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51bm4d | why isnt there a universal plug socket design? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/51bm4d/eli5_why_isnt_there_a_universal_plug_socket_design/ | {
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"Because in the past, every country would choose its own plug, and now it is too much work to adopt a universal design. We would have to change every existing plug and every socket in the world.",
"Different sockets have different advantages and disadvantages. It is also hard to change existing standards. A standard is emerging though as the European countries are making their sockets compatible with each other. The result in the Schuko/Europlug design. More and more countries are making their sockets compatible with this but it may take some iterations before they have something compatible.",
"Even if we did have a universal socket design, the electrical power is distributed differently in different countries. The current has different voltage peaks and different frequencies. Standardize the socket and people could find themselves plugging into something in a way that will cause damage. To standardize the power grids all over the world would be a massive investment. "
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210u8s | why does my cell phone battery drain faster in a large city than at home in my small town? | Multiple phones (iphones/galaxy s3's). Doing nothing different. No extra calls (forever alone). Not downloading apps or using maps. Within 4 hours of being in town my battery is down to 25%. Normally it never gets below 50 during the day. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/210u8s/eli5_why_does_my_cell_phone_battery_drain_faster/ | {
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"it's scanning and establishing links with new, mostly wifi, networks. even if you don't actively use them. try switching off your wifi if you're not using it, that'll probably help a lot.",
"In a small town there is generally only 1 or 2 cell towers that your phone is constantly connected to. When you are in a city there are many towers all over the place that your phone is constantly switching between causing your phone to work more and drain the battery faster\n"
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4kdzjf | why are porn websites filled with scams? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4kdzjf/eli5_why_are_porn_websites_filled_with_scams/ | {
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"Non-reputable sites are a lot more likely to have non-reputable income sources, such as non-reputable ad services. It's really that simple. You're in a (at best) grey morality zone - you can't be surprised to encounter grey morality behaviour. "
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372cqr | what is lightning made of? | Also how is thunder produced? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/372cqr/eli5_what_is_lightning_made_of/ | {
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"Lightning is a build up of static-electricity due to cloud friction as thunder is the collision of warm and cold air at high speed.",
"- Water builds up in clouds\n- Water has a net negative charge\n- That negative charge pushes the negative charged molecules in the ground away, because negative opposes other negative charges\n- what is left is a growing net positive charge (this is why you sometimes feel your hair on end before lightning strikes, it is the growing net positive charge)\n- finally, the negative charge in the cloud is so attracted to the net positive charge in the ground, they cause a charge, which meets somewhere in the middle (closer to the ground)\n- thunder is the sound of this charge, but since sound travels slower than light, it comes AFTER the lightning strike"
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98iedm | sometimes in video games and in video game glitches the characters will all of a sudden fling up into the sky at a thousand miles per hour. if games attempt to stimulate mass and physics, what are they getting so wrong that causes this to happen so regularly in video games? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/98iedm/eli5_sometimes_in_video_games_and_in_video_game/ | {
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"Divide by zero errors or an overflow error or clipping errors. \nSometimes what can happen is something will push your character out of bounds and the physics engine try to correct by moving you back in bounds as quickly as possible. But now maybe your clipping into another object so the physics there pushes you back and they kind of tug of war between the two objects. It's possible that each push from either object is giving you inertia because the character is \"moving\" even if it's just vibrating between two objects. When you are suddenly dislodged all the inertia can send you flying into low earth orbit. Same thing can happen with objects two objects. See tank flipping in halo one. The first tank is forced through the second one causing their physics to interact in an unpredictable fashion.",
"There's a variety of causes but sometimes the physics computation gets bad data as input. Under the hood physics engines are basically just math formulas. Games are dynamic and it's impossible to account for every single combination of things the player does or anything else that might happen. So sometimes the game will give the physics engine numbers that are too big or too small, etc and weird stuff happens as a result. ",
"there's a variety of scenarios that may cause this, but one common one that causes it is when a variable \"rolls\" past a range of values and then jumps to the other extreme.\n\nIn programming languages, in order to save memory, numeric variables have a limitation on how large the valid range of numbers can be. For example, if you're using a variable to keep track of how many houses people own, you wouldn't need to assign a very memory-intensive variable with a range that goes into the hundreds of millions of possible numbers. You would also not need any negative numbers. In fact, you might just assign a 3-bit, nonnegative number that goes from 0 to 7.\n\nThat's fine and all, but let's say a bug causes someone with 0 houses to \"lose\" a house. So they go from 0 to -1. But the variable used doesn't allow for -1 to be represented- Remember that it's only 0 to 7. Instead it \"rolls\" to the other end- a 7. Suddenly it's 7 houses that the person owns.\n\nIn video games something similar is happening. The developers don't think anyone would move faster than, say, 255 miles per hour, so they use an 8-bit non-negative variable that's 0-255. Someone standing on the ground would have a 0 for that variable.\n\nNow imagine that a bug caused their 0 to go down 1 number. It will roll over to a 255 so the character is now going comically fast at 255 miles per hour.",
"Game physics are really really rough approximations of actual physics. Good realistic physics generally just cannot be calculated fast enough to keep up with real time game play, especially considering all of the other stuff that the computer needs to calculate each frame (graphics/AI/sound/etc). \n\nSo physics engines in games take a ton of different shortcuts to make things run acceptably fast. And one of the results of substituting speed for accuracy is that you can end up with some really weird edge cases that the system just doesn't deal with well. \n\nJust as a general example, a huge portion of physics in games is collision detection. Figuring out when objects are touching each other or intersecting. Generally games will check for this at some sort of fixed rate (say 30 times per second or whatever), but depending on what is going on in the game, objects could intersect in between those checks (sometimes referred to as 'ticks'). \n\nIf an object was moving fast enough, by the time the engine checks to see if it's hit a wall or whatever, the object may have actually moved far enough to be in a position well inside the wall. In real life, the object would've started hitting that wall at some specific point in time, but in the game engine that collision can only start during one of the physics ticks. So by the time that next physics tick comes around and it sees the collision, the position of that moving object is now well inside the wall. The physics engine knows that the two objects shouldn't be interacting, but it doesn't really have a way to 'realistically' separate them, because that's a behavior that couldn't actually happen in real life. So sometimes weird things happen like objects getting ejected at ridiculous speeds at random directions as the physics system tries to cope with situations that weren't ever really planned for. \n\nGame developers can do various things to try to minimize these sorts of occurrences. For example, if performance allows, you might increase the rate at which the physics engine checks for collisions. Some times objects are given collision shapes that are significantly larger than the actual rendered object, so that their collisions with other objects are likely to be detected sooner. And so on. But there's just only so much you can predict and plan for, and once thousands of players start messing around your game, they're going to stumble across lots of edge cases that you never got around to fixing or even predicting. ",
"Based on my limited experience with the game I am making, you must choose a balance between reasonable performance, and how often the physics engine checks for collisions between objects. Which would you rather have, a game that never misses a single collision or gravity computation, but can only run at 10 fps and there fore looks choppy, or a game that runs butter smooth but sometimes freaks out? \n( Imho, I dont think a developer should have to make this awkward choice at all, the underlying engines should simply do a better job managing these fundamental behaviors.)",
"Game physics is simulated with the assumption that each object is not malleable. When objects collide at high speeds in real life, they bend or shatter as the atoms try to get out of each other's way. This is not simulated. \n\nImaging two spheres forced to clip each other. The game calculates that bit of the bound of sphere A inside B. The engine does not take this well, so the spheres propel each other away at near infinite speed or phase through each other. Generally speaking, this happen when a premade animation forces something into a movable object (like the GTA swing launcher glitch) or when the game has so many asset loaded that the CPU does not have time to stop objects in time.\n\nPhysics is very expensive in games, so devs resort to using a lot of animation, that's why it happens so often. It can also be cause when an object is in the spawn point of another."
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3x4xhn | why are sms text messages limited to 160 characters? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3x4xhn/eli5why_are_sms_text_messages_limited_to_160/ | {
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"Sms is a weird hack. It wasn't really meant to exist. Your phone and the tower talk back and forth every few seconds to work out things like phone frequencies and power levels and boring network stuff. Part of the message they send was empty 99% of the time so they said \"hey, what if we put a little email in there\" and they did that and it ended up being a weird size that made no sense for messages but was better than nothing. ",
"The control messages of GSM contain 140 bytes of data. The team developing texting decided 140 wasn't enough, but wanted to use the otherwise available channel. They cut down the available characters so they could use 7-bit encoding ([list of characters](_URL_0_)). The 7-bit encoding allows 140 bytes * 8/7 = 160 characters.",
"That is a great question. The short answer is this was the specification in the RFC for the SMS specification. Telecomm equipment is based on standards and this allows interoperability with different manufacturers equipment. Your radio network might be Nokia, and your core might be Alcatel-Lucent, and so they have to agree on common frameworks for exchanging data. SMS was developed long before we had high bandwidth and reliable data communications networks like GPRS, 3G, 4G, UMTS, EDGE, etc. When I got out of telecomm a few years ago they were still using dedicated systems for the handling of SMS messages (SMSC if I recall). These SMS messages originate in a handset, are sent over a radio timeslot to a radio base station, which sends packet or circuit switched data to a base station controller, and from there it gets sent to a mobile switching center (MSC), the MSC was originally designed to handle voice calls and circuit switched operations only, so it doesn't understand SMS. To add that capability the SMS messages are routed from the switch to a specialized system which encodes and decodes the SMS data (SMSC) and the data can be sent over packet networks, or backwards compatable with SS7 networks which is what most legacy telecomm equipment communicated over. SS7 is a bit like TCP/IP except it's designed around circuit switched networks and it uses things like point codes instead of IP addresses. The SIP protocol that voice over IP uses actually stands for SS7 over IP S.I.P. so it all comes down to backwards compatability. \n\nIn modern data networks they can bypass the whole labryntine legacy circuit switching and SS7 networks and just directly send the data over the packet switched network (TCP/IP), but for backwards compatability and to meet standards, they still abide by the old limit of 160 characters which was how much of a payload you could send in an SMS frame with the various protocol headers attached. \n\n"
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b9jw8k | what is a critical point and what is a supercritical fluid? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b9jw8k/eli5_what_is_a_critical_point_and_what_is_a/ | {
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"A critical point is a point where a phase boundary ceases to exist, and a supercritical fluid is a fluid beyond the critical point for the liquid-gas transition. In other words, for a liquid-gas transition, a critical point represents the point in the phase diagram where the liquid and gas phases become indistinguishable. And a supercritical fluid is a fluid above that point, where it's not really a gas and not really a liquid."
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2exc6r | why is the bordgame 'go' not calculatable like chess? | Every strict logic boardgame can be mastered with calculation power: This means computers are able to play better chess than humans.
Why isn't that applying to Go? The game seems pretty logic for me.
EDIT: In the comments there is also a good explanation about the more general topic about computer-bots abilities to play a given boardgame sucessful against a human. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2exc6r/eli5_why_is_the_bordgame_go_not_calculatable_like/ | {
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"There are a few things which I think are worth talking about here.\n\nFirst is the idea of whether a game is 'solvable'. Both Go and Chess are solvable games just like Checkers or Tic-Tac-Toe/Naughts-and-Crosses are solvable. The key here is that every move each player makes is with complete information of the game which means nothing is 'hidden', there are no truly random elements, and players don't take their turns 'simultaneously'. A solvable game means that when the solution is known and each player plays as best as possible one player will always win or the game will be forced into a draw. As I said earlier, Go is a 'solvable' game in this way.\n\nNow, the reality of it is very different. Computing the solution to a game involves a tremendous amount of computing power if the game is sufficiently complex. Chess has *not* been solved in this way and we probably need quite a lot more computing power to do so. Go is even more complicated as the number of board states is even larger. \n\nCompare the opening moves available to the first player in Chess vs. Go (I apologize if there are errors in specific numbers, but the scale sholud still be right). In Chess, there are only twenty possible opening moves for each player. After each player has taken just one move there are four-hundred possible game states. These numbers explode from there to have hundreds of thousands of possible combinations after just a few moves. In Go, the first player has three-hundred-sixty-one possible moves and the second player has three-hundred-sixty. After each player has taken just one move there are over one-hundred-twenty-five-thousand possible board states. People trying to solve these games will take advantage of patterns where seemingly different board states are actually the same, but the scale of the problem, particularly in the early turns of Go is much larger than for chess. By the way, this is in no way intended to compare the relative human complexity of the game, just the computational complexity.\n\nWhat I think you are referring to in your question is the ability to program computers to be competent at playing a game, particularly compared to humans. Here, the relative computational simplicity of Chess compared to Go makes it easier to make Chess master computers than Go. Two of the big parts of writing a Chess AI are optimizing the opening strategy and performing look-ahead calculations. \n\nOptimizing the opening strategy effectively means 'solving' the first few turns of the game which are very important in Chess. While solving hundreds of moves in Chess is computationally impossible for us right now, solving opening moves, which are constrained by the inability of many pieces to move very much, is relatively easy and the pay-off for Chess is very large. Many games can be won and lost in the opening moves even if the ultimate winner plays an otherwise mediocre game. Memorizing openings is a big part of how humans get good at Chess as well. Go, with its huge number of possible opening moves is more difficult to optimize and while important, the pay-off isn't as large as in Chess. The result is that Go AIs don't get as much of a bump from optimizing the opening moves of the game.\n\nLook-aheads are another important part of writing a board-game AI. Basically, the computer calculates future likely moves and runs them through an algorithm which gives each of those possible futures a rating and whichever has the best rating is the path the computer tries to take. Once again, the computer benefits from Chess having relatively few moves which each player can perform. Looking ahead several turns is within the capability of many computers. Go, with its huge number of possibilities requires more computing power to look ahead the same number of turns.\n\nFinally, modern computing began as a largely western affair with European cultural obsession over Chess. A lot of effort has gone into optimizing Chess AIs compared to Go. This is beginning to even out a bit, particularly since the Deep Blue vs. Kasparov matches have made Chess a less appealing target to show off how great computers can be.\n\nIf you find this topic interesting, you might read up a bit on [Arimaa](_URL_0_), a game designed to be used with a Chess set that is relatively easy for humans to play and which intentionally makes it difficult to write AI for."
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a0ya92 | how does sudden tempreture change happen? like how do we go from being -6 degrees celsius to +8 degrees celsius within a span of 12 hours? does the major factor in these changes have anything to do with solar flares or pressure systems? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a0ya92/eli5_how_does_sudden_tempreture_change_happen/ | {
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"It has zero to do with solar flares. If you have a big swing like that and you don't live in a desert, then most likely a warm mass of air has moved in to replace a colder one, rather the air itself changing temperature. \n\nIf you do live in a desert, then the sun alone can do that - things warm up in sunlight and cool off in its absence. Water requires a lot of energy to heat up, so the more water is around you, the less temperature will change from direct heating. That's why islands tend to be mostly the same temperature year round, and deserts have huge temperature changes just between day and night."
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8cndce | why is that when you touch an open wound (or the “white meat”) under your skin with your finger, it burns? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8cndce/eli5_why_is_that_when_you_touch_an_open_wound_or/ | {
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"Because the nerves that bring sensations like pressure, heat and cold to your brain get the info from special structures around nerve endings that are deep in your skin. If you touch an open wound you stimulate directly your nerves and give them a much greater stress. The other case where this happens is when your skin is removed by fire and the nerve endings are exposed to the air so the sensation is similar. \nThink of it like a short circuit.",
"Nerves pass feeling on to the brain but there are many different kinds of nerves. Some pass sensations like hot/cold, others pass pain signals, and still others pass sensations like itching and tickling sensations when an insect bites you. When you suffer a wound, you are exposing these nerves and this makes them very sensitive because the buffer of protective skin is removed and the exposed nerves are raw and easily triggered. Some of this pain is also caused by swelling which is the bodies reaction to damaged blood vessels. The pain is a combination of stimulating the nerves from touching, and partly the pressure of the touch exacerbating swollen tissue. \n\nYour finger has a rough texture, and our skin is often coated with oils, dirt, salt that irritate nerves if exposed to them. Latex gloves for instance don't hurt as much because latex is more tolerated and smooth. \n\n"
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epifad | why does slow motion video need a specific setting? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/epifad/eli5_why_does_slow_motion_video_need_a_specific/ | {
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"Video is made of of a bunch of photos played back typically at ~24 per second (24fps). When you're talking a slo-mo video it's recording 120-240+ fps. If you were to stretch out a regular 24fps video to be slo-mo it would be very choppy.",
"Let's say you have a 1-second video that was recorded at 30 frames/sec. That means your video consists of 30 still pictures.\n\nYou can play it back slower, but that'll make it choppier and not reveal any more detailed motion. You still won't see what is happening *between* those 30 pictures. You are just looking at each picture for longer.\n\nSo to capture more motion detail, you'll need to take more pictures per second. In other words, record at a higher frame rate. That's what the slow-motion mode on your camera does.\n\n \n\n\n(Side note: Motion-interpolation algorithms can *guess* what goes on between frames to increase the frame rate.)",
"Since the main question has been answered, I want to follow up with an explanation of another common question, which is:\n\n\"Well why don't cameras just record in 120-240 FPS all the time then, so you can turn a normal video into a slow-motion one?\"\n\nThe main reason is video quality. The more pictures a device takes per second, the more processing power and storage needed to create those videos.\n\nEven more important is the exposure time per frame. If you take a photo with a 1/30 second exposure to light, it'll look much different than taking a photo with a 1/120 second exposure. Shorter exposure time means darker-looking images. Sometimes that's fine, like if you're outside in bright sunlight or inside with a lot of really bright lightbulbs around you. \n\nThat's why \"slow motion mode\" on most cameras recommends that you only use it in bright light. Otherwise the images (and the resulting video) will be too under-exposed to look good."
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ayig2d | what makes up the rest of the weight in food? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ayig2d/eli5_what_makes_up_the_rest_of_the_weight_in_food/ | {
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"A lot of it is water. Or other inedables like bones. It is basically things that our body can not take use of in a meaningful way."
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1ztwat | how would a school voucher system work? | I can't really imagine a world without public education. Can someone please explain the argument to me? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ztwat/eli5_how_would_a_school_voucher_system_work/ | {
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"To be clear - vouchers ARE a form of public education. The public is still paying for the schools.\n\nHere's the system now:\n\nAll tax dollars for education are routed into a centralized bureaucracy. The administrators decide where schools will be built, and set policies for the schools under their control. They negotiate with the unions for the teachers and establish a contract through collective bargaining for all the teachers in their school system. \n\nGenerally speaking, if you don't want your kids to go to a school inside the tax-supported system, you pay to put your kids into private school, and you bear the costs associated with that.\n\nThe upsides to this system are economies of scale. A school district can negotiate for land, supplies, labor, and other necessities in bulk, which should theoretically lower costs. Having multiple locations under the same system should make it easier to assign resources like teachers and administrative staff between schools to account for changes in population.\n\nThe downsides to this system are that all the people who choose not to pay for private school don't have choices about how their kids will be educated. And since all the schools are run by the same team, that team is unlikely to be engaged in \"creative destruction\" - the effort to tear down old systems and replace them with new, better systems.\n\nThe advocates for a voucher system want to empower parents to place their kids in competitive schools without forcing those parents to shoulder the cost of doing so. Instead of all the money going into a central bureaucracy which then allocates those funds as it sees fit, in a voucher system the parents would control a sizable part of the money in the school system, which would be allocated based on where they decided to send their kids.\n\nSchools would \"compete\" for students. Poor schools would lose out, and with fewer students attending, would get less money. Theoretically this would create an incentive to either close the school, or fix it.\n\nDifferent strategies for education would compete. There is a \"one-size-fits-all\" approach in most school systems. Vouchers would give school administrators and teachers an incentive to break out of that box and experiment with different ways of teaching kids. The successes would attract more students (and thus more money).\n\nSome schools might present radically different curricula than others. Maybe a school wants to have an emphasis on math and science, another wants to focus on music, and a third wants religious studies. Parents would gain the ability to choose the kinds of classes their kids would have access to, and where the emphasis would be placed in their education."
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2zv2ws | why are 2x and nosleep default subs? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2zv2ws/eli5_why_are_2x_and_nosleep_default_subs/ | {
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" > i have been mainly a lurker for years and **made an account just to keep these two subs and their click bait toxic spam out of my feeds**. Why are they defaults? \n\nYou just answered your own question. "
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2irant | why are inconsistent costs of procedures and price-gauging within the healthcare industry passively accepted in the united states? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2irant/eli5_why_are_inconsistent_costs_of_procedures_and/ | {
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"Probably because any attempt to ~~regulate~~ reform healthcare is met by hundreds of millions of dollars from insurance companies, turned into a political issue, called socialism, and ends up generating extreme rejection rates by the public.",
"Mainly, lobbyists. I think you've posed a great question here and like you I wish there would be more attention brought to it. The cost of medical care lays squarely on insurance companies, medical providers, and most of all the government for allowing it to continue. \n\nThere is a reason India and other countries pay many times less for the same medicines that are developed in the United States. As Americans, we HAVE to pay it bc it off-sets the reduction in costs overseas. Our government, medicine manufactures, and insurance companies feel we should absorb the costs bc we are \"the richest country in the world\", and they feel completely justified in that reasoning.",
"I'd say it's America's reluctance to accept any sort of state run healthcare. While it's true large private insurance companies can collectively bargain effectively they all do it separately so Hospitals can play games with the costs of service as needed.\n\nCollectively Bargain is the concept of a group (Government body/insurance company) being able to tell medical providers (Hospitals, private care workers, medical suppliers, artificial parts manufactures) what the price they'll pay for, as example, a hip replacement. Large organizations, say Spain, will tell the providers that for a hip replacement they're only going to pay 6,000 Euros and if you want to do business within their jurisdiction that's all anyone should pay you. Nobody is telling the providers that here in America.\n\nThe reason for this is due to Free-market policies, which generally do make a lot of sense. With people's health we probably shouldn't be doing this. As the insurance companies will privately bargain down the Hospitals, but to attempt profit the hospitals will publicly blow up their prices. This is what you see as price gauging (sorry it took so long to get to this point). Some anecdotal stories have Motrin as $800, an insurance company would never pay this. Obviously. But as a private citizen, a small dot in this huge multi-billion dollar system you have no bargaining power. Often times when you don't have insurance the hospital will \"cut you a break,\" this is them adjusting the price back down to something sane. However it doesn't always happen if you're a \"well-off\" citizen i.g. not poor. I'll be around all day for questions.",
"It sounds crazy, but the answer to any of these types of questions will always be money. Someone's pocket is getting stuffed. ",
"Time Magazine (US) June 11, 2012 issue was devoted to this very issue. Longest single story they had ever produced. Mind boggling how manipulative the **cough cough not-for-profit-hospitals cough cough** play with the pricing. They had 3 years worth of data from every hospital in the nation, and tried to find correlations on pricing. You know, expensive city, remote environment, teaching hospital vs non, you name it. Their final analysis? They simply make it up. They could find zero correlation between costs pricing. But since the majority of people have insurance, nobody cares. Except it is slowly starting to creep to people that \"we\" are being taken advantage of. ",
"Whether you like it or not, healthcare insurance companies are basically backed by the government. The government forces them to give out insurances out at a less profitable rate and in return they are guaranteed to not go bankrupt. Same thing happened to housing. Anyway, the hospitals and any medical service takes advantage of this, and just over charges because now their customers are like a blank check. Everybody is likely to be insured by insurance comapnies and the insurance companies are insured by the government and the government is insured by the united states citizen. There really is no accountability because everybody just passes on the debt.\n\nAll that being said, its still not as bad as other countries. Sure you pay more in America, but you also get more. We have one of the highest quality medical care in the world and the wait time is still relatively low. Its not great, but it's still not that bad.",
"Who says it's accepted? We have no choice. Regular people with common sense don't have billion dollar lobbyists.",
"The same reason every form of price-gouging exists in America: as soon as you're in a position to fix the system, it's no longer in your best interest to do so.",
"Cause what the hell else are we gonna do? :-(",
"PhD Student in Health Services Research.\n\nThis is as five year old as I can get, given there is no clear answer to this question. The US healthcare system is really not one system. It is a number of systems working for different goals that often conflict. Many people will try to say there is one cause, whether it be malpractice, uninsured care, administrative costs, or lobbyists, but the truth is that they all contribute to high prices. There is no consistency between organizations in the system so they each have perverse incentives within themselves and between each other.",
"It's a very American belief that private industry works better than government. Which may be absolutely stupid, but it's a core belief for many people. Organisational theory and all that. Anyway.\n\nThe simplest way to put it: If someone can make a profit off it, for some reason, Americans believe they should.. Thus, Health care has it's for profit hospitals, it's for profit insurance, it's for profit research. However, since Medicine is an inelastic and essential good, it also has non profit research (Universities/NIH), non profit insurance (Medicare/Medicaid, though you can also google Part D to see why non profit may not quite be accurate) and \"Non-profit\" hospitals, which may be non profit in the same way Susan G Komen is non profit, I.E. we're trying to make money, just hiding it in other ways. These mix into an absolute cluster of a system.\n\nFor the record, studies like _URL_0_ Indicate that in the USA Frankenstein System, about half the people who go for care aren't receiving adequate care. So, people who say it's the best in the world may just be lying for some reason. It does however, have the highest expenditure rate per capita, though ranks 37th-38th for effeciency.",
"I got charged $600 for getting a shot of morphine and nothing more. I told them give me a reasonable price or you will never see a dime from me. Not everyone passively accepts it.",
"Seems that few responders are actually addressing your question, which boils down to, why are Americans so utterly stupid when it comes to our own well being and quality of life? The answer, in my opinion, is that we consistently put greed, hatred, and fear ahead of reason, particularly when we vote.",
"Because they have a lot of money, which means they have a lot of lobbyists, which means they have a lot of politicians, which means that they can get any laws passed that they want and there is very little the American people can do about it. ",
"In European countries, medical care providers have to negotiate with governments, not individual persons. If a medical company doubles the price of a critical medicine, an individual has to accept that or die. A government is not so easily manipulated and can negotiate lower prices.\n\nFor a slightly longer explanation, see _URL_0_",
"people won't like this, but please stop loading the questions so much. we may agree, but try to be objective to get a simple explanation for your issue.",
"In our country we have a system in place where you can influence the decisions of government officials in our congress via lobbying.\n\nthe people in congress desire the income that this can generate and convert to votes and the much higher paying positions that are offered once they leave office for the votes they deliver while in office.\n\nwhen you combine this with a wealth concentration in the single digits the result is very wealthy people (those running the medicare/pharma/insurance industries) can get laws passed that are in their best interest financially and legally.\n\nIt is quite essentially legal bribery.\n\nOriginal we paid our lawmakers quite handsomely to avoid precisely this kind of condition. alas our founders never could have anticipated the size and concentration of wealth that we have in private industry today.\n\nthis results in private corporations being able compensation many orders of magnitude larger than we the people can offer them for their service.\n\nEssentially the companies \"buy\" the laws that allow them to charge what they do for procedures etc.. in our health care industry.\n\nthose same people making the laws are the ones who would \"accept\" it on our behalf which of course they will do.\n\na good example of this is medicare part d reform where we essentially forced a vote through our branches that made it illegal for us to negotiate effectively over pricing with our concentrated buying power. \n\nWhen you examine the aftermath of that law being passed you find that the core players in the passage of that bill went on later to very lucrative well paying positions at the companies that lobbied for the passage of that law.\n\nas for why the \"people\" accept it. that is a little more complicated and has to do with group mentality in a society and the desire for perceived self preservation in the immediate future ignoring preservation further down the line.\n\nOne of the ways to get the people to accept it is to make them think they benefit from it (health care laws etc..) when in reality is just costs them more and more. You appease them while fooling them. This folds into the same system of wealth concentration and the lobbying of the lawmakers.\n\nI tried to make this reply as non politically biased as possible. that is why some parts of it are vague.\n\nJust trying to spell out the factual reality we operate in as clearly as I can.\n\nThe solution is education and willpower.\n\nThe problem with this solution is that people are naturally lazy. like all of nature they take the path of least resistance but not overall resistance but \"right now\" resistance.\n\nso even though this apathy will result in far more pain later it results in less pain and work \"right now\" so that is the path they take and the path our system encourages them to take.\n\nThese types of situations usually do not end well for the nation experiencing them.",
"Enough people are covered to think it's not too bad. Plenty of ignorant people who never traveled outside to see better systems at work. People think it will raise taxes, destroy businesses, create communism, etc if we overhaul the system (due to misinformation from the government / businesses involved)."
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29f0ny | if woken up from a dream, will thinking about the same dream get you back to sleep more quickly than thinking about something else? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/29f0ny/eli5_if_woken_up_from_a_dream_will_thinking_about/ | {
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"As someone who dreams a lot and has huge difficulty sleeping, I can very easily fall back into the sleep and continue where I left off.\n\nIf someone forced me awake causing me to start talking to them I will have great difficulty getting relaxed back into sleep. "
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3qd85w | serbia and bosnia | Why are the Serbian populated regions of Bosnia not apart of the country? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3qd85w/eli5_serbia_and_bosnia/ | {
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"Know why there are regions of Bosnia dominated by Serbs? Because the Serbs killed all the Bosniaks so that their regions would be ethnically pure. [Have a look at a map.](_URL_0_)"
]
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[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing_in_the_Bosnian_War#/media/File:Ethnic_makeup_of_Bosnia_and_Herzegovina_before_and_after_the_war.jpg"
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8ypnip | how does current and voltage get "stepped down" from a wall socket? | In Australia, wall sockets are rated at 240V and 10A. On my laptop charger, it's input is 100-240V 1.8A and output is 20V 3A.
How does the laptop charger only draw 1.8A from the power supply? Is this through the resistor and how does the resistor draw the certain amount of current? And if the input power is 240\*1.8 (432W) and the output is 20\*3(60W), where does this additional power go to? I know transformers can change voltage and current, however they will account for most power and little will be lost.
Thanks | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8ypnip/eli5_how_does_current_and_voltage_get_stepped/ | {
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"There are a few ways. Transformers change voltage quite efficiently, but they only work with AC. DC can be changed with things like voltage dividers and multipliers (stepping it down and up, respectively), or DC-DC converters.\n\nThe thing about the current is that a device will draw a given amount, and no more, based on the applied voltage and its internal characteristics. The simplest to understand is a resistor. The amount of current that will flow though it is a function of the applied voltage and its resistance and nothing more. If I apply 12 volts to a light bulb from a source that can supply 1 amp, or 1 million amps, either way the bulb will draw the same current from that 12 volt source.\n\nLooking at your power converter, first multiply the 1.8 amps by the 100 volts it can accept; that gives it 180 watts. It can draw less current at higher voltages to get the power it needs, but it has to be rated for the most current it might need to draw, which will be at the lowest voltage. There's also going to be a fair bit of internal loss (that's why it gets hot), and it will be overengineered so that little manufacturing flaws or other things don't melt it. Even with all that, it's not drawing 180 watts and supplying 60. Those are just working numbers for rating purposes, not the actual exact figures.",
"So I'm an audio engineer with a little knowledge of electrics so my knowledge my be off base. If so someone please correct me. \n\nBut as I understand it amps is more like a capacity. \n\nThink of your outlet as a cup with 10 amps in it. \nYou plug in a thing that takes up 1 amp. Now the cup has 9 amps in it and so on.\nPlug in something else that uses 3 amps. Now you only have 6 amps left in the cup. \n\nSo your laptop isn't converting the amps down. It's just only useing 1.8(or whatever number op said) of the available 10 amps. \n\nThis is how I understand it. If I'm wrong I apologize. ",
"It uses a transformer. A transformer has two independent coils which are coupled magnetically. The ratio of the turns in the secondary to turns in the primary is the factor which the voltage is reduced by. So 100 secondary/1000 primary gives 0.1x240 or 24V. Ignoring losses in the transformer, the energy in the primary is equal to the energy in the secondary. Since the secondary is lower voltage, it has higher current (by the same 10/1 ratio). \n\nLaptop supplies don't use 50/60 Hz transformers because they are heavy and inefficient. They convert 240VAC to 340VDC then switch it off/on at around 100 kHz before sending it to a transformer. \n\nEdit; the other part of your question\n\n > if the input power is 240*1.8 (432W) and the output is 20*3(60W), where does this additional power go to? \n\nThe input current rating is worst case which would be at 100V (100x1.8=180W). That only accounts for part of the discrepancy. The other part is likely due to [power factor](_URL_0_) (voltage and current not in phase) and power-on surge rating. The power adapter is about 85% efficient. "
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7e1v0b | malleability vs. ductility in metals | I understand the former deals with flattening, while the latter deals with stretching into a wire shape.
But aren't these properties very similar? Where do these properties matter practically? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7e1v0b/eli5_malleability_vs_ductility_in_metals/ | {
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"They are similar, but some metals are one but not the other. Gold and silver are both. Lead is just malleable, but not very ductile.",
"Malleability refers to how much a material squishes out to the sides when you squeeze or hammer it. Ductility refers to how much a material can be stretched without breaking by pulling on it. They're both related to how easily particles (atoms, since we're only talking about metals) slide over each other, but the directions involved can be a deciding factor. \n\nAlso, ductility is temperature dependent. At a certain low temperature depending on the metal (some metals actually become brittle at high temperature, but I don't know any examples, just that it's possible), it becomes easier to break the bonds between atoms instead of causing a deformation. This means the metal has become brittle and can no longer handle tensile force (stretching)\n\nWhen you bend an object. The part outside the bend gets stretched, and the part inside the bend gets squeezed. So temperature does affect bending as well. Really, any time any part of the metal gets stretched in any way, you look at its ductility.\n\nI want to say that any metal that is ductile must also be malleable, since stretching is a more concentrated force than squeezing, but I can't confirm that. "
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1w6fc5 | how do people achieve "invisibility" on the internet? | I am genuinely interested in this topic. I've read/learned a bit about things like Tor and proxies, but what I'd like to know is what is happening here? What is "invisibility?" Is it something measured by how difficult the person is to trace? What are the common or most effective methods of achieving invisibility? What are some of the downsides? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1w6fc5/eli5_how_do_people_achieve_invisibility_on_the/ | {
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" > what is \"invisibility\"?\n\nInvisibility is the only thing you can't achieve through Internet. You need weed, viagra, one night stand, or anything? Internet got it. But not invisibility. Sorry.\n\nYou can't be 100% invisible. Correct me if I am wrong. "
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25vku9 | if yeast and sugar creates alcohol how come fermenting root beer with the same ingredients doesn't produce any alcohol? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/25vku9/eli5_if_yeast_and_sugar_creates_alcohol_how_come/ | {
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"It will if done properly. First off though you cannot just use yeast for baking bread - it needs to be brewer's yeast which is a specific strain of yeast. Secondly, commercial root beer will have preservatives in it that will stop the fermentation process, so you have to make your own. I have made soda and after bottling, the yeast did not stop fermenting and some of the glass bottles exploded. You have to be careful.",
"Early root beer-like beverages actually were fermented and were alcoholic, although with a relatively small alcoholic content.\nModern root beer takes its name from the fact that it was originally flavored using sassafras root, and the beer part was simply used for marketing (its creator actually wanted to call it root tea). The common soft drink version is not a fermented beverage. They eventually stopped using sassafras because it is believed to be carcinogenic, so now mostly artificial flavors are used.\n\nEdit: Various companies (especially micro-breweries) and some home brewers do still make the traditional style of alcoholic root beer. It is sometimes marketed as hard root beer."
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1mbe3k | why 64gb phone is $100 more expensive than 32gb phone but diference between 32gb and 64gb microsd is only $22. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1mbe3k/eli5_why_64gb_phone_is_100_more_expensive_than/ | {
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"It's called price discrimination. Usually the 32 gb phone is actually exactly the same as the 64 gb phone but with half the memory disabled. Some people are unwilling to pay so much for a phone but instead of not selling to them at all, the company can instead sell them a cheaper phone and still earn some profit.",
"As my Grandfather always says \"It's the profit that makes it so expensive.\""
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163aft | why did we use to slap our tvs to get better reception? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/163aft/eli5_why_did_we_use_to_slap_our_tvs_to_get_better/ | {
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"In the days before cable or satellite, TV goes there reception through an antenna, often a pair of rabbit ears attached to the top.\n\nTV broadcast are pretty finicky, and don't travel nearly as well as radio. So you had to mess with the rabbit ears a lot and put up with bad signals. Very minute adjustments were after the different between getting a signal or not, and a frustrated smack often produced the right adjustment.\n\nIn addition, older TV had a lot of vacuum tubes, clunky light bulb like components that periodically had to be replaced. Smacking your TV could move the wires in the tube, change how it was seated, or just move the dust around, all of which could change the electrical characteristics of the tube, and sometimes improve the picutre."
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21oyfe | why do i get chest freezes instead of brain freezes? | I saw a question on here asking about the process behind brain freezes, and that got me thinking about how I have never had a brain freeze, but I do get chest freezes all the time after eating cold things. From my experience, this is fairly rare compared to the more ubiquitous brain freezes. So, why do some people get chest freezes while others get brain freezes? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/21oyfe/eli5_why_do_i_get_chest_freezes_instead_of_brain/ | {
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"Brain Freeze is a referred pain, from the esophagus. There are a few places in your body that this happens, where the pain occurs in one place and is felt elsewhere. In this case the pain in your esophagus caused by something cold is felt in your brain.\n\nIf you get chest/back/esophagus freeze, it's your body simply not referring the pain. It doesn't mean your defective, as far as I'm concerned it's your body working correctly. You're feeling the pain where it is occurring.\n\nI get esophagus freeze instead of brain freeze too. I think I might actually prefer getting a brain freeze, because sometimes it becomes difficult to breathe!"
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begder | do lizards and such that have regenerative limbs have higher rates of cancer? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/begder/eli5_do_lizards_and_such_that_have_regenerative/ | {
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"Great question. I don’t know the answer but I bet it’s more common in the regenerative tissue just like it is in tissue that regenerates in us. I’m also guessing lizards peg out before we get to know the answer."
]
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||
61hdlg | how to game advertisements that use false gameplay mechanics (ex: mobiles games) in commercials get away with it | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/61hdlg/eli5_how_to_game_advertisements_that_use_false/ | {
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"There will be a small disclaimer that says \"not actual gameplay\" or a simiiliar phrase (this isnt just games, a huge amount of commercials and industries use \"fake\" stuff to display their goods and all have some type of small disclaimer). Even if there wasn't it would almost certainly be understood by an average person that this was a promo and probably not representative of actual gameplay. But they'll put the disclaimer in anyways."
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1kwbl2 | binary numbers | Just started to study IT and naturally binary numbers came up... Reddit, I don't get it! Can anyone explain it to me like I am five? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1kwbl2/eli5_binary_numbers/ | {
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" > There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't.",
"Binary is actually incredibly simple.\n\nIn base-10 (what we use every day), the as you move up the places, the place values increase by a power of 10. E.g:\n\n 100 10 1\n hundreds tens units\nIn binary, instead of place values increasing by powers of ten, they increase by powers of two. So the place numbers are instead:\n\n 128 64 32 16 8 4 2 1\n\nSo, for example, the number 69 doesn't need any 128s. It needs a 64, so the most significant bit is going to be 1. Now we need to get 5 (64+5=69), so we need a 4 and 1, but we don't need 32, 16, 8, or 2, so we put a zero in their places. So the final binary number is `1000101`, or \n\n 1 0 0 0 1 0 1\n 64 4 1",
"Just think of the odometer in your car. When you buy a new car, it reads 0000. You drive one kilometer (or mile, wherever you are) and now it reads 0001. Keep driving and the odometer will do this:\n\n 0000\n 0001\n 0002\n 0003\n 0004\n 0005\n 0006\n 0007\n 0008\n 0009\n\nBut what happens when you drive that tenth kilometer? The rightmost digit can't increase anymore, because it's already at 9, which is as high as our numbers go. So, that one goes back to 0 and the one to the left of it goes up by one:\n\n 0010\n\nThis is how you, me, and everyone learned how to count. There are ten digits to work with, 0 through 9. \n\nBut now imagine how an odometer would work if you only had two digits to work with (0 and 1) instead of 0-9.\n\n 0000 (brand new car)\n 0001 (I've driven my first kilometer)\n\nWhat happens now? We want to increase the rightmost digit, but it's already as high as it can go! So, exactly as in the first example, we reset that one to 0 and increase the one to the left of it:\n\n 0010 (this looks like \"ten\" but it's actually two)\n\nAnd now you know how to count in binary:\n\n 0000 (zero)\n 0001 (one)\n 0010 (two)\n 0011 (three)\n 0100 (four)\n 0101 (five)\n 0110 (six)\n 0111 (seven)\n 1000 (eight)\n\nAnd so on. ",
"And how are the strings that represent letters in binary chosen?",
"It's really simple actually if you know how it works.\n\nConsider our standard counting system (base 10). Let's just make up a random number, like 1492.\n\nEach of the digits in the number are increasing powers of 10, like 1, 10, 100, 1000, so on and so forth.\n\n 1 4 9 2\n thousand hundred ten one\n\nNow, in binary it's ***exactly* the same**, except with each digit representing **increasing powers of 2**, like 1, 2, 4, 8, etc.\n\nFor example, let's consider the binary number 100101.\n\n 1 0 0 1 0 1\n thirty-two sixteen eight four two one\n\nYou can see that in the number 100101 there's 1×32, 0×16, 0×8, 1×4, 0×2, and 1×1.\n\nNow you add them all up: 32+4+1=37, which is the base 10 equivalent of the binary number 100101."
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1i0l9w | how installing custom roms on android devices works | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1i0l9w/eli5_how_installing_custom_roms_on_android/ | {
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"Installing a ROM is like installing another Windows or Linux OS. But there a few things that make the process a little more complicated.\n\nYour Smartphone has something called Bootloader which prevents you from just installing new ROMs (so that a normal user can not mess up his System accidentelly)\n\nAnother component is the Recovery. This part of the System helps you installing ROMs, making Backups and recover your System when something goes horribly wrong.\n\nThe process of installing a new ROM is called flashing and requieres some steps:\n\n* you have to open your Bootlader (which is normaly locked)\n* install a custom Recovery (not needed but very recommended)\n* download ROM (for your device! and version!) and place it on SD Card\n* get into Recovery and flash that ROM (consider making a backup first)\n\nThe process might vary from device to device so make sure you follow instructions that are specific for yours.\n\nAs mentioned Cyanogen-Mod is a very good source for both instructions and ROMs, so check it out!\n\nYou should make sure that you really understood the process of flashing a ROM before you go for it. I had some problems from time to time that requiered searching forums and flashing radios, kernels, etc. and that can be nasty..."
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2whnhy | when i need to pee, and i'm standing there waiting, but nothing is coming out, what's happening in my body that's making me wait? | Shy pissers unite! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2whnhy/eli5_when_i_need_to_pee_and_im_standing_there/ | {
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"You brain is good at knowing when the appropriate time to \"go\" is, so much so that it lets you be largely in charge of it. This happens because of 4 different types of nerves controlling the urinary mechanisms: Sensory (afferent) nerves, which tell you your bladder is full; sympathetic (\"fight/flight\") nerves which relax the bladder and keep the urinary sphincter tight; parasympathetic (\"rest/digest\") nerves which contract the bladder and relax said sphincter; and somatic nerves (that act on skeletal muscles, i.e. Muscles you can control voluntarily) which let you initiate when to go. When you are in line at Fatty's Pizza Shack, for instance, your sympathetic nervous system (fight/flight) is keeping that bladder sphincter tightly closed (it does this without you even knowing it, much like you don't need to consciously make your heart beat). Later, after drinking your extra large Floaty Shake, your bladder fills with urine, and sensory nerves alert you to this fact via stretch receptors on the bladder itself. As your bladder fills with more urine, the stretch sensors cause little contractions in the bladder which you feel as urges. When you finally feel like it's a good time to pee on something, your somatic nerves signal your accessory muscles (abdominals) to assist with voiding (a fancy word for micturition which is an even fancier word for urination), and your parasympathetic nerves (rest/digest) takes the hint and squeezes the bladder and relaxes your urinary sphincter. The result is pee happening. Several regions in the brain are also involved, mainly keeping you from peeing when you don't want to pee. You can consciously keep from wetting yourself for quite a while, unless you have some sort of disease where nerves are damaged or the muscles in your bladder (detrusor muscle and sphincters) don't cooperate. Incontinence = can't hold it in. Enuresis = bedwetting. ",
"It's the urinary sphincter not relaxing fast enough, probably due to shyness or tension. \nSome medications can affect the sphincter causing urinary retention.",
"I read on here somewhere, some post, about standing at the urinal, lots of dudes standing in line and it just wont release. This Redditor stated that doing math in your head releases the muscle or whatever it is that is clammed up due to self inflicted intimidation. Tried it and damn, it worked like a charm. 2+2=4, 4+4=8..I think I made it to 64 and was whizzing full throttle. Go figure...no pun intended."
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30f2k8 | how do cops choose who to give a ticket to and who to let off with a warning? | Furthermore, if they pull someone over for, say, speeding, how are they not obligated by law to write that person a ticket? When they let you off with a warning, they still write up some kind of slip that says they gave you a warning. Isn't that proof they witnessed you commit a crime and did nothing about it? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/30f2k8/eli5_how_do_cops_choose_who_to_give_a_ticket_to/ | {
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"Awesome question!\n\nThe answer is twofold. Officers are given discretion to choose who to and who not to ticket. The standard they are supposed to uphold though when using this discretion is whether it is beneficial to society to punish this person for the crime. If there is no benefit then there is no need to punish ",
"/u/chris90b gave you the legal reason. If you're wondering why police do it on a personal level, most of the time if it's a very minor thing and the person they're talking to is being calm and respectful, a lot of officers will choose to just let them off. But if you're being an asshole to a cop who pulls you over, you're pretty much garunteed to get that ticket",
"Police officer here;\nWhen misdemeanors occur in our presence, or we have probable cause to belive a felony occurred, we have a duty to act.\nFor infractions, we generally have discretion. We can choose not to press the issue if we so choose.\n\nAs far as what gets someone off from getting a ticket: Literally anything. ",
"Well watching cops as well as real experience gives me this. \n\n75 in a 65? Pulled over. While being pulled over, I do the \"Am I being detained?\". He automatically has a harder job and will most likely write me a ticket. If I play it nice and treat him like a human, I am more likely to just get a slow down. So why do they stop you? To look for other things. Why am I speeding? Am I nervous because I have drugs? Am I about to do something illegal?"
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dkifdv | mixologists, what's the difference in results between shaking and stirring a drink? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dkifdv/eli5_mixologists_whats_the_difference_in_results/ | {
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"Shaking a drink will chill the ingredients and dilute it in a shorter amount of time then stirring . Shaking also adds air to the drink and makes it frothy depending on what ingredients are in the cocktail.",
"Bruising the alcohol (specifically the gin) when shaking a Martini. Stirring is more delicate.\n\nEdit. Downvoted for a legit answer? Never change Reddit...\n\nEdit 2: _URL_0_",
"Shaking chills the drink and dilutes (waters it down) faster and more efficiently than stirring. In a drink like a whiskey sour, which contains ingredients like citrus and protein (egg white) that don't like to mix well, shaking ensures that these ingredients emulsify (disperse evenly through the liquid) and capture air (make the frothy top). However, aromatic or complex ingredients like absinthe, gin, or bitters will lose some of their unique characteristics from being handled so roughly\n\nStirring is typically reserved for drinks without citrus or protein, or do not require being diluted as much, such as martinis or sazeracs. Another benefit to stirring over shaking is that it requires much less effort.\n\nThese aren't hard and fast rules, just guidelines. If you like the drink at the end, you made it correctly!",
"In line with what most people have already said here, specifically with martinis and other aperitifs (negronis, boulevardiers etc that dont have fresh citrus) stirring and straining also gives the drink a notably velvety texture on the sip. There is a bit of weight to the drink, as if the sugar as seizing up together rather than distributed and diluted. I strongly recommend stirring all your aperitif type drinks!",
"Not a mixologist but kinda know this:\n\nShaking breaks up the ice more so it waters it down more. Also if youve got an egg or lime or lemon in your drink you wanna shake",
"I'm aware of the stir vs shaken martini arguments, but for me personally, I enjoy my Vesper Martini. I make mine strong and shaken. I like them cold, and actually prefer the dilution of water in it so it goes down smoother. \n\n(It could also be argued that Bond is drinking to fit in, but also is his own man. He will have his drink exactly as he wants it.)\n\nFor those that complain it pours cloudy, I argue so does a pint of Guinness. half the fun of that is watching it turn to its final colour.\n\nSome want the sharp taste of the alcohols, and for that stirring is much better, but as said earlier, if it's made the way you enjoy it, then it's made right!",
"Any BARTENDERS in here hate the word 'mixologist' as much as I do? I work fine dining at a place with a very well thought out craft cocktail menu but guess what, I still tend a bar, which makes me a bartender,not a mixologist. I seriously cringe when I hear that word.",
"Shaking- more agitation which dilutes more, (typically want to remove the ice chips with a fine mesh strainer because it will only further dilute the drink) citrus needs a more aggressive mixing to properly incorporate, and heavier liquids (heavy cream, egg white) need an aggressive mixing to add air and whip properly (sours, milk punch).\n\nStirring- less agitation which equals less dilution. Also, when using more delicate liquids like vermouths and amari the flavor wont be affected by the airation.",
"Most stirred drinks have vermouth which is wine and when you shake it, it “bruises” the wine making it cloudy in appearance. From my 10 plus years of bartending I will say the majority of people will never notice the difference. Hell you can make the same drink differently or forget an ingredient and most people would never know.",
"Bartender here. There are a few key differences already mentioned so I'll just expand on them. \n\nShaking: Shaking a cocktail provides the cocktail with heavy aeration, high chill, and between 22-25% dilution. Also if you are making an egg (white) cocktail shaking is usually the easiest way to whip the egg so it properly incorporates into the cocktail. You also typically want to always shake cocktails with any kind of juice. The aeration of juice tones down sharp overtones especially on citrus. The final result of a shaken cocktail is typically a lighter mouthfeel (if no egg(white)). \n\nStirring: A stirred cocktail provided 18-20% dilution, usually less chill (though still cold), and minimal aeration. This results in a fuller, silky mouthfeel. \n\nThere are also a few other methods of making cocktails.\n\n Throwing, which is kind of a middle ground between the effects of stirring and shaking, is where you take your shaker tins and have one of them full of ice covered with a strainer that you can easily pour the drink over. You toss the drink back and forth between the two a few times. Usually 20-22% dilution, some aeration, generally as cold as a stirred cocktail. \n\nBuilt in glass, think Gin and Tonic. Just pour and serve.\n\nSwizzle: A variation of a built cocktail where you add pellet sized ice and using a swizzle stick agitate the cocktail to incorporate all ingredients. A lot of tiki cocktails do this.\n\nThose are the primary methods, if anyone has any other questions please feel free to ask.",
"Okay. Here's a mostly complete and straight answer. \n\nBoth methods dilute a drink and depending on how much you do it obviously makes it more or less diluted. The only difference is that shaking does it a bit quicker. \n\nThe major difference is that shaking also adds air into the drink where as stirring won't. This does numerous things. With things that catch air like dairy, eggs and citrus fruits, it makes the drink varying levels of frothy. Changing the texture and mouth feel of the drink. Making it feel thicker and smoother. It also mellows out the bitterness of citrus fruits which is why most people say you should always shake a drink with citrus in it. Ice also leaves behind minute ice crystals after shaking vigorously, again adding texture to the drink. \n\nIt actually aerates the alcohol. Think about how leaving a wine or whisky open to the air, allowing it to breath, generally smoothes out that alcohol bite and changes the flavours slightly. You do the same thing when shaking a drink with ice. This is usually down to personal preference. If you want a cleaner, stronger, bitey flavour, then stir a drink. If you want it smoother and easier to drink, shake it. You can test this by making a drink without ice, shaking the hell out of half of it and not the other. One will taste noticeably smoother.\n\nMost drinks that don't contain citrus or dairy or eggs can be made both ways resulting in different flavours which can be better or worse depending on who wants the drink. \n\nAlso shaking drinks makes you look cool."
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4plip9 | why can't fire fighters just coat building fires with the stuff in fire extinguishers? | I see fire fighters use so much water, and it still can take a really long time to put out a fire. Wouldn't it be much quicker to just spray fire extinguisher material all over the fire? Hopefully you guys can tell me why I'm hilariously wrong.
EDIT: Thanks everyone I learnt a lot. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4plip9/eli5_why_cant_fire_fighters_just_coat_building/ | {
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"They cannot pack that much of it. They have near endless supplies of water via the fire hydrant. ",
"To add to the rest, the stuff inside a fire extinguisher needs to be pressurized in order to shoot out. This is difficult not to mention expensive to do in a fire truck the size of a small building. ",
"Stopping a fire requires cutting it off from its fuel so that it burns itself out before it can spread. Fire extinguishers work by quickly separating the burning material from oxygen (our air) by covering it with foam.\n\nBut they are only meant for small fires. If the fire is HUGE, you would need a TON of that foam crap to be able to smother the whole thing at the same time, and have it cool enough not to reignite.\n\nAnd actually with some airplanes and crazy fuels, they do have fire engines full of foam. Especially if the stuff that might catch on fire doesn't react well with water. But it is REALLY expensive compared to water.\n\nBut water is actually the superior fire-fighter anyway. With large-scale fires, it becomes about displacing the oxygen (fuel for the fire) rather than smothering the hot spots. By forcing the air away from the fire, the fire cools off and will burn itself out. \n\nAnd water is great at that. It turns to steam and pushes air away from the fire, AND it cools off the hot stuff. Especially with house fires, water is the best way to stop the blaze.."
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33ry99 | what are the pillars of creation? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/33ry99/eli5_what_are_the_pillars_of_creation/ | {
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"Well gas starts to accumulate together and over millions of years those gases start to form a star then nuclear fussion happens and ta da you have a star "
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9hzobs | why does competition stimulate the economy? | Alternatively, would it be bad if there was only one company ever in the world, that just does everything? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9hzobs/eli5_why_does_competition_stimulate_the_economy/ | {
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"Well there's several reasons. \n\nA. Competition incentivizes companies to make new technologies.\n\nB. Monopolies generally produce less of something than people need. \n\nC. Competition generally leads to lower prices."
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205drs | what exactly were they doing that was illegal in the wolf of wall street? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/205drs/eli5_what_exactly_were_they_doing_that_was/ | {
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"Fraud. They were selling businesses that didn't exist as investments (the name existed but there was no business behind the name) and they were selling businesses that the brokerage held an interest in without disclosing the interest. ",
"It's called the Pump and Dump scam method.\n\nBasically what you do is, you have a low-priced stock that no one has heard of. You attempt to get a guy to invest in the stock by giving him positive feedback about the stock, if he gets hooked, the price of the stock increases. This may attract other investors as news comes around and the price of the stock just increases. At this point, you will simply sell your shares and stop promoting the stock and the price of the stock will naturally fall and all the investors will lose their money while you gain money due to the increase in share price when you pulled out.\n\ntl:dr. \n\nStep 1. You have a low-priced stock\n\nStep 2. Promote and BS to investors to get them to invest in the share\n\nStep 3. Price of share increases due to investors investing money into it\n\nStep 4. You sell your shares while the price is high and stop promoting. Share price will naturally fall\n\nStep 5. ???\n\nStep 6. Profit.",
"The illegal thing they were doing is referred to as a \"pump and dump\" scheme. \n\nThere were these things called penny stocks. When the average person could not afford a stock selling at $30-$1,000 a share, there were these stocks which sold from $.01- $15 a share. \n\nWhat they were doing was buying up all or most of the shares of the penny stocks, thus increasing demand and price. Jordan was selling his clients these penny stock by telling them the price was going up, but failing to tell them it was going up because he was buying the shares. To get Jordan Belfort to buy their shares for them, as their trusted broker, Jordan would charge them a fee. When the client wanted to cash out, they could'nt because there was no one to buy the shares of penny stocks from them. \n\nWhats illegal about this is that Jordan Belfort committed fraud by charging a fee to trade shares which he was inflating and getting money by being the one who is selling the shares. "
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2wovy0 | what is the difference between drive, 3, 2, and 1, in an automatic car? | Very confused about this. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2wovy0/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_drive_3_2_and/ | {
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"When you choose Drive, you are telling the transmission to choose whichever gear it feels is most suitable for the driving condition at any moment. When you choose 1, you are limiting the transmission to the use of first gear only. 2 allows the use of first and second; 3 allows the use of the first three gears.",
"Lower gears (1-2-3) give you more torque for pulling heavy stuff or going uphill. Those settings force your auto transmission to stay in the lower gears.",
"Drive tells the transmission to shift when it thinks it should (one problem I have when automatics), 1, 2, and 3 limit your transmission to staying in those gears *or* puts them in those gears. For example, if you put it in 2 it will not shift up when it hits x amount of RPMs, although some cars will if you are redlining or going dangerously close to redlining."
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2whzyl | why do videos on porn websites have a share feature? | Unless it's to make sure we are more cautious when clicking around, I really don't know why porn websites have this feature, It must be very unpopular. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2whzyl/eli5_why_do_videos_on_porn_websites_have_a_share/ | {
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"There are reddit subs where people share porn videos, and I've ~~seen~~ heard about specific Reddit share buttons on porn sites. However, I can't help but think that having Facebook, etc., share buttons on those sites is a bit of trolling on their part, in hopes of people accidentally sharing with their family, friends, and co-workers.",
"If you're talking about the Facebook share button — those contain tracking scripts which tell Facebook that you visited the page, what you did there, and for how long you were there."
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bnmp2b | why do people yell when they sneeze? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bnmp2b/eli5_why_do_people_yell_when_they_sneeze/ | {
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"A sneeze is practically like a powerful blow through your nose to clean away the toxin that caused the sneeze. But many people don’t want to blow it out through their nose because it can be a mess and if you let it all out without holding back it can hurt. So, people redirect the pressure to be released through the throat and mouth instead, causing a wide variety of sounds. Which, of course, defeats the purpose of sneezing which is to clean out your nose",
"***TL;DR:*** *Because it both increases the \"healing power\" of the sneeze, and feels like it does that too, so it becomes a habit.*\n\n\\*\\*First, why a sneeze?\\*\\*\n\nSneezes deal with irritants that get into your nasal and throat and sometimes facial area, not necessarily toxins. That irritation can be an actual sourced one, such as pepper powder, or an allergy-causing material like pollen, or a cold virus that causes your throat to swell and there's built-up mucus in there. It could also be a sensed irritation that is not really there, such as walking outside into suddenly bright light that makes your eyes think they're being irritated. So your body performs an action that is intended to remove, or at least knock loose, the sensed irritant.\n\nSo you inhale and exhale a powerful and extremely rapid burst of air to do that knocking loose. It causes a massive rush of air to shake around all the material in your upper throat and mouth and nose, and maybe dislodge or flush out that irritant. And a lot of times, the knocking around leads up to additional irritation that your body follows up with a second or third sneeze or to complete the job that the first one didn't.\n\n\\*\\*So why the yelling?\\*\\*\n\nYelling causes your throat and sinus areas to undergo even more \"shaking\". Do this to actually experience it: breathe in, and then QUIETLY breathe out as fast as you can in a burst. You can feel it in your lungs, right? Now do the same, but in the second case, SHOUT as you breathe out. You can feel the additional stress on different areas of your throat and inner areas of your mouth. In a sneeze, that vocal addition creates a rattling that effect adds up to more dislodging force to help clear mucus and irritants. So the sneeze actually works better, or perhaps just \"feels\" like it's working better because it's more of a perceived explosive release.\n\nAnd if there's no reason for a person that has picked up a habit of sneezing this way to stop doing it, such as for example they're in a movie theater when a sneeze comes on, they'll yell when they're sneezing because it feels like it's more effective.",
"this is unrelated and probably unhelpful but I got detention once in high school for sneezing too loudly. Pretty sure the teacher was just pissed off and on edge but I let loose a very loud ACHOO and got a detention.\n\nSidenote: I've heard that people sneeze different in different cultures. Supposedly South American sneezes sound like ACHISSS!",
"I always try to say \"K'pow\" if I'm having a powerful sneeze, and I almost always say \"Bjork\" when I burp.\n\nI'm fun at parties."
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jghrx | dota (the real time strategy game) | I don't get what the difference between this one custom map (gametype?) and Warcraft 3 is. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jghrx/eli5_dota_the_real_time_strategy_game/ | {
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"One day, you decide to play a game of Pretend War with your friends. You and your friends all bring out a box of toy soldiers and a few toy houses. The rules of this game is that you get to make a base out of your houses, and you get to order your toy soldiers around the battlefield. If a soldier dies, he is removed, but after a little while you can make him again at one of the little houses. You want to destroy everybody else's base with your army. If you lose a house, after a little while you get to put another house in your base.\n\nAfter a while you get bored of this game, and decide to come up with another game. You already have all your little soldiers and houses and stuff, but you want different rules. So you and your friends bring two adults over, probably two daddies because they're nerdy enough to help out. You tell the daddies: you get to order the toy soldiers, but they're not very smart so just attack the enemy base and whoever is closest to you! And you and your buddies each pull out your own special action figure. You've pulled out Duke Nukem, but Carl pulled out Simba and Alan pulled out GI Joe. Duke Nukem can do awesome things, but Simba and GI Joe can also do awesome things, only they're different awesome things. Everybody is on a team, being with one or the other daddy's team, and you try to destroy the other base, defending your base and killing their heroes if you need to. If your hero gets killed, you have to sit out for a while before you can play again.\n\nPretend War is Warcraft 3, the other game is DotA.",
"Warcraft 3 is like you being a general of an army in a war game. Deciding what resources you need to win you the war, hence what structures to build and what type of soldiers you hire. You control EVERYTHING. And at the start of war, you have no idea where the enemy base it.\n\nDotA is like you being a Commando (hero), an elite soldier if you will. You know where the enemy base is, but you need to buy better equipment while you level up to help you destroy the enemy. You don't have control over normal soldiers (although sometimes you'll have skills to employ some to help you out). Your job is to level up your skills and accumulate money through accumulating enemy soldier kills and/or enemy Commando kills. \n\nWhen you have enough firepower, your objective is to destroy enemy defenses and bring down the enemy base.\n\nDotA is all about micro managing one special hero unit. There are many combinations of items. Throw in dozens of different heroes, each with 4 unique skills. Games of 5v5 will most likely never be the same from one another.",
"Imagine there's a giant roster of everyone who ever plays basketball, and you really enjoy playing basketball. Every time you get into a new basketball game, you're randomly paired up with any of those people who are as good as you. \n\nThe only issue is that 50% of the people who play the game are deaf, mute, in wheelchairs, and generally don't care if they lose the game. You have to rely on them to make every shot, as a team, and it's very hard to get deafmutes to line up the shot. You get very frustrated, but you can't blame them, it's no fault of their own they play this way.\n\nAfter one game, you become very upset with a handicapped player. You blame them for the game loss, telling everyone on the court how bad he is. Driving home you are sad you acted like that, but figure you lost your cool once, and it's bound to happen to anyone.\n\nThe next day you're playing and you've scored every basket on your team, and yet one of the handicapped players is yelling at you. Yelling to the court how much of a \"faggot noob\" you are. He begins to intentionally let the opposing team score. You haven't had a win in weeks now, and this one human being, full of irrationality and hatred has prevented you from what you so yearn for. You snap. Vision blinded by a blood red hue, you can't stop yourself from running train on his sorry paraplegic ass.\n\nYou try to stand but slip. Your shirt feels heavy from the amount of thick, rusty liquid leaking from your teammates head. You balk at what you have become.\n\nYou are DotA.",
"One day, you decide to play a game of Pretend War with your friends. You and your friends all bring out a box of toy soldiers and a few toy houses. The rules of this game is that you get to make a base out of your houses, and you get to order your toy soldiers around the battlefield. If a soldier dies, he is removed, but after a little while you can make him again at one of the little houses. You want to destroy everybody else's base with your army. If you lose a house, after a little while you get to put another house in your base.\n\nAfter a while you get bored of this game, and decide to come up with another game. You already have all your little soldiers and houses and stuff, but you want different rules. So you and your friends bring two adults over, probably two daddies because they're nerdy enough to help out. You tell the daddies: you get to order the toy soldiers, but they're not very smart so just attack the enemy base and whoever is closest to you! And you and your buddies each pull out your own special action figure. You've pulled out Duke Nukem, but Carl pulled out Simba and Alan pulled out GI Joe. Duke Nukem can do awesome things, but Simba and GI Joe can also do awesome things, only they're different awesome things. Everybody is on a team, being with one or the other daddy's team, and you try to destroy the other base, defending your base and killing their heroes if you need to. If your hero gets killed, you have to sit out for a while before you can play again.\n\nPretend War is Warcraft 3, the other game is DotA.",
"Warcraft 3 is like you being a general of an army in a war game. Deciding what resources you need to win you the war, hence what structures to build and what type of soldiers you hire. You control EVERYTHING. And at the start of war, you have no idea where the enemy base it.\n\nDotA is like you being a Commando (hero), an elite soldier if you will. You know where the enemy base is, but you need to buy better equipment while you level up to help you destroy the enemy. You don't have control over normal soldiers (although sometimes you'll have skills to employ some to help you out). Your job is to level up your skills and accumulate money through accumulating enemy soldier kills and/or enemy Commando kills. \n\nWhen you have enough firepower, your objective is to destroy enemy defenses and bring down the enemy base.\n\nDotA is all about micro managing one special hero unit. There are many combinations of items. Throw in dozens of different heroes, each with 4 unique skills. Games of 5v5 will most likely never be the same from one another.",
"Imagine there's a giant roster of everyone who ever plays basketball, and you really enjoy playing basketball. Every time you get into a new basketball game, you're randomly paired up with any of those people who are as good as you. \n\nThe only issue is that 50% of the people who play the game are deaf, mute, in wheelchairs, and generally don't care if they lose the game. You have to rely on them to make every shot, as a team, and it's very hard to get deafmutes to line up the shot. You get very frustrated, but you can't blame them, it's no fault of their own they play this way.\n\nAfter one game, you become very upset with a handicapped player. You blame them for the game loss, telling everyone on the court how bad he is. Driving home you are sad you acted like that, but figure you lost your cool once, and it's bound to happen to anyone.\n\nThe next day you're playing and you've scored every basket on your team, and yet one of the handicapped players is yelling at you. Yelling to the court how much of a \"faggot noob\" you are. He begins to intentionally let the opposing team score. You haven't had a win in weeks now, and this one human being, full of irrationality and hatred has prevented you from what you so yearn for. You snap. Vision blinded by a blood red hue, you can't stop yourself from running train on his sorry paraplegic ass.\n\nYou try to stand but slip. Your shirt feels heavy from the amount of thick, rusty liquid leaking from your teammates head. You balk at what you have become.\n\nYou are DotA."
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lnbve | - anti-intellectualism. | What is it? Does it exist? What can be done to battle it? Is it a bad thing? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/lnbve/eli5_antiintellectualism/ | {
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"What exactly is your question?",
"It's basically a view people hold which says that reason and thought are not the ways to determine what's true and right. Typically, anti-intellectuals are guided by emotion and values instead of reason. If you find people whose motives are driven by things like \"saving face\", \"strength\", \"honor\", \"fairness\", or \"justice\", then they are likely to be anti-intellectual as well.",
"I can only offer my limited observations to this. To explain this like you are five is even moredifficult. The way I see it is that those who are well educated tend to have political views that accept that society is interconnected. What this means, to a person who is entrenched in the ideology of american individualism, is that education is in opposition to their view of American[ism.]\n\nI think there are a couple different aspects of this 'movement' of anti-intellectualism. One side, call them middle class, believes in the most patriotic version of America without fault and heralds the common man beliefs. Another side see that willingness to ignore/overlook contradictions overly-patriotic ideologues present as an opportunity to gain a voting base.\n\nSomebody will have to help me articulate this. I am really ommiting a great deal to try to keep this simple. Perhaps that's a problem with ELI5: it creates generalized answers, and in response to this question an irony.",
"Neal Stephenson put it better than I could.\n\nThe twentieth century was one in which limits on state power were removed in order to let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abattoir. . . . We Americans are the only ones who didn't get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and value systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right.",
"One common scenario is when factory workers are introduced to their new boss: a kid who is half their age who and fresh out of college. He is their boss because he has a college degree and they don't. He may be smart, qualified, and the nicest kid in the world, and it doesn't matter because it doesn't seem fair.\n\nWhen the working class gets stuck in a bad economy, they lose a sense of mobility. They see others succeed who seem less deserving of it. They resent that other culture, that snotty college graduate culture that's thinks they're so smart. They resent all the symbols, art, jargon, and political ideals of the other culture. Fuck them!\n\nRepublicans have been the masters of exploiting this class resentment. Republicans tap into the angst of the working class and turn it into votes. They cast the liberals as the effete college grad elites that are stealing your jobs and raising your taxes for NPR, PBS, godless science, and artsy fartsy art projects. It's very effective.\n\nTaken to the extreme see the Khmer Rouge campaign to \"restart civilization\" in Cambodia ca. 1975. It began by imprisoning just about everyone with a college degree or owned a business. They earnestly wanted to purge their entire country of intellectuals by mass killing and return everyone to just farming. Insane, but a case study how extreme an anti-intellectual fervor can be stirred up when people are suffering.\n\nHow to fix it? Fix the economy so that people can feel a sense of career progression and ready access to career advancement opportunities.",
"If you're smart, you will probably think smartness matters a lot because smart people are usually able to give better reasons for things. If you think reasons are the ultimate way to figure out something and that this matters a lot, this is called intellectualism.\n\nIf you're not smart, you can think smartness matters or does not matter, but if you think it matters and you're not smart that means you're in a competition where you don't do very well. These competitions are called \"hierarchies\", because you have people who are good at it and people who are bad at it. Some people are physically strong, and some people are not strong, for example. If you have a competition where the strongest guy is 1st, and the weakest guy is last, that's a hierarchy of strength.\n\nPeople feel good from winning in competitions. Some people are *really* competitive and want to win at a lot of competitions. Sadly, no one can be good at everything, so you have to pick which competitions (hierarchies) you want to matter. This way, you can say \"you're good at this, that matters\".\n\nIf you get enough people together, they can say \"this hierarchy (competition) doesn't matter\" and if enough people agree, it seems true. So if you're not smart, this is a way to feel good about not being smart. They will say instead that other hierarchies matter instead, like strength or being good-looking or having a lot of friends, since most people will probably not be weak, dumb, ugly *and* lonely all at the same time.\n\nNot thinking smartness matters is a problem though because most of the world's best accomplishments rely on smartness. If you're smart, you can see the world for what it really is better than people who are not smart. Most of the world's scientists are smart, and they usually use their ability to see the truth to make the world a better place.\n\nUnfortunately, the world is often made a worse place by people who lie. When people lie, for example, they lie using language. But smartness and language are good friends. If you're smart, you are probably better at using language. So smart people are better at discovering lies, or \"bullshit\", in what other people say.\n\nPoliticians (and people who rely on policians, like journalists) rely on saying other things that makes people feel good. But since they need to make a lot of people feel good at once, and they can't make everyone feel good, sometimes they will be hypocrites and lie. Smart people are good at showing why a lie is a lie. This means that politicians have to defend their lies in some way.\n\nAn easy way to do that is to say that what lets the smart person show everyone that the politician is lying doesn't matter. Smart people use reasons to show that a politician is lying, and if people believe reasoning is the ultimate decider in an argument they have accepted something called [rational authority.](_URL_0_)\n\nBut most people don't think reason or smartness matters. People who rely on lying know that, and people who don't like the smartness hierarchy know that. Not everyone is smart, and not everyone does well on the smartness hierarchy. The people who don't do well will probably not like intellectualism. So if you need to lie, you can just say that smartness and reasoning is bad. If you don't like the smartness hierarchy, you can also say that smartness and reasoning is bad. That's called anti-intellectualism.",
"Let's do this step by step, kiddo.\n\n > **What is it?** \n\nAnti-intellectualism is a general rejection of the sciences and humanities.\n\n > **Does it exist?**\n\nYes.\n\n > **Why does it exist?** \n\n*(I know you didn't ask this, but it seems necessary)*\n\nThere are numerous reasons for why anti-intellectualism exists. For example, the medieval Church rejected translations of the Bible into languages other than Latin (despite the fact that the original was in Greek) to prevent the peasantry from gaining a better grasp of their faith and possibly challenging the positions of the Church (which did happen from time to time, and was inevitably condemned as heresy). That would be an example of anti-intellectualism for political reasons.\n\nOf course, anti-intellectualism isn't always political. Resisting further abuse of the Catholic Church (whose history I could probably draw from to exemplify each and every variety of anti-intellectualism), let us take a look at the history of guns in Japan. Gunpowder-weaponry was introduced to Japan via its proximity to China as early as 1270, and were not much different from the \"hand-cannons\" that European nations would begin to produce near the end of the medieval era. In 1543 however, the Japanese were exposed to matchlock weapons by the Portuguese and, for almost a hundred years thereafter, guns became the dominant weapon in Japanese warfare. Having studiously refined the weapon and its tactics, Japan then unexpectedly pulled a complete 180 and renounced the gun in 1631 with the rise of the Tokugawa shogunate.\n\nWhy did Japan turn its back on a technology that was rapidly advancing while simultaneously changing the face of warfare?\n\nPart of the answer is cultural; in highly feudal Japanese society, the Samurai class felt challenged by a weapon that allowed even the lowliest peasant to fell them on the battlefield and therefore pushed the Shoguns to regulate and essentially ban the weapons.\n\nBut another part of the answer might lie with the Shoguns themselves. After the reign of Shogun Oda Nobunga, one of the great military unifiers of feudal Japan and a man well-known for his love affair with guns, power fell to his two successors, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu. Hideyoshi was a man of low birth who had secured his power through cunning, both on and off the battlefield. Although he had used firearms liberally throughout his military career, it is likely he recognized them for the threat to power that they were as he went on to perform mass confiscations of all sorts of weaponry from the peasant class. This in itself would not be anti-intellectualism... however, Ieyasu (the member of the pair whose bloodline would found the coming Shogunate) also advocated for an end to guns as an aspect of Japanese culture for two other reasons that do fit the bill of anti-intellectualism. One was that Ieyasu had a personal beef with all things Western; he felt threatened by the rise of Christianity in Japan and had actually had a near-death experience in 1564 when a bullet nearly pierced his armor in battle. The other is that, along with Hideyoshi, Ieyasu wanted to empower the culture of Japan. So, motivated by this combination of fear and pride, Hideyoshi passed laws essentially banning Christianity and laying the basis for the policy of Sakoku (extreme isolationism) that would be instituted by his successors. This policy would cause Japan to fall so far behind technologically that in 1853 Commodore Matthew Perry would force its reversal with the mere threat of superior American firepower.\n\nSorry about that unexpectedly long journey into Japanese history, but hopefully you can at least understand now that politics, fear, and tradition are all potential motivators for anti-intellectualism. Just so I don't leave anything out, ideology can act in much the same way as tradition such as it did in the Cultural Revolution of China.\n\n > **What can be done to battle it?**\n\nOn a base level, universal education. If people understand new technologies and cultural movements, they will be more likely to understand them. Unfortunately, there are a few problems with making this happen. One is that universal education is, on a base level, a difficult thing to achieve. Educating an entire population is hard. Educating them well-enough that they won't revert to anti-intellectualism at times is even harder.\n\nAt the same time, there needs to be economic security. As technology advances, it makes business more efficient... and people lose jobs. This breeds resentment for progress; the factory laborer who loses his place to a faceless robot is not likely to support the future of artificial intelligence programming. This also holds true for art and the humanities. Modern art and literary theory cater to a highly educated and wealthy upper class, and have thus fallen out of favor with most modern laypersons who can't understand the reasoning behind it. This has bred no shortage of resentment and has driven the humanities ever further into the cloistered shadows of wealthy patronage (particularly in America).\n\nBasically, prevention becomes an incredibly complex cocktail of economic management and educational practices that really, I don't think I can explain to you as though you were a five year old. But on to the last question.\n\n > **Is it a bad thing?**\n\nLet me be clear: I am not opposed to culture of any kind, including the religious variety. However, for society to progress fairly there must be room for all viewpoints and the ability to express them must be available; to do otherwise is to infringe on the basic human rights of others.\n\nSo yes, anti-intellectualism is bad. New ideas should be approached with caution, but there is no reason why that caution should not come from within the intellectual community.",
"What exactly is your question?",
"It's basically a view people hold which says that reason and thought are not the ways to determine what's true and right. Typically, anti-intellectuals are guided by emotion and values instead of reason. If you find people whose motives are driven by things like \"saving face\", \"strength\", \"honor\", \"fairness\", or \"justice\", then they are likely to be anti-intellectual as well.",
"I can only offer my limited observations to this. To explain this like you are five is even moredifficult. The way I see it is that those who are well educated tend to have political views that accept that society is interconnected. What this means, to a person who is entrenched in the ideology of american individualism, is that education is in opposition to their view of American[ism.]\n\nI think there are a couple different aspects of this 'movement' of anti-intellectualism. One side, call them middle class, believes in the most patriotic version of America without fault and heralds the common man beliefs. Another side see that willingness to ignore/overlook contradictions overly-patriotic ideologues present as an opportunity to gain a voting base.\n\nSomebody will have to help me articulate this. I am really ommiting a great deal to try to keep this simple. Perhaps that's a problem with ELI5: it creates generalized answers, and in response to this question an irony.",
"Neal Stephenson put it better than I could.\n\nThe twentieth century was one in which limits on state power were removed in order to let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abattoir. . . . We Americans are the only ones who didn't get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and value systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right.",
"One common scenario is when factory workers are introduced to their new boss: a kid who is half their age who and fresh out of college. He is their boss because he has a college degree and they don't. He may be smart, qualified, and the nicest kid in the world, and it doesn't matter because it doesn't seem fair.\n\nWhen the working class gets stuck in a bad economy, they lose a sense of mobility. They see others succeed who seem less deserving of it. They resent that other culture, that snotty college graduate culture that's thinks they're so smart. They resent all the symbols, art, jargon, and political ideals of the other culture. Fuck them!\n\nRepublicans have been the masters of exploiting this class resentment. Republicans tap into the angst of the working class and turn it into votes. They cast the liberals as the effete college grad elites that are stealing your jobs and raising your taxes for NPR, PBS, godless science, and artsy fartsy art projects. It's very effective.\n\nTaken to the extreme see the Khmer Rouge campaign to \"restart civilization\" in Cambodia ca. 1975. It began by imprisoning just about everyone with a college degree or owned a business. They earnestly wanted to purge their entire country of intellectuals by mass killing and return everyone to just farming. Insane, but a case study how extreme an anti-intellectual fervor can be stirred up when people are suffering.\n\nHow to fix it? Fix the economy so that people can feel a sense of career progression and ready access to career advancement opportunities.",
"If you're smart, you will probably think smartness matters a lot because smart people are usually able to give better reasons for things. If you think reasons are the ultimate way to figure out something and that this matters a lot, this is called intellectualism.\n\nIf you're not smart, you can think smartness matters or does not matter, but if you think it matters and you're not smart that means you're in a competition where you don't do very well. These competitions are called \"hierarchies\", because you have people who are good at it and people who are bad at it. Some people are physically strong, and some people are not strong, for example. If you have a competition where the strongest guy is 1st, and the weakest guy is last, that's a hierarchy of strength.\n\nPeople feel good from winning in competitions. Some people are *really* competitive and want to win at a lot of competitions. Sadly, no one can be good at everything, so you have to pick which competitions (hierarchies) you want to matter. This way, you can say \"you're good at this, that matters\".\n\nIf you get enough people together, they can say \"this hierarchy (competition) doesn't matter\" and if enough people agree, it seems true. So if you're not smart, this is a way to feel good about not being smart. They will say instead that other hierarchies matter instead, like strength or being good-looking or having a lot of friends, since most people will probably not be weak, dumb, ugly *and* lonely all at the same time.\n\nNot thinking smartness matters is a problem though because most of the world's best accomplishments rely on smartness. If you're smart, you can see the world for what it really is better than people who are not smart. Most of the world's scientists are smart, and they usually use their ability to see the truth to make the world a better place.\n\nUnfortunately, the world is often made a worse place by people who lie. When people lie, for example, they lie using language. But smartness and language are good friends. If you're smart, you are probably better at using language. So smart people are better at discovering lies, or \"bullshit\", in what other people say.\n\nPoliticians (and people who rely on policians, like journalists) rely on saying other things that makes people feel good. But since they need to make a lot of people feel good at once, and they can't make everyone feel good, sometimes they will be hypocrites and lie. Smart people are good at showing why a lie is a lie. This means that politicians have to defend their lies in some way.\n\nAn easy way to do that is to say that what lets the smart person show everyone that the politician is lying doesn't matter. Smart people use reasons to show that a politician is lying, and if people believe reasoning is the ultimate decider in an argument they have accepted something called [rational authority.](_URL_0_)\n\nBut most people don't think reason or smartness matters. People who rely on lying know that, and people who don't like the smartness hierarchy know that. Not everyone is smart, and not everyone does well on the smartness hierarchy. The people who don't do well will probably not like intellectualism. So if you need to lie, you can just say that smartness and reasoning is bad. If you don't like the smartness hierarchy, you can also say that smartness and reasoning is bad. That's called anti-intellectualism.",
"Let's do this step by step, kiddo.\n\n > **What is it?** \n\nAnti-intellectualism is a general rejection of the sciences and humanities.\n\n > **Does it exist?**\n\nYes.\n\n > **Why does it exist?** \n\n*(I know you didn't ask this, but it seems necessary)*\n\nThere are numerous reasons for why anti-intellectualism exists. For example, the medieval Church rejected translations of the Bible into languages other than Latin (despite the fact that the original was in Greek) to prevent the peasantry from gaining a better grasp of their faith and possibly challenging the positions of the Church (which did happen from time to time, and was inevitably condemned as heresy). That would be an example of anti-intellectualism for political reasons.\n\nOf course, anti-intellectualism isn't always political. Resisting further abuse of the Catholic Church (whose history I could probably draw from to exemplify each and every variety of anti-intellectualism), let us take a look at the history of guns in Japan. Gunpowder-weaponry was introduced to Japan via its proximity to China as early as 1270, and were not much different from the \"hand-cannons\" that European nations would begin to produce near the end of the medieval era. In 1543 however, the Japanese were exposed to matchlock weapons by the Portuguese and, for almost a hundred years thereafter, guns became the dominant weapon in Japanese warfare. Having studiously refined the weapon and its tactics, Japan then unexpectedly pulled a complete 180 and renounced the gun in 1631 with the rise of the Tokugawa shogunate.\n\nWhy did Japan turn its back on a technology that was rapidly advancing while simultaneously changing the face of warfare?\n\nPart of the answer is cultural; in highly feudal Japanese society, the Samurai class felt challenged by a weapon that allowed even the lowliest peasant to fell them on the battlefield and therefore pushed the Shoguns to regulate and essentially ban the weapons.\n\nBut another part of the answer might lie with the Shoguns themselves. After the reign of Shogun Oda Nobunga, one of the great military unifiers of feudal Japan and a man well-known for his love affair with guns, power fell to his two successors, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu. Hideyoshi was a man of low birth who had secured his power through cunning, both on and off the battlefield. Although he had used firearms liberally throughout his military career, it is likely he recognized them for the threat to power that they were as he went on to perform mass confiscations of all sorts of weaponry from the peasant class. This in itself would not be anti-intellectualism... however, Ieyasu (the member of the pair whose bloodline would found the coming Shogunate) also advocated for an end to guns as an aspect of Japanese culture for two other reasons that do fit the bill of anti-intellectualism. One was that Ieyasu had a personal beef with all things Western; he felt threatened by the rise of Christianity in Japan and had actually had a near-death experience in 1564 when a bullet nearly pierced his armor in battle. The other is that, along with Hideyoshi, Ieyasu wanted to empower the culture of Japan. So, motivated by this combination of fear and pride, Hideyoshi passed laws essentially banning Christianity and laying the basis for the policy of Sakoku (extreme isolationism) that would be instituted by his successors. This policy would cause Japan to fall so far behind technologically that in 1853 Commodore Matthew Perry would force its reversal with the mere threat of superior American firepower.\n\nSorry about that unexpectedly long journey into Japanese history, but hopefully you can at least understand now that politics, fear, and tradition are all potential motivators for anti-intellectualism. Just so I don't leave anything out, ideology can act in much the same way as tradition such as it did in the Cultural Revolution of China.\n\n > **What can be done to battle it?**\n\nOn a base level, universal education. If people understand new technologies and cultural movements, they will be more likely to understand them. Unfortunately, there are a few problems with making this happen. One is that universal education is, on a base level, a difficult thing to achieve. Educating an entire population is hard. Educating them well-enough that they won't revert to anti-intellectualism at times is even harder.\n\nAt the same time, there needs to be economic security. As technology advances, it makes business more efficient... and people lose jobs. This breeds resentment for progress; the factory laborer who loses his place to a faceless robot is not likely to support the future of artificial intelligence programming. This also holds true for art and the humanities. Modern art and literary theory cater to a highly educated and wealthy upper class, and have thus fallen out of favor with most modern laypersons who can't understand the reasoning behind it. This has bred no shortage of resentment and has driven the humanities ever further into the cloistered shadows of wealthy patronage (particularly in America).\n\nBasically, prevention becomes an incredibly complex cocktail of economic management and educational practices that really, I don't think I can explain to you as though you were a five year old. But on to the last question.\n\n > **Is it a bad thing?**\n\nLet me be clear: I am not opposed to culture of any kind, including the religious variety. However, for society to progress fairly there must be room for all viewpoints and the ability to express them must be available; to do otherwise is to infringe on the basic human rights of others.\n\nSo yes, anti-intellectualism is bad. New ideas should be approached with caution, but there is no reason why that caution should not come from within the intellectual community."
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j34qw | [li5] what is cpu cache and how does it work? | How does it work and why is it faster than RAM? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j34qw/li5_what_is_cpu_cache_and_how_does_it_work/ | {
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"Lets say you are thirsty... \nThere are a few ways you can get water, you can either get it from the tap in your house, you can also go and get water from the well outside your house or even from the river flowing through your city.\n\nThe fastest way obviously is to get it from the tap (yes this is your CPU cache), the second fastest would be from the well, if you dont have the water in the tap (this is your RAM), the slowest would be to get it from the local river (you are loading the program from your Hard disk).\n\nSo basically when the system is running, the CPU can predict what instructions will be getting executed next or what data is might need. In order to execute it quickly it loads this up in the cache so that it can be processed fastest. Keep it mind that Cache is a small limited memory and so everything cant be stored in it. There are chances that the data it needs is not present in the cache, if that happens the CPU would load it from the RAM, this will take a little longer time as CPU will have to load the content from the RAM. \n\nNow suppose you run a new program, obviously the CPU could not predict this, now it has to load stuff from hard drive and pull it to RAM and then execute it. This takes more time understandably. Thats why programs may take time to load but once loaded usually run smoothly.\n\nHope this helps! :)",
"its just on board ram built right into the processor. without having to travel over the bus to ram and then back again its considerably faster. when the cpu is about to write to memory it will make sure a: its not already stored in cache, then that cache is full before writing out to ram. \n\nthink of cache like your fridge in your house and ram like the grocery store. then hard disk like the supplier warehouses. it all relates in distance from you in your house on how fast and much memory it has to work with. "
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2qg142 | why do we still use usb and not fibre optic for file transfer. my soundbar uses fibre optic, so it can't be a cost issue. | It takes ages to copy from one hard drive to another using USB, surely fibre optic would be faster? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2qg142/eli5_why_do_we_still_use_usb_and_not_fibre_optic/ | {
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"Because USB is cheaper, less fragile, and perfectly adequate speed wise for most applications that its used for. ",
"You wouldn't gain anything. USB 3.0 can transfer data faster than a hard drive can read and write it. \n\nFiber is used when pure speed is needed, but that's usually on big servers in data centers. The average home user has no need for it.",
"USB is cheaper, far more durable, and sufficient for what the majority of people need. ",
"USB requires less maintenance. There are people whose sole duty is to clean fiber optic tips in big data centers. Besides, you don't really need the speed that fiber optic provides at home. It would be like using a jet to go to the grocery store round the corner.",
"Fiber does not provide power and usb 3.0 is fast enough for anything that needs a significant amount of data.",
"USB is\n\n* cheaper (both cables and controllers)\n\n* bidirectional by default (SP/DIF is unidirectional because it is only 1 fibre cable)\n\n* can carry multiple signals at the same time (again, your SP/DIF only carries one. Alternative is multiple fibers, or multiple colours per fibre, but that second one increases cost exponentially)\n\n* can be split into multiple USB ports through hubs (fibre can only do point to point links)\n\n* has more compact controllers and interfaces (optical requires very deep jacks to ensure correct optical transfer between cable and socket)\n\nAnd last but not least\n\n* can carry power, because it's made of copper wiring\n\nwhich is VERY important for just about any peripheral. Without USB powering a peripheral, you'd have an extra power cable. In fact, they are drastically increasing the power transfer capability in USB Type C cables, so that soon you'll be able to charge your laptop and tablet PC just like you do your phone.\n\nas mentioned in this thread, fibre is only used where the limits of copper are a hindrance. This is\n\n* Where speed is very important\n\n* Where great distances need to be bridged (think kilometers, without amplifiers)",
"[Thunderbolt was going to be optical](_URL_0_)\n\nThey backed down though.",
"USB 3.0 allows you to reach the physical transfer limits of most mechanical drives. Pair USB 3.0 with a SSD, and your complaints will melt away.",
"Mostly cost. Corning makes a hybrid optical/copper USB cable with all the advantages of both - carries power but can run hundreds of feet. And is incredibly durable. ",
"Toslink (audio fiber) is 125 Mbit/sec where as USB 3.0 is 5 Gbit/sec so the cost comparison is not valid. Typical hard disks transfer (rough estimate) 10 times the rate of a Toslink cable. \n\nToslink is unidirectional\n\nUSB provides power, optical does not. \n",
"Please don't confuse optical connections with fiber optics. \n\nThey are two entirely different animals. Fiber optics usually means a small cable with a glass core that plugs into very expensive optics on both ends. And there's a few different flavors of fiber, all type of different connections, multimode fiber, single mode fiber. \n\nThat type of fiber connection might be used from city to city, or within a building, but not usually in a home setup. It's way too cost prohibitive for you to run fiber to every room in your house (however PC to PC transfer would be SICK!), and it only works if you can have something that will translate the light into electrical signal. PC's will take a fiber card (not to be confused with an optical audio out), but you can't do that to your BluRay or your TV. And even if you did have all your computer gear wired for fiber, your connection to the outside world is still negotiated over cable modem, POTS line, or if you're a lucky bastard, you have fiber to the home. \n\nSource: Certified Photonics Tech",
"Fiber is a form of glass. I work with fiber optics a fair bit and the way consumers toss, tangle, and throw their cables around fiber optics wouldn't hold up long. ",
"File transfers are only as fast as the slowest moving link in the chain. In this case, it would be the hard drive, making fiber for file transfers pointless."
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2qq6mv | why is adobe flash a resource hog and crash all the time? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2qq6mv/eli5_why_is_adobe_flash_a_resource_hog_and_crash/ | {
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"because thats what happens if you are not careful when programming. you get shitty code which does those things. And as it's a framework its not easy to fix broken behaviour because someone might rely on the brokenness. ",
"It's a large, old program that handles a awful lot of stuff - with no limitations on the code. It could have been made by a inexperienced dev, is badly optimised, etc. \n\nTaking YouTube as a example, think about how amazing what is happening is. You're taking (HD/Q) audio and video, streaming it from across the world, with little or no loading time. Not bad for a 18 year old program. "
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lqnaw | why does eating simple carbs (such as sugar or white bread) make people fat? | I understand that if calories consumed > calories burned you will gain weight, but how does the body turn sugar molecules into fat cells?
Thanks. :) | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/lqnaw/eli5_why_does_eating_simple_carbs_such_as_sugar/ | {
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"It's just not simple carbs, but carbs in general. All carbs are eventually turned into glucose and that is either used by your body as fuel or stored in your liver as glycogen. If there is any excess left in your system, they are moved and actually stored in your adipose cells, which are your fat cells.",
"Your body turns all carbs into energy in some form or another. When an excess of energy is present, your body stores this as fat.\n\nSimple carbohydrates are digested (turned into sugar) fairly quickly, as they are smaller chain carbohydrates, and more like sugar already -- basically it takes less steps for your body to break them down into sugars. This creates a wealth of energy for your body, all in a short period of time, causing more storage as fat. More complex carbohydrates are digested more slowly, so your body has a chance to use up that energy as it's gained and isn't as likely to convert it to fat. You can mimic the same effect by eating more protein with carbohydrates. Protein (for reasons I don't understand) slows the digestion of carbohydrates.\n\nTake a look at the [glycemic index](_URL_0_) for a more quantitative analysis of how fast your body digests certain types of foods.",
"Scumbag carbs. Taste delicious, makes you fat.",
"You are asking two different questions:\n\n1) how does the body turn sugar molecules into fat cells?\n\nThis is very tricky. Except in very rare conditions, you body just stores the fat that you eat.\n\nIt doesn't matter though. If you body saves the fat that you eat or converts carbs to fat and then stores it, the only thing that matters is if you end up fat or not.\n\n2) Why does eating simple carbs (such as sugar or white bread) make people fat?\n\nThis question is sort of complicated. Here are some reasons:\n\n* fats and protein make you feel full so you eat less\n\n* There is a hormone called insulin that does several things: 1) moves sugar out of the blood and into cells and the liver for storage 2) starts the conservation mode that tells your body to store any fat it can\n\n* simple carbs release sugar faster than foods with fiber because the carbs are trapped in the fiber and it takes longer to get the carbs out.\n\n* if a lot of sugar is dumped into the blood at once, the body responds with more insulin and sometimes more than is needed because keeping blood sugar levels is critical - get too high and you could die, get too low and you could also die. Insulin is only responsible from keeping you from getting too high.\n\n* when you burn up all the carbs then your body starts using the fat. the more carbs you eat, the longer it will be before your body starts using fat that you ate and fat from your body.\n\n",
"here is [an entire movie](_URL_0_) that will explain to you exactly how this works in simple easy to understand terms, I was going to comment but honestly nothing does it better than that movie. ",
"It's just not simple carbs, but carbs in general. All carbs are eventually turned into glucose and that is either used by your body as fuel or stored in your liver as glycogen. If there is any excess left in your system, they are moved and actually stored in your adipose cells, which are your fat cells.",
"Your body turns all carbs into energy in some form or another. When an excess of energy is present, your body stores this as fat.\n\nSimple carbohydrates are digested (turned into sugar) fairly quickly, as they are smaller chain carbohydrates, and more like sugar already -- basically it takes less steps for your body to break them down into sugars. This creates a wealth of energy for your body, all in a short period of time, causing more storage as fat. More complex carbohydrates are digested more slowly, so your body has a chance to use up that energy as it's gained and isn't as likely to convert it to fat. You can mimic the same effect by eating more protein with carbohydrates. Protein (for reasons I don't understand) slows the digestion of carbohydrates.\n\nTake a look at the [glycemic index](_URL_0_) for a more quantitative analysis of how fast your body digests certain types of foods.",
"Scumbag carbs. Taste delicious, makes you fat.",
"You are asking two different questions:\n\n1) how does the body turn sugar molecules into fat cells?\n\nThis is very tricky. Except in very rare conditions, you body just stores the fat that you eat.\n\nIt doesn't matter though. If you body saves the fat that you eat or converts carbs to fat and then stores it, the only thing that matters is if you end up fat or not.\n\n2) Why does eating simple carbs (such as sugar or white bread) make people fat?\n\nThis question is sort of complicated. Here are some reasons:\n\n* fats and protein make you feel full so you eat less\n\n* There is a hormone called insulin that does several things: 1) moves sugar out of the blood and into cells and the liver for storage 2) starts the conservation mode that tells your body to store any fat it can\n\n* simple carbs release sugar faster than foods with fiber because the carbs are trapped in the fiber and it takes longer to get the carbs out.\n\n* if a lot of sugar is dumped into the blood at once, the body responds with more insulin and sometimes more than is needed because keeping blood sugar levels is critical - get too high and you could die, get too low and you could also die. Insulin is only responsible from keeping you from getting too high.\n\n* when you burn up all the carbs then your body starts using the fat. the more carbs you eat, the longer it will be before your body starts using fat that you ate and fat from your body.\n\n",
"here is [an entire movie](_URL_0_) that will explain to you exactly how this works in simple easy to understand terms, I was going to comment but honestly nothing does it better than that movie. "
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qx4gl | reddit gold | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/qx4gl/eli5_reddit_gold/ | {
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"You donate some money to help Reddit run, and in return you get a \"gold account\" for a limited amount of time. The more you donate, the longer you get. With a gold account you get some special features and access to an exclusive subreddit.",
"I used to have Reddit gold. It lapsed and I never noticed a single difference.",
"[Reddit Enhancement Suite](_URL_0_) is a great add on and from what i heard is far better than Gold... i love it"
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4i7zpj | why do calorie dense foods like pizza not satiate us, despite their high level of energy? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4i7zpj/eli5_why_do_calorie_dense_foods_like_pizza_not/ | {
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"you feel full based on your stomach stretching. so what fills you up is the physical space and not the number of calories.",
"Because there is much less fiber and water in it. Those make up the \"bulk\" of a food. More bulk = more filling, in general. ",
"A few things:\n\nWhen your stomach is empty, your body releases a hormone called ghrelin that stimulates appetite. As your stomach fills that hormone is no longer secreted, so one doesn't feel as hungry.\n\nNot all calorie-dense foods are created equally.\n\nFirst of all, pizza is a high-fat food. Foods higher in fat and protein are more difficult to digest, which slows the rate of gastric emptying and the passage of the food through the intestinal tract. Thus, it will normally fill you up *longer* than would a calorie dense food composed mainly of simple sugars.\n\nFor example, complex carbohydrates are more difficult to digest than a simple disaccharide, like table sugar (which is fructose and glucose), even though a carbohydrate has four calories per gram whether it is simple or complex. A digestive enzyme called amylase in your saliva begins the initial breakdown of complex carbohydrates, but it is relatively insignificant. About 95% of the carbohydrates digested in your body are broken down in the small intestine by pancreatic amylases and brush border enzymes on the surface of the epithelial cells of your small intestine.\n\nThey break down the complex chains of carbohydrates (polysaccharides) into what are often called simple sugars (like glucose and fructose), which can then be absorbed and either used for energy or converted into fat for storage.\n\nIn contrast, a simple sugar does not need to be broken down by the aforementioned enzymes. It can be absorbed immediately by the epithelial cells in the intestine"
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18ns7v | why are prosecutors allowed to fight against the testing of dna evidence that could prove someone’s innocence after conviction? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/18ns7v/eli5_why_are_prosecutors_allowed_to_fight_against/ | {
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"there might be restrictions on when, how and what kind of new evidence can be used to overturn a conviction to prevent dribs and drabs of insignificant evidence leaking in for a single case. They are probably old standards that do not account for the effectiveness of DNA evidence. ",
"It is their job. Court is an adversarial system...defense attorneys try to keep their clients out of jail, prosecutors try to keep them in jail, and hopefully justice is somewhere in between. \n\nThe other reason is the state has an interest in limiting the number of \"do overs\" a convicted criminal can get. We don't want a system where criminals get to roll the dice over and over until they get lucky and walk free. For this reason, the standard for introducing new evidence post trial...even DNA evidence, it quite high.",
"If evidence is inconclusive, even with DNA, it can make a previous conviction look more iffy, even though the evidence is identical to what it was when they were first convicted. People have come to expect the DNA evidence be perfect, but in reality it's rarely so cut and dry. Evidence being inclusive simply means that they don't know. The sample wasn't good enough for a conclusive test, for example. A lot of people don't realize that though, and if the sample isn't a positive, they think that it's a negative, when really it's more of an 'I don't know'."
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5xl3d9 | why do galaxies appear to have a lot of mass if they are mainly comprised of empty space? | The recent pictures of the Sombrero Galaxy prompted this. Much like atoms, galaxies are mostly empty space. I remember an article several years ago where NASA witnessed the end stages of two galaxies passing through each other, and each had very little impact on the other.
Yet, when I see pictures of galaxies, especially the Sombrero Galaxy, I see chunkiness around the edges, and mass leading all the way to the center of the galaxy. What is that chunkiness? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5xl3d9/eli5_why_do_galaxies_appear_to_have_a_lot_of_mass/ | {
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"A lot of that has to do with distance. The objects in the galaxy, namely the stars, are large and, as they give off a lot of light, very noticeable. From this distance, all we can really see of the galaxy is light all coming from a similar location. Think about a mountain range viewed from high above in a plane. It looks like a row of bumps. But if you were on the mountain (much closer) you see the clearly large distance between the peaks. "
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cf3rud | is rabies naturally occurring? or if every organism that had rabies died at once, would it be wiped out? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cf3rud/eli5_is_rabies_naturally_occurring_or_if_every/ | {
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"Rabies is a natural virus has been around for a very long time. An animal (mostly bats, sometimes raccoons or other mammals, only occasionally dogs) that has the disease caries rabies virus particles in and on its body, and their saliva or claws transmits it when they bite or scratch someone. Those particles reproduce in the bitten creature's brain and basically drive it mad so it drools everywhere and attacks other creatures that it normally wouldn't, and this carries on the cycle.\n\nEven if you cremate them all, if you kill every single animal that's carrying the rabies virus, you're still going to have some of it around. Those creatures would have left particles in their environment that have a chance of being picked up by other animals, at least for a while. But this isn't the normal way it's transmitted so it would be a small chance."
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2ew2vt | what did gov rick perry do wrong to get charged with a felony? | I do not understand what the big deal is. The DA who got. DWI did not want to resign? So he cut off funding? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ew2vt/eli5_what_did_gov_rick_perry_do_wrong_to_get/ | {
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"The DA got a DWI, and Perry demanded she resign, threatening to veto millions of dollars of funding to her department. The charge is that he overstepped his authority, abusing his power and attempting to coerce a public official."
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26p6yq | the differentiation of laws in the new and old testaments in the bible | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/26p6yq/eli5_the_differentiation_of_laws_in_the_new_and/ | {
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"Ask your parents if they absolutely take the Bible's message word for word. If they say they do then ask them if they eat pork. In Leviticus chapter 11 lines 7 and 8 clearly state that even touching the pig is a sin let alone eating it. ",
"What did jesus say about it? nothing. \nHe did say :\n > Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest part or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law, until all things have taken place.” (Matthew 5:17)\n\nand many others:_URL_1_\n\nAnd Your mom should read all of the new testament, including 1 corinthians 14:34\n\n > Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law. \n\n_URL_0_\n\n\nedit: this conversation wont end well, i was in your shoes 10 years ago... You'll hear horrible excuses like 'out of context' and 'thats not what that means'.. Really they are the ones interpreting the bible as they see fit. Try to push back on the basics of jesus teachings... loving one another and such. Im atheist now but its harder to turn older generations that have been brainwashed for this long. They will defend w/o hearing or thinking about a single thing because they are afraid 'its the devil trying to trick them' and so forth.\n\nits not easy but good luck.... ",
"Romans 1:27\n[Referring to those who reject God]\n\"Likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust for one another, men with men committing what is shameful, and receiving in themselves the penalty of their error which was due.\"\n\nThat said, Jesus also made it a point that He as God in flesh was more interested in offering forgiveness to those who seek it than to condemn those who have sinned (John 8:1-11). He wanted the get the issue of sin out of the way so that a person could have a personal relationship with God. Sin still exists, and Christians still sin, but a person who accepts Christ is free to focus on that relationship rather than worry about being condemned for his or her sin.\n\nAlso, Laws in the Old Testament were no dismissed, per se, but with the sacrifice of Christ, God deemed many things that were once considered unclean to be clean (Acts 10:10-15). The 10 Commandments, on the other hand, all addressed a person's outward behavior, while Jesus went farther and addressed a person's heart (instead of just \"Don't murder your neighbor\", you should love your neighbor).\n\nIf you are not a Christian, than your parents (or any Christians) should not be personally judging you, but instead sharing with you the love of God. If you are a Christian, than other Christians should be encouraging you to avoid sin."
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2gpt1e | the cost of buying out companies | Can someone explain to me how they figure out the cost to buy a company? I'm curious as to how Marvel could be purchased for 4 billion while Mojang with one popular game sold for $2.5 billion. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2gpt1e/eli5_the_cost_of_buying_out_companies/ | {
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"To simplify: They guess or pay what the company asks for. Even if the information is public about their assets and liabilities (Or it may be private) as well as their revenue projections, companies often inflate their price to provide the most value to their current owners.\n\nThe overpayment of assets is recorded as goodwill, which itself is an asset, is complete and utter bullshit from an accounting standpoint, but that is a new discussion."
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yep9o | how remote controls work | This has always confused me. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/yep9o/eli5_how_remote_controls_work/ | {
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"Most remote controls are *infrared* remote controls. These use a kind of invisible light called infrared. They have an LED on the front (similar to indicator lights on electronics) that emits the invisible infrared light in pulses. Different patterns of pulses correspond to different functions. The device you're controlling has a sensor on the front that detects infrared light, attached to a controller which decodes the pulses, and if the pulse is in a pattern that corresponds to a particular function of the device, it performs that function."
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53eenz | how do people get video game soundtracks to youtube? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/53eenz/eli5how_do_people_get_video_game_soundtracks_to/ | {
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"Depends on the game, but usually just install it and poke around in the installation directory, it's usually an mp3 or something somewhere in there. I remember the PS1 games were just wav files and they would usually play if you just popped the game into a CD player.",
"There's a few ways to get the music from a video game. After that, it's like creating any other video with music.\n\nReleased files. Sometimes developers will release the files as a soundtrack, either for sale or as a bonus download. \n\nDigging around. Like edman007 mentioned, some games store music as straightforward files.\n\nRecording. You can record the sound playing out of your computer with standard recording software.\n\nReverse engineer. Sometimes game developers create a brand-new format for storing the audio files. Once you figure out a format, you can write a computer program to extract it to a standard format like WAV.\n\nI don't actually do this myself, but based on what I know about computer audio, these are the likeliest options.",
"I only can speak vor valve games, but they use vpk files wich basically have all of the sound of the game compressed in one file (like a zip, but more efficient), and you can use various unpacker to extract them (they are often multiple gigabytes big) and then you have them in mp3 format. This even includes things like audio and ambient effects or voice lines."
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2iy1j8 | why is everyone jumping on the 'we hate america/americans' bandwagon? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2iy1j8/eli5_why_is_everyone_jumping_on_the_we_hate/ | {
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"The US is the only real superpower at this point. The eurozone is theoretically comprable, but on most scales it really isn't the same thing. \n\nAmerica does a lot of things, and some of those things are arguably pretty bad. Other countries do bad things, but they aren't as noticable because, well, those countries don't draw as much attention. Other countries also don't have the same sphere of influence; they might do equally bad things if they could, but they just don't have the means. \n\nBasically, the US is a fantastic lightning rod. "
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2ivbt5 | why do customer service companies ask for surveys where anything less than a 10 (out of 10) means the employee didn't do their job right? | If you visit a national retail store of almost any kind you'll likely hear from the employee who rings up your transaction, "Please fill out the survey and remember, anything less than perfect 10s means I didn't do my job right".
I know there is corporate pressure to provide great customer service but it seems like it's gotten out of hand. It seems to me like an aggregate score over 80% would still be a great score for a customer service experience and beyond that, scores less than 10/10 will draw attention to areas that could use improvement, a useful metric in improving efficiency in your store.
It must provide value, otherwise so many companies wouldn't do it right? So what value does a company get from essentially putting employees in a situation where they want to encourage customers to lie (or bend the truth) about their experiences in surveys?
| explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ivbt5/eli5_why_do_customer_service_companies_ask_for/ | {
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"Its so the idiots in charge can tout statistical numbers for customer service success. ",
"I'm not going to argue that it's an effective method, but...consider these:\n\n1. the requirement to say that makes the employee aware that this moment is coming. It's not about instructing the evaluator, it's about changing the behavior of the sales person.\n\n2. the data can be used in _marketing_, not only in \"continual improvement\". If you want to say \"we get a 90% ranking\" it's good to anchor people to \"10\" right before they fill out the survey. There is a lot of research (kahneman / tversky) on these sort of \"anchoring biases\", and this is an example of them at play (I suspect). You might call this \"lying\", but..you might also call it \"standardization\"! If you ARE actually doing research it's pretty smart to very simply and quickly anchor everyone to the same point - otherwise you'll have people thinking 7 is _awesome_ and other people thinking 7 is super shitty. You're controlling for data quality to some extent using this method. \n\n3. you have this idea that \"8\" is \"still good\". That's arbitrary. Whenever you use a scale you have to decide the meaning of locations on the scale. If you're trying to get into harvard, 80% sucks, but if your goal is to be able to play football in D1, it's not going to get in the way. To be able to decide that their method is wrong, you'd need to understand the overall design of the study, not just hear that line or see the questions. For example, my company uses a study like this not to understand averages, but to figure out what is going on when people have _bad_ experiences. We know our average experience is just fine. What we don't know is why 2 in 100 have a truly shitty experience. We want that \"2\" to be \"1\" in 100 instead. So...when we design a questionnaire we literally do not care about the people who have a good experience. If the goal of this study isn't to optimize the average experience, but to fix the shitty one...it could very well be reasonable.",
"Seriously. If I was ever given a questionnaire and asked to put 10s on it, I would not put a single 10, if not for anything else than because being asked to put a 10 means my experience was definitely not a 10."
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34o17s | how are movie companies able to get entire roads/highways/places shut down in order to film? if i payed enough money, could i shut down highways? | Experienced some heavy traffic and detours because of a highway being shut down for a few hours each day for a week for filming of a new movie.. Just made me think. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/34o17s/eli5_how_are_movie_companies_able_to_get_entire/ | {
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"In theory? Sure.\n\nIn practice? Not unless you have a good reason... like say a few million dollars and a movie to film. \"Just because\" isn't going to fly.",
"The city has the say in the end, but getting it done in the first place is going to take some serious cash. The detour is going to cost the city so they are going to want compensation.",
"Filmmakers need to apply for a Filming Permit with the city, and the application process can take a lot of effort. The city then reviews the permit request, considers all the implications to traffic, businesses, residents, etc., and decides whether to grant the permit or not. \n\nAnd, of course, permits cost money, so it does cost a bunch of time and money to go through the permitting process. \n\nNote that cities don't automatically grant permits just because they're submitted -- if they did, they'd have some angry residents (i.e., voters) on their hands. "
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3t992i | why do russia and china support the syrian government while the us, turkey, saudi arabia, and other western countries support syrian rebels in the syrian civil war? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3t992i/eli5_why_do_russia_and_china_support_the_syrian/ | {
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"China doesn't support the Syrian government that much. Its more like they want to prevent the UN from passing resolutions that take actions against human rights violators in fear that the resolutions could be used also against them. \n\nRussia supports the Syrians because Syria has always been a major buyer of Russian weapons. This has lead to Syria being more likely to listen to Russian suggestions of politics in the region. Since Syria is the only country that relies on Russian support in the region, it is the only Russian toe-hold in the Middle East. ",
"It's mainly about friends and enemies of Bashar al-Assad, whom the US and friends would like to remove, to install their own stooge in his place. Russia has military bases on Syrian soil, including the naval facility in Tartus, and an airbase in Palmyra. They also have signals intelligence spyposts in Syria. I'm sure you can see why Russia might be opposed to a Western stooge taking power there.\n\nNo idea on China.",
"Money from energy. Russia has supplied Assad with weapons for years and in return Assad said no to a gas pipeline that was to run from Qatar to Europe. That leaves Gazprom as the main gas supplier to Europe which makes Russia billions every year, and also gives them leverage over Europe.\n\nThe Western countries would be happy to see Assad go as they could then complete the pipeline through Syria, ensuring energy supplies to Europe while at the same time weakening Russia.",
"Russia supports the Syrian government because they have a strategic interest in Syria, having a military base there in the port of Tartous. They are concerned that the fall of the Syrian regime would deprive them of their access to the Mediterranean sea. it is also geopolitical, this support being a way to reassert the fact that Russia remains a power to be reckoned with facing the mostly pro US countries all around. (Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and to a lesser extent Egypt).",
"Ok so you've guessed it. It's all about energy.\n\nQatar, which is a very small middle eastearn country just to the east of Saudi Arabia recently discovered a very large natural gas field. Now they want to sell all of this lovely new gas to the world and one of the best ways to access the market would be to build a pipeline through Syria and Turkey into Europe and start selling. \nThe trouble is that Russia quite likes its monopoly on its Gas in Europe so is naturally against the idea.\nPresident Assad has historically been a close ally to the Soviet Union and Russia and is therefore not allowing this pipeline to go through Syria.\nThere we have it. The US and her allies want regime change and rid Assad to pave the way for this shiny new pipeline in order to reduce Russia's power in the world and Russia and her allies want Assad to stay.\nIt was never about chemical attacks or \"atrocities\". People need to wake up and realise that governments don't give a shit about any of that and only care about \"National Interests\" ",
"Everyone is here to bash Russia and make them out to be the bad guys. Let me give you the other side of the story. \n\nSyria was kinda a shit county to begin with, well no worse than you would expect for a third world county. Arab Spring happened and suddenly the whole region is in turmoil. Now it's widely accepted the western powers were delighted with this, and many of the rebellions and uprisings were funded, armed, and incited by Western powers. Looking at you CIA! \n\nAnyway Syria and neighbouring countries lose all rule of law, and infrastructure. It's chaos, like mad max land. This is the perfect condition for groups like ISIS to come to power, they're stronger, meaner and better equipped. \n\nSo who do you support to give this county it's stability back? Well Putin recons Assad, while a corrupt asshole, is the closest thing to ligitimate leader. let him sort it out and then move on with peaceful transition of power later when Syria has got its shit together. \n\nUS and Europe seem to think it's the rebels and Kurds who should take power. Well currently ISIS are also rebelling against Assad, so maybe \"the rebels\" aren't that great. And as for the Kurds, why should they be put in power? the only thing they're good at is killing ISIS, which is great but they're not a majority, they don't have influence or respect in a lot of Syria. \n\nYea there's a thousand ways to see all this. But I hate when an argument is one sided. Putin probability is defending his Base there, but he's also trying to fix the situation which is good for no one. ",
"The united states is hell bent on replacing governments in the middle east. \n \nIf you're not bending the knee, we don't want you in power. \n \nThat's why we went in and riled up the syrian opposition, and brought in moderate terrorists to attempt to overthrow Assad. \n \nRussia, a long time ally of Syria decided to step in to support their ally and while doing so, show the world exactly how ineffective the US has been in fighting isis. \n \nThe US main goal in syria of course being illegal regime change, and not fighting terrorism.",
"Their really is no simple answer, which is part of the reason why the Syrian Civil War is such a terrible clusterfuck. Energy certainly plays an important role, but it's not everything. The Syrian Civil War is an extension of a broader sectarian conflict between Sunni and Shia Islam, and of a competition between more or less the Gulf Cooperation Council and Iran for regional hegemony. Turkey along with \"other western countries\" are part of NATO. NATO and more or less the Gulf Cooperation Council support the Free Syrian Army (FSA) against Syria for a number of reasons. 1. the FSA is predominately if not entirely Sunni. 2. the FSA is Arab. 3. Where Iraq was predominately Shia, but ruled by the Sunni Baathist Saddam Hussein, Syria is predominately Sunni, but ruled by Alawite Shia Baathist Bashar Al Assad. Why this is the case is largely because of British Imperialism and U.S. interventionism during the Cold War, but that is for another discussion. What matters is that NATO now wants \"liberal democracies\" in these countries, so we are supporting the FSA against Assad. What NATO and the Gulf Cooperation Council really want is to expand their sphere of influence in the area to counter Iran. \nIran's initial postwar WWII democracy was leaning toward the soviet union, so the U.S. overthrew it in 1953 and put the Shah of Iran in power, who turned out not to be such a great dude. When the Iranians overthrew him in 1979, understandably they did not like the USA very much. So Iran is not on the best of terms with Gulf States or NATO. They also don't like Israel too much either. They want to extend their sphere of influence, hence they support Assad, along with houthi rebels, and Hezbollah.\nRussia supports Assad too. The Russian port in Syria is strategically important. It also wants to counter both NATO-Gulf State influence and Iranian influence in the region. Iran and Russia are not best friends, but their interests do align in several areas. While Russia supports Iran, The Gulf States and Russia are simultaneously doing everything they can to kill Iran's oil business. In many ways, some people believe Russia is allying itself with Iran in an attempt to control it / compete with NATO-Gulf Cooperation Council.\nDaesh (ISIS, ISIL, IS), is a major non state actor in the region. They are a Sunni extremist group, made up of extremist and ex-Iraqi baathists. They don't really like anybody, and no one really likes them either, but contrary to popular belief, no one really knows what to do with them. The NATO-Gulf States have been trying to use Daesh to attack Assad. All the coalition bombings that have been going on have been to keep Daesh in check, not to eliminate them. NATO-Gulf States don't want them to attack Iraq, they don't want them to attack the FSA, but they do want them to attack Assad. Simultaneously, Assad has allegedly been buying gas from Daesh to support his campaign against the FSA. Sadly, up until very recently there hasn't been enough political support to really do anything about them. Neither the NATO-Gulf States nor Russia have the political want or will to do what is necessary to eliminate them. The refuge crisis, Paris attacks, and Metrojet Flight 9268 bombing may change all that, but we will see. "
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5pm91w | why is it that video games have loading screens after deaths? | Okay, so I accept the need for loading screens in general. I don't get, however, why they're necessary after you **die**. It seems to me that if you have a save in the room/area you're fighting in when you die, the area should already be loaded (because you were JUST standing there) and all the computer has to do is refill everyone's health bars and put the enemies where they were. However in a game like The Witcher 3, it's faster to warp to an entirely different area of the map than it is to load a save or continue after death. What gives? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5pm91w/eli5_why_is_it_that_video_games_have_loading/ | {
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"Resetting just the things that changed back to their proper state can be harder than you think. The laziest way to program it is to just pretend you're loading the game for the first time, and re-initialize everything. It's inefficient, but effective.",
"Game State is actually a really finicky thing, when the player dies and resets, everything that should reset, needs to actually reset, this means enemies, destroyed terrain, power ups, score, time and a dozen other things. \n\nThe one thing a game dev must avoid at all cost, is a soft-lock. A soft-lock is when the game still runs, but the player has no means of progressing. For example, you are at a boss that is only weak to frost weapons, but you are out of frost ammo, and no frost ammo is near, and you can't leave the room cause the boss is still alive.\n\nSoft-locks are the most frustrating things ever, cause unlike a hard crash, the player doesn't get any feedback that something is wrong, and can look around for hours before giving up.\n\nSo you could develop a proper quick reset of the level by resetting everything that is needed, without reloading the entire level, but if you forget one vital thing, you could ruin someones day royally. Or... you say, the player can wait 10/20 seconds every death, and we never have the issue by reloading the entire level.",
"Because, at the risk of making this sound political, naïve death systems that go through the same code path as loading are super easy to make, and well-designed death systems that squeeze out every drop of performance are hard. Every team competent enough to make a triple-a game _could_ make a loading system like the latter, but the decisions about what to spend time and effort on are made by higher-ups (usually a project manager or team lead, rather than the game director, although this varies between teams) who don't often realise or care that users really do care about loading times."
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7c86w2 | if you put tires on your car that are larger than the ones from the factory, would you actually be going slower than the reading on your speedometer? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7c86w2/eli5_if_you_put_tires_on_your_car_that_are_larger/ | {
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"No, you'll actually be going faster. The speed is calculated based on the OEM tire size, whereas if you put a larger tire on, there is more circumference so the hub will spin slower, yet will be traveling the same speed.\n\nYou can have it recalibrated fairly cheaply.",
"Example: Your car comes with factory-installed tires that are 21.8 inches in diameter. That means the circumference of each tire is 68.5 inches. Now let’s say you want to replace the stock tires with new tires that are 24.6 inches in diameter. Each new tire has a circumference of 77.3 inches, which means it travels almost 10 inches farther with each complete revolution. This has a tremendous affect on your speedometer, which will now indicate a speed that is too slow by almost 13 percent. When your speedometer reads 60 miles per hour, your car will actually be traveling 67.7 miles per hour!\n\n[source ](_URL_0_) "
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3hsh4h | if a prisoner sentenced to life in prison gets some kind of condition, gets rushed to the hospital, dies, it's declared dead but then comes back to life, can he/she be released from prison? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3hsh4h/eli5_if_a_prisoner_sentenced_to_life_in_prison/ | {
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"No. It's not a different life. You did not end one life and start another. You resumed your life.",
"It is not going to happen. Prisoners do not get rushed to a hospital very quickly. Physicians do not pronounce them dead quickly. A person will be cold and dead for hours before a physician is ready to declare them dead."
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1y2yth | why _url_0_ says i have fast internet, but i have to wait 5 minutes for a page to load | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1y2yth/eli5_why_speedtestnet_says_i_have_fast_internet/ | {
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"Just out of curiosity how fast is your connection?\n\nBTW you don't have 'fast internet', you have a connection to the internet.",
"It might be slow on the host for the website.",
"Speed test site pick a server as close to you as possible. Makes for a faster and more secure connection. Lots of hops between england and kangaroosgonewild, you can lose a lot of data over large distances. "
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e7ltyg | how can large bushfires (i think called wildfires in most of the world) have their own climate systems? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e7ltyg/eli5_how_can_large_bushfires_i_think_called/ | {
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"What you’re asking about is called “fire weather” and it’s an entire field unto itself that people literally spend years studying. So it’s hard to simplify. \n\nHaving said that, the basics arise from multiple points:\n\n the fire consumes oxygen, which draws more air toward the fire. When the fire is big enough, that creates lots of wind towards the fire. \n\nThe ash and soot can only be carried so far up, and can form a “ceiling” that other ash and soot collects under. Since it can’t go up it will build out. It eventually will form clouds that are big enough to turn into thunderstorms. \n\nWhen a fire starts forming storms, that draws even more wind towards the area. This is all in a delicate balance, because if the fire burns all the fuel then it will die and the fire weather will change, and sometimes the storms it forms will collect and drop rain, which will slow the fire enough to spiral down the whole situation.\n\nI know, long answer, but it’s a complicated subject that isn’t totally understood because it’s so difficult to study. (It’s also been a while since I took my wild-land fire class in college, so i do t know if o got everything right).\n\nEdit:\nBonus content: [fire whirls](_URL_0_) are the ultimate crazy fire weather. Literally a flaming tornado.",
"Warm air rises and the air over fires is very warm, this then pulls in the air at ground level in to replace the rising warm air, the air is carrying small particles of soot and ash which can act as condensation nuclei, which are require for raindrops to form. The rising warm air can also carry up with it significant amounts of water vapour, all of this changes the local weather formations and creates a new micro-climate."
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dyw5bx | how does free wifi work is large public places? how are they able to get it to stretch across whole airports, malls, etc, when my wifi barely stretches across my house? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dyw5bx/eli5_how_does_free_wifi_work_is_large_public/ | {
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"Multiple routers and the phone thinks they are the same because they project themselves as if they are. It’s also called a mesh network",
"A facility the size of an airport with have dozens if not well over a hundred Wireless Access Points (antennas) all managed by a centralized controller.\n\nEnterprise Grade wifi gear is also significantly more powerful and reliable than what you have in house, and also significantly more expensive.",
"I work at a small university, and we have around 500 individual access points around campus, while you only have one. Most of our academic buildings have an access point in every single classroom, and two in larger lecture halls, as well as access points in office areas, lounges, and other spaces.\n\nAll of those access points are managed and controlled by a central piece of hardware, the controller. Normally, your device would decide which access point to connect to as you move around, usually trying to stay connected to the current access point for as long as possible. But our controller makes that decision for you in order to put you on the access point that's best for you, and balance the wireless clients to give everyone the best connection possible.\n\nEach access point can also each handle a lot more connections than your home wireless router probably can."
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oznqr | a business going public | No idea what it means. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/oznqr/eli5_a_business_going_public/ | {
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"A business is owned by somebody, or sometimes it's owned by a group of somebodies. If you wanted to invest in a business, you'd have to contact the owners and negotiate with them and probably sign a contract, but you could. The business is under no obligations to report to anybody how it's doing or what it spends money on, other than the IRS.\n\n\"Going public\" means listing your company on the stock market so that anybody can quickly buy and sell shares of it. Your business suddenly has millions of owners. There are some extra rules that kick in, like you have to report what your company spends money on every quarter or so."
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4t71uc | what stops "bad" people from going to "good" neighborhoods to do bad stuff? | You hear a lot about towns where people don't bother to lock their cars or homes. These are also presumably the towns/neighborhoods where there would be goods worth stealing. Is it just a professional courtesy on the part of the thieves? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4t71uc/eli5_what_stops_bad_people_from_going_to_good/ | {
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"\"Bad\" people will stick out like a sore thumb in a \"good\" neighborhood. \n\n\nBetter areas will also usually have something like a neighborhood watch scheme where everyone helps look out for each other or it may even be a gated community with round-the-clock surveillance. \n\n\nNow obviously there's going to be better stuff worth stealing, but is it worth the risk of getting spotted, getting your face plastered on CCTV or walking into a rent-a-cop with a gun, when you could choose a nearby house in a bad neighborhood and make off with some TVs, laptops or smartphones that you can quickly sell off?\n\n\nYou've got to remember, a fence won't buy the real-high ticket items e.g jewellery, rolexes etc for full price-- not like you can complain to the manager that you're getting stiffed-- and these kind of items will usually have some kind of identifying mark that links them to the legitimate owner.\n\nAlso remember, most thieves are opportunists that just want enough money for the next hit.",
"Thieves and other criminals usually focus on places the know so they can better plan their crime or escape.\n\nKnew a guy who decided to rob a fast food joint.....the same one he worked at for 3 years prior.\n\nAlso, a lot of criminal violence is due to the drug trade or issues with people you know. Gangsters and their rival associates usually live in the poorer side of town. My sketchy relatives have no beef with the rich folks 20 miles away....\n\nMind you, junkies robbing cars and houses in rich towns happen but the local community will hire private security or up police presence. In poor areas....not so much.",
"My parents grew up in a town like that. My grandparents *never* locked their house or car. In a small town you know everybody and as stranger hanging around to steal stuff would stick out. In a big town the police might take hours to respond to a simple B & E; in a small town the sheriff or police chief might show up in person just to check on you.\n\nOn top of that my grandparents had very little worth stealing.\n",
"Basically it's the same reason why people usually shop at grocery stores near their home: it's more convenient.\n\n\"Dr. Kim Rossmo of Texas State University, who studies the geography of crime, has found that criminals tend to behave according to reliable geographic patterns. Rossmo’s formula (and that’s not just a turn of phrase — there is something called “Rossmo’s formula”) is used to explain how serial thieves, rapists and other criminals commit their offenses at a close-but-not-too-close distance from their home.\"\n\n_URL_0_\n",
"1) Criminals usually stick out like sore thumbs in \"nice\" neighbourhoods.\n\n2) People in nice neighbourhoods (at least in the US) have no problem defending themselves and protecting what they have worked hard for.\n\n3) They will call the police and don't subscribe to that ridiculous \"no snitching\" rule.\n\n4) Criminals are usually parasites and prey on their own.",
"I have a lot of experience with this. In short. They do. \n\nPeople from bad neighborhoods absolutely travel to good neighborhoods seeking victims, day and night. \n\nIt is true they stick out during the day so depending on how the neighborhood is built they might only target it during night hours. \n\nDuring night hours auto burglaries in good areas are rampant. In older areas with smaller roads and dim lighting it's easier to hide. They work in teams. A driver drops them off, a spotter at the front of the neighborhood with a walkie talkie telling the door pullers when people come in. They walk down the roads pulling door handles looking for unlocked cars. You'd be surprised how many people leave their doors unlocked. Electronics, guns, and other cars are stolen (people leave spare keys to other cars inside) ... Regularly. \n\nThey go to night life hot spots and rob people walking away from the bars on neighboring streets. All in good areas. \n\nThey steal cars and purposefully travel to good areas to look for more things to steal. \n\nA lot of people here are saying people don't, but they do. I deal with this problem every time I go to work. I hunt down these people at night, and we are out numbered. It's extremely difficult to catch them. They slip behind a parked car and you'd never see them. It's frustrating. \n\n"
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1x9wcz | why does my banana ripe slowly at home, but when i bring it to work, it turns black within an hour? | Apparently it doesn't like work and dies, like my insides. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1x9wcz/eli5_why_does_my_banana_ripe_slowly_at_home_but/ | {
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"Banana riping and blacking are not necessarily related. Blacking of the skin happens when exposed to cold temperatures. Maybe outside is very cold and it takes you some time to reach work (or you work in freezing conditions ;) ).\n\nAs an advice, banana will not ripen by themselves. However you can put them in the same box/bag with apples and in ~2 days they will go from green to a nice yellow"
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2pio4f | if hacker groups are so powerful, why don't a bunch of hackers that are into free speech wage a war on the hackers waging a war on sony?? | Maybe it's because I have zero hack skillz, but why aren't there some badass hackers like Anonymous going after the hackers going after Sony. It would seem like most hackers would be into fighting for free speech and expression...I know these hackers say they are about keeping the peace between nations by putting a kibosh on the movie, but people familiar with US - N Korea relations no that is BS, because this move would neither move the needle very much on the temperature of those relations nor provoke action from N Korea (beyond sabre rattling).
What gives? I'd love to see some hackers beat these people f@#king with Sony at their own game | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2pio4f/eli5_if_hacker_groups_are_so_powerful_why_dont_a/ | {
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"A hacker that got the sony data is going door to door in a city and going in when the front door is open. What you're suggesting is that robin-hood hackers pick a specific house and trying to get into it. That later is a much taller order.",
"Why would hackers who believe in free speech act to defend a company?If anything they would applaud the sony hackers for releasing more data to the world.\n"
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etly62 | how do screaming firework rockets work? | What kind of chemicals are used to make the noise? What does it look like when it is in a firework? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/etly62/eli5_how_do_screaming_firework_rockets_work/ | {
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"Whistles/screamers use a composition of solid fuel where the combustion rate of the fuel is sensitive to *pressure*. \n\nNormally, on the kinds of solid fuels used in rockets and fireworks, this is not a desirable tendency. The rapid increase in pressure in the rocket's chamber upon ignition, could cause such a fuel to *detonate* rather than simply burning quickly (deflagration.) Indeed, a good degree of pressure sensitivity is important to the detonation process in high explosives. The primer caps in ammunition use a small amount of a high explosive that is particularly pressure sensitive. The pressure from the impact of the firing pin causes it to detonate, igniting the powder charge.\n\nIndeed, whistle composition is considered dangerous and difficult to make, and the devices can be prone to igniting unintentionally or exploding. The mix itself may be prone to spontaneously combust or exploding. For this reason I won't go into details. \n\nIn whistles, this mixture is placed in a narrow tube. The length of the tube determines the pitch of the whistle.\n\nThe process of burning produces hot gases that rush out of the tube. This produces turbulence and noise. Vibrations of a certain frequency or pitch resonate inside the tube in the same way that wind instruments like flutes do. This is the same basic process as blowing over the top of an empty bottle. The increased pressure caused by the resonation inside the tube causes the mix to burn more quickly, producing more gases and increasing the pressure. This amplifies the sound produced. As the sound wave leaves the tube the pressure drops again, burning slows, producing a partial vacuum. This draws air back into the tube, increasing pressure and causing the burn rate to accelerate again. \n\nThe YouTube channel Periodic Table of Videos made particularly interesting [slow motion video on oscillating combustion.](_URL_0_) This gives a rough idea of what is going on on inside the firework, although this video uses a pair of gaseous fuels instead of a single solid one."
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661g0b | why do different cpus/motherboards have different pin counts and does the number of pins affect performance? | I was looking to buy an Intel gaming/workstation PC when I came across different motherboard sockets like 1151 and 2011-3 which have 1151 and 2011 pins respectively. It came across me that if the you had 2 of the same CPU and the only difference is being the number of CPU/Motherboard pins on it, would the performance be affected as more data can be transferred through the pins? For example a CPU/Motherboard with 2000 pins can have proportionately double the performance of one with 1000 pins. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/661g0b/eli5why_do_different_cpusmotherboards_have/ | {
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"More pins are mostly used for more power and ground connections as power requirements increase. In addition, we are now doing more in the processor, which requires direct connections. Before, we used a single bus, to connect to a Northbridge chip, which connected to memory, graphics and expansion ports. Now that Northbridge chip has been folded into the processor, so we need on-chip connections directly to memory, graphics and expansion slots.\n\nIn addition, they will often make a small change to the pin count when they make changes that require a different motherboard. If they used the same socket, they'd have problems with people using the wrong motherboard. with a different pin count and socket design, this problem goes away - or at least, it should...."
]
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852fu8 | what's the least dangerous way to fall off a high building? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/852fu8/eli5_whats_the_least_dangerous_way_to_fall_off_a/ | {
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"For surviving, legs first. You'll be crippled for life but you have a slightly higher chance of not dying. \n\nFor anything else, flat on your back would distribute the force most evenly, but risk damaging your spinal cord. \n\nJust...don't fall off a tall building?",
"Build platforms along the side of the building as you fall down, make sure you have enough materials before you start your descent tho"
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3oj8i1 | why do we need to shower? | Yes - to be clean. Why can't we just spray some stuff to be clean? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3oj8i1/eli5_why_do_we_need_to_shower/ | {
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"So you don't stink. \n\nGood hygine will also keep you healthier then you would otherwise be but the main reason you shower every day (sometimes more) is so you don't smell bad to yourself and other people. ",
"Spraying some stuff will not remove the mix of dead skin cells, sweat, dirt, body oils, and bacteria that build up on your skin over time. It will, at best, mask the smell of the previously mentioned skin build up."
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2pokr9 | why does it seem like anyone photographed with kim jong un has to be taking notes on tiny scraps of paper? | Is it really just a visual cue that they are at all times "interested" in what he's saying? I could understand why they might want to do that to please him but when these pictures go out it looks like all the heads of military cannot retain any information unless they write it down immediately. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2pokr9/eli5_why_does_it_seem_like_anyone_photographed/ | {
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"The \"scribe\" icon is a common symbol used in Asia to show a leaders intelligence and visionary approach. If you look through old photos of China's Mao or even older paintings of Emperors you'll see the subservient advisors taking notes. \n\nIt's a visual trope common is asiatic art and propaganda. ",
" > Is it really just a visual cue that they are at all times \"interested\" in what he's saying?\n\nIt's that, but taken to a psycho extreme. The personality cult they've developed holds that essentially every word he utters is The Greatest Wisdom Ever Revealed to Man. So it all gets written down, and any goofy, offhand remark he makes gets treated like Divine Law. If he visits a factory or a military base and says, \"hey you guys should do such-and-such,\" they *don't* treat it like a suggestion.\n\nL Ron Hubbard had a similar setup when he was still walking the planet. He had an army of pre-teen girls in hotpants and halter tops called The Messengers who were expected to (among other duties) write down any pearls of wisdom he casually dropped. When he was pissed at somebody, but didn't want to walk elsewhere to yell at them in person, he would \"dictate\" a rant to a Messenger, to be delivered *precisely* as he had delivered it, tone of voice and copious profanity included. The Scientology higher-ups grew to become *terrified* of these kids.\n\n\n\n\n"
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3zbh7x | how do those "magic eye" 3d object puzzle pictures work? | Like this one?
_URL_0_ | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3zbh7x/eli5_how_do_those_magic_eye_3d_object_puzzle/ | {
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"First off, your brain translates the angle between your eyes into distance. When you look at close things, you go slightly cross-eyed for example.\n\nThese pictures are actually not completely regular, but distorted in a way that when you overlap the images from both eyes correctly, it tricks your eyes into thinking there is depth in that resulting structure, because it needs to adjust the angle your eyes cross, which gives it fake depth information."
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a8gkx3 | how the hell do studios produce bad movies. with all the cast, production crew, investors, and higher ups, how does one produce a bad movie without anyone, even a janitor, expressing how trash a film will be in theaters? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a8gkx3/eli5_how_the_hell_do_studios_produce_bad_movies/ | {
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"The people who don't have a say in the creative direction of a movie don't want to speak up because being seen as disruptive, critical or hard to work with will effect their job prospects in the future. Besides, they won't earn more money if the movie is more successful.\n\nThe people in charge may be misguided or out of touch with what audiences would like or they may simply not care because they're going to make sure that they get paid first.\n\nStudios know when they have a bad movie on their hands and sometimes, the only thing to do is just finish it, release it and make whatever money they can off of it. Going back to rewrite half of it or fire the actors and start over with a new cast just adds more cost to the project without any guarantee of profit.",
"If the formula says it will make money, then it must be a winner. After all you can never have too many synthesized dinosaur roars and shaky camera action scenes that go on for way too long. Those dinosaur roars... man those come in handy. You can use those anywhere. The Hulk.. dinosaurs.... even sharks underwater seem to have the ability to make that noise in movies these days.",
"So many movies are made or ruined in the editor’s box. Between the director and the editor the final movie is decided. Principal photography gives them the material to work with but they have many takes and many options for what to use and how. Music cues, scene timing, character development, so much is decided in the hectic days of the editing room. ",
"Because some people are really good at selling ideas and spinning things to look positive. Additionally, most of those bad movies recover their costs at the very least.\n\nOnce the process is started and large sums of money are spent, even if an executive thinks the project will be a flop they will usually continue in the hopes that the project will break even, rather than stop and lose what was already spent.\n\n",
"If you're on the production crew, working on a bad movie is still a major resume bullet. \n\nAnd you don't want to be the guy who trashes the movie, no matter how accurate the criticism.",
"Listen here young squirt. The way it works is that some bloke has an idea for a movie. Usually he’s a creative type. Life’s work and all. Something flashy and original. \n\nThen it gets handed to a committee. Now you’ve got a bunch of bureaucrats with their heads up their arses making suggestions. They don’t understand the structure of the movie or how it goes together - they’ve just got egos the size of Uluru. Think they’re owls when really they’re wombats.\n\nNow these Wally’s start changing the film. Everyone around them is collecting a pay check so doesn’t want to point out that the movies going to get the same reception as an old mans talcum powder. So they keep making it. \n\nThen they screen it to test audiences. These aren’t the working mob - they’re too busy with their yakka. Nah, bunch of students and pensioners and unemployed Sheilas offering opinions. They modify it a bit and send it out the door. \n\nEveryone throughout knows this is a compromise. It’s got more odd parts than a platypus. Just doesn’t go together right. But they’re doing what they’re told. More often than not it works - but sometimes it doesn’t. ",
"Films need to release by a certain date. The space in theaters is booked, the Marketing and production cycles are locked in, and it's carefully chosen so that no other major movie will be competing with it on the week of it's release. The date of a film's release is mostly fixed long before problems surface. Sure, it can be pushed back, but doing so is costly. \n\nA film is mostly [made or killed in the Edit.](_URL_0_) You can have the best Director, the most emotive actors, glorious cinematography, but still die in the cutting room because it just can't be fit together in a cohesive story with good pacing. This effect only grows when CGI is introduced. Millions of dollars have been put into releasing this film on October 3rd, 2019, and it's September 1st- no time for reshoots. They know it's bad, you just realized that your main character in an action looks like a weakling and a jerk, but it would cost even more money to reshoot it and then push back the release date, and the audience will pay for the ticket anyways, so you can hopefully make your money back. \n\nMovies aren't about making a good movie. Big studio movies are about making money (Duh). If the movie is trash but will still make money, it will be pushed through. Most people in a bad movie know it's a bad movie, but that doesn't matter. It keeps the heat on in their homes (metaphorically) and it won't really hurt their careers if they have a few good movies under their belt. The Studio, Actors, Director, Janitors, Editors, and Theaters all get paid. The only people hurt by the bad movie is the audience. Sure, it would be better if it was good, but bad is okay. ",
"The cast, crew, and investors have little idea what the final product will look like. Effects (visual and sound), editing, music all contribute to the final product. A great script can become a mediocre film and a mediocre script can become a great film. The crew aren't going to second guess the director's decisions. Actors are often surprised when they see the final product because most of them aren't in every scene. Investors shouldn't meddle in the production process. Janitors don't stand around watching the filming. Plus audiences and critics are fickle.",
"Also, more and more movies aren’t exactly tailored to an American audience. They are truly aiming to entertain the Chinese audience.\n\nIn fact movies, like Red Dawn (2012), get a complete makeover because Chinese focus groups don’t like it. [the invaders were originally Chinese, but this upset many Chinese critics. So they ended up changing it to the NKoreans. Spending hundreds of thousand to CGI over scenes they couldn’t re-shoot) \n\nLook at a lot of these huge name movies that you have been disappointed in. I bet 8/10 are more successful in foreign markets than domestic. ",
"You don't know until the end\n\nmost people though Star Wars was a turd, but [saved in the edit by Marcia Lucas](_URL_0_)\n\nEven Lucas himself thought it was a failure and skipped the whole premiere\n\nBut, during filming of *The Room*, the entire film crew quit... and replaced.. and they quit too. Over and over. Because Wiseau was ranting and giving confusing, impossible directions.\n\nIn the end many pros don't mind working for a turd, as long as they're paid and not a % of the box office.",
"I think you have two very different questions here:\n\n1. Why do studios make bad movies?\n2. Why don't we get leaked info that it'll be bad?\n\nSecond question is easy: buttloads of Non-disclosures. As other people have said, you don't want to have worked on a terrible movie. Also you want to do your part to the best of your ability. So let's take a film like Avatar (blue people): best visual effects anyone has ever seen! Story is pretty mediocre. If you're on that effects team, you want that credit. See Star Wars prequels: no one on the special effects team can tell Lucas how bad the script was if they want a good line on their resume. Basically no one wants to rock the boat.\n\nThe first one is a lot harder. Honestly there are lots of different answers. First thing that can happen, probably one of the more common foibles, is last minute rewrites. They think they have a good movie, then they realize they have to change... something. The problem is that they're at some stage of making the movie already and they can't push back the release date a year to massively rework everything. So they try to stick everything back together with duct tape and hope it works. Sometimes it does! Frozen had massive rewrites to make Elsa a protagonist, but that's part of the reason why there's so much there-and-back between different locations, they had to just get them from point A to point B.\n\nStudios are generally unwilling to start from square one once things go sour. The Emperor's New Groove is really the best example of starting from square one I can think of and Disney is deadly ashamed of the rework and like to pretend it never happened and it was always supposed to be a zany comedy. They hold the making-of documentary under literal lock and key although I think it did slip out. I don't know if you can still find it though.\n\nSometimes directors/writers get too full of themselves shit: or just too big/famous to correct and people don't edit them anymore. This happens with books too. I remember reading a paragraph or two from a Stephen King novel about a creepy character eating a rat for lunch and just going: \"Really? You couldn't have left any subtlety there?\" The book would have been so much better without those pages. JK Rowling's epilogue comes to mind too as does a lot of the recent stuff from George Lucas. But who's going to tell these creatives \"No, this is a terrible idea. Stop doing that!\"\n\nBut a lot of time, troubled production seems to lead to bad pictures. If the crew doesn't have something they're all working towards, things get extremely messy. If studio heads and directors are clashing you get messy things. It's not even that studio heads are always wrong and directors are always right. The problem is that they don't agree. It's like coming to a fork in the road and directors try to take the left path and studio heads try to take the right path so they end up in the median which was the worst of all possible worlds. Think about a dark, scary movie with an obnoxious comedy sidekick. It would be better if it were all dark and scary or all a little bit more light-hearted and commercial.",
"Keep in mind that for major studios, a “good” movie is a profitable one. A bad movie, made for a modest budget, but marketed correctly, can make money for the investors. ",
"Usually it's the higher ups that ruin it. Then the brown nosers and yes men go along with it",
"I've never seen a workplace that takes criticism or complaints seriously and would imagine movie sets are no different.\n. People only take notice when things go bad. ",
"It's really hard to make a good movie even under the best circumstances, and the best circumstances don't happen very often. ",
"I think you’re touching on two different things. The first is what you consider a “good” movie. For example, not many people would consider the Transformers movies “good” in the classical sense of the word, however they are very profitable which makes them good investments on the part of the studio. \n\nThe second is an issue f hindsight. It’s much easier to pick apart a completed film and point out its shortcomings and why it failed after the fact. Actually creating something that is both “good” and profitable from the get go is no small feat. \n\nIn fact, one could argue that the committee system that you mention is part of the reason so many mediocre movies come out. ",
"TL;DR for exactly the reason you mention: there are so many people involved that actually keeping track of everything is really, really difficult, and that's what good directors actually do. It's really difficult to get the whole picture during the process",
"Seth Rogen has talked about this a bit:\n\n > Rogen said he knows firsthand how difficult it is to be forced to promote a film that you're not 100% proud of. He had to do just that for 2012's \"The Guilt Trip,\" a movie he made alongside Barbra Streisand.\n\n > \"I did have a wonderful time making it,\" Seth said, telling Howard Stern that the script for the film was actually one of the best he's ever read. \"As we were making it I was beginning to suspect it was not turning out in the way I hoped.\"\n\n > Seth wasn't the only one who sensed the film was struggling – Barbra grew concerned with the movie during production, as well.\n\n > \"We would talk about how we did not think it was coming together,\" Seth told Howard. \"I'm more surprised when any movie is good … A hundred million things need to come together in order to make a movie good that I am not surprised when movies are bad. I am shocked when movies are good.\"",
"Oh did you just see aquaman too?",
"Generally speaking, all Hollywood movies are bad. Not morally or aesthetically, most of them don't even make money.\n\nMovie studios make about 4% return on their investment in making movies. A few big hit redeem all the money lost on failures. In a logical world, every movie studio could make a better income by liquidating their assets and putting the money into a decent investment account.",
"Real answer: On Purpose.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nBad movies are made...on purpose. As vehicles for up and comers to show what they can do. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nScriptwriters are given absolute garbage to turn into a viable movie. Directors are given the chance to direct. Cinematographers, DPs, Editors, and even Grip teams all get to show they know what the hell they're doing. And of course Actors. If you can convincingly pull off that fact that your character is a reincarnated, cybernetic, half-demon, Nazi from the moon...well shit, you can earn the right to audition to be Jason Statham's nerd lackey on that triple A movie coming up. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe studios *know* they're bad movies. That's the point. No real investment, no support, no real professionals. Make it work, and we'll give you a shot at making another one. Do it more than once, and we'll let you make something better. ",
"Because it is expected that all kinds of people will say it will be bad. We expect 8 out of 9 movies to actually lose money. \n\nAnd really decisions are made from a two minute pitch. So think about some of the most profitable movies ever made. Titanic is a story of love and betrayal on the doomed cruiseliner, starring a sitcom star and an unknown. That sounds downright awful. Star Wars is a classic space opera about an orphan finding out he has magical powers and fighting the great evil empire, and for Star power they deliberately didn't have any. Shit that's bad. \n\nOn the other hand let's look at the basic pitch for Battlefield Earth. A movie from a scifi book that has maintained sales for decades, starring a resurgent Travolta and other high level stat talent. That's a great idea, a sure winner.\n\nThe biggest problem is that what wins and what loses makes no sense at all.",
"My family works in film. I would chalk it up to \"just another job\". At the end of the day, you work on so many sets, so many shows that the content doesn't really matter, whether it's a show that gets cancelled after one season or a huge block buster \n\nOn the flip side, I've worked on a couple of those Hallmark Christmas movies. They're absolute trash and everyone knows it, including the actors. But it's a paycheck, and there's people out there that love it. There's a reason they keep getting made.",
"One perspective that no one seems to have touched on is the economic decision to intentionally release a bad movie. The whole idea is that by the time the studio realizes the movie will be a flop, they still finish creating it because they can at least recoup some of their sunk costs by putting the movie out rather than by letting it die quietly. \n\nSay for instance, initial projections are that the film will cost $20M to make and will net $40M at the box office (profit of $20M). They begin filming it and halfway through the entire process, they realize the movie is probably going to be bad and they expect it to only get $15M at the box office. They have already spent $10M and that money is gone. So the studio's options are to:\n\n1. End production now and not release the movie. They will earn $0 from not releasing it, and they already spent $10M for a net of -$10M. \n2. Spend another $10M on production to at least get the movie out. Their total expenses will be $20M, and they will earn $15M in revenue for a net of -$5M. \n\nWhen actually calculated, the studio should logically decide to release the shit movie anyways because they will at least recoup some of their expenses. The overall idea is to never make an economic decision based on the sunk costs (the $10M already spent) but rather on the costs and benefits *going forwards*. Hope that helps"
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5domqc | why do people always make eye contact with me as soon as i start staring at them as if they could feel it? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5domqc/eli5why_do_people_always_make_eye_contact_with_me/ | {
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"Confirmation bias. Since it's now on your mind, every time it happens to you it starts building up as an idea in your head and you think it's always happening. Your memory starts to ignore all the times it doesn't happen and only focuses on the times it does. Think about how many people you look at every day, and how many times they actually happen to be looking at you.\n\nThat, or they just want to bone you. "
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agzwfb | why does fruit taste different (and often better) when it’s sliced? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/agzwfb/eli5_why_does_fruit_taste_different_and_often/ | {
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"A lot of what you think of as taste is actually your sense of smell. When you cut open a fruit you release a lot of the chemicals inside the fruit to the air where they are more easily drawn into your nose. So, you have more to smell which affects what you perceive as taste."
]
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4zvm86 | why does pruning plants help them grow? | My dad made me prune some roses in the backyard today and claimed that it will help them grow better and make them look nicer. They definitely look nicer, but why does this help them grow? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4zvm86/eli5_why_does_pruning_plants_help_them_grow/ | {
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"I'm not sure about the physiology of it, but from an evolutionary standpoint, it is because plants have coevolved with animals. \n\n\nIn nature most plants have some kind of herbivore that regularly trims off excess growth and whatnot. Herbivores probably don't have access to the plants in your yard, so humans need to play this role instead by trimming them artificially.",
"Pruning plants can redirect energy to places where you'd like them to grow e.g. the plant will put energy into growth towards the top if you trim them at the base, or get bushier if you trim the top. Part of it is that they will grow better in the ways that are most visually pleasing rather than just tons of new branches and leaves everywhere.\n\nIt can also prevent the plant from getting really dense to a point where the top sets of branches and leaves block the sun from the lower parts. In this case you'd want to get rid of some leaves up top so the rest of the plant can get sun. When lots of leaves get too close they are also more likely to get pest infestations and things like that due to extra humidity."
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3czls2 | in sci-fi movies, why are alien organisms almost always silicone based? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3czls2/eli5_in_scifi_movies_why_are_alien_organisms/ | {
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"Silicon is the other element other than carbon that would form long complicated bonds that life could evolve around. Though it is almost certain that another life form would be carbon based this gives a way of creating a \"totally new life form\".",
"It's silicon .. Not silicone. Silicon is the next element after carbon with the same characteristics. It's abundant and in most cases you can substitute carbon with silicon and form similar compounds. Eg ch4 is methane, a flammable gas. SiH4 is silane, another flammable gas.",
"First off, I wouldn't say sci-fi movies \"almost always\" have silicon-based life forms. I don't think I've seen that idea used in a long time, in fact.\n\nSecondly, take a look at a periodic table. Silicon is directly underneath carbon, which means that in theory, it could have very similar properties. In practice, this turns out not to be true. Silicon just doesn't do the same types of complex chemistry that carbon does. But for a quick and dirty \"ooh, this is a sciencey-sounding thing!\", it works. "
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6dkwdb | why is the internet slow in space stations if they're right next to satellites? | Shouldn't their proximity allow them faster than normal internet?
EDIT: my whole life has been a fucking lie | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6dkwdb/eli5_why_is_the_internet_slow_in_space_stations/ | {
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"Most of the internet doesn't pass through satellites. I'm not sure why being close to unrelated hardware is relevant.\n\nMost satellites point their transmitters and receivers at the ground. Being in space they may not be able to reach them at all.",
"To answer your original question:\n\nInternet for the International Space Station does connect via a network of satellites, but those satellites are not close to the ISS at all. The space station orbits the Earth at around 250 miles up, but the relay satellites orbit at roughly 22,000 miles up. That means the signal has to go from the ISS up 199,750 miles to a satellite, then back down 22,000 miles to Earth to connect to the internet on the ground, then back up 22,000 miles to the satellite and down 199,750 miles again to reach the station. That results in huge latency, although the bandwith is actually roughly the same as home broadband internet."
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blcall | how does a self-playing piano work? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/blcall/eli5_how_does_a_selfplaying_piano_work/ | {
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"We have a very old one in our garage. It used paper rolls with the notes of the song punched out, like an old music box. A person had to sit and basically pump the pedals to make it go.\n\nNow it works by sitting there being broken and filthy and taking up to much room."
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23fp0u | why is it so hard to change sleep patterns? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/23fp0u/eli5_why_is_it_so_hard_to_change_sleep_patterns/ | {
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"all creatures that sleep have what is known as a \"circadian rhythm\" basically your body goes through phases during the day and night. with certain phases best suited for sleeping and certain phases best suited for activity. if your body is in a phase for activity, or just getting into a phase for sleep, it will be difficult to get a good nights sleep.\n\nbut fret not, after a few days of going to sleep at this new time your body will adjust it's circadian rhythm.",
"A lot of people don't realize that it's actually very much ingrained with your eating schedule. You can actually reset your clock by fasting for a period of time then eating at a certain point in the day. I don't have the source on hand but if you look it up you should find something.",
"Person with chronic fatigue here who does shift work in a call centre.\n\nIt's easier for some to reset than others, it becomes easier with practise and eating is indeed a part of that (u/setaeserstostun :)). If you intend to reset it, Don't eat for 16 hours then at the time you wish to begin waking up, eat breakfast. This meal 'breaks the fast' (not eating) and sets up your body to tell it this is the time it should start a day. Our ancestors did not have electric lighting, nor a need to stay awake over night. This was a cold time best fit for sleeping and by habbit as a species we are not nocturnal.\n\nTaking naps can help if timed with an alarm clock, over sleeping makes it harder.\n\nHope this answer was helpful. Even if terribly written at 0441am in New Zealand and at work! :p"
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p8nij | how do computer circuits work? | I love gadgets and techy things. But I have absolutely zero idea how circuit boards, microchips and all that crap works. To me they're magical little pieces of plastic and copper. Please tell me how they work. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/p8nij/eli5_how_do_computer_circuits_work/ | {
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"**EDIT** Oh God, that ended up way longer than I intended. Sorry.\n\nOooh, hardware major here. I'm a huge fan of all things microchippy, and although I think I have answered a question like this before I sort of want to give it another shot.\n\nSo, the basic idea behind pretty much every gadget ever is that we want it to work with information. We want to be able to give it information (input - like clicking a mouse, or tilting your phone), have it *do* stuff to that information (processing - like adding two numbers), and then have it give us a reaction (output - like moving a robot arm or changing something on the monitor).\n\nNow, when people say that devices pass around \"information\" it might seem a little weird, because information isn't exactly something that you can put in a jar and leave on your shelf. It helps to think of information as just being something that you store in a pattern. English is a pattern that stores information, for instance.\n\nSo it's just that computers use a different language to move around their information. They form their patterns with electricity.\n\nLet's scale up a bit. Think of a light bulb and a switch. The switch can be in one of two states - on, or off. How could you use that to store information? You could say, \"when the light is on, I am home; when it's off, I am away.\" You could ... count from zero (off) to one (on). Very exciting, I know. This is one \"bit\" of information. \n\nNow let's say you add another lightbulb and switch. What can you store now? You've got a little more variety, since you can use different combinations to mean different things:\n\n on on = I'm home and busy\n off on = I'm not home and busy (at work)\n on off = I'm home and not busy (playing games)\n off off = I'm not home and not busy (off partying)\n\nSo this pattern is all well and good, but let's say that you want to be able to tell people to go away when you're at home but busy (on on). So you wire the two lights you have to a third light that goes outside in such a way that if light 1 is on AND light 2 is on, the third light comes on and illuminates a huge sign that tells people to gtfo; otherwise, that light is off. (After all, you don't care if people knock while you aren't home or when you're not busy).\n\nWhat you just created is what's called a \"logic gate.\" It takes your information as input, does some action (checks if light 1 = on AND light 2 = on), and outputs something else. There are a few different kinds that give different outputs depending on your input.\n\nNow... imagine you have a million lights.\n\nThat's a lot of information. If you knew exactly how to encode things, and the people passing by outside your ludicrously-lit fire hazard of a house knew exactly how to decode them, you could share a lot of information with each other. If you wired up the right gates, you could do a *ton* of work between the switches flipped and the lights that actually get turned on - enough to, say, do math (with your secret number code that is also encoded in light bulbs), even send entire messages if you had a pattern that represented letters and words.\n\nThat's basically how information gets input, mucked around with, and output from a circuit. Ones and zeroes of binary actually mean \"off\" and \"on\" in wires of a circuit. Gates are made with transistors (an electrical component that I'm not sure I'm comfortable explaining) that react to the voltages carried by the wires and provide some output. \n\nThe information sometimes has to go through a series of interpretations before it gets to be readable by a human (and the interpretations are also done with series of wires, gates and switches! Crazy!); the more complicated the machine is, generally, the more interpretations it has to go through (see below\\*). But a chain of very, very simple operations - if you've got enough of them - can result in some very complex behaviour. "
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23n36i | why exactly is netflix opposing the comcast/twc merger? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/23n36i/eli5_why_exactly_is_netflix_opposing_the/ | {
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"Because Comcast is known to throttle streaming services (they limit how fast your connection is artificially) which is how Netflix makes most of their money nowadays. Add in the fact that almost every city in the US has Comcast or TWC and nothing else for cable services, that means that Most cities will now not be able to stream Netflix at the speed that they're used to.",
"Netflix benefits from a competitive market. If there are fewer ISPs, it's harder for them (and consumers!) to negotiate for and demand better services.\n\nIf one ISP throttles your traffic and you have ten other options, you might switch.\n\nIf one ISP throttles your traffic and you have no other options, you're out of luck.\n\nIn this case, \"your traffic\" could mean Netflix movie streaming. Since net neutrality is under attack, there's nothing necessarily stopping cable companies from throttling your communication with Netflix servers while offering their own competing service.\n\nSlightly similar example: Apple sometimes clones successful apps, then bans the original from the App Store as a duplicate.\n\nWhen the person controlling your connection has a vested interest in getting you to pick their service, ugly things may happen."
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4rpunq | what counts as/is considered sexual assault? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4rpunq/eli5_what_counts_asis_considered_sexual_assault/ | {
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"That's something that's treated very differently depending on where you are and what laws are on the books. Often times, what is considered sexual assault is dependent upon what is considered rape. Thinking of it along the terms of \"murder\" vs \"manslaughter\" might help. Different places draw the dividing line different places, but it's usually in an effort to create different levels of criminal offense along a scale,\n\nFor example, in some places, rape is still, according to the law, something that can only happen to women. By default, any coerced or non-consensual sex that a man suffers is then sexual assault (since it can't be rape). In other places, \"rape\" isn't even a distinct legal category, so all rapes are prosecuted as sexual assaults in those jurisdictions. So, on one end of the spectrum, sexual assault can be essentially indistinguishable from rape.\n\nFurther down the spectrum, we can just look at it an assault of a sexual nature or motivation. If someone were to walk up to you and grab you by your wrists and keep you in that place against your will, that would be an assault (and battery). If they were to do the same thing, but grabbed your breasts, genitals, ass, etc, that would still be assault, but now it's of a sexual nature.\n\nIn many places, an assault is also seen as anything that would reasonably be seen as a credible threat. If I show up with a baseball bat and talk about breaking your legs, I don't have to lay a finger on you to be guilty of assault. Likewise, if someone makes threats of sexual violence against you that a court determines would have caused credible fear to a reasonable person, they're guilty of sexual assault.\n\nIn terms of punishment if found guilty, that varies even more, unfortunately. In places where both rape and sexual assault laws exist, rape is typically punished more severely. Often times, there are different degrees of sexual assault charges which carry different punishments.\n\n\n\n"
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6k4rv4 | we went to the zoo today in the united states and there was a machine there where you put in 51 cents and turn the wheel to flatten your penny with an imprint on it. i thought it was against federal law to deface currency? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6k4rv4/eli5_we_went_to_the_zoo_today_in_the_united/ | {
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"The law does not prohibit the defacing of coins if the intent is to no longer use the coin as currency anymore. The law is more concerned with preventing counterfeiting/fraud. Elongated coins are souvenirs, and don't get circulated. \n\nThis is all US law. It may be different elsewhere.",
"It's only against the law if you are doing it with the intent to commit fraud (i.e. trying to pass off that flattened thing as a 300 cent piece, actual currency). You may deface currency all you want as long as you destroy it, or don't try to pass it off as money.",
"Yes it is illegal to destroy US currency. It is a violation of Title 18, Section 331 of the United States Code.\n\nHowever there are certain stipulations that concern the government more than others. If you are trying to increase the value or trying to commit fraud the government is more concerned than if you are making a souvenir.\n\nThere is a penny collecting community and this information is in their faq: _URL_0_\n ",
"US laws are less explicit about this than some other countries, such as Canada. \n\nIn Canada the law is much more strict, although not necessarily enforced. That said, most of those penny flattening machines in Canada provide the penny and actually use American ones. That way they can get around the law - the Canadian government doesn't care about defacing American currency, and the US has no jurisdiction there. "
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4txhu5 | why do some notes / chords in music sound appealing when others sound abrasive and hard to listen to? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4txhu5/eli5_why_do_some_notes_chords_in_music_sound/ | {
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"It has to do with interference.\n\nThe ancient Greeks figured out that certain ratios of frequencies make a pleasing sound together. When you take two frequencies that are exactly double each other (say, 200 Hz and 400 Hz), we consider them to be the same note, just in different octaves. The reason for that is that the peaks of the waves will always line up.\n\nIt happens that when you have two frequencies related to each other at a 3:2 ratio (say, 300 Hz and 200 Hz), that also makes a really pleasing sound, and that's what we call a \"perfect fifth.\" For instance, a C and a G will always sound really nice together. \n\nOn the other hand, if you have two frequencies that don't relate at a simple ratio, you don't get a nice sound, because sometimes the peaks line up, and sometimes they don't, so you get a variety of constructive and destructive interference between the two frequencies.\n\nSo the TL;DR - the Greeks figured out that some ratios of frequencies were better than others, and we developed our notes and our scales to emphasize the nice frequencies",
"The above answer is somewhat true to the Western classical tradition of scales we are familiar with. However, there has recently been studies that argue that whatever we hear as \"pleasant\" or \"painful\" has more to do with nurture vs nature. \n\nThere are many cultures around the world that play many different notes that lie in between the notes of traditional western major or minor scales/chords. \n\nWhat we consider consonant (or pleasant, resolved, stable) only exists when compared to and in the context of something dissonant. \n\nGreeks happen to reason what they were used to hearing with math. Even western classical music has physical proof of harmonic series lying in ratios. However, these are not the absolute rules for all of mankind. \n\nYou are most familiar with whatever you grow up with and that shapes your ear's musical language. Just like you do with speech. Every language has its own grammars and syntax that makes sense and can creat beautiful art of its own beyond just basic communication. Same with music. \n\nEdit: link to an article that talks about one of the recent studies I mentioned - _URL_1_\n\nEdit 2: Link to the image showing the notes of the harmonic series that people are talking about starting on C (Do).\n_URL_0_\n\nAs you can see on the diagram, the as the series keeps progressing, the notes become closer and closer together. In western music, composers utilize the basic notes shown in the diagram (thus modern day western chromatic scale on the piano). However, as you can imagine, if the series continues and notes get closer and closer together, there will be notes that are between what we call half-steps apart and even smaller. Upon first hearing, they might sound \"out\" or \"unpleasant\" but they indeed still lie on the same progression of harmonic series. There are numerous cultures around the world that utilize these higher overtones and create very expressive music. \n\nFor example, Sitar, an Indian instrument, uses drones and notes that lie out of the traditional western music scale -- yet, you know it sounds super cool and expressive: _URL_2_\n\nTL;DR - What sounds \"good\" or \"bad\" depends on the musical language your ear grew up with. Since you are most likely used to the western scales, refer to the other answers for specific mechanics of why. Just remember that not all music around the world complies to 8-note octave of the western music and can still totally be cool and beautiful. "
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2ro0i2 | is the party system beneficial, or does it do more harm than good? is there a purpose to it? why can't we get rid of it and just work together to get things done? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ro0i2/eli5_is_the_party_system_beneficial_or_does_it_do/ | {
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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.",
"No problem, I think it's a legitimate question and I would like to see some answers from better educated people than myself. Mostly that was my opinion. Why was it removed? \n\nEdit: meant to reply to your comment. "
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5kqzkd | what exactly went wrong on the deepwater horizon. | I just finished watching the movie based on the event, and I want to know exactly what happened, and what lead to the catastrophic failure, in technical terms, but ones I can still understand.
I Googled it, I can't understand exactly what the Internet says, it's a bit too complicated for me.
What was all that mud? Where did it come from? What's this talk about methane? What does cement have to do with it all?
I hope it's clear what I want to know.
Thank you. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5kqzkd/eli5_what_exactly_went_wrong_on_the_deepwater/ | {
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"This graphic does a pretty good job of explaining what happened:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThis is a really high level overview, and it all comes down to pressure:\nThe mud is barged in and specifically used for drilling a well. It's extremely heavy, and is pumped down the well as its being drilled to keep the gas pressure from blowing up through the well. The mud was removed early. \n\nThe cement used, combined with the BOP is what really caused the catastrophe. The cement is used as a casing along the well, with the BOP sitting on top. Not only did the BOP fail, but the cement casing failed as well, so it became impossible to cap the well from the top. \n\nImagine trying to suck water through a straw thats cracked inside of your drink. It's like that. Not only is all the pressure coming through the top of the well, but since the cement casing failed deep in the water, the pressure was coming out from below also. Any attempt to plug the well from the top wouldn't have stopped the leak. "
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rz6r7 | why with increasing velocity there is a decreasing rate of passage of time? | Thank you in advance. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/rz6r7/eli5_why_with_increasing_velocity_there_is_a/ | {
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"I'm not sure this is really ELI5 material, but I'll give it a bash. \n \nIt all comes directly from Einstein's special relativity, which essentially states that the speed of light is always measured with the same value; *c*, or 3 x 10^8 m s^-1. There's more to it than that, but for ELI5 that will do. \n \nYou can see how it works by doing a simple thought experiment. Imagine a train moving past a platform. On the train there is a 'light clock'; a beam of light bouncing back and forth between two mirrors, arranged vertically, and each bounce is a tick of the clock. There is an observer on the train and an observer on the platform, who both see the beam of light travelling between the mirrors (yes, it's unrealistic, but just run with it for now). \n \nTo the observer on the train, the light travels straight up and down between the two mirrors, and takes a given amount of time to travel between the two mirrors. He measures the time taken between ticks and he knows the distance between the mirrors, so he calculates the speed of light as being *c*, or 3 x 10^8 m s^-1. \n \nTo the observer on the platform, the light travels farther before it reaches the top mirror, because the beam of light is also moving forward with the train. She measures the distance travelled by the light and the time taken for it to travel between the mirrors, and she also calcuates the speed of light as being *c*, or 3 x 10^8 m s^-1. \n \nBut if the light is moving at the same speed to both observers, yet the distance travelled by the light between ticks is greater according to the observer on the platform, the inescapable conclusion is that the observer on the platform sees the clock ticking more slowly than does the observer on the train. To her, time appears to be moving more slowly on the train than it appears to move on the platform. \n \nBut it gets a little weirder than that, because what special relativity actually says is that when you are moving *relative to a frame of reference in which an event (in this case the clock) is at rest*, time in that frame of reference appears to be moving more slowly than it does in your own frame. In the case we've looked at, the clock is at rest in the frame of reference of the train, and the 'stationary' observer on the platform is actually moving relative to the frame of reference of the clock/train. So if the clock were on the platform, then it would be the observer on the train who saw the light travelling farther between 'ticks', yet still measuring the speed of light to be the same. \n \nIndeed, if there was a clock both on the train and on the platform, both observers would actually each see *each other's* clocks as taking longer between each tick. To both observers, time appears to be moving more slowly in the other frame of reference, and special relativity says that both viewpoints are equally valid!",
"I'm not really sure how to explain special relativity to a five-year-old, but I can try to give a high school level explanation.\n\nFirst of all, imagine you're standing on the side of the road and a car passes you at 50 MPH. From your frame of reference, it appears just like that: the car passes you at 50 MPH. In the car's reference frame, it appears that you move past him in the other direction at 50 MPH.\n\nNow imagine you're in another car, going 45 MPH, and a car passes you at 50 MPH. In your reference frame, it appears that the car is creeping past you at 5 MPH. In the other car's reference frame, it appears that you are slowly moving backwards at 5 MPH. This is called relative velocity; because you're both moving at different speeds with respect to the \"stationary\" road, you perceive the speeds of other moving objects differently.\n\nNow, strap yourself in, because this is where it gets weird. Light doesn't work that way. If you're standing still, and turn on a flashlight, the light moves away from you at the speed of light (about 300,000,000 meters/second). However, if you're moving at 2/3 the speed of light, and turn on a flashlight, the light still moves away from you at the same speed. In other words, if you were to try to measure the speed of light while moving at 2/3 the speed of light, you would still get the same number. Not, as we would expect from the above car analogy, a number 1/3 as large. Put more succinctly, the speed of light is constant across ALL reference frames. This has been shown to be true in a number of experiments.\n\nThis is not at all intuitive, and it has some interesting consequences. Among these is time dilation. Imagine you're on a train, with a set of parallel mirrors, which are also parallel to the floor of the train (that is, the mirrors are horizontal). There's a beam of light bouncing vertically between these two mirrors. Because the speed of light is constant, and the distance between the mirrors is constant, we can say that the time it takes to complete one bounce between the mirrors is some constant time. We'll call this time \"t\". [Here's a diagram](_URL_0_).\n\nNow imagine you're outside the train, watching the mirrors as they pass by you. The motion of the light beam can no longer be described as purely vertical. If it were, then the parallel mirrors would move down the train tracks, and the light beam would escape. So, according to the person outside the train, the light is moving in a sort of sawtooth pattern, bouncing between the moving mirrors. This is hard to describe in words, so [here's another diagram](_URL_1_). The \"stationary\" observer sees the light travel a longer distance in one bounce than the observer on the train. Since the speed of light is the same in both reference frames, then the light must seem to take longer to make one bounce to the stationary person, than to the person on the train. In other words, to the stationary observer, the clock on the train appears slow.\n\ntl;dr This is really hard to explain, go take a physics course.",
"from my understanding, we are all travelling at the speed of light. this is divided amongst time and distance. if you are standing absolutely still, you are then travelling through time at the speed of light. however, if you were travelling at a speed of 1/3 the speed of light, then you will be travelling through time at 2/3 the speed of light. therefore, you will appear to be travelling slower to others (who are travelling at a slower speed than you). not sure if that makes sense. that's just what i remember..although it sounds counter intuitive. ",
"Imagine drawing a two axis graph and labelling the x axis as time and the y axis as speed. Now imagine plotting on the graph at intervals of something like every ten seconds your speed. If you stay at 0 meters per second the line plotted on the graph will be a horizontal line along the x axis. That is your normal perception of time. Now start plotting faster and faster speeds as though you were accelerating at a huge rate. You will see the line plotted curves upwards into the y axis. Now imagine that you live in that plotted line, inside it is your perception of time and outside it is the rest of the universe. As your speed increases the distance travelled in the x axis decreases and you move further and further into the y axis, but because you are living inside the line your perception of time has not changed, but the rest of the universe being outside of the line, observes you move slower in time. ",
"Imagine that the seconds on a clock are determined by a ball which bounces between 2 platforms laying horizontally, where each bounce counts as a second and the ball always move from one platform to the other at the same speed. If these two platforms start to move in the x direction, each bounce between the platforms is no longer perfectly vertical, and is sloped at an angle. Because it is sloped, the ball is taking a longer route than if the platforms weren't moving and the ball were allowed to continue it's perfectly vertical movement. So, when we start to move, the \"seconds\" ball has to take a longer path in between the two platforms, increasing the length of each second.\n\nDISCLAIMER: I'm not an expert on this at all, and this is an idea which was presented to me in video format. Please, if something is wrong, or if all of it is wrong, let me know!",
"When I was about 12, [we were given this book to read in school](_URL_0_). From what I can remember, it explains pretty well and simply the theory and mechanics of relativity.",
"I'm going to wing this. Imagine your are standing in a stream, the speed of it's flow is time. When you walk with the flow, the river seems to slow, but just a bit. Once you get to the speed of light, you are going the same speed of time.\n\nI doubt that is accurate, but I guess it is a good way to visualize.",
"There are some very good answers here, but a quick glance leaves me with the impression that a key point is being missed. That point is: you never experience time as passing at a slower rate. You're always at rest relative to yourself, and you always experience time as passing at the usual rate. What we mean when we say \"increasing speed in space causes a decreased speed in time\" is \"if you're moving relative to me, then I see your clock tick more slowly.\" Of course, as I said, you don't experience anything out the ordinary. To you, *I* am the one moving, so you see *my* clock tick more slowly.\n\nThe reason for this is down to geometry. It turns out that humans got it all wrong, which isn't surprising given our environment. Space and time should really be considered sort of the same (they're just connected in a funny way). As it happens, what we think of as \"speeding up\" is *really* \"rotating between time and space\". So when you're sitting still relative to me, we're both traveling along purely in the direction I think of as \"toward the future\". But when you \"speed up\", you've turned—now you're going less in the direction I think of as \"into the future\" and more in the direction I think of as \"away from me\".",
"Alright kiddo let learn some relativity! Now I have an important question to ask you. If time slowed down to half its speed, would anyone even notice? Think about it for a bit. You should come to the conclusion that, No, it would not seem to slow down for anyone. This is because life would be going at half speed, but so would your brain and your neurons, which capture experience. In general, you need CHANGE or a DIFFERENCE in two states to notice anything. Now then, is it not entirely possible that the \"speed of time\" is wildly fluctuating all over the place and nobody notices?\n\nNow to even talk about this potential change in the speed of time we need to set up a senario where something is WITHOUT time. Now the following is just an analogy so calm down you crazy atheist kid. Lets just say God is sitting in heaven with a remote control and he can fast forward and slow down the universe at will. None of us would notice. We know now that he actually has a remote and TV for not only every person, but every thing. Also he doesn't even use his remote anymore, but has set up an automated system that changes everyone's \"speed of time\" depending on how fast they're moving. We also found that this relationship between \"speed of time\" and actual speed, which we will call now \"speed of space\", is inversely proportional. That is, the faster you move in space, the slower your \"speed of time\". Also, Total speed, the sum of the two speeds, is constant.\n\nImagine a graph with the speed of time on the vertical axis and the speed of space in the horizontal axis. Remember, \"speed of space\" is just what you've always known to be speed, in any direction. Now imagine an arrow coming out of the bottom left corner (the origin) of the graph. The tail of the graph is stuck with a pin at the origin so that the arrow is free to rotate. The height of the arrow at any point is its \"speed of time\", or better yet, its fraction of the total \"speed of time\". The length of the arrow (the length of the shadow it casts when you put a light above it) is its \"speed of space\" or \"Fraction of total speed of space\". Couple interesting things to note: a person standing still would produce a purely vertical arrow. You can say \"He's not moving in space, so now He's purely moving in time\". A diagonal arrow means that time is moving half of the total possible value and space speed is at half its total value. Now what happens when the arrow is completely horizontal? The horizontal value of the arrow now is what we call \"the speed of light\" and since you can only rotate the arrow an not extend it, this is the fastest anything can go. But notice a horizontal arrow means the Speed of Time is zero. What does that mean? well time is not moving, but you are free to go anywhere. Hmm, that sounds a bit like TELEPORTATION to me! So, yes, at the speed of light you can teleport anywhere. Photons ARE traveling at the speed of light they're ALWAYS teleporting. It only takes a year at 1G to get to to light speed so its safe to say, and any scientist will agree, that IT TAKES TWO YEARS TO GET ANYWHERE IN THE UNIVERSE!! you just can't comeback and tell anyone about it. Also if you keep turning the arrow, in an attempt to go faster than the speed of light, you will see that you go into the negative in your vertical axis, meaning going backwards in time. This is why people say that going faster than the speed of light will make you go backwards in time.\n\nHopefully I answered your question. I had to skip a lot of math to explain this to you so read a damn textbook if you want a better answer. Also this guy probably explains it better than me: _URL_0_"
]
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"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Time-dilation-002.svg"
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"http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Time-Space-Uncle-Albert/dp/0571142826/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1333902349&sr=1-2"
],
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"http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fjwkh/why_exactly_can_nothing_go_faster_than_the_speed/c1gh4x7"
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|
42a202 | the recent elections in taiwan and why everyone is freaking out. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/42a202/eli5_the_recent_elections_in_taiwan_and_why/ | {
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"[Here's](_URL_0_) a pretty good rundown of the history behind Taiwan, and the tensions with China.\n\nIn short: when the Communists took China, Chairman Mao's Party replaced the Nationalist leadership, headed by Chiang Kai-Shek. Chiang and the remnants of his government fled to what was then the Island of Formosa, modern day Taiwan. Since then, the Taiwanese have considered themselves an independent state, and China has disagreed.\n\nIn the way of all things Cold War, the United States got involved, using their military to support and defend Taiwan. At one point, it was considered to be one of the 'flashpoints' that might start a nuclear war. US involvement has ebbed and flowed over the years, but since the turn of the 21 century, there has been an uptick in military cooperation.\n\nSo, the election. China has been eyeing Taiwan for a long time. They want it back, and they have been thinking about taking it. The new Taiwanese President ran on a staunchly nationalist (We will NOT be your puppets) sort of ticket, which has considerably inflamed the Communist party. There is concern that the mainland Chinese government will take military action, which might necessitate a response from the US, leading to an escalating conflict between the last two real global superpowers."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/chinese-nationalists-move-capital-to-taiwan"
]
] |
||
48lgfp | how do people reverse engineer a piece of software? | I've read about it but still not entirely sure. A good eli5 would be greatly appreciated | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/48lgfp/eli5_how_do_people_reverse_engineer_a_piece_of/ | {
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"A computer program - or a piece of software - is just a list of instructions. An *incredibly complex and long* list of instructions, mind you. But a list of instructions, nonetheless.\n\nWhat else is a list of instructions? Baking a cake! So let's use cake as our example instead, because cake does not lie.\n\nSo, you see a cake sitting on the counter in your kitchen: A frosted black forest chocolate cake, with cherries on top. You wonder how it got there, this miraculous cake. For our purposes, there's two different ways to make this cake.\n\n > You steal the recipe, follow the instructions, and make the cake\n\nor\n\n > You know a cake consists of sugar, eggs, water, oil, flour, cocoa, vanilla extract, and cherries. You start blindly throwing ingredients together, baking each concoction, until something that resembles a cake comes out of the oven\n\nThis is how you reverse engineer software.\n\nThe first example is *highly* illegal, because someone else made the recipe - it's thieving someone else's intellectual property (the recipe on the card). Although you have the recipe - you might need to test it out a couple times before you get the correct end result. Regardless, the cake isn't your work as you didn't write the original recipe.\n\nFor number two, it's completely legal and legitimate because you're creating the recipe yourself through trial and error, to *hopefully* come up with an identical end-result. This is called \"clean-room\" engineering, and since you're creating the recipe (or code) to make the cake, it's your own property as you aren't stealing from someone else. Be prepared to bake 100's of cakes until you start getting something remotely similar to what's on your counter.\n\nIn software terms - it's not necessarily the end result that matters, it's how you go about doing it.\n\n**EDIT:** removed incorrect terms and replaced with \"clean-room\" engineering",
"One of the first steps is run it against an intelligently designed set of inputs to determine the full extent of its design. Next, view a hex dump all programs especially if written in higher-level languages will be structured similarly. The location of text the program prints out will help locate code blocks that do different things. At the hex level you see the logical flow of the program via its test, branch and jump instructions. Other things you can do are see what libraries it is using. Most software is mostly made up of libraries that have included from somewhere else. If you know a lot about the libraries you know a lot about the code. Other things you can do are send it bad inputs to see if you can can cause it malfunction in a way that lets you learn more or get access to data you aren't supposed to have. Sometimes you can try to see there are debug or maintenance modes left enabled. Look for back doors or even cartographic keys left in the code. ",
"Reverse engineering is done by looking at the outside of a construction (software or otherwise) and by observing how it works, guessing how it's built.\n\nSometimes, this means that you get something really, really close to the original, sometimes, you get a colmpletely different construction, which, outwardly, behaves like the original.\n\nOccasionally, som constructions allow you to \"get a peek under the hood\". In that case, you still don't have the original plans, but you get more accurate information on how it's build, and can build something more like it.\n\nSo, for example, ReactOS is a Windows-compatible free operating system. It's made by observing how Windows works, and looking at the official documentation of all the calls you as a programmer can do in Windows. So, they see that Windows have a call you can use to, for example, draw a text with a certain font at a specified position of the screen. So, they do their own version of that call. Once they can properly do all the calls you can do in Windows, they have basically done a free Windows clone that doesn't contain a single line of the original Windows source code.",
"answerman pretty much nailed the general idea.\n\nMore so, there are other methods such as mimicking the behavior of the software, what the software actually produces, or how the software stores its data.\n\nThe first two are relatively simple to understand, but reverse engineering by the software's stored data structure is more complex. Back to the cake analogy, you don't know what the cake is made of, but you know what it looks like, and as long as you have a mold you can put whatever taste in you want. Better analogy, this is how unofficial game modding tools work. From there it's building a behavior or purpose as to why the data was stored in such a fashion, then a clone of the software can be made over time. \n\n^^See: ^^/r/aoe2 ^^because ^^many ^^of ^^the ^^new ^^assets ^^for ^^HD ^^had ^^to ^^be ^^created ^^with ^^reversed ^^engineered ^^tools ^^even ^^when ^^having ^^the ^^source ^^code.\n\nOne extremely important application for this method is information theory (how information is encoded, stored, transferred, and decoded) and its subset of cryptography. If you know the output, the constraints (the mold), then all that remains is the function and input. Finding the correct input for the correct, or partial, output reveals information about the function. Like knowing that a 500F degree oven will burn the cake, and a 100F degree will do nothing at all. But one must attempt different inputs for, sometimes, different functions to achieve the correct input+output pair. This is why cryptography is so, because that's really hard to do in reverse.",
"Any piece of software that runs on an end-user's machine is reverse engineerable to a determined enough adversary. The trick is to make it sufficiently difficult that people are disincentivized to try to reverse engineer it. The reason is because by definition, if your computer is running a piece of software, it must know all the necessary information to run that program in the form of binary code, and by extension so do you (who controls the computer and has lots of time to spare).\n\nIf you open any exe program on your computer in Notepad, you'll see what looks like a bunch of gibberish - this is the binary data of the executable. Some of it is metadata about the file and some hard-coded data that your program needs, but a lot of it is code in the form of [Opcodes](_URL_0_). Opcodes are like the DNA of a computer program. Each one is short and signifies a specific action (move this data here, check to see what this data is, jump to this location next, etc.) and together, all the opcodes make up your program. The art of reading and writing opcodes is mostly lost today, because almost everyone writes in a human-readable programming language (like C, Java, Python, etc.) that is later compiled down into opcodes. However, it's still critical to certain professions such as malware writers and anti-malware writers.\n\nBut determining what a program does by its opcodes is still an almost impossible task -- it's like trying to figure out how the human brain works if you can only see individual neurons at a time. There are some tricks to this - as others mentioned, testing the program with various inputs will give you hints as to what you should be looking for. It should be noted that trying to figure out what a program does purely by looking at its output (so-called black-box testing) is not true reverse engineering -- for one, software can be infinitely complex, and there's no guarantee what a program does in one environment is at all what it will do in another environment. For instance, malware will often attempt to detect when they're being run on a malware researcher's machine, and deliberately change their behavior to act in a more benign manner and throw the \"good guys\" off. [Stuxnet](_URL_1_) is another good example - it was designed specifically to be harmless on almost all computers, and drop its devastating payload on one and only one machine (the controller at Tehran's nuclear facility).\n\nThe other tool is a good debugger. Just about all operating systems and hardware support some level of debugging. This is where a specialized piece of software (the debugger) will tell the operating system \"hey, I see you're currently executing another program (the debugee). I'd like to debug it please.\" The operating system will say \"sure\", halt the debugee and give the debugger full control over it. The debugger can see the full memory space, what opcodes are currently being executed, it can arbitrarily start and pause the program, mess with the data, set it to pause when certain conditions are met, etc. Going back to the neuron analogy, it would like if brain scientists had the ability to alter or remove whole sets of neurons at will and see how it affects the brain.\n\nWith a debugger, one of the big things to look for is the pattern of API calls to the operating system. Basically, the operating system acts like a gatekeeper for some of the more advanced features of a computer. Any time a program wants to write memory to disk, access the Internet, print something, or do anything else that extends beyond its capabilities, it needs to ask permission from the operating system thorough what's called the OS's API. If you're using Windows, this API is fairly well documented and well known, and you can hook into these calls using a debugger and be notified any time the program makes one of these calls. It can give you a really good starting point for reversing the rest of the program.\n\nThe way to circumvent software reverse engineering is to not have the program run on the user's machine at all -- make it run somewhere on the Internet instead. This is the idea of \"Software as a Service (SaaS)\". Instead of giving the user a potentially sensitive program to use and trusting them not to reverse it, you (as a software company) have the user send you their input, you run the program somewhere on your own machines, then you give them the output back. The user is completely oblivious as to what happened behind the scenes in this scenario.",
"The boring but most common answer is that people use tools to help them look directly at the software's instructions, and then they *reason* about them until they understand what the software does.\n\nPeople use *compilers* and *assemblers* to turn their high-level ideas into software that computers can run. For some software, it's possible to use a [decompiler](_URL_0_) to reverse the process. But on many occasions, a decompiler won't work, because the *compiler* threw away lots of useful information (for humans) it proved unnecessary (for the computer). Instead, people have to use a [disassembler](_URL_3_), which at least lets them read the software's basic instructions, and sometimes a [debugger](_URL_1_) to look at what the software does, step by step, when it's running. Using this information, people can piece together how the software works.\n\nThat's not the only form of reverse engineering. [Andrew Tridgell reverse-engineered Microsoft's file server protocols without even looking at Microsoft's software](_URL_2_). He explained how he did it by likening it to wanting to learn French (how the protocols work) by sitting in a French cafe and listening to other people order food (capturing the messages that Microsoft clients and servers send to each other), then trying to order food yourself (repeating the messages and variations on them to a Microsoft server) and finding out what you get back. \n\nYou might not know what \"excusez-moi serveur, puis-je avoir un croque monsieur?\" means, but you do know that if you say it in a French cafe, you will be brought a ham and cheese toastie."
]
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[],
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"http://ref.x86asm.net/",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet"
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"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decompiler",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debugger",
"https://www.samba.org/ftp/tridge/misc/french_cafe.txt",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disassembler"
]
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|
40prse | why have governments made such a push to go green and use less oil then when we do the entire worlds economy crashes from declining oil prices, didn't they see this coming? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/40prse/eli5_why_have_governments_made_such_a_push_to_go/ | {
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"text": [
"Oil isn't sustainable? Why would we prolong the inevitable?",
"The declining oil prices were not caused by a reduction in demand due to green technologies. Large drops in price are usually due to things like global economic slowdowns (2008, for example) or, more recently, declining demand from China due to a slowdown in construction."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
||
1tby2o | ssl vs tls vs rsa encryption | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1tby2o/eli5_ssl_vs_tls_vs_rsa_encryption/ | {
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"text": [
"SSL and TLS aren't encryption algorithms, they are secure communication protocols. Also, they are essentialy the same (first there was SSL, and it was later standardized and renamed TLS).\n\nRSA is the name of the first, and probably most popular and well known public-key encryption mechanism.\n\nYou can search both SSL and RSA in this subreddit to find out how they work."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
4krjuw | how are crimes solved years after the fact using dna evidence? | Often we'll hear stories of people being exonerated or convicted of a crime years after the crime took place based on some kind of forensic evidence.
My question is not how it works but more how is it still admissible? Surely DNA evidence would have been destroyed over time, or if it was collected and in evidence from the time of the initial crime then it should have been used to prosecute/exonerate the defendant at the time. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4krjuw/eli5_how_are_crimes_solved_years_after_the_fact/ | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"DNA, kept in reasonable decent conditions (which boils down to not exposing it to lots of ionizing radiation ) lasts of several years. While it does degrade over time, it's half life (the point at which half of the DNA in a sample will no longer be useable) is somewhere north of 500 years. \n\n",
"1. Dna technology has improved significantly over the years.\n\n2. Despite what csi shows, not everything in every case has dna tests done. It is expensive and slow and if there is other evidence, the prosecution may not run it and the defendant may not have the money to have their experts run it. \n\n3. Police keep evidence in storage long after a trial and maintain chain of custody.\n\n4. They may have run dna but not known who to compare it to. A jotel room or a park could have dozens of people's dna. If it has the victim and the defendant's, maybe they consider that evidence of guilt and presume the other dna is from strangers. Years later a new viable suspect surfaces and low and behold his is one of those \"stranger' dna samples."
]
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[],
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|
p1son | why is china's government considered brutal, and bad? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/p1son/eli5_why_is_chinas_government_considered_brutal/ | {
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"text": [
"Basically because the needs of the republic come be for those of its people but that is saying it very nicely. ",
"They aren't considered all bad. They're raised millions of people out of poverty in the last few decades through economic reforms and controlling population growth (the one child policy has massive cons of course in terms of personal freedoms but it has to be said that preventing famine is a pretty massive pro). This rising prosperity is a strong contender for 'World's best contribution to overall human happiness' \n\nFor the bad side cf. Amnesty international reports. \n\nBut, put basically, it's a one party state and that party's priority is staying in power. So freedom of expression is heavily curtailed through censorship and violent oppression. There's a lot more besides but that's the crux of it. \n\nChina has actually come on in leaps and bounds in recent years, today's China is NOT the same as the China of Mao or the Tienanmen square massacre. However, its human rights record is still pretty damn dodgy (not North Korea dodgy, but it's still a country where criticising the gov. can be a damn dangerous thing to do) \n\nChina gets a lot of attention because it's hotly tipped to be the world's superpower someday soon, maybe in our lifetimes and because of it's international clout. It has a UN security council seat and lots of economic investment abroad and there's lots of foreign investment in China. So China's human rights record *matters* to the west in a way that those of smaller, but more repressive regimes' simply don't. "
]
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[],
[]
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||
a2km5x | why does the water level in lakes and rivers change in the winter | At least in the southeastern US, the water level in lakes and rivers drop during the winter months. What is the reason for this? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a2km5x/eli5_why_does_the_water_level_in_lakes_and_rivers/ | {
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"text": [
"Many rivers and lakes are fed by the melting of mountain snow, though I am not sure this is the case in the southeast. ",
"In the southeastern US, the winter months are relatively dry - Atlanta gets around 40% the rain in January as it does in July. This can cause a big drop in lake/river levels.\n\nIn much of the US, water systems include rivers and lakes are ultimately under human control, with dams, locks, and other water-diverting structures. By allowing more water to pass through a dam (and ultimately to the sea), it's possible to intentionally reduce water levels. Many areas reduce water levels during the winter to limit shoreline erosion and to help kill off invasive plant species.\n\nFinally, liquid water contracts when cold. Not by a lot - only 0.2% - but in a large body of water, this amount can be enough to be noticeable.",
"Flood control. Winter pool (the amount of water held in the lake during the winter) is lower to allow for the rain in the Spring."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
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|
2t5eri | why do diet sodas e.g diet coke and pepsi max fizz more than regular sodas? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2t5eri/eli5_why_do_diet_sodas_eg_diet_coke_and_pepsi_max/ | {
"a_id": [
"cnvve99",
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"score": [
4,
3
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"text": [
"It's intentional. Diet sodas tend to contain more carbonation to mask the difference in flavor.",
"Its because of the sweetener. It react more to the carbonation compared to sugar. Source i remember that they mentioned this in mythbusters one time"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
||
6yoycs | what are targeted individuals and/or gang stalking? is this real or a symptom of mental illness. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6yoycs/eli5_what_are_targeted_individuals_andor_gang/ | {
"a_id": [
"dmp0izj",
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"score": [
4,
4
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"text": [
"It's paranoid schizophrenia.\n\n\"Gang stalking\" always magically ceases to be a problem when the \"targeted individual\" engages in mental health treatment.",
"There's no solid proof it's actually a thing, and the flexible \"everyone's out to get me\" narrative sounds very much like schizophrenia or other mental illness.\n\n"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
||
5z3thz | if instead of sleeping we just close our eyes. did we get any of the benefits of a good night's sleep? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5z3thz/eli5_if_instead_of_sleeping_we_just_close_our/ | {
"a_id": [
"dev5xr6",
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"text": [
"I know little about this subject, but I would assume you wouldn't get the same benefit because your body would still be fully awake and active.\n\nWhen you sleep, your rhythms and shit (I believe that's the technical term...) change and would allow your body to rest, recharge etc.\n\nOtherwise you could stay on the couch all night playing PS4 and be totally sweet, which is not the case unfortunately.\n\n[Edit] typos.",
"I dont think you get the same benifits. If you try it out, and you lay down and close your eyes you start to relax but that only goes so far. When you fall asleep, your body shuts down everything to the absolute minimum. Heart rate, breathing, energy consumtion etc. Your body recharges because your brain itself can rest. \n\nIf you close your eyes and lay down, only your body rests but not your mind. After a while you would get a headache which happens often after someone pulls an all-nighter.\n\n\n\nJust my train of thought, not an expert or anything"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
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