly less sleep (6-7 hours a night) or slightly more sleep (9-10 hours a night), but in general getting less than 7 hours a night is where one starts to see evidence of sleep-related concerns like memory problems, low mood, irritability, etc. Insufficient sleep rather quickly contributes to health concerns like increased blood pressure, poorer regulation of blood sugar levels, poorer immune response, etc. So it's kind of a big deal. Likewise, consistently needing 10 hours or more a night to feel rested also indicates that something might be wrong and needs to be investigated.\n\nTo address something in other comments, there is very little evidence that polyphasic sleep is natural or even minimally healthy. Why? *People can't tolerate studies long enough to evaluate outcomes*. That's a major red flag. Polyphasic sleep schedules *kill other mammals like rats*. Polyphasic sleep \"works\" because you become so sleep deprived that your body prioritizes NREM3 and REM sleep every time your eyes close for more than a few seconds. It's a last-ditch mechanism to stay alive, not a healthy or sustainable lifestyle. The thing about sleep deprivation is that a symptom of severe sleep deprivation is losing insight into how terribly incapacitated you have become.\n\n[Here is one article] (_URL_1_) and [another article] (_URL_0_) debunking some sleep \"hacks.\""
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50sg5n | what causes scintillating scotomas/occular migraines, and why do only some people suffer from them? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/50sg5n/eli5_what_causes_scintillating_scotomasoccular/ | {
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"It's a thing called Cortical Spreading Depression. People who suffer from this specific kind of migrain usually experience SS before headache. Neurons from the occipital lobe (vision) actually get \"inactivated\" in a synchronous way, then this depressing wave goes forward eventually (not in all cases) involving the areas implied in sensorial and speech tasks, leading to transitory speech impairment and sensorial deficits. "
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28eaul | audio eq'ing | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/28eaul/eli5_audio_eqing/ | {
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"All sounds come with different frequencies. A sound's frequencies determines its pitch. Frequencies are measured with the Hertz. We can hear sounds ranging from 20 Hz to 20 kHz. Equalization is the changing of the loudness of those certain frequencies."
]
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||
5ylai8 | why does stirring helps dissolve things faster | Like when eating cocoa cereal and mixing it makes it dissolve to the milk faster | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ylai8/eli5_why_does_stirring_helps_dissolve_things/ | {
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"It's all about surface area. The actual process of disolving only happens when a molecule of the the stuff that's disolving is next to a free gap between two water molecules.\n\nWhen you stir it, you move the already saturated liquid away, and allow unsaturated liquid to move up next to the cocoa. It also moves the cocoa around so that all of it is in contact with the milk, and not with other molecules of the same stuff. \n\nOn reflection, moving through a crowded room is much easier if everyone else is moving. The gaps to disolve into the crowd just seem easier to find.\n\n",
"By stirring you increase the amount of solvent molecules that come in contact with the solute. Faster and more turbulent stirring means things dissolve faster due to this very reason"
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dttmal | why do your eyes move about when you stare at an object? | A lot of focus exercises mention staring at an object for a few minutes but some freaky stuff happens when I do this and I was wondering if anyone had an explanation for this.
For one thing my eyes won't keep still at all, they dart, drift or make tiny movements and I have to keep pulling them back to the object, the corners of my vision darken and cloud, objects in my field of vision turn into streaks of light, a shadow of colored light hovers about the object I look at, the object itself keeps fading, what gives, is this an eye muscle thing, a brain thing, some vestibular nervous system thing, I'm honestly curious. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dttmal/eli5_why_do_your_eyes_move_about_when_you_stare/ | {
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"Eyes do dart around - that's called a saccade (the eyes have 4 basic movements) but when they dart around uncontrollably it's called Nystagmus however that condition pertains to eyeball movement. \n\nHowever, you are talking about doing focus exercises so what you are experiencing is neither saccade nor nystagmus. \n\nIt is called Troxler's Fading or Troxler's Effect and it is a kind of \"side-effect\" of staring at something for a period of time."
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297162 | why do beer commercials advertise how cold their beer is as a selling point? isn't that up to how i store it? | example: _URL_0_ | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/297162/eli5_why_do_beer_commercials_advertise_how_cold/ | {
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"Cheap beer tastes terrible, but the colder it is the harder it is to taste. If they advertise how good it is when it's cold, then it's now *your* fault that it tastes bad when warm, since you're consuming it wrong. ",
"Pro-tip: if the best thing a beer ad can say is that it's cold, it's a shitty beer. Cold dulls flavour.",
"Refreshing means water. The more refreshing, the more watered down it is. ",
"I work in a beer distribution center. Shit, it gets sent to us warm and it only has to be stored at 60 degrees. When it gets loaded onto the trucks, it sits overnight in our warehouse at around 80 degrees.\n\nLike others have said, it's all a marketing trick. It's a bunch of BS too. Like I said, it never stays cold like they want you to think. It doesn't even really matter all that much in the end though. The beer is fine no matter how we store it (it only matters how cold it is when you drink it), it's pretty much just a placebo.",
"I like a cool beer as much as the next guy, but a beer isn't a good beer unless it's also good at room temperature."
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36j482 | pirate bay megathread | This is the megathread for all things Pirate Bay related, included the recent court-mandated domain closures.
Please post all Pirate Bay related topics in here for the time being. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/36j482/eli5_pirate_bay_megathread/ | {
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"I love how the government spends so much time to seize it, and then another one pops up an hour later. ",
"Here's an Eli5 request: I understand people can download a current Pirate Bay site mirror to a flash drive, but how are the mirrors all able to update with new content? \n\nSo if you have someone submitting a torrent for CuteCats.mp4 on .am, for example, how are all the other mirrors updated with this new torrent data? Is there one central server?",
"So can anyone give us the rundown of what happened?",
"Can someone just give me a rundown of what pirate bay is? I gather it's a site that governments don't like. But what's it doing and why do people start it back up so quickly?",
"Why was the government now able to seize the site?",
"ELI5: I thought the switch over to magnet links was supposed to work around the legality problems with torrent files and prevent another shutdown/seizure.",
"What does it mean when the feds 'seized' the site? How does one remove something from the internet? What does it mean to shut down a domain?\n\nSorry for the incessant questions ",
" Pirate Bay's existence is NOT the result of a want for piracy. This is the misconception that has the industry execs spending HUGE amounts of time and money trying to control the symptom of a much larger issue.\n\n People, like water, follow the path of least resistance. If the resistance becomes too much, we make a new path. Napster, Limewire, Bearshare, were all birthed as an affront to the system that made you spend $22.99 on a CD that had two songs on it you wanted to hear. Want to hear good indie bands? Tough shit. You get to chug the corporate swill and be happy to pay for it. Filesharing allowed people to get select songs from select albums quickly and conveniently. No more slogging through Best Buy.\n\n \"But Lobsterbib, surely the attraction to pirated music was driven by how free it was?\" Nope. iTunes is proof that cost of music isn't the deciding factor in piracy. Convenience is king. People will pay for anything so long as they can get it instantly. Ticketmaster thrives on this fact alone. We'd pay the Devil himself if it meant we could get Emma Watson delivered.\n\n If the industry could spend the same effort on combining their IPs into a singular venue that peeps could pay for and receive instantly, Piratebay would see its traffic PLUMMET. Wanna see crime drop? Legalize and regulate drugs. Want to see piracy drop? Make it easier to get content for fuck sake.\n\n The other night I wanted to show my GF The Neverending Story. Turns out, no one is streaming it. All the video stores have closed so I'd have to drive all the way to Wal-Hitler to buy a $9.99 DVD in 4:3 ratio. Great way to spend an evening, amirite? I would PAY to see the movie if it were there! Get off your asses and let me give you my money!\n\n So, until the elephant in the room is addressed, don't be surprised that it's pirating every episode of 30 Rock while you try to smash its wireless router.\n",
"You think the government would do something a little better with their time. Like the war on drug.... oh wait.",
"I want to know why we're all rooting for TPB? Is it just because we like free stuff or what? ",
"This is all fun and games, but I can't access Pirate Bay in Portugal, my Internet company has blocked it. Anyway around this?\n\nEDIT: it*",
"I'm kinda tech savy, but I don't under stand the word \"seized\" in this context.\n\nWhy is there a redirect to _URL_0_ even after _URL_1_ got seized? I'd understand that they grabbed permissions of the domain name and therefore no redirect could happen, but this seems not to be the case.",
"I love the token Time Warner pop up I get as soon as I click on torrent files in Pirate Bay - Good try boys \n\n",
"A little bit of a meta question, but what's up with all these 'megathreads' popping up lately? Are these necessary / requested? Not hating on the idea, I just find it a little peculiar.",
"ELI5: Why can't they touch the load balancer and transit-routers instead? How are those being \"hidden\"?\n\nI get they could get more, but wouldnt that be a much bigger hit than any domain or VM \"seizures\"? Isn't that hardware that would need to be replaced?\n",
"why are the feds repeatedly using the same strategy that has been proven to be futile? It takes them thousands of times longer to remove the site than it does for one person to upload it again.\n\nare they just retarded, or is this a small piece of an elaborate scheme to undermine piracy that we are unaware of? what the fuck is going on? i want answers. i don't care if they're grounded in reason or pulled out of your ass, just give me answers.\n",
"What's a torrent? I get that PirateBay helps you \"torrent\" stuff for free, but I don't understand exactly how that's different from streaming a show on Hulu or something.",
"If the pirate bay domain got seized why does .se redirect to one of the other domains? Wouldn't they need to code something into the html page of the page on server that .se directs to? If it was seized by some sort of authority why would they allow it to redirect?\n\nWhy was it such a big deal to stop it being in .se? Because they are lax on copyright? Wouldn't russia be a better domain?",
"How was TPB originally set up? Was it one dude with a lot of content or was it a group effort? Basically I guess how was filesharing and pirating discovered? I need a history.",
"For the people not getting the hydra logo. The swedish government seized The_URL_0_ and _URL_0_. Refering to greek mythology, cut of one head, two new appear. In this case, 4.",
"Kind of a general question but can they ever wipe out Pirate bay completely...assuming the people behind Pirate bay never give up on the website?",
"Why aren't any of these type of sites just hosted on a Native American reservation in the U.S.?",
"Why are they not registered on the namecoin system yet? Seems like a convenient method for those who care enough. ",
"How much does it cost to launch a satellite? Can they host the site legally in space?\n\nWhat happens if they don't use a domain and everyone visits an IP address? What sort of legal action can occur against the IP address?",
"Kinda related to the topic of the pirate bay, but I was using it and happened to come across an album I like, by Kanye. So I downloaded the torrent and get a letter the next day from our ISP (Verizon) saying to cease and desist. Did they send me the letter because I have been doing it too often or because Kanye's record label Def Jams is the one monitoring me. I thought it was Def Jams because I have been guilty of getting other albums yet no cease and desist letter. ",
"As far as my understanding goes, it's illegal to seed torrents, but not necessarily to download torrents. Something about protecting people who download things, unaware they're getting pirated stuff. Is there any truth to that?",
"A couple questions I haven't seen here:\n\n* How do people buy domains from different countries? Do they live there?\n\n* Who is doing this? Random people who like pirating or a staff? \n\n* Do they get paid? Ad revenue?\n\n* If anyone can download the website and upload it to a server? Why are there only official sites and not a bunch of useless copies?",
"No one is talking about media consumption being ruled by major corporate networks and that small media companies need a way to level the playing field: Putting their movies in 720p on torrent, and offering 1080/4k for $3.99 directly from their own website.\n\n/only movies I'm talking about in this example.",
"Question, if a site was made that simply stated the current pirate bay URL, would it be able to be taken down? Seems like they wouldn't be breaking any laws and it would provide a constant clear path to the site.",
"Here in the uk, tpb is blocked. However, with this closing and rebirth of the site under a different url, providers do not block the new one.\n\nClosing the domain has the exact opposite effect.",
"Instead of spending all this money tracking down/seizing property/domains etc why don't the feds just give that money to the music/film industry and we all are happy. ",
"The big thing in this event isn't that they siezed the \"_URL_0_\" domain. The big thing is that they siezed A domain that isn't doing anything more illegal than google is. It could have been any domain really, but they did start the beginning of internet censorship in Sweden, which is a problem.",
"People will pirate if:\n\n1) piracy is the only way to obtain the goods. Examples would be TV shows or games not available in your country.\n\n2) they simply cannot afford to pay. Examples would be poor countries where the media industry set the price too high. $60 for a game is fine in Europe, but not in Afghanistan.\n\n3) pirate sites beat legal sites in quality, availability and comfort. If I know I can find what I'm looking for on a pirate site in good quality, why would I bother to go check multiple legal sites with multiple clients, yadda yadda..\n\n4) prices across the board are too high on legal sites. This one is tricky, since what people perceive as a \"fair\" price depends on many factors.",
"This goes to show that the people rule the world. No leader or government can ever stop us. It's now at the internet age the people take back the world. It's a very exciting time to be living. ",
"At this point the take down attempts are just advertising, bringing a bunch of new users to the pirate-bay.\n\nAll that the anti-piracy efforts seem to do is provide an evolutionary pressure to become really resilient.\n\nIt also has produced a niche-industry that makes money fighting piracy, so wiping out piracy really isn't in their interest.\n\nGoing after the users isn't really an option, since that strengthens/causes the Pirate Party.\n\nPiracy probably could have been avoided as a mass phenomenon, if we had a fairer society, that doesn’t teach people the lesson that *ruthless & merciless wins the race*.\n\nThe financial sharks that screwed over so many talented but naive programmers in the dot-com-bubble at the turn of the millennium, did their share to produce the robin-hood/rebel mentality.\n\nI think Piracy is a net positive, because it produces the pressure for improvements in business-practices as well as innovation.\n\nIn the face of overwhelmingly powerful corporations it seems to be that causing chaos and disorder is the only voice loud enough to heard.\n\nFor me Piracy still has to kill DRM and Geo-blocking, then it can go away.",
"So I understand magnet links greatly aid in reducing size of the site and thus making it easier to transfer, and magnet links are downloaded through P2P.\n\nBut where are the files themselves hosted? For example, if I want to download Album X, where are the mp3s actually stored? What if no one is connected to you via p2p because its a very low popularity album? And how does this all translate to a .torrent file?\n\nNot very good with networking, I only really understand what p2p is due to some games having p2p online servers.",
"What can I do as a layman, to help the PiratBay stay alive? ",
"The porn industry did it before anyone else: Make your content free and easy to access, and people will come in HUGE numbers, which you can capitalize on with ad revenue. Sell ad spots on your sites in a real-time, auction-style system which ensures fair market value for ad spots, and you make a fortune.\n\nThe moment major movie and TV studios get this, will be the moment they save themselves from oblivion. At this rate, movies are so terrible for the most part that most people can't justify paying for them, anyway.\n\nTelevision is going the way of the dodo as well. 95% of TV shows are absolutely terrible. Most TV stations only exist because people are forced to subscribe to them in order to get the channels they actually want. If cable companies allowed everyone to choose channels 1 at a time, I believe at least 75% of TV stations would go bankrupt in a heartbeat. \n\nNetworks like HBO understand their customer base. Create decent, high quality programming that isn't constantly interrupted by the same 3 commercials which are very obviously aimed at specific, easily-identified demographics (denture cleaners, life insurance, stair elevator/escalator chair thingies advertised during The Price Is Right, for example), and people will love you for it and pay a premium for your service. \n\nFor everything else, like the ridiculous reality shows that plague the airwaves, just take all that crap and put it on a site like pornhub for non-adult content, make it free, and sell the ads. \n\nThis is the only way you'll ever truly negate the demand for piracy.\n\n",
"What is pirate bay and why does reddit love it so much?",
"Is somebody arrested because of this?"
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4dlk5g | why is it when we 'delete' items they don't really get deleted? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4dlk5g/eli5_why_is_it_when_we_delete_items_they_dont/ | {
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"Because there's not generally a particular need to do so. The computer simply marks the space is 'unused' (or rather, it deletes the information that says 'there is stuff here') and will later reuse that space for new information, at which time the old information is toast. \n\nRemoving the pointer is quick, you're just wiping out a couple pointers that say \"Something is here.\" On the other hand, actually deleting 5 gigs of data would take as long as writing 5 gigs of data (since you are effectively writing over it). So to optimize performance, the 'write over to delete' and 'write over to replace with new data' are simply combined into one process. ",
"Computer storage can be thought of as 2 seperate things. First of all there's the actual 1s and 0s that make up your data. Then there's a list that the computer keeps where it's put all your data.\n\nThink of it like a warehouse. You have all the shit on the shelves, then you have a list that tells the warehouse worker what shelf to look at to find speisfic things. \n\nWhen your computer deletes something, it removes the thing from the list. It does not take it off the shelf, it just takes it off the list.\n\nThat shelf is then listed as \"empty\" and at some point in the future the computer will put something else of that shelf, right overtop of what used to be there. \n\nThe secret here is that the computer might take quite a while before it uses that \"empty\" shelf space, there's lots of shelf space that's not in use at any give time, so it might use some other spot. If it does that your old data stays on the shelf for days or weeks.\n\nThe listing is the critical part as it manages what space is full, what space is available, where the computer can find what thing. All of the important information for storing and retrieving something is found on the list.\n\nThis is where the warehouse analogy kind of breaks down. Computers don't deal with physical things, just 1s and 0s written down on a disk. Unlike physical objects, computer data can just override one thing with another thing. So there's no need to actually remove anything ever. You just flag the space as available and some day you write data to that space. "
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6p84y5 | why does ambient temperature exacerbate the 'burn' from chilli? | Tonight I had some very hot sauce on my dinner. Some time later, after the inferno in my mouth had largely subsided, I had to load logs in to my wood fire. The ambient heat from the fire lit my mouth back up like I had just eaten more hot sauce; why is this so? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6p84y5/eli5_why_does_ambient_temperature_exacerbate_the/ | {
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"It seems to me that this can best be summed up by evaporation. Lets say you pour capsaicin (The compound in hot peppers that gives them their heat) all over your face. Over time, the burning will cease as the capsaicin is lifted off your skin by the oil your skin produces, assuming you don't irritate the process by rubbing your face. Inside your mouth would work the same way, except instead of oil, we are talking about the dilution of the capsaicin with saliva. ",
"Likely it stuck around in your mouth, as it is an oil and does not dilute easily, and while you had gotten used to the slightly diluted amount at the ambient temperature you were not used to the remnant amount at the temperature of the fire environs. So the fire heated up your mouth enough to make it noticeable again.\n\nOr it could be psycho-somatic. Peppers *literally* make your mouth tell your brain it's on fire. Then thinking about fire made you remember the peppers and that was more a memory.\n\nFun fact: Wasabi is a 'hot sauce' like peppers but is water-soluble, so it dilutes much faster and the burn can be more intense without lasting as long."
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9v0y78 | what is the difference between linux and bsd? | I have been told by many people that it is not safe to use Windows XP on a computer with internet access anymore and that I need to switch. I do not like Windows Vista, 7, 8 or 10 and I do not like Mac OS X, so I am considering switching to a Unix system. The ones recommended to me were Slackware, Debian and ArchLinux (Linux) and FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD.
I have used 3 computer operating systems in my life, Mac OS 8 and 9 on a PowerMac G3 (our family’s first computer, from 1998 until 2005), Windows XP on an IBM NetVista and then my IBM ThinkCentre M55p which I am on right now, and Solaris at work. Mac OS 9 was my favorite of them all. Thanks for your answer! | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9v0y78/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_linux_and_bsd/ | {
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"Both BSD and Linux are open source Operating systems based on UNIX. Modern BSD OSs are descended from a UNIX distro directly while LINUX started out as an attempt to rebuild something like UNIX from scratch. Linux in its various distributions is far more popular and widely used. BSD, especially FreeBSD does enjoy some popularity as a desktop OS, but is more widely found embedded in devices and appliances. It also indirectly forms the basis of the modern Apple OS.\n\nWhile the various BSD types are very secure and arguably more secure than Linux or Windows, they are not exactly the sort of thing I would recommend to a novice enduser.\n\n\nIf you are familiar with Solaris than UNIX is not completely a new thing to you, but I would not expect to be able to transfer too much knowledge to BSD and even less to modern LINUX distros.\n\nDebian probably will be the most user friendly of your choices followed by the other Linuxes and then the BSDs.\n\nA lot of it comes down to personal preferences and taste.",
"linux and BSD are different derivatives of unix. they have partial software compatibility, for example freeBSD includes compatibility layers that let it run a lot of software that was made for linux. they're released under different licenses that determine how you're allowed to modify and redistribute them. depending on what you want to do with it, the differences may be negligible or life-altering\n\nyou'd probably get the best answers from the people who made those recommendations, by telling them what hardware you have (or intend to get) and how you want to use it",
"If you want to try out a distro before \"buying\" make a live disc and test run the os to see if it will play nice with our rig. I like using old HW to reuse is to keep it out of the tip/landfill.",
"So, Unix was not the first operating system in existence but it is arguably the most influential to the modern day. With the exception of Windows/anything Microsoft makes, OS's today are either direct descendants of the Unix code or heavily inspired by its design philosophy. This was largely due to its design philosophy, a very modular code, a single filesystem even with multiple drives, and probably its most defining feature, the fact that \"everything is a file.\" Want random data? The file /dev/random always spits out random data for you to use for whatever you want. Want to clone one USB drive onto another? Read the entirety of one usb drive file and write it to the other USB drive file. The key thing was that the way to interface with anything in the computer was to do so through a file, and while it wasn't actually \"writing and reading\" to a file under the hood, it looks that way from the top. \n\n\nAnyways, in the 1970s, UC Berkeley got its first computer running Unix, students and staff immediately began making software for it. People became interested since this software had very useful tools in it, so this began with some at Berkeley compiling this software into what they called Berkeley Software Distribution, or BSD. This was not an operating system as this point, but rather just tools to run with Unix, just as we have software today we download. \n\nAnyways, a newer computer is soon installed at Berkeley and is not completely compatible with Unix. So the solution was that students completely rewrote the code to Unix, essentially now making BSD its own operating system, and most importantly, a free version, as before this, AT & T owned Unix. AT & T later tried to sue Berkeley for it but Berkeley won the case and this allowed for BSD to live on as free open source software. Berkeley slowly stopped developing BSD as Linux becomes a dominating Unix successor, but some of the open source community still keep on the project as successors such as OpenBSD.\n\nLinux originates from a Finnish lad by the name of Linus Torvalds, who made a Unix inspired OS for a largely irrelevant platform back in the early 90s. He didn't expect it to explode as much as it did, but he put the code for it into a mailing list and it actually got popular. Linus mixed his own name with that of Unix to call it Linux, and the rest is history.\n\nIts important to mention that neither one of these are a single operating system. Unix has a very modular design philosophy, that is to say you can make changes to one aspect of the OS without breaking everything else. So this results in many versions of the actual operating system itself. BSD tends to be a bit more consolidated and developed more as an OS, while Linus mainly focuses at least what he does on the kernel of the OS, the core part running everything, while leaving the specifics of its implementation to others, resulting in there being 10 thousand versions of the damn thing. \n\nI suggest Linux over BSD. More support these days. LUbuntu was mentioned somewhere and its a solid choice. ",
"So I don't really see a good ELI5 so the real answer is nothing at the ELI5 level. Both are fully functional desktop environments though common Linux distro's have more hardware support, cleaner desktops and more commonly used preinstalled apps, and generally a more out the box stuff just works feel. Both are free. And both support most of the same software you will want to use. Outside that you can get into religious arguments over which license is more \"free\", is a release or distro better, or the same even internal to Linux fights, i.e. are ports v. packages v. source v. apt v. rpm v. $etc better for third party applications, etc. From a business perspective Linux has better third party application support, from a technical perspective Linux has a larger user base hence easier to find technical support, from a legal perspective BSD has a better license, and from a security perspective BSD probably slightly edges out Linux.\n\nHonestly though just buy Windows 10; it's generally better for everything outside niche uses.",
"Windows seven has a \"XP mode\" where (I think) you get win7 updates & security but get to keep using the look and feel of XP. You can also run an XP virtual machine over win 10 pro hyper-v.. if the XP vm gets a virus you just roll it back"
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4vyyxt | why do you have to ask the us government for permission to land on the moon? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4vyyxt/eli5_why_do_you_have_to_ask_the_us_government_for/ | {
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"You don't... *if you aren't an American Company*.\n\nThere is an international treaty in place that says (paraphrasing) that the Governments of each country are required to take responsibility for the actions of any of their companies in space. So the US Government is effectively the gatekeeper to the moon... for US companies.",
"Any US company or individual that wants to send ANYTHING into space has to ask the US for permission. Companies and individuals in other nations have to get permission of their governments. The reason for this is that the Government is held responsible for all actions involving space made by their citizens or from within their borders. Anything majorly crazy can and would be taken as an act of war so they want to watch things fairly carefully. "
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22flci | why don't some companies allow international shipping? | I know that some companies don't ship internationally because of the extra costs involved, which makes sense, But I was browsing a third party reseller that shipped other similar items overseas, except those from the company I wanted! Can someone explain why a company wouldn't allow even a third party to take care of the shipping costs and hassle involved? Money is Money, right? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22flci/eli5_why_dont_some_companies_allow_international/ | {
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"Part of the reason is not just the shipping itself but the legalities of supplying goods to a particular country where they have differing laws especially on distance trading. The prime example of this is Germany where the consumer has huge rights and many companies lose cases against German law due to this. Some smaller companies just refuse to ship there therefore removing this obstacle to them as a company because if a German citizen finds an alternative way of getting the product the retailer is not held liable in the same way."
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d0opv9 | how can american judges waive laws as they see fit? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d0opv9/eli5_how_can_american_judges_waive_laws_as_they/ | {
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"The judge ruled based on what the law is. Environmental concerns can be waived to secure the border. Congress explicitly passed a law to prevent environmental regulations to stop border wall construction over 20 years ago.\n\nIllegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996\n\n_URL_0_\n\nYou should consider changing whatever sources you are using because you are being fed propaganda. Judges have repeatedly ruled in this fashion. These environmental regulation lawsuits are just frivolous lawsuits to try to slow the government down. Anyone telling you otherwise is lying to you.\n\nHere's a similar ruling from earlier in the year.\n\n_URL_1_"
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1wv6fm | why is the windows phone so unsuccessful compared to other smartphones? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1wv6fm/eli5_why_is_the_windows_phone_so_unsuccessful/ | {
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"Small App market mostly. ",
"I'd say, mainly because of the association with Microsoft. \n\nAlso, questionable design features. And the fact that it doesn't really bring anything new to what is essentally a Google v.s. Apple battlefield at the moment. Yes, I do realise that that is a very general thing to say. ",
"It came into the market late and is behind in multiple aspects. The app store is catching up but still behind android or ios. There are also some features that aren't available but should be. Give it time, they are gaining ground in the market.",
"Developers don't build for Windows Phone because nobody has one, but then nobody has one because there's no apps and its just stuck in a cycle now.\nMS really need to fund a good app store to get their sales going and get some great exclusive apps.",
"Bing rewards was just released for iphone and android but \"coming soon\" to windows phone. Microsoft owns bing and windows and chose to release bing rewards for their phone last. Wtf",
"An overly simple answer would be the old saying \"too little too late\"",
"Microsoft tried to popularize stylus-oriented touchscreen phones and tablets back around the time Windows XP was released. It didn't really catch on, of course, and Microsoft seems to have convinced themselves that touchscreens would never be more than a niche product. \n\nAnd they also apparently didn't grasp that interfaces and screens made for finger use would be a hell of a lot more popular. Not too many people want to pull out a stylus every time they do something with their phone.\n\nI remember a statement from a Microsoft employee made after the iPhone was released claiming that resistive touchscreens (like those used on MS's older smartphones & tablets) were superior because they're more precise than capacitive touchscreens (like those used on modern touchscreens). That's true, and resistive screens are better if you want to write with a stylus like you would with a pen - something most modern smartphones still tend to struggle with but older MS products did well. But capacitive touchscreens are much more responsive to the touch of a human finger, and again, MS completely failed to see that this was the killer feature for touchscreen devices.\n\nA historical footnote here is HTC. While Apple was putting the finishing touches on the iPhone, HTC was developing the original [Touch](_URL_2_) smartphone. The Touch featured HTC's then-new TouchFlo interface, which added a finger-oriented launcher to Windows Mobile. (It's also the ancestor of the SenseUI interface used on their modern Android phones.) The Touch was launched in the same month as the original iPhone. But of course, it was still saddled with a resistive touchscreen (albeit one that was at least somewhat better for finger usage), and the rest of the OS and apps were still largely stylus-oriented. HTC seems to have understood that finger-oriented interfaces were the future well before Microsoft, but they were just a small Taiwanese manufacturer without the resources to build a full OS and ecosystem.\n\nAnyway, Microsoft sloooowly started to get with the program. In mid-2009, they released Windows Mobile 6.5, which added a finger-oriented launcher based on the interface of the [Zune](_URL_1_). But that was merely catching them up with what HTC had done with TouchFlo for Windows Mobile *two years* earlier! And nevermind catching up with the iPhone, or even the [HTC G1](_URL_0_), the original Android smartphone. (HTC was moving on!)\n\nBy this point, Microsoft was in full-on \"SHIT SHIT WE FUCKED UP\" mode, and president Steve Ballmer admitted as much. In late 2010, they released Windows Phone 7, finally giving them a modern touchscreen-oriented system. Originally called Metro, it's essentially the same as their current touch UI. (It's now officially called 'Microsoft design language', but the name Metro is still widely used.) But by this point, the iPhone had been on the market for over 3 years, and Android for 2. The market was already starting to saturate, and iOS and Android now had robust app markets. Windows Phone has never been able to make up for lost time in that department, and hasn't been able to close the gap in public mindshare, either.\n\nFast forward today, and consider Windows 8. In a lot of ways, Windows 8 is the desktop equivalent of Windows Mobile 6.5 - a touch-oriented front end bolted onto an OS and app ecosystem that is still very much built for more precise mouse pointer control. But of course, Windows is FAR more dominant on the desktop than it ever was on phones. And even if Windows 8 has its detractors, it's introducing Microsoft's touchscreen interface to a much broader audience. It also brings a degree of app compatibility - some .NET-based ~~Metro~~ apps can run on both Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. Microsoft's hope is that they will be able to leverage this familiarity to produce more sales of Windows Phone devices. \n\nLooking forward, it will be interesting to see what shape Windows 9 takes. Will they successfully blur the line between their touchscreen-oriented interface and their traditional desktop interface? And will they be able to blur the line between the desktop and mobile worlds, both in experience and in app selection? If they eventually manage to pull that off, they might still have a chance of catching up in the smartphone race.",
"Basically, late to the party.\n\nOnce Apple \"created\" the market (in the sense that \"smartphones\" such that they were at the time were a niche business product (see Blackberry) until the iPhone came along), Android quickly took the other model (give it away to anyone) to success.\n\nBlackberry failed to adapt to the new touchscreen concept, Palm made a go at it with Pre, and Windows were late to the game. For Windows Phone to gain traction, it had to be **noticeably** better than iOS or Android **AND** convince developers to develop for it.\n\nThere's nothing wrong with Windows Phone technology, but it's like bringing yet another avocado dip to the SuperBowl part when two damn good and large avocado dips already exist - there's no compelling reason to switch.\n\nOnce Apple and Android had built their leads, no amount of catch-up will appreciably displace them. Apple chose the \"closed\" platform option, Android chose the \"open\" platform option, thus Windows Phone would have to try to take turf to two established and millions-of-users-strong competitors using their own business model with technology and UI that is not appreciably better (or worse) than what's already out there.\n\nIf MS had poured a very, very, very unreasonable amount of money on bribing developers and marketing, they could have made a go at it. Maybe.\n\nTLDR - it sucks to be late to an emerging market.",
"Former windows phone 8 user here. I am in IT and from an IT perspective the phone operating system is very immature. The UI looks cool, but it is not very functional in terms of getting work done. I have been down voted to hell and back in the WP8 subreddit for the following, but I will say it again.\n\n\nThe outlook to exchange integration is a joke. Despite it being a Microsoft product connecting to a Microsoft, you can configure your Activesync in fewer steps in Android, FireFox OS, and iOS then what you can in WP8. \n\n\nYou have live tiles in WP8, but they contain very little useful information. You have quicker access to information from widgets in Android. Email as an example again. In WP8 you just get a little number next to the icon telling you that you have new mail. In Android, the default mail client has a nice mail widget that can sit right on your home screen that has subject and some of the first sentence of the email. At a glance you can see if it is email you need to read or if it is mail that can wait. You can't do that in WP8, you have to go into the outlook to get the mail preview. \n\n\nThe app market. Plenty has been said about this. Sure there are apps in the WP app market, but the app market itself stinks. It is very difficult to find a good app through all the junk that is in there. \n\n\nThere is a lack of customization. Beyond changing the color and size of your background and tiles there isn't much else you can do. There is an app that you can download to make skinned tiles, but again not much else you can do beyond that. As opposed to, say, android where you can change launchers, keyboards, even entire roms. If you know what you are doing you can have a lean fast super responsive android system. \n\n\nI have to go to work so I can't really add too much more. I hate the keyboard in wp8. I struggled so much with that. Anyway, there is my two cents on the issue. "
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2ekgpw | why is there such a sitgma against living with your parents in your early 20s, specifically in the u.s.? | From what I've seen, it seems that the U.S. has a big stigma against those who live with their parents, even those in early twenties. However, in Asia (at least in Korea, Japan and China) from what I've seen, it is standard to live with your parents until late ish twenties, and no one bats an eye.
Why is it that the U.S. (or any other part of the world?) has such a stigma against living with your parents in your early 20s?
Inspired by my current situation. Currently a senior in college, but accepted a return offer for a nicely paying job from my internship (will be getting paid more than my parents). Parent's home is a pretty close commute to work, and it has plenty of extra space for me to be in. Parents are trying to get me to live with them to save money/costs. I'm personally not sure what to do.
I get the whole if you want a gf, it's going to be awkward for them to come visit whenever they want, but that doesn't seem to serve as a problem that much in Asia. Are there any other reasons? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ekgpw/eli5_why_is_there_such_a_sitgma_against_living/ | {
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"A lot of people i know live with their parents for various reasons off and on throughout their lives. \n\nNothing wrong with it around here.\n\nOnly issue is getting laid may be tricky while at home.",
"because of American \"independence\" you're expected to leave the house at 18. whereas asian cultures are more \"communal\"",
"I only recently moved out and I seemed to get the most flak from people who had been living out of home since they were legally able to. \n\nIt's always come across as a sort of \"ha you're a pussy living at home, I moved out when I was eighteen!\". \n\nFunny how those same people are the ones living pay to pay and have massive debt ",
"I haven't seen so much stigma against people in their young 20s living at home, especially if they have something else going on (are attending school, helping their families, etc). The stigma tends to come when the kids are in their late 20s/early 30s, and don't really have much going on (live expense free, and have a PT job for fun money, without much ambition for anything else, etc).",
"The US has a pretty unique (Canada and Australia are similar) combination of high personal income and low cost of property.\n\nA young person is more likely be able to afford their own place than in Europe (where property costs more) or, say, Mexico (where few people can afford their own place). ",
"Until the most recent recession it wasn't that difficult to quickly find employment that paid well enough to move into your own place.",
"The stigma isn't really so much against living at home in your early twenties, so much as stagnating. A 24 year old living at home while he goes to college is understandable, but a 24 year old who sits in his room all day jackin' off and eating the food his parents buy without plans to do something is looked upon as a parasite to both his family and society",
"Because America has an epidemic of narcissistic personality traits: devaluing other human beings, inability to self-criticize, lack of compassion, blindness to the needs and rights of others. This started with the Boomers and has continued - [because the best way to raise a narcissist is to put a kid in a household full of narcissists](_URL_1_). Monkey see, monkey do.\n\n(Pet peeve: high self-esteem is not a predictor of narcissism. Actually it's the opposite. However, falsely trying to raise someone's self-esteem has the opposite effect, making \"the cult of self-esteem\" a perfect breeding ground for narcissism. [Complicated, and not exactly what the pop-culture wisdom claims.](_URL_0_))\n\nSo what we have now is a generation with many self-absorbed parents who have many self-absorbed kids. This sub-population is constitutionally incapable of appreciating the benefits of living together into adulthood. And their crappy attitudes have poisoned the culture at large.",
"Prior to 1830, there was no such thing as childhood. By age 4, people were expected to contribute in some way to the running of the family farm. Industrialization led societies away from subsistence farming and childhood was extended into the teens. Mandatory schooling began in the 1850s-60s. By 1900, most people had attended high school.\n\nThe years following World War II were a huge economic and population boom. Never before was so much wealth in the hands of so many young parents. They were able to feed, house, clothe, and educate their children on a single income. They expected their children, given every opportunity, to transition to adulthood and independence around the age of 18. \n\nAt the same time, youth movements such as the free speech and anti-war movement pushed teenagers to seek greater independence from the older generation, while the Vietnam War and a boom in public university construction, facilitated 18 year olds moving away and fending increasingly for themselves.\n\nBy 1980, 10 percent of of 20-year olds lived with their parents. This is the generation that is currently raising (and reraising) the so-called Boomerang generation currently living at home.\n\nThe cost of public education has shifted from the state to the student, the effort to learn a job has been shifted from the employer (to train on the job) to the job applicant (come to the job with the skills). The cost of health insurance and health care are the largest percentage of income they have ever been. \n\nWages have not increased at the same rate as fuel, rents, food, and entertainment have. 10% of 20 somethings had bachelors degrees in 1970, today 30% have. The demand for entry-level work has nearly remained constant. Trade jobs have fallen, so those without a college education have even fewer prospects outside of low wage service sector jobs.\n\nThis creates an economic system that suffocates the inexperienced. Thus 20% of 20-somethings now live with their parents and 60% receive money from them.\n\nYet, 20th century norms persist in most families and social groups. Moving in with mom and dad remains a mark of failure and shame. There is an expectation that success is readily attainable and that the person living at home is opting out of adulthood."
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boih7t | how do archaea survive in extreme conditions like hot springs that reach 100c? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/boih7t/eli5_how_do_archaea_survive_in_extreme_conditions/ | {
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"Their DNA, membranes and proteins are specialised to resist heat. This makes them very unique and useful to study to produce it own heat-resistant organisms.\n\nDNA is made of the 4 letters ATCG, CG pairs have 3 hydrogen bonds while AT pairs have 2 hydrogen bonds. Most organisms (including humans) have roughly 50-50 mix of these pairs.\n\nThermophiles have higher GC than AT pairs, so the hydrogen bond between both strands of the DNA is stronger and can resist heat.\n\nSimilarly for proteins and fats, they use unique chemical compounds not common in other organisms, such as ethers instead of esters in their membranes.",
"There's two strategies to make cell chemistry work: build proteins that have a narrow functional temperature range but are super efficient, or build proteins that have broad functional ranges but are less useful.\n\nHumans and the other large mammals are hyperspecialists at the narrow temperature option. We've developed intricate temperature control mechanisms to keep our internal temperature extremely stable. This in turn has allowed us to develop ultra-specific proteins that only function in a tiny temperature range but can do incredible things.\n\nAt the extreme other end of the scale you have these ancient thermal vent cells. They've built cell chemistry that functions over an absurd temperature range that would not only kill other organisms, but physically destroy them.\n\nIt's a great strategy if you're expecting extreme temperatures, but the sacrifices you need to make in efficiency and complexity leave those cells basically non-competitive in more stable environments."
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690y9j | is there any merit behind the idea that global warming could create more usable farmland in the northern regions of north america/asia, like canada/russia? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/690y9j/eli5_is_there_any_merit_behind_the_idea_that/ | {
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"There's similar merit in the notion that you should set your house on fire because the trash is piling up.\n\nContrary to what poorly informed internet rabble will shout - The world does not currently have an overpopulation or food production issue. What we do have is a *density* problem what with human's natural inclination to pile up all in one place. There's plenty of food, just not the logistics to get it to everywhere it needs to be.\n\nMelting the ice caps and warming the planet might increase arable land in some areas at the cost of others and in the end I doubt that it will be a net positive. ",
"It might, but it will also render existing farm land unusable and the kind of farmland that would be created is land we already have no shortage of... we may have some more land to grow wheat but we may lose access to all sorts of tropical produce. Additionally, while regions may warm, there is also evidence of wider swings in precipitation... so some years may get too much rain and flood (which could ruin crops) and some years there will be draught (which could ruin crops), so even with more land available there is still greater risk of crop loss.",
"Of course there is merit to that idea. But what it does is basically this:\n\n* Meager places where right now few people life become more fertile.\n* Fertile places where a lot of people live right now become less fertile.\n\nThe first creates a possible benefit for few and the possibility for development in the middle or far future. The second creates massive disadvantages for a lot of people very soon. \n\nYou can try to counter the second, but that costs a lot of ressources and effort and poor areas that right now can feed themselves, won't be able to afford that. Already rich areas can get their food from anywhere they want anyway.",
"In any complex system changing a single variable is going to have effects that are good for some metrics and bad for other metrics.\n\nWith Global Warming the reality is that a small boost in temperatures can actually lead to a net win for humanity, before starting to drop and turning into losses as temperatures continue to rise.\n\nThe problem is one of narrative. If you have been telling people that warming is bad, it is much harder to tell them, \"warming above X is bad, but warming below X is good.\" Not the least of which is because you have no idea what X actually is, and we don't have any kind of way to stop at X."
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3xvn2f | - movies getting awards before they even play in theatres | The movie the big short has 4 nominations before anyone has even seen it? What. Sometime explain this to my 5 year old ass.
Edit - thank you all for responding, I feel very informed | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3xvn2f/eli5_movies_getting_awards_before_they_even_play/ | {
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"Critics get to see review showings of movies before they're released to general audiences in the theaters.",
"In practice, anyone with a vote in the big awards get deluged in screeners - DVD/BRD and maybe nowadays even streaming copies of movies the studios are pushing for awards.\n\nIf you listen to the podcast of someone with a vote, they will sometimes talk about how they watched a movie on their laptop on a flight and the movie isn't even in theaters yet. \n\nIt's good to be famous.",
"Movies are often submitted to film festivals like Sundance or the Berlin Film Festival before they are actually distributed. It's not only important for marketing but often the only way they will actually get distribution. "
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f1ulix | why do wheels shake at specific speeds when a car’s alignment is off? | Why is there a sweet spot (50-60mph) where a vehicle will shake when the alignment is off? How does the shaking start around 50/55 and get better after going over 60? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f1ulix/eli5_why_do_wheels_shake_at_specific_speeds_when/ | {
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"It is caused by harmonics. The wheel actually shakes the whole time you're driving, but there is a certain frequency of vibration that causes harmonic resonance, and the fact that a vibration shows up much worse at certain speeds is a good indicator that you have harmonics playing into the vibration mix. What happens is that as the tire rotates with either a misalignment or damage to the tire or wheel itself, it vibrates. As the speed increases, so does the frequency of the vibration. There is a certain point at which that frequency will cause sympathetic vibrations in other parts of the car, and that's what you're feeling when it really shakes at a certain speed, and you get out of that harmonic range when the vibration stops at a higher speed.",
"It usually has nothing to do with alignment, but balance (imbalance actually) of the wheels and tires or other spinning driveline components.\n\nThe \"sweet spot\" is when it hits a resonant frequency that makes it most noticable. Above or below that and it gets absorbed or dampened by other vibrations.\n\nIn the rare event you do feel a vibration caused by alignment would most likely be attributed to extreme toe-in. Camber and caster aren't going to cause a vibration. In the case of toe, if it's so far in that the tires are scrubbing along the pavement, that could potentially be perceived as a vibration in the steering wheel, but it's not common, and it's more likely to just wear the tires prematurely.\n\nWhat you're describing is very typical of first order driveline vibrations."
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1xqnip | the potential benefits of nuclear fusion. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1xqnip/eli5_the_potential_benefits_of_nuclear_fusion/ | {
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"Sustainable nuclear fusion would, in theory, use an extremely cheap fuel source (hydrogen) to make energy at levels many times more efficient than anything else we currently have. Its only byproduct (helium) is an inert gas which is in short supply anyways, so even the waste is useful. It is inexpensive, clean, and ridiculously powerful. The only reason the world doesn't run on fusion right now is we can't control fusion on a large enough scale for it to put out more energy than we need to use to keep it from vaporizing everything in a 25 mile radius."
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5xfzkm | why does mao have such a bad reputation? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5xfzkm/eli5why_does_mao_have_such_a_bad_reputation/ | {
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"[Critics consider him a dictator comparable to Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin who severely damaged traditional Chinese culture, as well as a perpetrator of systematic human rights abuses and estimate that Mao was responsible for 40 to 70 million deaths through starvation, prison labour and executions, ranking his tenure as the top incidence of excess mortality in human history.](_URL_0_)\n\nI think it's mostly the killing off of 40 - 70 million people, less so the whole damaging traditional culture thing. Though both are pretty bad, of course.",
"It's not an explanation, but I can really recommend the book \"Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China\" by Jung Chang. It's very well written and gives a super understanding of what China was like during Mao (and what happened just before and after). And it's quite easy read :)"
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15ahf7 | how come so many shows on fox make fun of fox so much? why does fox keep them on the channel? shows like simpsons and family guy. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/15ahf7/eli5_how_come_so_many_shows_on_fox_make_fun_of/ | {
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"Because they're popular. If the Simpsons bring in a lot of viewers, it would be a really bad business decision to cut them because they make fun of Fox.",
"Aside from the fact that the shows are very popular and make the company a lot of money, letting shows like The Simpsons and Family Guy make fun of Fox boosts the company's corporate image. By letting shows poke fun at the company, Fox seems like a \"good sport\" and like they don't take themselves to seriously (even if they do). \n\nYou'll notice that when these shows make fun of Fox, they often pick on easy targets. For example, there is that one Family Guy joke when Peter lists off all of the \"successful\" (i.e. unsuccessful and cancelled) Fox shows (Titus, Andy Richter Controls the Universe, etc.) These shows have been cancelled and there really isn't any chance of them coming back. Sure it makes fun of Fox' decision making, but it isn't maliciously attacking the network. \n\nWhat you don't see is Family Guy or the Simpsons calling Glenn Beck out as a moron, stating that Bill O'Reilly is an asshole, or claiming that Rupert Murdoch is a corrupt chauvinist. Fox shows poke fun at, but don't openly defame their parent company because without the company, they wouldn't be on TV. It is like making fun of your boss; posting a \"Dilbert\" comic with the Pointy-Haired Boss on his door is ok, but calling him a fascist is crossing the line.",
"Contract.\n\n > When The Simpsons was developed for the half-hour show, James L. Brooks negotiated an unusual contract, in which the producers prevented the Fox network from interfering with the show. This contract made it possible to write several jokes about both the Fox network and Fox News. The fact that most networks use network notes to tinker with television shows is often parodied on The Simpsons. Creator Matt Groening has commented that this contract puts The Simpsons in a unique position and commentators have commented that it defies industry practices.\n\n"
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3a1xev | why do english speakers always use "i" correctly as a subject if it is alone, "me" mostly correctly if it is alone, but so many mess up if it is used with another noun? | Generally, everyone with even basic English will correctly say "I am going to town." But so many (even native English speakers) will say "My friend and me were going to town."
Similarly, they correctly say "He took a photo of me," but say "He took a photo of my wife and I."
Can any language experts explain why this error occurs? (I think the second one might have to do with being drummed to say "John and I" as a subject, but I'm guessing.)
| explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3a1xev/eli5_why_do_english_speakers_always_use_i/ | {
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"The problem is that for years, schools taught children to stop saying things like \"My friend and me are going to town.\" You would get the stern message from the teacher -- \"My friend and *I*!\" \n\nSince it was corrected with just a stern message instead of actual teaching about proper usage, a lot of people adopted the shortcut of never saying \"and me.\" They always change it to \"and I\" because that mistake was less frequently admonished. ",
"Most native speakers don't really learn all the grammar and correct way of doing things when speaking. They learn the vernacular. 'I' is a subject pronoun, and 'me' is an object pronoun. Many native speakers don't know this, so they just use whichever sounds best do to them from their experience learning the vernacular. This has mixed results, as you can see.\r\rJust something interesting to add, because students are required to take two years of a foreign language in high school, most native speakers from the US know said language's grammar better than English's grammar."
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atsud2 | how does the auto start-stop feature on high end cars work? how does the engine know when to stop? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/atsud2/eli5_how_does_the_auto_startstop_feature_on_high/ | {
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"Wheels not turning? Stop engine.\nAccelerator pedal pushed? Start engine.",
"Road speed is 0. For an auto foot brake is being held or car in park.\nFor a manual (stick) car is in neutral and foot brake being held or car is in gear, clutch pedal is down.\n\n\nThere are a whole bunch of other things tied up in this too, if the engine is not up to operating temperature, it won't stop because we want the engine at operating temp ASAP.\nThe engine won't stop if it sees a demand, for example if it is cold outside and the cabin is not up to temperature the engine won't stop, to provide heat. \nLikewise, if there is large electrical demand (e.g. rear heated screen not, maybe a seat heater too) it won't stop.\n\nIt probably works the other way too, so if the inside of the car is warm and climate control is trying to cool the car it probably won't stop to leave aircon running to help cool the car as quickly as possible.\n"
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bsml2x | why the bass is so important to music in general, even though it doesn't sound loud in most songs? | I feel it "fills" the song but I dont know how to express this in better words | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bsml2x/eli5_why_the_bass_is_so_important_to_music_in/ | {
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"Filling the song is actually quite a good way to think about it. It's not about loudness, it's more like the foundation of a building. You need to be able to build *on* something.\n\nFor example, imagine [this song](_URL_0_) without the bass. Without the bass there is no song.",
"Depends on the music you are listening to. Most pop songs will have the bass ride the root notes. Bass players job is to keep time and out line the chord. So that in genres like rock, jazz, blues, etc the other instruments like piano, guitar, horns can solo and improvise. Jazz music is a great example. Bass “walks” the chord progression while keep time with the drummer, keeping the overall feel and rhythm while the improvisation is done.\n\nCheck out Miles Davis “So What”",
"The drummer is your goalkeeper.\nThe bass is your defence.\nThe guitar is your midfield.\nThe singer is your striker.",
"In club music you get 16 beats to a bar, for most of the track you get 12 beats of bass then the last four are a recognisable buildup then a bang as the first of the next 16 beats. This is a consistent pattern that is used to know when to cue up another to mix in or out to. You can use head phones listen to the alternate track whilst counting the beats of the track thats playing and as not all tracks are recorded at the same speed (or played at the same RPM) the bass then is a distinct marker that helps to know if one track is going faster or slower.",
"But it's great when the Bass just lets loose too. My favorite example of this right now is Skameleon's cover of 'What is Love'. Go over to youtube and watch it. Right after the bridge, the bassist steps forward and lays down some righeous bars....",
"Music is made with chord sequences. \n\nChords are made out of notes. \n\nIf all those notes are played on the same instrument, it sounds boring, or it sounds thin. \n\nDifferent instruments add colour, but they can’t all play the same exact notes because that doesn’t sound good either. \n\nBass often plays the root note of a chord (though it doesn’t have to). That quite often “fixes” the chord, even if there aren’t enough other notes to fully define the chord. A chord can be implied with just a bass note and a melody line. \n\nHumans also like things that sound like pink noise. It fairly closely matches the curve of human hearing. There are a lot of frequencies to cover. Having low-end, mid-range and top-end all covered by different instruments just sounds better to people."
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9qp9r4 | how are kids,between 3 to 6 ,able to climb stairs and just jump around in general without getting exhausted despite having very little muscle development? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9qp9r4/eli5_how_are_kidsbetween_3_to_6_able_to_climb/ | {
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"Kids are running around and playing all the time. Adults can have the same energy level as kids if they practice some fitness. There's plenty of athletes that have huge amounts of energy.\n\nAnecdotal Example, but I used to get tired and out of breathe even after two floors of stairs. I then walked up the stairs everyday, maybe 4 times. Now I can easily walk up maybe 50 floors of stairs without getting tired at all. So basically kids are super active, making it easy for their bodies to continue being active. There's a social stigma about Adults jumping around, playing tag, hide and go seek, playing on a playground, so Adults only really get that exercise at the gym, and most don't go to the gym.",
"What you’re talking about is muscle tone and growth. The developed muscle you see in adults is called “fast twitch muscle,” which is bigger, bulky, and can produce a lot of force but tired quickly. Slow twitch muscle is weaker, but can go a long time without tiring out. \n\nAnother thing is that kids have very little mass. They’re lightweight (if healthy) and so it doesn’t take much to move them around. The larger you get, the more muscle mass required to move you around. ",
"Because they weigh less, they need less strength and energy to jump and move around the same amount as an adult. The amount of energy needed to move something a certain amount depends on the weight of the thing you're moving.\n\nThe muscles that they do have are also able to do more work due to having more energy. Young children tend to have faster metabolisms meaning their bodies can more quickly make use of the energy parts of food, things like sugars and fats. This means their muscles can more quickly get to this energy when they need to.\n\nThese two things work together, both giving their body's more energy that's \"ready to use\" and making the energy that they *do* use worth more."
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208s4j | why is john carmack so revered in the gaming / programming industry? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/208s4j/eli5_why_is_john_carmack_so_revered_in_the_gaming/ | {
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"The guy basically invented the field of 3D graphics. And the algorithms that allow it to be ran on modern computers. \n\nOn top of that he made Doom. Doom basically was Half Life before Half Life. It completely changed the way people though about gaming. It was installed on more computers then Windows95.",
"Put it this way, OP. John Carmack was the central figure in designing Doom. Doom was so popular the the term \"first person shooter\" was originally \"Doom clone.\" ",
"He is a grade A programing nerd. Read \"Masters of Doom\" by David Kushner. It's a great biography of John Carmack and Romero, and the creation of Doom. Carmack is the type of guy to think of a problem, read EVERYTHING about it, then decide he can do it better. Then actually come through on his promises. See his work on scrolling in PC games and networking Doom as an example. Things like these are the reasons why so many people will consider him to be one of the greatest game programers of all time.\n\nHe also (don't have the source for this) once ordered a development kit for the Nintendo DS, then spent like a week in a hotel room, just so he could learn how to program on it. As far as I know, he didn't even release anything for the DS. He did it solely for the challenge."
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8puydj | how come that in ww2 the soviet union was able to produce so many tanks, but lacked guns to equip their soldiers with? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8puydj/eli5_how_come_that_in_ww2_the_soviet_union_was/ | {
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"The Soviet Union never seriously lacked for small arms.\n\n*Enemy at the Gates* is not a documentary.\n\nReally the whole \"Human wave attacks! Barbarian hordes!\" myth was cooked up by embarrassed Nazis post-war and then trumpeted by American anti-Communist blowhards in order to denigrate Soviet achievements and paint them as an inhuman foe.",
"You are making a common mistake and conflating WWI and WWII. \n\nIn WWI the Imperial Russian army was woefully under equipped and using weapons that were decades out of date (at least at the start of the war). This is the war where it was common for soldiers to be paired up and share equipment, including weapons. \n\nBut WWII Soviets were generally well equipped, at least when it came to their weapons. Some of the sieges had weapons shortages, and non-weapon equipment often had logistical issues due to the culture of never asking questions or voicing complaints to superiors for fear of reprisal, and much of the trained leadership being execution during the power transition when the Soviets took over. ",
"How you imagine war is heavily influenced by the US's recent war(s) in Iraq and Afghanistan. These wars were models of efficiency. Total casualties in all three of these wars combined was less than what WW1 averaged in a single day. \n\nThis was achieved despite Iraq having one of the largest and best militaries of the world because the USA was just so much better in absolutely every way (including logistics). \n\nThis was not typical in war. Typically in war the stuff you need to fight the war (weapons, food, boots, ammunition) was actually very much a limiting factor on what you could do.\n\nAnd your stuff wouldn't be distributed evenly. You might have too many tanks but not enough gas for them. You might have too many 75 mm pieces of ammunition but only 60 mm guns. This logistical shit show was common in WW1 and WW2.\n\nHowever what you are really thinking of is likely a fictional movie where the event being depicted was inspired by a situation from WW1 so there is no specific answer to your question as it simply didn't ever happen. Instead just take the scene to mean \"the logistics were fucked and it was costing lives\".",
"The soviet union in WW2 was equipped for war since they dedicated most of their factories to produce war equipment. Maybe you are confusing it for WW1 where their equipment was outdated and small in quantities.",
"Here's a a very common thing to happen in ussr during ww2, which would lead to those situations:\n\nSoviet union had amazing production capacitiy of all kinds of weapons during WWII, and usually had enough, on paper, to arm their infantry before sending them to battle.\n\nBut it being the 40's, logistics (getting everything a regiment needs to where the regiment is) were really complicated by themselves, especially during wartime and the execution was too insitutionalized (totalitarism, go figure) sometimes a fresh regiment would be formed, with a set date to leave for frontline, but the weapons which they were supposed to get could be stuck on some train station due to delays. But in USSR a deadline was a deadline, and NCO's could risk lives if they didn't meet them. So soldiers were treated just like any other commodity, if they are supposed to be sent to the front by april, they were, and if the weapons made it a week later that's someone else's problem.\n\n(and someone else's head to roll)\n\ntl;dr it was often not the production of arms that was lacking, but coordination and logistics to put them in soldiers hand by the time they were set to leave for the frontlines"
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dut2bg | it is possible to see something because the photons from the light source reflect off the object and form an image in our retina of that object. but how are the photons able to carry the information of the object it got reflected from? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dut2bg/eli5_it_is_possible_to_see_something_because_the/ | {
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"I think the photons reflect the color of the specific area they are bouncing from...our optic nerve processes it and our brains put the picture together and form a recognizable image... \n\nThink of it as bread, lettuce, tomato, meat, onions, ketchup and cheese going into your mouth, but you think you’re eating a cheeseburger...",
"The photon carries information such as wavelength / frequency. It doesn't carry any additional information. So, let's say a whole bunch of photons come from a light bulb, hit a white piece of paper with a rainbow drawn on it, reflect off the paper and hit our retinas. Some photons get scattered, some get absorbed, and some get reflected. The ones that get reflected in each area of the rainbow or white paper are those of a particular wavelength / frequency (or combination of photons with different wavelengths / frequencies). Our eyes see these as a particular color, and our brains interpret these signals as coming from a particular location, forming an image in our heads. With this combination, we see a rainbow on the white paper. All this from photons simply having a set wavelength / frequency.",
"You're thinking of the interaction as a single photon reflecting off the surface, but what happens is billions of them interact with the surface at the same time, and billions of them hit our eyes at the same time.\n\nSo, while the interaction of any single photon can be:\n\n* Interact like a particle and get absorbed into an atom's electron layer, and then the electrons create another photon of a certain frequency (color) to release the energy. This gives you color effects, and transparency / opaqueness effects (whether the photon gets absorbed or doesn't get absorbed).\n\n* Interact with the arrangement of atoms like a wave that \"bounces back\" from a wall, giving you reflection and refraction effects, as well as \"the texture\" of the object.\n\n... ultimately, what you see is a deluge of photons interacting with the object as particles and waves, and the information about the object is \"captured\" in the color of the photons AND the \"shapes\" of the waves of light that get reflected off the object. \n\nIn a way, imagine pouring rain outside, and you place a plastic cube IN the rain. You can observe quite a bit about the shape of the cube from just how the rain drops bounce off it. If you use digital effects to erase the cube from the video (but not the rain), you'd still know that there was a cube there, just from the way the rain drops hit and bounce and how the water runs off the sides of the \"vacated\" space. \n\nVision with photons is similar to that."
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6iovwr | how come sometimes i just "know" what time it is, even if i haven't checked the clock in awhile? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6iovwr/eli5_how_come_sometimes_i_just_know_what_time_it/ | {
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"Many times when you look at the clock, you have an expectation of what time it will be. Most of those times your guess is inaccurate, but every now and then it'll be dead on right. \n\nThe thing is, our brains are programmed by millions of years of successful evolution to pay extra special attention to success, even when we don't know why we succeeded. So those right guesses get far more of your attention than the wrong guesses. \n\nBecause the act of checking the time is such a momentary thing, you don't remember most of the times you do it - why remember the act of checking the clock? But that special programming *wants* you to remember the successful guesses, so you do remember them, along with a peculiar feeling of \"how did I get that right?\""
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3s02wu | why does dogs yawn when they're frustrated or stressed? | I noticed this today with my dog. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3s02wu/eli5why_does_dogs_yawn_when_theyre_frustrated_or/ | {
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"It's called a \"calming signal.\" Dogs communicate with each other primarily through body language, rather than speech. Yawning is just one of many ways a dog can say \"I'm nervous,\" or \"leave me alone.\" Other calming signals include looking away (avoiding eye contact), licking lips, and panting.",
"If you want to find out more, read the book 'Calming Signals: What Your Dog Tells You' by Turid Rugaas which is a fascinating read and has good examples of various type of calming signals used by dogs that we do not usually see.\n\nI meet and deal with dogs on a regular basis and find that yawning and licking my lips works as a great way to deal with a dog showing signs of being nervous."
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72do7n | why does someone open their mouths when they are feeding someone? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/72do7n/eli5_why_does_someone_open_their_mouths_when_they/ | {
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"People often mimic what they see, especially infants and young children who are still learning how the world works. So the parent feeding them open their mouths with the goal to get the child to mimic it so they can be fed. Eventually the kid gets old enough that you don't have to do this anymore, but by then it has often become a subconscious habit of the parent."
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6g1l1y | what's the best way to comfort/speak to someone with depression when they express frustration or bleakness to you? | Considering one of my friends recently committed suicide, and I know at least one person who's open to me about her depression, I want to know the best way to talk to someone when they reach out to me for comfort. I don't want to make empty/hopeful promises that won't actually help. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6g1l1y/eli5_whats_the_best_way_to_comfortspeak_to/ | {
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"I don't know if it is really ELI5, but I'll try to explain from someone that has struggled with severe depression. Don't make those false hopes, don't try to silver-line or sugar-coat stuff, we will shut down upon hearing a single line of bullshit cliche. The thing that worked best (for me) is just to hear sympathy/empathy. Acknowledging someone's feelings and making them more comfortable (re: feel normal) with how they feel helps more than you may realize. I know it sounds simple, but just by being there and listening, truly listening, it should help. ",
"When dealing with tragedy and loss, the two best remedies at first are **time** and **positive company.** There is a grieving cycle and it varies in length for each person. The thing to consider is that they firstly are likely not in a state of mind where they have the emotional capacity to 'fix' or reconcile the turmoil of emotions. A person needs time and it helps (especially with depression) to just regularly be around other people who are stable and emotionally available to be a positive input.\n\n[There was a study done by heartmath institute about emotions and being present around other people.](_URL_0_) The main point for this is that essentially when you experience emotions, you broadcast it in the form of electromagnetic waves from your heart-brain (neural network in the heart) and your heart also acts like an antenna. That's why you often can 'feel' that someone is in a bad mood, because there is a measureable wave being emitted by your heart that is reflective of your emotional state. Some beliefs have picked up on this and might call it auras and such. They are spiritualizing an otherwise real biological reaction.\n\nAs you stick around people, your heartrate and emotions will begin to sync up with whatever 'signals' you are constantly exposing yourself to. That is why isolation and depression are such as a bad combination, because just like in physical therapy, in order to develop better motion and response, you need your body to be exposed to new motions and signals to [re-]learn how to move properly. The same thing happens with your emotions with this presence of positive or negative emotions.\n\nThis is why time and company is important and has a real biological and psychological impact to emotional healing. The focus should not be on answering questions literally to fix things, because they are the symptom of a psychological state of mind that is in trauma. In order to deal with the root of the issue of emotional trauma, 'physical therapy' in the form of exposure to positive company and comfort will help elevate the person's emotions into a state where they can better process what has happened and do so in a healthy way. Once you reach that point, then you can begin to work thru reason and talk thru things easier. ",
"Remember that it's the disease talking, the frustration is with the expression of that disease (feeling bad mentally & physically), and their mind isn't working right. \n \nBe with them. Might not talk much, might not do much, but just knowing that someone is actually _there_ for / with them helps. \nThey might want to stay in bed all day, and while it's not really healthy it's OK once in a while. Be in the house with them. Make a simple meal they like, bring them a cold drink of water, just be near them. \n \nEncourage healthy thoughts & acts. Remind them that they have not always felt horrible, and depression can be treated so they won't always feel this way. Take them to their doctor's appointment so there's no excuse not to get there. If they won't go for a short walk around the block, how about just sitting outside in the sun for a little while? \n"
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22l2ik | 3-d printing | Could someone please explain how they work and possible implications? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22l2ik/eli5_3d_printing/ | {
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"A basic 3d printer melts plastic into a liquid and puts it down layer by layer using a 3d model from a cad program or something similar as a reference. The plastic quickly hardens and can be built up into Many different shapes. More advanced 3d printers can print using many different materials, even metal. Well, I'm lucky enough to have access to three 3d printers as a part of my High school engineering class, and seeing some of the cool things that we come up with has shown me that the limits of this technology will take many years to be realised, especially as the printers get better every year."
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87an2y | is the probability of flipping a coin and getting the same result as last time 1/4? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/87an2y/eli5_is_the_probability_of_flipping_a_coin_and/ | {
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"The flips are independent. \n\n1/4 is your chance of getting heads or tails two times in a row, not the chance of getting heads or tails any particular time. ",
" > Lets say heads. Now, is the chance you get another heads 1/4?\n\nNo. Remember that once you know the first flip you eliminate the possible outcomes which would occur with the first flip that didn't happen. For example if our options are:\n\nHH,\nHT,\nTH,\nTT\n\nand we know the first flip is heads we also know that the options TH and TT aren't possible. So there is only HH and HT left.",
"No, the odds are 1/2 for every single flip. Odds would only be different for *combinations* of flips, like getting 2 heads in a row (1/4), or something like heads, heads, heads, tails in order (1/16). When you've already flipped a coin and are considering the odds of the net flip, you're only considering a single event: one flip. So the odds are naturally 50/50 and don't change. It's only when you predict *multiple* flips at once that you can reduce the odds.\n\nResponding to your edit: the law of large numbers is a *trend,* but it doesn't affect any individual flip. It just explains what's *likely* to happen, but it's completely possible for some very bad luck to mess with the expectations that the law of large numbers gives us. Assuming your coin is perfectly fair, *every* flip is a 50/50 chance, no matter what happened before it. After all, nothing physically changes about the coin when it flips, so how could the odds change?\n\n If what you said were true and the odds shifted very slightly after flipping a heads (for example), then you would be able to \"save up\" on a coin, and if you happened to flip a million heads in a row, you'd end up in a situation where the next flip had to be tails. That obviously doesn't happen, because the coin is the same after the millionth flip as it was after the first. The odds on that 1,000,001st flip are still 50/50, no matter what."
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cnyu1v | i dont know if this gets asked a lot but why do animals get put down and how does that get decided? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cnyu1v/eli5_i_dont_know_if_this_gets_asked_a_lot_but_why/ | {
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"If an animal is sick/hurt with no chance of surviving. \nOld age where their QOL has diminished\nSome shelters will euthanize if they don’t have space (stares daggers at PETA)",
"We had to put down our to labs last year. They were both 12 years old and had big hip problems. They required medication and we also noticed that they had huge problems sleeping.\n\nIt was honestly just a decision between putting them down and let them go away with dignity or let them suffer until they die naturally.\n\nI personally looked at it as doing them a favor and something they deserved. I was the one that drove them to the veterinarian and I wasn’t really sad about it. They were both loved and cared for since they were puppies and had everything a dog could wish for. Now they get to say goodbye and end their lifes with dignity.\n\nThey both went away peacefully and looked generally happy and in peace in their last moments.",
"With my cat I usually put him down when he struggles or when he tries to scratch me. And he is quite heavy, so putting him down is a good option to take the pressure off my arms and back.",
"This is just my opinion, not a vet and have never worked in an animal shelter.\n\nI think for pets, the decision comes down to cost and comfort. Do you have the money to treat a sick pet, and do you want to see it suffer? Cost is a big thing though. Vet bills can be huge. Some people are kind of forced into a sad decision.\n\nI think for shelters, it comes down to sort of the same thing... I think if an animal is going to cost thousands to bring back to a healthy 'saleable' condition, they don't have that kind of money to spend. Also, I think for our local shelter, sometimes there is just no room at the inn: the place is full to overflowing. Also, some breeds or perhaps temperaments are harder or almost impossible to rehome... kind of a variation on 'saleable'. I say saleable as animals from our local shelter cost upwards of $200.\n\nJust my opinion."
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6to3l8 | why do doctors schedule ten people for the same time and make their patients wait for hours? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6to3l8/eli5_why_do_doctors_schedule_ten_people_for_the/ | {
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"unfortunately an unplanned delay/emergency early in the day trickles through the rest of the schedule. \n\nTo plan for delays would be wasting valuable time the entire staff and office if there are no delays. And simply put, your time is less valuable than theirs. Insurance doesnt compensate for patients that ask a lot of questions.\n\nIf you want to go to an out of network doctor that allocates more time to each patient, and charges appropriately, you can certainly pay to do so.",
"They don't. A doctor's office will know that on-average, they can see a patient for an average of (example) 25 minutes. And given their office hours, this equates to a certain number of patients per day. \nSome patients take 2 minutes (\"My throught is sore.\" \"Yep, you have strep. Take this perscription.\"), others take an hour (hypochondriacs who think every ache or burp means they have ebola or rabies.). \nBut on average it will all work out. \n\nWhat doesn't work out, and what causes the delays you talk about, is when that 9:25 patient doesn't show up on time because they had to stop and get a fucking latte. The 9:50 patient however shows up 15 minutes early at 9:40, so the doctor takes them. Meanwhile at 9:45, Mr. 9:25 rolls in and is quite irate that he missed his apmnt, maybe they can fit him in. \n\nSo an hour later at 10:40, that guy is 5 minutes late because he couldn't find parking (he should have had Mr. 9:25's parking spot) and Mr. 9:25 has been sighing very loudly, and complaining to everyone in the waiting room about how horribly run this office is. So to get rid of him, and hopefully he's a 2 minute not an hour patient, they fit him in. But 10:40 guy gets bumped and whammo, Mr. 9:25 is complaining about seven different things and takes the full hour. Everybody else's day gets ruined unless the Doctor does something heroic like working through his lunch. \n\nSelfish people are (mostly) to blame for waits at the doctor's office. Or they get a bad luck string of 1hr patients instead of 5 minute patients.",
"Look at it from the doctors perspective. Some patients need an appointment at a short notice. Sometimes within the same day. It may also be hard to tell how long an examination will take as it depends on the exact condition which you do not know beforehand. And some patients might cancel their appointments if they get better or worse. And some might just not show up at all leaving the doctor with no work. So he have to decide how much of his schedule he should fill up. It is often better to be slightly overbooked then underbooked. And statistically you are more likely to see him on a day where he is overbooked as he is seeing more patients on those days."
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69h4z1 | what is reverse racism and how does/doesn't it exist? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/69h4z1/eli5_what_is_reverse_racism_and_how_doesdoesnt_it/ | {
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"\"Reverse racism\" doesn't exist because it is just normal racism. Some people have tried to define racism as only applying to those who have the power to enforce it upon others, but that is more an attempt to justify their own racial prejudice.",
"It's a somewhat controversial term describing racism of minorities against the empowered majority. It's controversial in that it posits that there is a difference in forms/magnitude/importance of racism, rather than the more basic definition of racism, which would be any discrimination or inappropriate generalization based on race, regardless of one's position in the power structure of a society. ",
"it's an idiotic term. Racism is racism, doesn't matter who's hating who.\n\nI do agree that there is a thing called \"institutional racism,\" and it is a problem, but that doesn't really fit here. In its purest form, anybody can be a simple racist, no matter the skin color.",
"Racism used to be *\"White against others\"*. Reversing that hence results in *\"Others against white\"*. Obviously both are racist as hell, and the *\"reverse\"* only says that it's the opposite way around as it used to be.\n\n*\"Black people cannot be racist\"* is one of the most common forms of these. "
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331dof | why do humans require much more grooming, haircuts, shaving, etc., than other mammals? | Edit: You see humans with very long hair, long facial hair and long fingernails when not groomed while not often in other animals and mammals. Why is that? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/331dof/eli5_why_do_humans_require_much_more_grooming/ | {
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"We don't require it. If we didn't groom we'd be just fine. Society and culture has decided that we like the way we look when we're groomed, so we do.",
"I may be wrong but I'm pretty sure OP is trying to understand why the hair on our head grows disproportionately compared to the hair on the heads of other mammals? ",
"Hair grows in cycles. When it reaches a certain length that is determined by the individual's (or animal's) genetic profile, growing stops, the blood supply ceases and the hairs fall out. Human hair has a much longer growing cycle than animals. Human hair grows typically 2-7 years before \"shedding\" which is why humans will generally need to cut their hairs before they fall out naturally. Generally, mammal hair (or fur) has a much shorter growing cycle causing their hairs to fall out after a very short time making hair cuts uneccessary. Some dog breeds (poodle, maltese, shi'tzu) have hair with a longer growing cycle. These dogs need regular grooming like humans. "
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2tm7yi | why is one bad movie so bad for an actor's career? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2tm7yi/eli5_why_is_one_bad_movie_so_bad_for_an_actors/ | {
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"It seems that if the movie is hated by the public and looses money, then other producers will be hesitant to cast the lead from that movie, feeling that their profits will be effected by the bad reception of the previous film. \nIn the comentary track of \"Jersey Girl\" Kevin Smith states that he tried very very hard to get his movie out BEFORE \"Gili\", but he was held up by music rights. He seems (the producer, director, writer) to believe that his film was effected by the faliure of the previous film with the same star (even though he loved Ben).",
"It depends on the actor. It depends on the movie. If an actor has an extensive career, then one bad movie will almost certainly have little to no effect on his/her career. If this \"bad movie\" is one of only a few roles, then it would obviously have a greater effect. But realistically, most (if not all) actors will play in absolutely horrid movies/TV shows/plays in their careers... usually many horrid ones. That is just part of the business.",
"What would happen to the One True God (Nicholas Cage's) career if he was in one bad movie?",
"getting roles is all about popularity.\n\nAlso as an actor you have a lot of competition, why would I chose someone who is hated/frowned upon by society when I can have someone else who is not? At the same time you go for the \"any publicity is good publicity\" strat.\n",
"I don't one bad movie will ruin an actors career but there are a couple of things to take into account\n- how bad was the movie? If the movie was legendary for how awful you were in it, that's a problem. \n- Was it an expensive failure? If the movie lost a lot of money even though you were prominently featured as the star, that will hurt your career. \n- Were you hard to work with on set. Were you a terror to work with and your co stars and director hated you, no one will want to work with you in the future. \n\n",
"I don't think it is bad for their career necessarily, but rather depends on the actors ability to shed a particular character type. I mean if a actor plays a terrible role in a universally lampooned comedy, yet is able to adapt to play in a serious drama they will survive. But if you are a 1 trick pony, and you only play in those films, you are gonna be screwed. ",
"It takes more than merely being in a bad movie, to be a true career ender, a movie usually needs:\n\n* really bad...not disappointing, not overly ambitious, not \"didn't come together\", trainwreck bad\n* the actor has to be particularly bad in it\n* it has to be well promoted with high expectations\n* self indulgence helps...actors get punished more when a autobiographical movie (*Glitter*), a project with an SO (*Gigli*), or a personal cause (*Battlefield Earth*) is a bomb\n* it also helps when the actor has questionable acting chops, and is more of a comedian or sex symbol...a bomb is going to hurt, say, Jim Carey more than ~~Michael~~ Matthew McConaughey ",
"It's about money.\n\nIt's always about money.\n\nFilms are an investment.\n\nLet's use round numbers for ease.\n\nA film costs $100M to make, and brings in $100M, then it broke even. The more money it makes, the more profitable it is. Now.... that doesn't talk about quality, just profitability.\n\nAdam Sandler makes lots of bad, but profitable movies. So his career is fine.\n\nHowever if you make good but unprofitable movies.... your career will not be fine. You might end up with cult classic status, and get a second chances... but they aren't going to \"invest\" in you.\n\nThat's why we see so many reboots for super hero movies. When they become less profitable than expected, they reboot the series hoping to make them more profitable.",
"If you buy a sandwich from Subway and it's ok, then nothing much happens...\n\nIf you buy a sandwich from Subway and it's horrible and gives you the shits, then you tell everyone you know to avoid it...",
"These all miss the point. A lead actor is a significant investment, and you make that investment expecting significant returns. \n\nActors have brands to maintain and a level of quality to guarantee or they, in the eyes of the studio, lose the power to draw an audience and therefore to make a significant profit. A tarnished brand or a lower expected return means that actor can't reasonably demand a certain fee anymore. \n\nWhen you go to see an actor, you're not just going because you like that actor; you're going because you've come to expect a certain type of taste from them. ",
"My theatre teacher once told me, \"It's better to be an extra in a great film, than the lead in a bad one.\"\n\nI think it's because the actor becomes the representative for the project to the public. The audience doesn't see the writers ignoring character development. They don't see the studio execs hiring some director that only has experience doing Revlon ads because his salary is dirt cheap. They don't see the producers doing whatever the fuck they do on set.\n\nAll they see is the actor, saying shitty lines as a shitty character in a shitty story, and that actor is an asshole.",
"It's not just for movies. In design school our professor used to tell us your work is only as good as it's weakest part. \n\nSay you're working on an illustration of a face. You nailed every single part, expect for one eye. The eye takes about 5% of the actual image. No matter how good the other parts are, the focus will always be on the eye, because it is noticeably worse than the rest of the image. You will still be judged on the weakest part. \n\nThink of it this way: you're doing a math test, and you get 49 questions correct, and 1 wrong. The teacher isn't going to look at all the correct questions and say \"Oh he got 49, why not bump it to 50?\".\n\nA bad movie would affect his repertoire on the long term when being revised for future rolls. One bad movie might lead to another. People will start associating bad movies with that actor. He starts losing his leeway as an actor because studios stop hiring him since he won't draw an audience due to them associating the actor with bad movies.\n\nSome actors are type-cast, and generally speaking people are a bit more forgiving to that. You aren't gonna judge an action movie star, like Jason Statham, on his drama ability. If he was cast as Freddo in a Godfather remake, people aren't going to blame him entirely, but blame whoever thought it would be a good idea. You'll find the audience a lot more forgiving for his career since they know he's good at action movies, and he shouldn't be in a highly dramatic role like that.",
"As a person who works in entertainment I'll give you my understanding if it. \n\nBasically it's similar to what other people have said. It is easier for the general public to \"blame\" a bad movie on the actors because they are the most visible individuals. \n\nSo why does that tank their career? No one wants to work with damaged goods. If the public has a negative opinion of an actor they are less likely to want to see a movie with them in it. So that makes the casting, production, and direction less apt to want to hire the people as they may not make their investment plus. \n\nThe actor could be the next Leonardo DiCaprio (talent/skill wise) but if the public isn't that into them they don't have any marketing presences and therefore no \"value\" to the companies producing the movie. It's unfortunate but that's just how the industry works. I truly do believe the public is becoming more aware of the other forces involved in the creative film process and we are learning to question more than the actors but directors, producers, writers etc. Hence the pig backing of product by associating it with... say \"from the creator of x\" that was successful. \n",
"The last couple of movies that Bruce Willis starred in were all bad in my opinion and I just shake my head and am confused about that. Alright, he does it for the money? Is he so desperate about having enough money that he goes ahead and makes really bad movies?\n\nAt least in my respect for the actor it does damage. He did so many good movies a long time ago and now my thoughts on probably every new one is \"sigh, just stop doing these\".\nI do not understand his motivation. Does he read the script and think it might be a decent story? Or does he see how many dollars he will make and then read the script ...",
"Jack Sparrow was so strong a creation, it took five movies to kill Johnny Depp's career"
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fiklov | why are some diseases less dangerous for children? (e.g.: measles) don’t adults have stronger immune systems? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fiklov/eli5_why_are_some_diseases_less_dangerous_for/ | {
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"Biologist here!\n\nWe aren't 100% sure!\n\nWe have a solid theory it has to do with how adults immune systems work compared to kids.\n\nSee, kids immune systems are still learning, so they have a higher number of phagocytes, big cells that eat invaders to learn how to fight them later.\n\nAdults have more antibodies, cells that attack infected tissue or invaders. Our body has already learned so many diseases, we now have a specialized army to fight them\n\nThe problem is, antibodies will destroy infected tissue. If the infection is bad enough, the antibodies go into overload and start attacking our organs, start shutting down our critical systems, and cause far more damage than just the infection would.\n\n\nChildren's bodies take more time and are slower to respond, giving them a better chance to kill the invader slower and safer!",
"I'll posit one theory: That an adult immune system is better, therefore the response that's triggered when it detects something can actually make the situation worse (burning more energy, heating up more from fever, etc.)."
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acjsax | if sufficient exposure to x-ray light and uv light can be dangerous and cause cancer, why is exposure to light in the visible spectrum -- the next closest light frequency -- safe? | [The light spectrum](_URL_0_)
& #x200B;
Is it just a wild coincidence that the light we can see in the visible spectrum happens to be the cutoff threshold for where exposure to light frequencies is safe instead of dangerous? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/acjsax/eli5_if_sufficient_exposure_to_xray_light_and_uv/ | {
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"The deciding factor is if the radiation has enough energy in a wave to ionize a substance, knocking loose an electron and changing the chemistry. The switch between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation actually occurs somewhere in the ultraviolet spectrum so not all UV light is dangerous, just the higher frequencies.",
"The Sun primarily emits visible light, and it's far more effective at penetrating liquid water than UV or IR, which means two things:\n\n1) Any lifeform that was damaged by visible light almost certainly went extinct before having a chance to develop cell membranes. \n\n2) Any light sensing organ adapted for other frequencies either used more resources or produced inferior results. Those inferior results are still different enough to be useful for certain applications which is why so many lifeforms can see UV light. "
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1sp2gp | the unsettling feeling produced when looking down while on top of a tall building | And why is a similar reaction sparked even when viewing a picture taken from a high vantage point aiming down? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1sp2gp/eli5_the_unsettling_feeling_produced_when_looking/ | {
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"You are at the edge of something really really really high. You are aware that the fall would likely kill you. You are instinctively afraid of the situation because it presents danger. It makes you perfectly rational.",
"It would be so easy for you to die. \nOne step, and it's over. Your brain knows that. It's screaming at you to turn back, but there you stand, on the edge of mortality, because it looks neat.",
"This is a really interesting phenomenon! Sometimes on the edge of a high place, you feel as though you're almost being pulled to it. This is because in your brain, alarms are going off everywhere (mostly in the amygdala, the part which processes fear) telling you that you are in danger, yet your brain's prefrontal cortex is also able to rationalize that you are not actually in danger. \n\nThe conflict between these two processes creates the intense unsettling feeling.\n\nTL;DR: Your brain thinks you're in danger, but knows you're actually safe, and has a tough time dealing with both of these ideas simultaneously.",
"I like the Douglas Adams explanation that it's down to some latent primate elements remaining in our brain from our evolution. So part of our primitive brain is working out the best way of jumping as we might from tree to tree in our past and getting ready to make the leap, meanwhile the modern bit of our brain is going \"oh Christ no don't jump\"."
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5u9s87 | what's the psychological mechanism behind why incestual porn is so popular but most people are grossed out by the thought of having sexual relations with a family member in real life? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5u9s87/eli5_whats_the_psychological_mechanism_behind_why/ | {
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"On the grand scale of human evolution, incest isn't particularly out of the norm. We're not well hardwired to avoid it in the short term which is pretty much the only way we think at a basic level. \n\nThus what we find \"sexy\" and what we deem as \"gross\" often overlap as one is societally imposed and the other is pretty much what the small lizard brain at the base of your skull likes. \n\nLet's take \"mom and son\" porn. You've got a young male (probably similar age to yourself) and an attractive fertile woman. The concept of mom and son can be almost completely ignored, instead you're seeing a sexy woman and a guy who you can put yourself in the place of. ",
"Kind of guessing here but one answer that comes to mind is how arousal works. There are studies that show that being sexually aroused or anxious are not really that different, mostly the context is different. So the wires cross fire when it comes to incest. Incest is \"wrong\", which makes you anxious and uncomfortable, coupled with sexual arousal it intensifies it, which is where the \"forbidden fruit\" arousal comes from, basically because of us feeling it's wrong.\n\nHowever, it's still a fantasy, you can enjoy fantasies but in real life you would never want to do it. It's almost like you're highjacking the anxiety that the idea incest gives you for a better sexual high, but wouldn't want to do it in real life. Same way with how we kill people in video games because we high jack the high, but would never want to kill someone in IRL.\n\nAlso from what I've seen the most popular porn seems to be \"step moms\" and cousins, and cousins don't count!\n"
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ap1fyu | what are some of the physiological differences between a night of normal sleeping and a full night laying down awake? | I understand the usual suspects as in being more tired and less alert, but are there other interesting changes? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ap1fyu/eli5_what_are_some_of_the_physiological/ | {
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"After one night, nothing other than what you mentioned. After a few days, you’ll start to become delirious and may even hallucinate. "
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j5sak | evolution. | I've gotten the "Why aren't monkeys evolving right now speech?" Just wanting to know some more background that I may not already know. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j5sak/eli5_evolution/ | {
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"There was a kind of moth that lived about a hundred years ago, in London. Most of the moths had white wings but occasionally you'd see one with black wings.\n\nThen London became a very grey place - all the new factories made so much smoke the whole place became covered with soot and dust. Now the white moths were really easy to see because everything around them was darker, so any birds looking for something to eat could easily spot the white moths. Meanwhile, the black moths could blend in more easily with their environment and didn't get eaten so much.\n\nThe black moths were able to have more children, also with black wings, and before long the moths were mostly black, not mostly white.\n\nThat's evolution. Animals with different characteristics can have better odds of surviving and having children depending on their environment. The ones who live longer tend to have more kids, and their kids tend to inherit the thing that helped their parents survive, so the kids survive too.\n\nThe thing to remember is that with the moths, there were already black moths and white moths so the thing that helped them survive - what scientists call a \"mutation\" had already happened. The pollution in london changed the environment, which is what scientists call a \"selection pressure\".\n\nThe mutation itself can take millions of years to appear, and not all mutations are helpful. Some mutations make it *less* likely that the animal will survive and have kids. Some mutations have no real effect until the environment changes or the animals move to a new place - like with the moths.",
"Once upon a time on the African plains there were horses. These horses could only eat the leaves that fell from the trees just out of their reach.\n\nOne day a special horse was born, it had a freakishly mutantly long neck. Just long enough to be able to reach the trees. This horse ate a lot of the food so other horses couldn't eat and eventually died out. This horse bread with another horse, and the long necked gene was passed on.\n\nThis carried on over thousands and millions of years, and now we have these:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nEvolution is a series of mutations that makes living coincidentally easier for that species. Those mutations get bread on mass because those certain animals thrive, and the ones without the helpful mutation all die out.",
"The answer is \"Monkeys **are** evolving right now.\" Life is always evolving but evolution takes a long long time to produce noticeable change because it is the result of small mutations being reinforced by gradually changing needs.",
"Have you ever seen a tree grow? Like, in real time, actually become bigger, create more branches, just by looking at it for an hour?\n\nOfcourse not. Trees do not grow that fast. It takes months, years for them to visibly change. \n\nEvolution is similar. We are evolving all the time, but evolution happens so slowly that it is not visible unless you look at it from a large timescale. \n\n\"Why arent monkeys evolving\" also suggest a different faulty understanding of human evolution. The question suggests that Monkeys evolved into Humans a long time ago, but are not evolving into anything right now. \n\nBut the truth is that \"Monkeys\" is an overarching term that encompasses multiple species. Think of it as branches growing from a tree. A tree starts out as a single trunk, but eventually it will start to split up and grow more branches. Imagine a branch called \"Apes\" growing and splitting up into many new branches. One of these branches we will call \"Chimpanzees\", another we will call \"Gorilla's\", and another \"Humans\". All three of these branches grew from the original \"Ape\" branch. However, because the original \"Ape\" branch has split up into these new branches, we cannot say that any of the three new ones are the real \"Ape\" branch, and the others just offshoots. Therefore we simply say \"This is the Human branch, which, along with the Gorrilla and Chimpanzee branches, came from the bigger \"Ape\" branch.\"",
"Every living thing is always evolving. Monkeys are evolving right now, us people are evolving right now, and even single-cell organisms are evolving right now.\n\nThe problem with the question \"why aren't monkeys evolving right now?\" is that the people asking it are making some dramatically false assumptions about evolution.\n\nThese people are assuming that evolution is a change they'll be able to see happening right in front of them. Evolution isn't a transformation like a caterpillar to a butterfly, it doesn't happen overnight, or in a lifetime, or even in multiple lifetimes. It is a process that can take millions of years to play out. Although in some cases we *can* see it happening faster. Species that reproduce faster, such as some viruses and bacteria, can evolve at a much faster rate. This is why doctors are often hesitant to prescribe antibiotic drugs, and [will tell you not to take antibiotic drugs when you have a cold](_URL_0_) (which is caused by viruses, which antibiotics have no effect on) - bacteria can evolve to build up a resistance to such treatments if they are used too liberally.\n\nTo give you an idea of how it works, let's start with common, everyday stuff. You are a product of your parents' combined DNA (the \"blueprints of life\" that say how you're built). If your mom is black and your dad is white, odds are your skin color will be somewhere in-between. If your parents and grandparents all had curly hair or big noses, it's very likely you will too. If your parents and grandparents all got cancer, there's a very strong chance you'll get it too. This is because when your DNA blueprint is created, it's mostly just a combination of the DNA blueprints of your parents. Half from your father, and half from your mother.\n\nHowever, every now and then, something randomly changes. You get a little line on the blueprint that didn't come from your mother or your father. Consider it a smudge on the copying machine used to make that blueprint, and even though it wasn't in your parents' plans, it's a part of your plans now. This is called a \"mutation\".\n\nProbably gets you thinking of the Ninja Turtles and the X-Men, right? Well, most mutations aren't anything even remotely like that. In fact, most mutations do absolutely nothing at all. Your DNA blueprints are so incredibly huge that, for the most part, one tiny little line out of place here or there isn't going to make any noticeable change. Just a little quirk on your blueprint, albeit a little quirk that you might pass on when you make a copy of the blueprint (when you have kids).\n\nEvery now and then, one of those little lines out of place will show up somewhere where it *does* do something different, or maybe a few of those out-of-place lines build up and do something together that they didn't do before. This can be a good change or a bad change, or something inexplicable. It can be as simple as your skin color being a little lighter than usual, or grow hair on your elbows. It can be something that causes your brain to function wrong, or make you born with a hole in your heart.\n\nThese are traits you didn't get from your mother and father, traits that make you slightly different, slightly *new*. And sometimes these things are good, and sometimes they're bad. Bad stuff, like the \"hole in the heart\" example, or other traits that make them not as good at evading predators, or not as good at getting food, often leads to the creatures that have them dying without having children, so they don't pass on those wonky blueprints to any future generations. Good traits, ones that make a living thing better at getting food, better at avoiding predators, or better at reproducing, result in that trait getting passed on to new generations. This is a process called Natural Selection.\n\nNature constantly does this. Everything is always mutating, ever so slightly, and if a mutation is bad, it dies out, and if it's good, it thrives and gets passed on to new generations. As time goes on, these good traits build up, and after many, many generations, lifeforms gradually become something different than they used to be.\n\nPeople have used this to our advantage even before we knew we were doing it. Domestication is a good example. At one point in time, some guy was undoubtedly hanging around the campfire when he saw something he'd seen a hundred times before - some wolves scavenging around his campsite looking for food. However, he noticed something different with one of them. It was friendly. Maybe he took a liking to it, fed it scraps... and suddenly, being a friendly wolf is a *very* successful survival trait. If you're friendly to humans, you get fed! Over time, more wolves start to evolve this behavioral trait, and more and more people started to notice that the wolves hanging around their campsite weren't mean and nasty, but were nice.\n\nThen, at some point some guy took one of those wolves and kept it around his house, and he paid attention when that wolf had pups, and noticed that some of the baby wolves it had were more friendly than others. Well, that person probably got rid of the less friendly ones, and continued to breed the friendly ones... until, after a while of doing this, they were all even more friendly. This process was undoubtedly repeated numerous times. Maybe at one point one of the babies looked a bit different, had more fur or was a bit smaller, and it would be pulled aside and bred until they could make all of them like that. This is a bit of a simplification, but imagine this process going on over many thousands of years... and eventually you've gone from a world with nothing but wild, feral wolves, to a world with numerous varieties of domesticated dogs.\n\nThe process of evolution, as you see it in cartoons and stuff, generally shows a microscopic organism morphing into a fish, which grows legs and becomes a lizard crawling on land, which grows fur and becomes a monkey, which stands up and becomes a caveman, who sheds his hair and becomes a modern man. This kinda' conveys the idea, but it is such an oversimplification it has undoubtedly led to much confusion that has caused a lot of the misunderstanding behind it.\n\nTo turn that process into something more closely resembling reality, first you'd have to stretch it over *millions* of years. Second, you'd be showing the change not by one creature morphing into another, then another, and so on, but by each creature giving birth to creatures *slightly* different than it is. Thirdly, each creature gives birth to *multiple* creatures. Some are more or less the same, some have good new features and thrive, some have bad new features and die off (picture an ever-expanding tree, with some branches ending sooner than others).\n\nThis tree, now that you look at it, is huge. If you go up close and look at any one part of it, you won't really see much change - each generation more or less looks just like the previous one. But the farther you zoom out, the more you'll see more dramatic change. Follow back humanity far enough and you'll see that both humans and monkeys branch off from the same common ancestor. One group of us became humans, the other became monkeys, even though at the time, we seemed nearly identical. But gradually, we grew apart, became different, even though each generation was mostly just like the one that came before.\n\nFollow that same path back further still, and you'll see simpler and simpler life-forms. Eventually, you see that all mammals have a common origin, just like monkeys and humans share a common origin. Rats didn't turn into monkeys, but both rats and monkeys have the same ancestor, millions of years ago.\n\nYou'll also notice that a few species haven't changed much, even in those millions of years. Sharks, alligators and cockroaches, for example, are believed to be more or less just like they were many millions of years ago (modern humans, by comparison, are believed to be only about 200,000 years old). These creatures didn't stop evolving - undoubtedly they still mutate and have variations, but since those species as we know them have apparently remained successful in their environments, despite the changes those environments have gone through over the ages, those species have continued to thrive in their current form, perhaps with occasional genetic offspring branching off to become a new species in its own right - mantises and termites, for example, are believed to have branched off from early cockroaches.\n\nAgain, this isn't to say that at some point a cockroach had a termite baby, but that at some point a cockroach had a cockroach baby that was a little different, and that one had a baby that was a little different, and so on, until eventually the differences added up to be a completely different sort of animal, a new species.\n\nThat's evolution at work.",
"There was a kind of moth that lived about a hundred years ago, in London. Most of the moths had white wings but occasionally you'd see one with black wings.\n\nThen London became a very grey place - all the new factories made so much smoke the whole place became covered with soot and dust. Now the white moths were really easy to see because everything around them was darker, so any birds looking for something to eat could easily spot the white moths. Meanwhile, the black moths could blend in more easily with their environment and didn't get eaten so much.\n\nThe black moths were able to have more children, also with black wings, and before long the moths were mostly black, not mostly white.\n\nThat's evolution. Animals with different characteristics can have better odds of surviving and having children depending on their environment. The ones who live longer tend to have more kids, and their kids tend to inherit the thing that helped their parents survive, so the kids survive too.\n\nThe thing to remember is that with the moths, there were already black moths and white moths so the thing that helped them survive - what scientists call a \"mutation\" had already happened. The pollution in london changed the environment, which is what scientists call a \"selection pressure\".\n\nThe mutation itself can take millions of years to appear, and not all mutations are helpful. Some mutations make it *less* likely that the animal will survive and have kids. Some mutations have no real effect until the environment changes or the animals move to a new place - like with the moths.",
"Once upon a time on the African plains there were horses. These horses could only eat the leaves that fell from the trees just out of their reach.\n\nOne day a special horse was born, it had a freakishly mutantly long neck. Just long enough to be able to reach the trees. This horse ate a lot of the food so other horses couldn't eat and eventually died out. This horse bread with another horse, and the long necked gene was passed on.\n\nThis carried on over thousands and millions of years, and now we have these:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nEvolution is a series of mutations that makes living coincidentally easier for that species. Those mutations get bread on mass because those certain animals thrive, and the ones without the helpful mutation all die out.",
"The answer is \"Monkeys **are** evolving right now.\" Life is always evolving but evolution takes a long long time to produce noticeable change because it is the result of small mutations being reinforced by gradually changing needs.",
"Have you ever seen a tree grow? Like, in real time, actually become bigger, create more branches, just by looking at it for an hour?\n\nOfcourse not. Trees do not grow that fast. It takes months, years for them to visibly change. \n\nEvolution is similar. We are evolving all the time, but evolution happens so slowly that it is not visible unless you look at it from a large timescale. \n\n\"Why arent monkeys evolving\" also suggest a different faulty understanding of human evolution. The question suggests that Monkeys evolved into Humans a long time ago, but are not evolving into anything right now. \n\nBut the truth is that \"Monkeys\" is an overarching term that encompasses multiple species. Think of it as branches growing from a tree. A tree starts out as a single trunk, but eventually it will start to split up and grow more branches. Imagine a branch called \"Apes\" growing and splitting up into many new branches. One of these branches we will call \"Chimpanzees\", another we will call \"Gorilla's\", and another \"Humans\". All three of these branches grew from the original \"Ape\" branch. However, because the original \"Ape\" branch has split up into these new branches, we cannot say that any of the three new ones are the real \"Ape\" branch, and the others just offshoots. Therefore we simply say \"This is the Human branch, which, along with the Gorrilla and Chimpanzee branches, came from the bigger \"Ape\" branch.\"",
"Every living thing is always evolving. Monkeys are evolving right now, us people are evolving right now, and even single-cell organisms are evolving right now.\n\nThe problem with the question \"why aren't monkeys evolving right now?\" is that the people asking it are making some dramatically false assumptions about evolution.\n\nThese people are assuming that evolution is a change they'll be able to see happening right in front of them. Evolution isn't a transformation like a caterpillar to a butterfly, it doesn't happen overnight, or in a lifetime, or even in multiple lifetimes. It is a process that can take millions of years to play out. Although in some cases we *can* see it happening faster. Species that reproduce faster, such as some viruses and bacteria, can evolve at a much faster rate. This is why doctors are often hesitant to prescribe antibiotic drugs, and [will tell you not to take antibiotic drugs when you have a cold](_URL_0_) (which is caused by viruses, which antibiotics have no effect on) - bacteria can evolve to build up a resistance to such treatments if they are used too liberally.\n\nTo give you an idea of how it works, let's start with common, everyday stuff. You are a product of your parents' combined DNA (the \"blueprints of life\" that say how you're built). If your mom is black and your dad is white, odds are your skin color will be somewhere in-between. If your parents and grandparents all had curly hair or big noses, it's very likely you will too. If your parents and grandparents all got cancer, there's a very strong chance you'll get it too. This is because when your DNA blueprint is created, it's mostly just a combination of the DNA blueprints of your parents. Half from your father, and half from your mother.\n\nHowever, every now and then, something randomly changes. You get a little line on the blueprint that didn't come from your mother or your father. Consider it a smudge on the copying machine used to make that blueprint, and even though it wasn't in your parents' plans, it's a part of your plans now. This is called a \"mutation\".\n\nProbably gets you thinking of the Ninja Turtles and the X-Men, right? Well, most mutations aren't anything even remotely like that. In fact, most mutations do absolutely nothing at all. Your DNA blueprints are so incredibly huge that, for the most part, one tiny little line out of place here or there isn't going to make any noticeable change. Just a little quirk on your blueprint, albeit a little quirk that you might pass on when you make a copy of the blueprint (when you have kids).\n\nEvery now and then, one of those little lines out of place will show up somewhere where it *does* do something different, or maybe a few of those out-of-place lines build up and do something together that they didn't do before. This can be a good change or a bad change, or something inexplicable. It can be as simple as your skin color being a little lighter than usual, or grow hair on your elbows. It can be something that causes your brain to function wrong, or make you born with a hole in your heart.\n\nThese are traits you didn't get from your mother and father, traits that make you slightly different, slightly *new*. And sometimes these things are good, and sometimes they're bad. Bad stuff, like the \"hole in the heart\" example, or other traits that make them not as good at evading predators, or not as good at getting food, often leads to the creatures that have them dying without having children, so they don't pass on those wonky blueprints to any future generations. Good traits, ones that make a living thing better at getting food, better at avoiding predators, or better at reproducing, result in that trait getting passed on to new generations. This is a process called Natural Selection.\n\nNature constantly does this. Everything is always mutating, ever so slightly, and if a mutation is bad, it dies out, and if it's good, it thrives and gets passed on to new generations. As time goes on, these good traits build up, and after many, many generations, lifeforms gradually become something different than they used to be.\n\nPeople have used this to our advantage even before we knew we were doing it. Domestication is a good example. At one point in time, some guy was undoubtedly hanging around the campfire when he saw something he'd seen a hundred times before - some wolves scavenging around his campsite looking for food. However, he noticed something different with one of them. It was friendly. Maybe he took a liking to it, fed it scraps... and suddenly, being a friendly wolf is a *very* successful survival trait. If you're friendly to humans, you get fed! Over time, more wolves start to evolve this behavioral trait, and more and more people started to notice that the wolves hanging around their campsite weren't mean and nasty, but were nice.\n\nThen, at some point some guy took one of those wolves and kept it around his house, and he paid attention when that wolf had pups, and noticed that some of the baby wolves it had were more friendly than others. Well, that person probably got rid of the less friendly ones, and continued to breed the friendly ones... until, after a while of doing this, they were all even more friendly. This process was undoubtedly repeated numerous times. Maybe at one point one of the babies looked a bit different, had more fur or was a bit smaller, and it would be pulled aside and bred until they could make all of them like that. This is a bit of a simplification, but imagine this process going on over many thousands of years... and eventually you've gone from a world with nothing but wild, feral wolves, to a world with numerous varieties of domesticated dogs.\n\nThe process of evolution, as you see it in cartoons and stuff, generally shows a microscopic organism morphing into a fish, which grows legs and becomes a lizard crawling on land, which grows fur and becomes a monkey, which stands up and becomes a caveman, who sheds his hair and becomes a modern man. This kinda' conveys the idea, but it is such an oversimplification it has undoubtedly led to much confusion that has caused a lot of the misunderstanding behind it.\n\nTo turn that process into something more closely resembling reality, first you'd have to stretch it over *millions* of years. Second, you'd be showing the change not by one creature morphing into another, then another, and so on, but by each creature giving birth to creatures *slightly* different than it is. Thirdly, each creature gives birth to *multiple* creatures. Some are more or less the same, some have good new features and thrive, some have bad new features and die off (picture an ever-expanding tree, with some branches ending sooner than others).\n\nThis tree, now that you look at it, is huge. If you go up close and look at any one part of it, you won't really see much change - each generation more or less looks just like the previous one. But the farther you zoom out, the more you'll see more dramatic change. Follow back humanity far enough and you'll see that both humans and monkeys branch off from the same common ancestor. One group of us became humans, the other became monkeys, even though at the time, we seemed nearly identical. But gradually, we grew apart, became different, even though each generation was mostly just like the one that came before.\n\nFollow that same path back further still, and you'll see simpler and simpler life-forms. Eventually, you see that all mammals have a common origin, just like monkeys and humans share a common origin. Rats didn't turn into monkeys, but both rats and monkeys have the same ancestor, millions of years ago.\n\nYou'll also notice that a few species haven't changed much, even in those millions of years. Sharks, alligators and cockroaches, for example, are believed to be more or less just like they were many millions of years ago (modern humans, by comparison, are believed to be only about 200,000 years old). These creatures didn't stop evolving - undoubtedly they still mutate and have variations, but since those species as we know them have apparently remained successful in their environments, despite the changes those environments have gone through over the ages, those species have continued to thrive in their current form, perhaps with occasional genetic offspring branching off to become a new species in its own right - mantises and termites, for example, are believed to have branched off from early cockroaches.\n\nAgain, this isn't to say that at some point a cockroach had a termite baby, but that at some point a cockroach had a cockroach baby that was a little different, and that one had a baby that was a little different, and so on, until eventually the differences added up to be a completely different sort of animal, a new species.\n\nThat's evolution at work."
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1owj64 | why can you drop bugs from 7+ feet and it does no damage to them | If I drop a ant 5 feet that's like dropping me 500 feet in scale. Yet it does no damage to them and they can even walk away. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1owj64/eli5_why_can_you_drop_bugs_from_7_feet_and_it/ | {
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"Less mass = less impact force. In other words the bigger they are the harder they fall. ",
"Their mass is so small they reach terminal velocity very quickly due to the resistance of the air they are falling through. They land quite slowly compared to how fast a human dropped from 500ft would land. Their smaller mass also means that they have less of themselves to stop suddenly and their bodies don't crush themselves.",
"The scale assumption you have is incorrect. \n\nA bug dropping from 5 feet is experiencing the same downward force from gravity as that of a human jumping from 5 feet. There are terminal velocity and physical reasons why a bug can survive higher distances than a human, but just be aware that the size scale isn't the right way to think about it.\n\nTL,DR: Small and large things fall at the same rate. _URL_0_",
"A better way to look at it is that things don't scale up. If you made a human size version of the bugs and dropped them from a proportional hight they would die.\n\n\n\nSmall mass\n\nWind resistance\n\nSmall hight"
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uahuv | - how the automatic shutoff on gasoline nozzles work. | When you go to a gas (petrol station for those across the pond) station and you fill up your car, and the pump shuts off automatically. I want that explained. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/uahuv/eli5_how_the_automatic_shutoff_on_gasoline/ | {
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"Vacuum. \nThere is a second little tube in the nozzle. When it gets blocked the vacuum pulls the shut off and stops the flow of gas in the larger tube. \n[found an image](_URL_0_)",
"Thanks guys! I appreciate the responses!"
]
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16iejd | difference between 240p, 360p, 480p, 720p, 1080p and 1080i. | I understand fully they are different resolutions and that the higher it goes the better they are. But what do the numbers represent? What's the "p" for?
And my main curiosity is what is the real difference between 1080i and 1080p. Again what does the "i" stand for? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/16iejd/eli5_difference_between_240p_360p_480p_720p_1080p/ | {
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"The way that TVs and monitors work is by displaying still images (called frames) and changing them a certain number of times per second. This is the refresh rate, measured in Hertz. Most computer monitors refresh at either 60 Hz or 120 Hz. They essentially work like flip books.\n\nThe numbers in the name are, as you say, the resolution. A 1080 display has a resolution of 1920 x 1080 - there are 1920 vertical columns and 1080 horizontal rows, which we call *lines*.\n\nThis is where P and I come in - they stand for Progressive Scan and Interlaced. Progressive Scan screens change every single pixel every single time they refresh the display.\n\nInterlaced screens, on the other hand, only change half the pixels each time they refresh the display. They will refresh the odd numbered lines during one cycle and the even numbered lines on the next. So at any given time, you will actually have half the lines displaying the image from one frame, and the other half displaying the image from the next frame.\n\nA 1080i display, running at 60 Hz will only display 30 *full* frames per second, but a 1080p display, also running at 60 Hz, will display 60 full frames per second."
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1bnf89 | when i clasp my hands together, why does it feel so unnatural to have my right thumb on top? | And is the reverse true for others? Is it a right-handed / left-handed thing? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1bnf89/when_i_clasp_my_hands_together_why_does_it_feel/ | {
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"Everyone reading this just put their hands together.",
"I am right-handed and I prefer my right thumb on top. So does the other guy I asked. Another guy I asked is right-handed and prefers the left thumb.",
"It is not a left/right-handed thing. It also doesn't seem to be genetic, or at least if it is, it's not determined by one single gene.\n\nIt's a well-documented phenomena, with 99% of people having a preference, but it is not really understood why it happens. There is generally a 50/50 split between which thumb goes on top, although in some populations, left thumb on top happens more often.\n\n[Source](_URL_0_)",
"Are you left handed?",
"You get so good at hand clasping that it becomes automated and unconscious. When you change that skill up a little (swap thumbs around), the automatic and thus unconscious information that was being sent to your brain about the skill performance is suddenly tweaked, and so the information gets surfaced (you become consciously aware of it) because it registers as somewhat of an error. So your body learns how you perform a skill and gets so damn good at it that you don't even have to consciously process information relating to that skill anymore. *Except* for when you change the skill around a little. You'll pick up that this is \"wrong\", and suddenly you will become consciously aware of your thumb placement. (When you were doing it normally, your brain didn't bother consciously letting you know of your thumb placement). \n\nIf you're still not understanding, it relates to what is called proprioception. This is how your brain knows where your body parts are without looking at them or touching them. It's how you can know that your left arm is by your side without physically looking down or touching it to check its placement using your right arm. You become awesome at hand clasping = your brain decides it doesn't need to consciously alert you of this proprioceptive info anymore. Subconsciously you know your left thumb is on top, but this info isn't passed on to consciousness. But when you change it up, your brain decides it's going to make you aware of your thumb placement because this is \"an error\". Suddenly you're aware that your right thumb is on top. \n\n**This is why it feels unnatural; because your brain is giving you conscious proprioceptive information that was previously (when your hands were clasped normally) kept unconscious.**\n\nCross your arms. Now cross them the opposite way. Feels unnatural? This is the same kind of concept. Basically, you've become so damn good at crossing your arms that your brain doesn't even have to process that shit consciously anymore. It's all automatic. You want to cross your arms? There you go. You don't need to figure out where your left arm is, where your right arm is and how to get them from A to B. Ain't nobody got time for that. You just do it subconsciously. \n\nThink of yourself as a factory manager sitting up in your cosy office. When everything is running smoothly and done as usual you don't have workers running in and out to let you know \"Hey boss we're doing great!\". When something goes wrong or is out of the ordinary, a worker will come in and let you know.\n\nHope that helps. Sorry if I've repeated myself a little, I'm super sleepy. I just saw your post and thought I might be able to give you some insight. Happy hand clasping. \n\n",
"I'm left-handed and prefer right thumb on top.",
"I tried it. Then I figured it out, it feels unnatural because it's not the same clasp. Extend your right hand in front of you horizontally then clasp with your left vertically and if you swap thumbs then it feels weird. Flip it and have your left hand in front and you clasp with your right then it's the same and if you swap your thumbs: it feels weird again."
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2y8ftl | do irregular sleep patterns cause nightmares? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2y8ftl/eli5_do_irregular_sleep_patterns_cause_nightmares/ | {
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"You probably have nightmares pretty often, you just don't remember them when you wake up normally. You have the most vivid dreams during the middle of the night when you have REM sleep, waking up during that or immediately after makes you remember dreams you would've otherwise forgot."
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98tuud | why is hot weather so exhausting? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/98tuud/eli5_why_is_hot_weather_so_exhausting/ | {
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"Heat makes you sweat, causing you to be less hydrated than normal, and your body functions somewhat less efficiently. ",
"Like water flowing downhill, heat naturally moves from warm areas to cooler ones. As long as the air around you is cooler than your body, you radiate heat to the air. But this transfer stops when the air temperature approaches body temperature.\n\nRadiation requires rerouting blood flow so more of it goes to the skin. This makes the heart beat faster and pump harder. On a hot day, it may circulate two to four times as much blood each minute as it does on a cool day. ",
"When it is hot out, it is difficult for the body to get rid of excess heat. Exercise generates excess body heat. The feeling of exhaustion inhibits the desire to exercise. So, when it's hot out, our body makes us feel exhausted.",
"We as a species are regulators, not conformers. That means that we involuntarily try and maintain our internal environment instead of letting it change to match the environment. To keep our bodies at a specific temperature when it’s hot out, our system has to work hard, ex: sweating to cool down our skin, breathing heavily, thirsting for cool beverages. Therefore we end up expending a lot more energy performing these tasks and get tired."
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50ouww | how are near-century old buildings still safe? was structural engineering knowledge the same then as it is today? | It baffles my mind that the Empire State Building (~85 years old) is just as structurally sound as modern buildings built today that have the luxury of using complex software and simulations.
I imagine engineering back then (both materials and structural) pales in comparison to what we know today.
Shouldn't older buildings present hazards or was our knowledge of engineering good enough back then? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/50ouww/eli5_how_are_nearcentury_old_buildings_still_safe/ | {
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"Older buildings certainly present hazards, which is why the ESB has been renovated many times in it's history. Our knowledge of engineering was pretty solid back then, and Manhattan is a very effective place to build large buildings due to the stable bedrock beneath. ",
"There are plenty of buildings still standing that are well over 1,000 years old. 85 years is absolutely nothing -- and yes, our knowledge of building and engineering design was just as good back then as it is now.\n\nThe principles of physics and architecture that enable buildings to stand up have been well understood by masons for many centuries. The main change over the years has been in the ability of architects to make use of newer materials, not in the basic principles involved.",
"There have been cases where a skyscraper was built within my lifetime, and then...\n\nWell, read for yourself about the Citibank building.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\n",
"Just because the building is old doesn't mean the structure is bad. New architectural knowledge allows us to incorporate more materials into building structures like glass to give it a more refreshing and updated look, not because glass is better than bricks but we've figured out ways to incorporate more glass into the look of the building while maintaining structural integrity.",
"The Windsor Guildhall began construction in 1687 over three hundred years ago, and is still semi famous due to a fight between the architect and the local government. The architect used mathematics to calculate the structural properties of the building when designing it, similar to the techniques that modern architects use just with pen and paper rather than a computer. \n\nHowever after doing his design work, the local council (government) decided that there was no way the building could stand up without more supports and insisted that columns be placed in the building. So the building was built with the extra columns requested, however in an inspired act of trolling, the architect realised that the council never specified that the pillars had to be holding up the roof. If you look at the picture on the wiki page you can see that there are eight pillars, the four the architect wanted which DO touch the roof, and the four he was forced to add which don't\n\n_URL_0_\n\nSomething to note is that the older buildings where often over engineered as the designers would know that there are differences in materials that may not be able to be spotted visually, So they would often err on the side of caution and use thicker beams or walls just to be safe. Whereas today we have a tendency to think that our testing and understanding of materials lets us be more precise. This can cause issues like the Charles de Gaulle Airport collapse where the designers calculated the tolerances precisely so that they could have an impressive un supported roof on the building. However the builders decided that they could save a little money by using cheaper concrete and so the building collapsed in on itself about a year after construction.\n\n_URL_1_"
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"https://failures.wikispaces.com/Terminal+2E+at+Charles+de+Gaulle+Airport"
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7n3df1 | why do televisions often cut the end off of recorded programs, even if space is available? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7n3df1/eli5_why_do_televisions_often_cut_the_end_off_of/ | {
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"They often have a schedule for advertisers and later programming, and the program was \"fudged\" in that time slot. Sometimes programs, especially live broadcasts, go over or under time by a few minutes, but shows later in the day have to be on at a certain time. Since everything is set to run in the same time intervals, the gap moves on down the line thriving the day so they often prefer to cut some time from somewhere else to make it work. "
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opdsb | how megaupload can be held responsible for the files uploaded to it. | I mean, how are they supposed to check every single file for copyright violation. Aren't literally MILLIONS of files uploaded/downloaded from it's website every single day? Does the technology to filter that much raw data even EXIST? And if there are legitimate paying customers who used Megaupload for their business file storage, how can the Government shut down Megaupload, and deprive a paying customer of their rightful property? Even if they obtained a warrant to search Megaupload's files wouldn't they need a warrant to search every single paying customer's files? Or is that lumped into a warrant for the company? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/opdsb/eli5_how_megaupload_can_be_held_responsible_for/ | {
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"I believe it was because they made no attempt to moderate their servers for pirated content. They even admitted making money off of pirated content.",
"They don't have to check every single file for copyright violation. The only thing that they were legally required to do was to remove copyright violations from their servers when they recieved a legitimate complaint from the copyright holder. They didn't do that, so they got shut down.\n"
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39t4em | when someone gets eaten in 1 bite, when do they actually die? | I was watching Jurassic World and I noticed in parts of the movie people get eaten whole while still alive, but what happens once they are eaten, do they die in the stomach? What is the actual cause of death? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/39t4em/eli5_when_someone_gets_eaten_in_1_bite_when_do/ | {
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"Going by a fairly generic analysis of this question...\n\nSomewhere between initial ingestion and around 2 minutes.\n\nHow much oxygen do you think is in the stomach of a dinosaur? Plus, the added problem of there being the presence of toxic chemicals you are breathing in for digestion.\n\nYou would die fairly quickly."
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6but1m | what was wrong with '70s britain? | I'm hearing from the older generation all this terror that Labour will take us back to '70s Britain and it was all completely terrible, but I don't really understand it. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6but1m/eli5_what_was_wrong_with_70s_britain/ | {
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"Basically a combination of rampant inflation, getting up to 25%. Strikes, electricity blackouts, and other things like no refuse collection etc.\n\n_URL_2_\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\n",
"From what I understand, labour have gathered a perceived reputation (rightly or wrongly) for economic mismanagement. Historically, they have been known to spend out on public services and public jobs, but to afford this, they have also raised taxes and borrowed more.\n\nIn the 1970's, many services were owned and run by the government. The unions on these public sectors had a lot of power. Unions were (/are) closely affiliated to Labour, and so they felt they could get away with a lot.\n\nRising wages (sometimes given to avert the ever-present threat of strike action) and rising oil prices drove inflation up to around 25 percent. \n\nTo get the economy back under control, the government then had to start cutting back and capping pay in the public sector. This really annoyed the unions. It led to widespread and very disruptive strike action and frequent shut-downs in services. This culminated in \"the winter of discontent\" in 1978. There were frequent power cuts and rubbish building up in the streets, and a sense that the country was going from bad to worse.\n\nWhen the tories took over in 1979, they began a program of legally reducing the power of the unions, selling off the public services to private companies, and shutting down the coal industry. Which caused a whole new set of problems.\n\n_URL_0_",
"A stagnant economy, manufacturing/heavy industry jobs being lost to outsourcing or just lost, oil crisis and flared corduroy pants are why the 70s in Britain were bad."
]
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"http://www.inflation.eu/inflation-rates/great-britain/historic-inflation/cpi-inflation-great-britain.aspx",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_of_Discontent",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Day_Week"
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khj6a | li5, what is the different between explainlikeimfive and askreddit. i feel like a lot of post here belong over there. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/khj6a/li5_what_is_the_different_between/ | {
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"Ask Reddit - ask for advice, stories, explanations etc.\n\nELI5 - get complicated stuff explained so anyone can understand.",
"AskReddit is for your opinion on a question with no hard factual answer.\n\nELI5 - is for simple explanations of topics in a factual manner with no opinions (or as little opinion as possible).\n\nanswers - similar but true high level answers\n\nstupidquestions - for real answers to a question that you feel like you ought to already know the answer to",
"This question belongs in Askreddit.\n\n",
"Ask Reddit - ask for advice, stories, explanations etc.\n\nELI5 - get complicated stuff explained so anyone can understand.",
"AskReddit is for your opinion on a question with no hard factual answer.\n\nELI5 - is for simple explanations of topics in a factual manner with no opinions (or as little opinion as possible).\n\nanswers - similar but true high level answers\n\nstupidquestions - for real answers to a question that you feel like you ought to already know the answer to",
"This question belongs in Askreddit.\n\n"
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||
5hu2xk | why do commercials for law firms always have to state that the speaker is a "non-attorney spokesperson"? | Why is it such a big deal that the person speaking isn't an attorney? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5hu2xk/eli5_why_do_commercials_for_law_firms_always_have/ | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"There are very specific and strict laws concerning the giving of legal advice, particularly if you're a lawyer. If you do not specifically spell out that the person talking is not a lawyer, then the viewer could believe that they are, and arguably view their statements as legal advice. \n\nIf ever an industry existed where your average member is well aware of potential legal issues, and thus paranoid about avoiding them, it would be lawyers. "
]
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[]
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|
2r3jxm | if i killed kim jong-un, would i go to prison? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2r3jxm/eli5if_i_killed_kim_jongun_would_i_go_to_prison/ | {
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"text": [
"1. In North Korea? Most likely yes. I'm willing to bet they have some law against killing their leader. At least you'd be considered a criminal. Whether or not you made it to prison *alive* is a different story.\n\n2. If you escaped, North Korea would probably petition whatever country you were in to extradite you. This is a stickier issue. Assuming the country even *has* an extradition treaty with North Korea (the US doesn't, for example), many countries will refuse to extradite if the crime carries the death penalty in that country or if the person is likely to be tortured or otherwise suffer cruel treatment. Also, many countries will refuse to extradite their own citizens (though they may instead prosecute the crime locally, as if it had happened there).\n\n3. Even if you navigate all of the above (escaping Korea, going to a country that will not extradite you or try you locally instead of extradition), it may be an actual crime in that country to commit a crime abroad. For example: Let's say you live in the US and you're planning on killing Kim Jong-un. Probably can't do it alone. So you work with some people to do that. Bam, you have now run afoul of 18 U.S. Code § 956, Conspiracy to kill, kidnap, maim, or injure persons or damage property in a foreign country."
]
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[]
] |
||
7yq6tn | how do you test a lethal injection? | Lady on a documentary talking about lethal injections just said "the drug is effective, we just completed testing". How does that work? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7yq6tn/eli5_how_do_you_test_a_lethal_injection/ | {
"a_id": [
"duicycx",
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"score": [
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"text": [
"First, don't underestimate the amount of knowledge we have on what will kill a person. A lot of lethal toxins are not new and have been \"tested\" for hundreds, of not thousands of years. \n\nPast that, well... they test on animals. ",
"Can someone actually provide information about constitution of such injection? I am really interested. No need to be perfectly exact but the mixture of contents is something i have no idea about. ",
"These drugs aren't just \"kill people\" drugs. They are anesthetics and muscle relaxants. You know how much it takes to have the effect, as a function of body mass. You know that if you give a surgical patient too much, you have to revive them. In a death penalty setting, you give them more than enough, and choose not to revive them."
]
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[],
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|
71n9e3 | do humans need to eat carbohydrates to survive? to thrive? | I am keenly interested in nutrition, but I feel like there is so much talk on either side of this debate. I read blogs from people who say they have eaten a zero carb diet for decades and have never felt better, but an equal amount of dieticians who say they are essential.
Help? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/71n9e3/eli5_do_humans_need_to_eat_carbohydrates_to/ | {
"a_id": [
"dnc009o",
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],
"score": [
19,
3
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"text": [
"Your brain and body run on sugar. Which is a carbohydrate. If you do not consume them directly then your body will process sugars out of protein and fats. \n\nIt is virtually impossible to eat zero carbs, as even meat has carbs (it is what allows it to brown) but you can eat an extremely low carb diet. As to if this is better, that depends on the person. Every individuals needs are unique and the diet that is best for them will not match what is best for the next person. There is no singular diet that everyone should eat. ",
"No - your body can convert protein and fat into carbohydrates as necessary, so carbohydrates are not necessary to survive."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
|
5xmk7s | in the usa, how are presidential travel and security budgeted? where does the money come from, and where does it go? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5xmk7s/eli5_in_the_usa_how_are_presidential_travel_and/ | {
"a_id": [
"dej8g8l",
"dejd7c3"
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"score": [
2,
3
],
"text": [
"Typically the main costs are for staff wages, if the president has 15 cars in a motorcade that's 15 drivers and upwards of 70 staff members such as guards and paramedics. As well maintenance and fuel all fall into the travel and transport budget. Jet fuel can cost a lot especially for more demanding planes like Air Force One. Usually the bulk of travel expenses come from fuel and staff wages. Not to mention maintenance ",
"Other details that aren't wages involve logistics for support personnel, I.e rental cars, hotels, per diems, etc. Naturally they need to go out ahead of time to secure the area as well as during. Judicial Watch have posted specific details of travel line items (obtained thru FOIA lawsuits) but many line items are redacted by the source for security reasons. They have a category on their web site specially for presidential travel. \nWith departments like DOD and DHS having budgets in the tens of billions, a presidential travel budget is a rounding error. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
|
3pce44 | is political correctness considered of liberal leaning or conservative leaning? | I read a thread in the internet discussing about this and to be honest I was under the impression too that PC is being liberal to the extreme akin to social justice warrior. I did read the Wikipedia entry about political correctness but I am still not sure for definite. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3pce44/eli5_is_political_correctness_considered_of/ | {
"a_id": [
"cw523fy",
"cw52788",
"cw59sb5"
],
"score": [
3,
2,
3
],
"text": [
"political correctness means simply treating others as they wish to be treated. They ask you to not clal them something, you shouldnt clal them it.\n\nTo put it simply, \"political correctness\" has a synonym: \"Respect.\"",
"The term itself has nothing to do with left or right wing politics. It just means \"not to use terms that might offend or discriminate someone e.g. based on sex, or race.\" So I'd say its just the decent thing to do. However US conservatives critisize the concept as censorship. They want to maintain their right to say racist/homophobe things. So what does that tell us about the type of person?\n",
"PC is a more generic term than what others are posting.\n\nBeing \"politically correct\" literally means trying to say/do the thing that most of the people listening/watching/judging would agree is the \"correct\" thing to say/do.\n\nStatements and actions that are considered \"politically correct\" naturally change with society and the point of view of the audience. \n\nThere is not always consensus about what constitutes politically correct at each moment in history.\n\nCurrently in the US liberals largely identify with the role of defending others they see as weaker and so they are strongly associated with pushing back against language that is considered to be bullying. That's why at the moment they are also associated with political correctness. \n\nBut there are certainly counter-examples from the conservative side of things. Conservatives tend to identify with accomplishment and national exceptional-ism. This often manifests in strong support of the military and there have certainly been times in recent US history where any critique of military policy or military actions wasn't considered to be \"politically correct\". \n\n"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[]
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|
46cxlb | why do so many canned foods have that same "cat food" smell when opened? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/46cxlb/eli5_why_do_so_many_canned_foods_have_that_same/ | {
"a_id": [
"d045x7r",
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"score": [
15,
5,
11
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"text": [
"Um, can you elaborate on what canned foods, other than canned cat food itself, that you think smell like cat food? ",
"Likely because the things in canned cat food (fish, chicken, etc) are the things commonly canned (tuna, canned chicken, etc)\n\n",
" > Most corned beef hash, refried beans, tuna, Spam.\n\nWhat you're smelling is overcooked meat and/or protein in a can (which is due to the canning process).\n\nCats require meat to live (no, there's no such thing as vegan cats unless forced by a human) so therefore cat food is made up of mostly meat and other proteins + a few ingredients just for cats.\n\nThere's pretty much negligible difference between catfood and a lot of canned meats / proteins on the market. Yes that means you can eat cat food if you want to and be totally fine.\n\n"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
3tq53t | is there any correlation between lithium ion batteries and lithium as an anti-depressant? | Question explained it title. Just wondering what properties Lithium has that makes it ideal for both of these uses or if it's just a magical coincidence? Please explain! | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3tq53t/eli5is_there_any_correlation_between_lithium_ion/ | {
"a_id": [
"cx88wwu"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"That's... not what correlation means (: \n\nIt's also not how elements work, really. \n\nWhen people refer to \"lithium\" as medication, it is not -- I repeat -- not the raw element. It's a chemical compound which *includes* lithium. Usually a very complex one. Lithium on it's own is extremely toxic and volatile - it actually bursts into flames when it comes in contact with *water*. \n\nWhen you combine elements into compounds, they end up behaving completely differently. A bit complex for an ELI5, but when atoms and molecules combine into compounds it can change their properties immensely. \n\nSimple example? Oxygen. The oxygen we breathe every day is actually O2, which means it's two oxygen atoms. We need it to live. However, O3, which is three oxygen atoms, is called ozone and would *kill* us. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
20repg | why doesn't every car has a turbocharger/supercharger? | They make cars more powerful without increasing (or increasing in smaller proportion) the fuel consumption. If they deliver more power for the same size, just by adding extra oxygen in the combustion, shouldn't all cars be using this technology? I know there is a drawback in responsiveness but, is it worth the inefficiency?
Edit: a word | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/20repg/eli5_why_doesnt_every_car_has_a/ | {
"a_id": [
"cg60zhw",
"cg66q45"
],
"score": [
5,
2
],
"text": [
"You need higher octane (more expensive) fuel to get the full benefit, it adds complexity and cost to the engine, and reliability suffers. \n\nAs fuel prices rise you'll keep seeing more and more of them because the balance is shifting but there is no free lunch. ",
"Because it would be too reliable, and too economic for oil and car companies to make money. That's why you get shitty V6's with \"good mileage\" and guarantees. But these last a few years before major repairs are needed, all while wasting gas for less power. \n\n\nA turbo charger , is probably one of the best ways to get free energy during an already-happening cycle. The exhaust is forced out of the engine, and through a turbine which spins quite freely. The other end sucks in air and pushes it into the engine to create a better air to fuel ratio and less energy cost for the engine. This basically means more power. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
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