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2woz2h | why aren't car bumpers covered in a soft material that doesn't scratch everything with the slightest tap? | Like pool noodles. It just seems an obvious solution to a common problem. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2woz2h/eli5_why_arent_car_bumpers_covered_in_a_soft/ | {
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"(1) Because it's ugly. Go look at (some) cars from the late 70's and 80's where they had those stupid expanda-bumpers. \n(2) because cars are designed for people who know how to drive by sight, not touch,",
"I would assume that people should know how to drive before they buy a car, if you see someone with a foam bumper, I would stay far away from them.",
"Bumper cars are sort of padded. But you are meant to hit other bumper cars with them. Actual cars aren't meant for that. The bumper can serve the basic purpose of absorbing damage to eliminate significant damage to the main body but it wasn't built with the intent that it would happen all of the time. ",
"I remember metal bumpers with rubber strips, but it doesn't always look good & probably costs a lot in production. Plus modern bumpers break in minor collisions, getting more profit for manufacturers selling parts. ",
"Bumpers used to be made with a different finish than the rest of the car and many (especially fleet vehicles) had inserts as well. Unfortunately a molded bumper that is the same color as the car moves off the lot better because, for the average consumer, style beats practicality every time."
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22i3gc | how can someone be allergic to a vaccine? | I read it in comments before, now i understand how allergies in general work, but i thought a vaccine works by creating an immune response in your body to weakened/dead pathogens so that when your body faces them next time it faces the pathogen.
allergy is also an immune reaction, so could someone please ELI5 | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22i3gc/eli5_how_can_someone_be_allergic_to_a_vaccine/ | {
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"That is how a vaccine works, but there are other things inside the vaccine beside the weakened/dead pathogens, and those are the things that people can be allergic to. For example, some vaccines contain gelatin to preserve the vaccine during freeze-drying or heat, and there are people who are allergic to gelatin. So you can be allergic to only some vaccines, while not allergic to others.",
"Many children and adult shots to prevent illness (vaccines) contain egg proteins. In some people, these vaccines pose a risk of an allergic reaction. The main ones that contain egg protein : MMR, Flu , yellow fever, rabies, "
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287dp8 | is amazon getting into publishing good for new writers or not? i hear a lot of supposed success stories but yet keep seeing a big backlash against them. | So are they good or bad? What is the breakdown of ownership on the book? Thank you. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/287dp8/eli5_is_amazon_getting_into_publishing_good_for/ | {
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"They're cutting out a middleman (traditional publishers). As the sage Malcolm Reynolds once said, \"50% of the human race is middlemen and they don't take kindly to being cut out.\"",
"That depends on how you look at it. Publishers (for all their many many many faults) are good at one thing: they will fucking kill any book written by someone too incompetent to write a book. You know what, I need to back up a moment.\n\nSo, let's say you've written a book. *Adventures of my Dick*, whatever. So, you've written your book and you've gone through (like a good boy) and edited it. This is actually a multistep process, because there are more than one way to edit a book. The common thought of \"edit for spelling and grammar\" is proofreading, sometimes called \"line editing\". There's also \"developmental editing\" where you go through and rearrange paragraphs and change endings and crap because it doesn't fit with the theme. There's also copy editing, where you make changes to the formatting and is best left to the publisher.\n\nSo, you've written *Adventures of my Dick* and you've line and developmentally edited it. Now you send it to a publisher, right? Nope. Publishers will take all of those submissions and stick them in a room called the \"slush pile\" where it will be ignored until you give up all hope and kill yourself. Sometimes, very very rarely, a publisher will actually skim something in the slush pile if they're bored and feeling masochistic. Why masochistic? Because the slush pile is the stuff submitted by people that don't play the game, so it's usually shit, or at least seen that way.\n\nWell then, how do I play the game? Simple: you pay the publisher to look at your book. Or, well, that's basically what you're doing. You send your book to an agent, and if he/she doesn't think you're an idiot (or possibly because they do) they will take you on. You then pay them. They reedit your book and take it with them when they go to lunch and shit, because they're going to lunch with publishers. They then pitch your book to the publisher, who will then actually consider you. When the book is purchased, the agent takes a cut of your money. Notice how the agent is basically getting paid to get someone else to publish your book. Try not to think how very much that seems like a scam and a bunch of horseshit\n\nSo, you're is going to be published, right? Well, sure. In like, a year. The publisher is going to have it be line, developmentally, and copy edited a few times before it actually hits the printing press. For all this, there are still books published like *The Road* with an amazingly bad structure (seriously, 200+ pages, no chapters, double spaced, dialog isn't in quotes; wtf?), and several books are still published with weirdly phrased sentences or misspellings. 99.9999% of shit is gone, but still this is your one selling point Traditionalists, step up your game!\n\nNow comes the fun part: you will probably not actually break even on your book. The publisher makes this deal with you: we will give you an amount of money (usually between 7-10k) upfront that you will taxed on and share with your agent. This is your advance. After that, we will keep all of the revenue from the book until we've made back your advance. After that, we will split the revenue in a way that generally favors us. Also, we control the book now. If you want to make a sequel, you may very well need our permission, and we might reserve the right to take a cut from proceeds from an adaption. Those last two I've seen intermittently. Not enough that writers are up in arms, but enough that people talk about it.\n\nHere's another problem I couldn't think of how to work in: your agent may be stealing from you. The normal way a publisher pays you and your agent for your book is to write a check to your agent, who then deposits the check, and writes you a check for your cut. If you ask to review the agents books before taking him on (which, outside of publishing is the assumption), he will end the discussion. If you ask to make sure he isn't stealing from you by looking at the original deposit receipt, he will tell you no. Several major agents have been accused of stealing from their clients and ended up paying out. The contracts that they have you sign, however, will not change\n\nBasically, the system in a lot of ways bends the writer over a desk, assfucks him, and tells him to be thankful.\n\nThen you have self publishing and ebooks. They are different. It really pisses me off when people conflate the two. In self publishing you take your book and have it published by a 'vanity press'. These are people that make physical books, have none of the asinine stipulations of traditional publishing, none of the quality control of traditional publishing, and none of the distribution of traditional publishing. They take your money, print the physical books, and give them directly to you. You will almost never make any money this way. If you want to make a family history book, that's cool. But *Adventures of my Dick* will never make any money this way.\n\nFinally, you have ebooks. Again, none of the stipulations, quality control, or distribution of traditional publishers. Amazon is really only taking over the \"distribution\" part. The way Amazon works is that they keep a certain amount of all profit from the book until $5. I want to say it's like 50%. So, if your book is sold for $5, you actually get $2.50. After that, they take I think 10%. So, if you sell for $10, they keep that same $2.50, plus another $0.50. In the end though, if you market smartly and edit well, you will probably make as much money as if you went the traditional route.\n\nThe reason more and more people are going to ebooks over traditional publishing is because the writer has complete control. And publishing houses have very small profit margins, so one flop could very well bankrupt a small-medium publisher, so they are *extremely* unwilling to take on anything too different. Harry Potter and Dr. Seuss both had extremely difficult uphill battles to be published because they were so fucking weird. So, if your book isn't similar to something that already made them a few tubs of money, they might tell you to fuck off. \n\nSomething traditionalist reply with is that in ebooks you have to do the marketing yourself. That's true, but a traditional publisher isn't going to market you at all. They will put your name in the catalogue (if they have one), and that's it. If you have 2-3 books out already they might pay for a sign in Barnes and Nobel. Otherwise, no, go fuck yourself, we aren't advertising you.\n\nIn all, I think online publishing isn't going to destroy traditional publishing since people still like their books, but it is going to force the industry to change. Something I've seen some very small publishers take up is that they will take on almost any book, do some basic editing and sell it on Amazon with minimal advertisement and give you your advance. Then if the book makes a certain amount of money, they do a traditional publication. That's probably the direction existing publishing houses need to go: cut the agent bullshit, put untested books up as ebook only, if it makes back the advance give it a traditional publishing shot."
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29qpre | why does it feel like i'm spinning while going to sleep? | sometimes when I lay in bed to sleep, it feels like I'm rolling down a hill or spinning while trying to sleep. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/29qpre/eli5_why_does_it_feel_like_im_spinning_while/ | {
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"Sounds like a partial loss of [proprioception](_URL_0_) to me. When that happens (which is relatively normal when you're tired), your sense of balance is irritated for a while which would explain your sensation.",
"I have this but I'm not spinning on my Z axis so much as rocking on my X axis",
"When you lay very still the amount of propioceptive information your brain recieves is very small due to the lack of movement. Our brain can never stop processing information, so when this happens it \"creates\" it own information to process, thus giving you the false feeling of movement.\n\nThis same explanation can also be applied to dreams. We stop recieving information from the outside reality and our brain creates this information influx, its own reality, with what it has inside.",
"This sounds vestibular to me. Probably you have some kind of sensitivity going on where even though you are lying down, your brain is still processing vestibular input. Personally, this used to happen to me a lot (among other things) and got better once I did some vestibular integration therapy.",
"When I feel that way it's usually because I have an ear infection coming on.",
"It's a vestibular problem. I suffer from what are known as vestibular migraines. I often get this spinning sensation when laying down as well. Some Dramamine should help if you take it before bed...it has the same active ingredient as a Rx called Antivert that may be prescribed to treat dizziness/vertigo. It basically inhibits your inner ear's processing of vestibular inputs and responses, essentially negating the conflict between what your vestibular \"thinks\" is happening to your body, and what is actually happening. \n\nObligatory note: I'm not a doctor. If this bothers you, see one. And talk to a doc before taking new meds. :)\n\n",
"[This might answer your question](_URL_0_). It's called Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo or BPPV. According to the article: \n\n\"The symptoms are brought on by typical head movements, usually neck extension - such as with looking up at a high shelf or at the sky - or rotation to one side. The vertigo will commonly be felt when going to lie down in bed, or when rolling over to one side while in bed, and for this reason it is frequently first noticed at night or upon awakening.\"",
"I've experienced this too, but it usually comes after an unhealthy dose of alcohol before going to bed. ",
"It's possible you may have Vertigo. "
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12668a | how can wine tasters claim that a particular wine has a taste of exotic fruits, vanilla and other things that are not actually present inside the wine? | Whenever I read the description of a bottle of wine, there is always a lengthy text explaining the taste and texture of the wine. Most expert wine tasters tell you that a wine tastes like a mix of exotic fruits or has a special scent or taste.
But when I drink the wine, it just tastes like grapes and alcohol. Am I missing something? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/12668a/eli5_how_can_wine_tasters_claim_that_a_particular/ | {
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"Yes and no. Many experts claim many more flavours than scientists say is possible. But the process of wine is turning grape juice (one of the sweetest fruit juices) into wine (no sweetness at all in the popular normal wines). If there's 5% sugar left it'll taste sweet and then factors like the grape variant, the barrel, the temperature and so on 'give' a fruitiness.",
"Certain winemaking techniques impart flavors similar to things like vanilla, grapefruit, \"earthy\" etc so they're just used as a frame of reference to describe the taste. \n\nFor instance, wines aged in oak barrels often have a hint of vanilla-like flavor. Low-sugar wines made from the Riesling grape varietal frequently have light peach or apple like taste. \n\nThis is simply a result of how that specific grape taste when nearly all of the sugar in it is converted into alcohol, so the more subtle latent flavors are easier to detect. If you ate that same grape off the vine it would just taste like a grape.\n\nAdditionally, there are certain descriptors used to describe the alcohol quantity of the wine. A \"big\" red (for instance a Cabernet Sauvignon at 13.5% ABV) will \"bite\" as the alcohol reacts with the surfaces in your mouth. A smoother wine will, well, go down smoother, and this could be the result of less alcohol or flavors that mask it.\n\nLast and not least is the tannic content, and this is kinda similar for our purposes here to the alcohol content, and oftentimes they correlate. Tannins are found in the skin of grapes (so white wines, where the grapeskin isn't included, have little to no tannins) and contribute to the mouthfeel and the bitterness much in the same why that the alcohol content does (it is different but don't worry about that for now). It's a similar compound in grapes as what you would find in tea or coffee. You might hear a very tannic wine described with words like currants, blackberries, earthy, or any number of similar flavors.",
"The simplest ways to understand the nuances of wine is to taste several bottles at one sitting. Here's some tips:\n\n1. do a \"blind\" tasting if possible. Ask a friend to pour several different wines into several separate glasses and then taste them.\n\n2. when sampling the wines, look for other characteristics such as color of the wine. To do this, tip the glass slightly and examine the color against a white background such as a piece of blank paper. Also give it a good \"sniffy sniff\" (r)-Gary Vaynerchuk.\n\n3. take a good swig but don't swallow. Gargle, swish it around. See how it feels in your mouth. Dry? Fruity? These are basic distinctions and you'll soon learn to appreciate more including the elusive exotic fruits and vanillas you are curious about.\n\n4. Serious tasters will not drink the wine but spit it out so as not to affect their impressions of the later wines. You should also clear your palate between tastes. Popular cleansers include saltines or just water. The point is to have something bland.\n\n5. Get some friends in on it. You'll need all the help you can polishing off the bottles you just opened. No better reason for a party. \n\nDon't let others tell you what is good or bad. Drink what you like. A few wine tastings should put you on the road to a life time of wine appreciation.",
"Studies have shown that wine \"experts\" can't tell the difference between red wine and white wine with red food coloring.",
"Because they are full of shit. "
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tu0gh | i was told the real proof for why "1 + 1 = 2" takes more that one hundred pages. i am being trolled? if it is true can someone point out what is so hard about it? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/tu0gh/eli5_i_was_told_the_real_proof_for_why_1_1_2/ | {
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"Well, the proof depends on how far down the rabbit hole you want to go; which assumptions you wish to challenge. For example, do you require during this proof that you rigorously define *exactly what addition is*? At its most basic \"addition\" is just one kind of \"operator\" that acts on some kind of \"object\". What are the properties of this operator? For that matter, what are the properties of the \"objects\" this operator acts upon? \n\nTo you and me (non-mathematicians) addition is simply something that tells you to take one number and increase it by another number, but to certain kinds of mathematicians addition is an \"operation\" and the exactly how this operator behaves on a certain set of objects are serious questions that address issues like \"what is a number\" and \"what sort of operations upon these so-called \"numbers\" do we wish to call \"addition\"\". Obviously, this kind of rigorous reasoning can be very abstract. ",
"Yes, and no. Actually, it was more than 300 pages.\n\nBut, it wasn't just a proof that 1 + 1 = 2; it was much more than that. \n\nAlfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell wrote *Principia Mathematica* in order to prove the entire foundations of mathematics, without contradiction. It's an incredibly dense mathematical and philosophical book, and considered one of the most important non-fiction books ever written. They spent years working on it and never even finished it all due to *\"intellectual exhaustion.\"*\n\nSo, in the portion of the book where they show that 1 + 1 = 2, it does take a very long time to prove, but on the way they're proving the entirety of maths.\n\nThen, a few years later, this guy name Godel came along and proved that what they were trying to do was impossible.\n\n"
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6i6zww | can combustion occur underwater? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6i6zww/eli5_can_combustion_occur_underwater/ | {
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"yes, as long as you have all the ingredients for combustion and enough energy to maintain the reaction it is absolutely possible",
"Absolutely. All combustion needs is fuel, heat and oxygen. Typically the barriers to underwater burning are lack of oxygen, and lack of heat. But you can get it to work, for example, see this oxyacetylene torch burning underwater:\n\n_URL_0_"
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6oroxv | is capsaicin really good at stopping cancer? | I read online that capsaicin has been found to reduce tumors and stop the growth of cancerous cells in a number cancers—and possibly all. I am just wondering if y'all can help me get a better idea of capsaicin's benefits. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6oroxv/eli5_is_capsaicin_really_good_at_stopping_cancer/ | {
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" > I read online that capsaicin has been found to reduce tumors and stop the growth of cancerous cells in a number cancers—and possibly all.\n\nIt is garbage, you can safely ignore such articles. Basically everything can be found to impact tumors at one point or another including just looking at them funny. Eating peppers isn't going to cure your cancer.",
"You know what else stops the growth of cancer cells in the lab? A blowtorch. \n\nThere are literally thousands of substances that preliminary studies show might fight cancer. Some have side effects more severe than cancer, some only work on mice or in lab conditions, some work, but not as well as existing medicines, and sometimes the study is wrong. \n\nAnd of course, some do work and are in the approval pipeline.\n\nWhenever you hear about a food fighting cancer, you can be 99.9% sure it is either complete bullshit, or a lazy and stupid journalist misreading science to grab a headline.",
"Do you know what they call alternative medicine that actually works? \n \n\"Medicine\". \n \nProbably 99% of alternative therapies are complete BS. Medical researchers work very hard to find treatments that are effective and safe. But they actually have to be able to prove with studies that the treatment really is good, not just rely on anecdotes and philosophy. \n \nBack in the day, people used to chew on the bark of the yew tree and it made their aches and pains feel better. People studied it and found out that it really did work, and then refined the active ingredient. That's why we now have aspirin. \n \nHave valid, rigorous studies been done on capsaicin and cancer? I don't know. I suspect that they have, since the anecdotes have been around for a while. \n \n**TL;DR** - Don't believe everything you read on the internet. "
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22htih | why does sunlight 'dim' computer screens but artificial lights don't? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22htih/eli5_why_does_sunlight_dim_computer_screens_but/ | {
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"I'm going to take a stab at this and say its the intensity of the sun light. No matter how bright your interior lights are. Its not gonna be as bright as the sun. Also most interior lighting has a different color temp so that could be a factor as well.",
"Because it is far, far brighter. Imagine your computer on a 1x1 meter desk with 10,000 watts worth of halogen lamps shining on it. That is how much artificial light you need to have the same effect as sunlight. I have a 150W halogen desk lamp; it's crazy bright; you'd need 65 more."
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7ufmyz | why do video game companies try to hard to prevent remakes of games that they technically own, but dont run or operate anymore and have no plans to? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7ufmyz/eli5why_do_video_game_companies_try_to_hard_to/ | {
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"if you mean unauthorized fan remakes. because they own the copyright and trademarks. if you don't make effort to fight unauthorized use, it hurts your legal case when you DO fight one. \n\nif nintendo didn't fight every fan made mario game, then someone could make a huge successful one and have a shot at WINNING in court. and then nintendo would be up shit creek and lose the mario trademark. "
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1io7k0 | evolution to this point in time. | From past to present. Please. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1io7k0/eli5_evolution_to_this_point_in_time/ | {
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" > > from the group guidelines - Be specific! Don't ask about a general topic if you can help it. The more detailed the better.\n\nPlease explain what type of evolution you are asking about? ",
"1. weakly self replicating organic molecules \n2. self replicating molecules inside lipid shells\n3. single cell organisms\n4. multi-cell organisms\n5. diverse aquatic lifeforms, including early fish\n6. fish able to survive out of water for short periods\n7. amphibians\n8. reptiles\n9. mammals\n10. monkeys\n11. apes\n12. primitive hominids\n13. primitive humans\n14. modern humans"
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3rb1xz | what is the difference between bohemians and gypsies? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3rb1xz/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_bohemians_and/ | {
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"bohemians in the sense you probably mean it is just an old fashioned way of saying hipster (Very old fashioned, it was popular around the time the opers La Boheme was written in the 1890's, the movie/musical Rent is based on it).\n\nGypsies are an ethnic/cultural group of people who tend to be poor and migratory. Sometimes people refer to themselves or others as gypsy meaning free spirit or hippy outlook too though, which is similar to bohemian which is a sort of trendy urban hippy type."
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mobg4 | power grids, and what's wrong with the us power grid | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/mobg4/eli5_power_grids_and_whats_wrong_with_the_us/ | {
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"Power grids in general:\n\n3 major issues with power grids. \n\nFirst thing is that power usually has to travel a long way. Things that make power: nuke stations, coal plants, natural gas plants, hydroelectric, renewable. If you look at that list, everything is either something you don't wanna live near, or something that depends on geography (hydro, most renewables.) So it has to travel a long way.\n\nA very long power line is going to experience some loss. However, if you step up the power (I don't know exactly what that means. It's watts, amps, something. I know you use a transformer) you'll lose less in that line. And then you step the power back down so it's usable. You don't wanna run a vacuum on the sort of power coming straight out of a big cross-country line.\n\nOther thing - power is very, very difficult to store. You basically have to use it when you make it. Batteries, you say? Sure. You can run an iPod on batteries, or an RC car. But batteries are big, expensive to produce, difficult to get rid of in a responsible way, and just not feasible on a large scale. \n\nSo you have a system where you experience loss traveling over long distances, most of the production points are far away, and you can't store it if you make too much. Add to this the issue that renewables are very 'streaky'. Wind works great when it's windy, not so good when it ain't. Solar works great when there's sun, not so good at night. This makes providing steady energy a lot tougher.\n\nThis doesn't even get into the issue that you need a power grid that can handle peak demand instead of average demand. A power grid doesn't slow down like a highway system if you overload it, it just craps out.\n\nSo when people talk about smart grids, the goals are to get a) better preservation of power across distances, b) get production points closer to usage areas, and c) uses automation and lots of data to be better at switching and distributing power for greater efficiency.\n\nI know the goals and issues, but not the science and tech behind 'em. Lemme know if there's anything else.\n\nEdit: Added something else 'bout renewables.",
"Power grids in general:\n\n3 major issues with power grids. \n\nFirst thing is that power usually has to travel a long way. Things that make power: nuke stations, coal plants, natural gas plants, hydroelectric, renewable. If you look at that list, everything is either something you don't wanna live near, or something that depends on geography (hydro, most renewables.) So it has to travel a long way.\n\nA very long power line is going to experience some loss. However, if you step up the power (I don't know exactly what that means. It's watts, amps, something. I know you use a transformer) you'll lose less in that line. And then you step the power back down so it's usable. You don't wanna run a vacuum on the sort of power coming straight out of a big cross-country line.\n\nOther thing - power is very, very difficult to store. You basically have to use it when you make it. Batteries, you say? Sure. You can run an iPod on batteries, or an RC car. But batteries are big, expensive to produce, difficult to get rid of in a responsible way, and just not feasible on a large scale. \n\nSo you have a system where you experience loss traveling over long distances, most of the production points are far away, and you can't store it if you make too much. Add to this the issue that renewables are very 'streaky'. Wind works great when it's windy, not so good when it ain't. Solar works great when there's sun, not so good at night. This makes providing steady energy a lot tougher.\n\nThis doesn't even get into the issue that you need a power grid that can handle peak demand instead of average demand. A power grid doesn't slow down like a highway system if you overload it, it just craps out.\n\nSo when people talk about smart grids, the goals are to get a) better preservation of power across distances, b) get production points closer to usage areas, and c) uses automation and lots of data to be better at switching and distributing power for greater efficiency.\n\nI know the goals and issues, but not the science and tech behind 'em. Lemme know if there's anything else.\n\nEdit: Added something else 'bout renewables."
]
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2izwxb | - at what height/speed does water become deadly? | Ex. If I fell from 100ft, would water feel like cement? No? Well then what height? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2izwxb/eli5_at_what_heightspeed_does_water_become_deadly/ | {
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"It's not about height per se, but rather deceleration and distribution of force. Any calculation for describing the maximum height at which one could fall in to water without resulting in a fatality must also include the mass of the person falling, the way in which they impact the water, and even factors such as wind direction and force. For example, a belly-flop could prove fatal from relatively low heights, while a feet-first dive might prove less fatal -- especially if there are wind forces reducing the person's rate of descent."
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3vljll | how does liquid cooling in a smartphone work? | I've been reading about the new phones of 2015 and some, like the Sony Xperia Z5 and Microsoft Lumia 950XL have built in liquid cooling solutions. How does that work in such a small area? Does it even have benefits? Downsides? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3vljll/eli5_how_does_liquid_cooling_in_a_smartphone_work/ | {
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"Cell phones usually deal with the heat from their hottest chips by making a direct physical contact with metal parts of the case, to spread the heat out to a larger area where it can radiate & conduct away to the environment. With the hottest chips it's hard to spread the heat around enough that way.\n\nThese sort of \"heat pipes\" use water in a closed loop of thin copper tubing, in physical contact with the hot chip and other, farther-away parts of the case. The water in the hot area boils into vapor, while the steam in the cooler area condenses back into water. The vapor and steam flow between the two areas through either two pipes or one special type of pipe.\n\nUnlike larger liquid-cooling systems there's no pumps to actively move the liquid around, the heat itself drives the flow. And there's no fans helping keep the cool end of the loop cool. So it's not as powerful as a big system, but apparently it's better than just a metal heat spreader.\n\n[It looks like the fanciest version, not yet used by any cell phone](_URL_2_), uses a pair of flat tubes to cycle the water and uses multiple porous layers of copper to let capillary action move the water.\n\n Whereas [current state-of-the-art cell phone heat pipes use a single tube](_URL_1_)—you can see in the picture how it spreads the heat from the thermal pad to the side of the case—where the inside of the pipe [looks like this funky thing](_URL_0_) so that water *vapor* passes through the middle of the pipe one way, and water *liquid* flows by capillary action along the inner walls of the pipe the other way. Clever."
]
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"http://msmobile.pl/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Lumia-950-XL-heat-pipe.jpg",
"http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/hardware/superslim-liquid-loop-will-keep-future-smartphones-cool"
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|
4x71ez | the difference between rythym, beat, time signature and metre in songs? | There's a band called Dream Theater that I like listening too.
One of my friends commented saying that they like to use complex time signatures or changing them half way through songs although I never noticed a change in the rythym easily.
So what the heck is a time signature and how does it differ to rythym or beat and metre?
Thanks | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4x71ez/eli5_the_difference_between_rythym_beat_time/ | {
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"Time signature is per se the same as metre signature. It´s the sign at the beginning of sheet music telling you how many beats are contained in each bar/measure.\n\nE.g. 3/4, 2/4 or 4/4 are some common time or metre signatures.\n\nA beat is one single note being played, so in [this picture](_URL_0_), you have 3 beats in one bar. The timing signature or metre signature indicates that the rhythmic structure is 3/4 this means that you play 3 beats of quarter tones.\n\nIn Music beats are commonly divided by 4 or multiples thereof to indicate how fast each beat is. E.g. in one bar you can play one full tone, four quarter tones, 8 eights tones, etc.\n\nRhythmic structure as a whole describes the complete song and all the rhythmic elements, the time signature as well as the overall tempo (beats per minute) and any other rhythmic elements.",
"These things are all tied together and build on each other so it may take a bit. \n\nRhythm is the pattern of notes over time that a musician makes. This could be slow and simple, or fast and complex and anywhere inbetween. A Rhythm can fall on the beat, fall on offbeats, or both. \n\nBeat is what pulse in the music gets emphasis and how much emphasis they get. \n\nTime signature is how the beat is communicated to the musician and conductor in the music. 4/4 time means that there are 4 beats per measure and the note value that gets the beat is a quarter note. The Emphasis structure in 4/4 time is Strongest, weak, strong, weak which is repeated until the song ends or the music changes time signatures. You can also play on the off beats which is playing when there is not pulse, kind of like going onto sand when a wave withdraws. In 4/4 time there are 8 eighth notes per measure and \"even\" ones are the ones on the offbeats. \n\nMeter is a way to classify time signatures. You have duple time signatures which mean the number of beats is divided into two's or is a multiple of 2 (some exceptions). So you have 2/4, 4/4, 12/8 etc. Then you have triple time which is the waltz like feel. There are three beats per measure or a multiple of three (some exceptions). So you have things like 3/4, 6/8, 9/8 etc. Complex time signatures are when the subdivision of the beat are in 3s instead of 2s. So 12/8 is Complex Duple having 4 beats with 3 eighth notes in each beat, but 2/4 is simple duple with two beats in each measure and quarter notes getting the beat. Complex triple is 9/8 with three beats per measure and three eighth notes in each beat, while simple triple is 3/4 time with three notes per measure and a quarter note getting the beat. \n\nI hope this is some help. What you are asking for is the first few weeks to first few months of an intro to music class and that is hard to boil down into a single post. ",
"I reccomend you listen to their song 'Dance of Eternity.' It's got quite a few changes and it'll be a lot easier to spot them there",
"**Meter** is one complete segment of a music. It's kinda like one sentence in an essay if the essay is the whole song.\n\n**Time signature** tells musician how many notes fit (not play) in one meter.\n\n4/4 time signature means four quarter notes fit in one meter. (probably the most common and used in almost all pop songs)\n\n3/4 time signature means three quarter notes fit in one meter (happy birthday song is an example)\n\n6/8 time signature means six eighth notes fit in one meter (it gives that swinging left and right feel)\n\n**Beat** is just a blimp of a pulse of the music that dictates speed. Beats per minute or BPM is used to set the speed of the song. BPM of 132 means there are 132 beeps or blimps or pulse in one minute.\n\n**Rhythm** is sorta subjective but mostly it's just a repeating pattern. Think of a drummer playing a beat to keep everything together. \n\n"
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19mloq | how exactly the wealth distribution in the us has gotten so skewed in the last 40-50 years. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/19mloq/eli5_how_exactly_the_wealth_distribution_in_the/ | {
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"[I saw this video on the front page](_URL_0_) and so I started wondering, how exactly have things gotten this way?",
"Real wages (average wages, adjusted by inflation) have not increased at *all* in the last 40-50 years.",
"Lower income tax rates for high earners.\n\nSo all the total amount of money earned in income by everyone in the country is called the income pool. The size of the income pool is relatively inelastic (meaning that it doesn't change overnight, and the changes aren't big enough to support additional workers on their own). \n\nWhat happens is that when workers organize themselves into a hierarchy, the people at the top take their share of the pool. Now, the people at the top don't answer to anyone when they make this decision - it is completely up to them. They pick their own salary. So effectively, these people are competing with the people at the bottom (of which there are many more) for salary. High taxes put pressure on them not to say, simply, \"We'll pay ourselves 90% of all the money, and leave 10% of you\" - because it doesn't make economic sense to do this. eg, in 1980 the top tax rate was 70%. So if you wanted to pay yourself $10M per year, you paid a 70% tax on most of that money meaning that you could never earn more than $3M per year, even if you paid yourself $10M. This is a big waste of money and resources, and so people didn't really try to do it. \n\nThen taxes were cut from 70% to 40%. This meant that you got to keep most of the $10M, but not all. So what happened is that now it began to make economic sense to pay yourself that much money - and so people do it. \n\nThe corrolary is, that as people at the top began paying themselves this much, they had to get the money from somewhere. They got it by going overseas to hire employees (instead of the in the US) and hiring fewer people in the US, and cutting raises and cutting salaries for the people that worked for them. This initiated a wealth transfer - from the poor to the wealthy - that hasn't stopped for 30+ years. \n\n"
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1xa2sn | java factory / abstract factory | I would consider myself fairly skilled in Java but the concept of Factories completely escape me. I've tried reading multiple online resources but they seem to not make sense or to be completely useless. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1xa2sn/eli5_java_factory_abstract_factory/ | {
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"The intent as described in my old college textbook is to \"provide an interface for creating families of related or dependent objects without specifying their concrete classes.\" What this means is you can create an factory that abstract classes for your application to use, and your application does not need to know the concrete implementation of the classes. Factories are more often used when you have a family of classes, so the one concrete factory can produce the necessary family of concrete classes. From there, you can swap out concrete implementations of the factory to update your application without having to go through and change all the code in your application. "
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akdj60 | what happens if you don't turn off a stainless steel stove top kettle after it starts whistling? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/akdj60/eli5_what_happens_if_you_dont_turn_off_a/ | {
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"Yes. Eventually all of the water will boil off. Then the kettle will get very hot, and might be damaged. (The steam carries away most of the heat energy from the stove, until the water runs out.)",
"It can’t explode because it isn’t a sealed vessel. The whistling is a valve tuned to make noise to inform you the water is boiling by using the steam allowed to escape to make that noise. \n\nThe steam making the whistling noise is the water evaporating. It would continue to do so until all the water is gone. As the steam is released so is the pressure building in the kettle. The kettle lid would pop off before any actual explosion took place if it didn’t have a release valve."
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6v2fju | how obesity causes type 2 diabetes | Also is it possible for people with low body fat to get type 2 diabetes? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6v2fju/eli5how_obesity_causes_type_2_diabetes/ | {
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"There are many risk factors for type 2 diabetes such as age, race, pregnancy, stress, certain medications, genetics or family history, high cholesterol and obesity. However, the single best predictor of type 2 diabetes is overweight or obesity. Almost 90% of people living with type 2 diabetes are overweight or have obesity. People who are overweight or have obesity have added pressure on their body's ability to use insulin to properly control blood sugar levels, and are therefore more likely to develop diabetes. ",
"Obesity doesn't cause diabetes. It is a risk factor because if you are obese (which is easy to find out) you are much more likely to have/get diabetes. Basically the kinds of things that cause obesity also tend to cause diabetes, so if you get one you are more likely to get the other. "
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1kt82t | since water can be absorbed by the skin, can that aid in dehydration? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1kt82t/eli5_since_water_can_be_absorbed_by_the_skin_can/ | {
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"Skin blocks water and other substances from entering the body. To get water into the body and in the proper locations, the water would need to enter the bloodstream, which is generally accomplished by eating or drinking, so the water can be absorbed through the digestive system. Alternatively, an [IV](_URL_0_) could be used, since it cuts through the skin and goes directly into a vein. \n\nTo put it another way, if you dump a dehydrated person into a bathtub without the person being able to drink the water, that wouldn't be all that helpful. ",
"**TL; DR. Yes.** That's how professional fighters lose/gain weight for a fight. You can see in [this video](_URL_1_), pro MMA fighter, [Joe Lauzon](_URL_0_) gets in a hot bath full of salt to pull the water out of him to lose weight for his fight.\n\nEDIT: Skip to 3:41 in the video."
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1hhswq | how are we able to look "back in time" to the origins of the universe when the light should be well past us? | It may be that the media simply explains this wrong, but maybe I just don't get it. I will hear reports from time to time that say we're looking further back into time to see the origins of the universe. That is, our more powerful telescopes can see farther away, and because that light took 13 billion years to get here, it's almost the beginning of the universe. Or something like that.
I'm imagining the universe first as a singularity, and then as an expanding balloon. My not-so-bright mind then deduces that the singularity was probably at or near the center of that three-dimensional space that is enclosed by that balloon.
Here's the thing: we're not going the speed of light. Light from 1 billion years after the Big Bang would have then expanded outwards at, say, the speed of light. Since we're not going the speed of light, it must necessarily have accelerated past our position like a bastard doing 40 over in the fast lane, never to be seen again. The light that was created(??) at the moment of the Big Bang, and in the seconds and minutes and years that followed would, by now, be some 14 billion light years from wherever it was that the singularity first lived, and we must be less than 14 billion light years from that point in space. Or time. Or something.
So how is it that we can then presumably "look back in time" when the light from back in time should already be in Vegas while we're still not even on the I-15 (assuming, for this exercise, that the Centre of the Universe is my favourite hotel in West Hollywood, the Sunset Marquis). | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1hhswq/eli5how_are_we_able_to_look_back_in_time_to_the/ | {
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"First, you are experiencing a common mistake with the balloon analogy. The universe isn't like the area within the balloon, it is like the *surface* of the balloon. The intent is just to show how an expanding area results in all points moving apart with the more distant ones moving faster, when people are not generally intuitively familiar with rubber sheets. The confusion with the balloon analogy when people think about it as expanding in three dimensions is that the universe doesn't (seem to at least) have a border or a center. While perhaps finite it is likely boundless.\n\nNow to your question; while nothing with mass can move at or beyond light speed, any amount of uniform expansion over a long enough distance *can* result in things appearing to recede at or beyond light speed. That is what happened with the light from the Big Bang; the light was distant enough and stretched out by the expansion of space that it took 13.77 billion years to arrive. It didn't necessarily start out 13.77 billion light years away, but 13.77 billion light years appeared in its path during its travels. There are likely things beyond our ability to see because they are simply too distant for the light ever to arrive. More universe space will appear between us faster than the light can traverse the distance.",
"This doesn't answer your whole question, but it might help you visualize it more. You said that you deduced that the singularity was at the center of the three-dimensional space... As Phage said, the Universe doesn't metaphorically exist inside the balloon, but is the expanding surface. What this also means is that every point on that surface, including ourselves, IS the singularity. \nThink about the balloon, again. It starts out very small. This smallness is the singularity. This is the universe starting. \nBecause we're using the balloon as an analogy, all that matters here is the balloon in relation to itself. Don't imagine where the small, somewhat flaccid, balloon is in relation to YOUR space - as in, is it in your hand, how far from the ground is it, is it left or right of you... none of these things exist if the balloon is the universe. It's just the balloon and itself.\nNow, blow the balloon up, and ask yourself how far away each point of the surface is from where the balloon was.\nYou can't say that the part you pinched off is the closest because it's still in your fingers, right where it was before it got blown up. There are no cosmic fingers. It's just the balloon and itself.\n\nNow, we have a second problem, and that's the concept that we're 'looking really far away.'\nThis makes us think that the Universe started at Point A and then we got thrown out into Point B and are looking back at Point A. That's not true. We are still at Point A *spatially*. In spacetime, however, we have traveled quite a *temporal* 'distance.'\nSo we're not looking at a place that's far away, we're looking at a space that is, technically, right here, just from a while back.\nOf course, in what we can experience with our senses, it *seems* like spatial distance."
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1rz6xc | inoculation/vaccination. if you purposely infect me with a disease you're trying to prevent me from succumbing to, why don't i get sick/die? | First off, this has NOTHING to do with the whole "vaccines cause autism" lie. So let's blow that bullshit out of the water from the get go. Additionally, can we focus the explanation in regards specifically to inoculation since there is some sort of difference between that and vaccination? I know I included vaccination in the title, but that was more to orientate the request.
I'm just having problems understanding a particular function of the process.
**What I understand:**
I have read:
[Vaccination](_URL_1_)
[Acquired Immunity](_URL_0_)
[Small Pox](_URL_3_)
[Inoculation](_URL_2_)
I understand that there is some difference between inoculation and vaccination, as inoculation "uses unweakened live pathogens". Though I'm not exactly clear on what vaccination uses, I think it uses some weakened strain that isn't infectious/related less harmful diseases that will produce tolerance to the more deadly one? It'd be nice if we could clear up the difference.
I understand that this method relies on the function of acquired immunity. If a foreign thing is introduced to my body, the alarms go off saying "Stranger Danger! Stranger Danger!" Then my antibodies break down the door wearing shiny sunglasses and pull out some whoop ass to KO the intruder. My body learns from this encounter and if the same thing tries to fuck shit up again, my body has it going on like Donkey Kong and can kill that motherfucker faster, better, and deader.
I also get that a healthy body is more likely to fight off an infection, but a sickly body is more likely to contract an infection in the wild.
**What I Don't Get:**
Why doesn't the inoculation/vaccination make me sick/kill me just like encountering the disease naturally would? Is it because it uses a really tiny amount? Or something else. I just don't get: this toxin will kill you if your neighbor has it and she coughs on you and it gets in your body. So to prevent that, we're going to go ahead and put it in your body.
in your body = dead
in your body =\= dead
Make it make sense guys. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1rz6xc/eli5_inoculationvaccination_if_you_purposely/ | {
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"Because it's either a related virus that's not deadly, but still gives you immunity, or it's a weakened strain that isn't capable of causing a full blown infection. ",
"They inject you with a disabled/dead/imitation version of the virus, not the full fledged harmful one.\n\nIn some cases you might even get a little sick, but the stuff you were injected with was weakened and in a relatively low dosage.\n\nThe point is to give your body something that is very similar to the natural virus. This way it learns to recognize and attack it. But you make sure that the stuff you put it wont actually hurt you.",
"To add to the correct responses about weakened or dead viruses being used, in some cases it's also possible to just use a particular protein from the outside of the virus, so you don't wind up with any viral DNA from the vaccination at all. \n\nYour immune system learns to recognize this protein, so if the full virus does show up, it will attack.",
"I've re-written this like eight times, because it's actually kind of hard to explain something as complex as the immune system to a five-year-old.\n\nI guess the simplest way of explaining it is that your body is very good at fighting off infection, usually. When you receive a vaccination or inoculation, you are essentially having a very small part of a pathogen introduced into your body, or a weakened or modified strain. This strain is, generally, a less infectious version of the original, but it retains much of its structure, so your body is still able to recognize it as something doesn't belong, and behaves accordingly.\n\nA good analogy might be a baseball bat. If someone swings a normal, three-dimensional baseball bat at you, it's probably going to hurt when it hits you. But let's say they take a picture of a baseball bat and print it on a piece of cardboard and swing that at you. You still recognize that it's supposed to resemble a baseball bat, but it doesn't hurt as much when it hits you.\n\nIn the case of the pathogen, because it retains much of its appearance, or because your body still recognizes it for what it is, it is able to flag it as unwelcome and fight it off appropriately. But because it was a weakened version, there was never any real threat of becoming infected, because it only LOOKED like the real thing. But it's a convincing enough fake that your body learns how to fight it off in the future."
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2nfzj3 | how long will modern human "races" continue to exist? | How long will it take before the global population is so intermarried between race lines that people will no longer be able to identify themselves as Black, White, Asian, Hispanic, and so on? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2nfzj3/eli5_how_long_will_modern_human_races_continue_to/ | {
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"I don't think it will ever happen. Even though interracial couples are becoming more common in countries where people of multiple races reside, there are still countries out there that are very racially isolated, so interbreeding isn't really a thing there. Like in Japan, where 98% of the population is ethnically Japanese, you're not going to get much in the way of mixing.",
"'Races' are just groups of individuals that have the same slight genetic variations compared to another group of individuals.\n\nThere will likely always be groups that have the same slight genetic variations.",
"It's almost impossible to say. Look at how much more the world is interconnected than even a hundred years ago. There will probably always be small pockets of isolated people for whatever reason. However I've read some anthropologists speculate a couple of hundred years. If you want to know what those future people may look like, just look at Brazil. It's one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the world with a lot of intermingling between different races during its history."
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2plwc6 | why don't we have 'statutory mandatory voting'? | * In the US
Like if you had not been registered in an election, you would get a cheap ticket in the mail.
A lighter version could be that you would not be allowed to vote in the next 2 or 3 elections, | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2plwc6/eli5_why_dont_we_have_statutory_mandatory_voting/ | {
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"Because then Billy Q Jebidiahson, who thinks that Congress is the name of a person, will be forced to vote or he won't have money to pay for his ICP ticket.\n\nHe's likely to fill out the ballet randomly. This would not be good for our political system. ",
"Some countries do have this, but I assume you're referring to the United States?\n\nBasically a lot of people would argue that people have the right not to vote if they don't want to. It's not the government's place to force people to do something if its not a matter of public safety or health.\n\nNot to mention that while people not voting is bad, it's not as bad as ignorant and uniformed people going out and casting random votes. The reason people don't vote (aside from laziness) is because they don't believe their vote matters, which isn't a problem that can be solved by forcing them to vote."
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5mqxco | how does a plan detect that missiles have been 'locked on'? what does this mean? | Is it just something they have in movies or does it happen in real life? If so, how does that work? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5mqxco/eli5_how_does_a_plan_detect_that_missiles_have/ | {
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"So, there are different ways in which a missile can \"see\" its target - and this determines whether a missile lock can be detected by the plane.\n\nThe way which can be detected is either active or semi-active radar homing. In active radar homing, the missile itself carries a radar transmitter and receiver, and uses the reflected radar waves from the plane to home in on it - it is like walking around in the dark, looking for someone, and waving around a flashlight to see them.\n\nSemi-active radar homing instead has only a radar receiver on the missile (which is useful because it means the missile can be lighter and smaller, and thus faster and more agile), and you have the large radar at the missile's launch site pointed at the target plane. This is like going around in the dark, and having a friend with a powerful spotlight shine it on the person you are looking for.\n\nIn both of those cases, radar waves are sent out, and the plane can pick them up, and thus warn the pilot that someone has a missile lock on the plane - just like the person you are looking for can see the light from your flashlight or your friend's spotlight.\n\nThere are also ways of missile homing which cannot be detected like that - the prime one used for anti-air missiles is infrared homing, in which the missile has an infrared camera in the nose which looks for hot things (on a plane, this is mainly the engines/exhaust plume). This is like looking for someone in the dark with a thermal camera, that can see their body heat. This cannot be detected, as it doesn't send out anything - it is just passively looking. More or less the only way a pilot could tell he is being chased by an IR homing missile is by actually seeing the missile itself (which can be quite difficult, as missiles are small and fast-moving), or by his wingman seeing it and warning him.",
"A lock-on is an act of focusing the sensor system on a single target so that the target can be automatically tracked. With the sensors in our case being the missile's seeker.\n\nNow, in case with an infrared missile such as an AIM-9 Sidewinder, FIM-92 Stinger or R-73, there will be no lock-on warning because the seeker is *passive*. You will only be able to detect incoming fire by spotting the missle itself, and there are plane-based infrared systems to do that for you as well. The good thing is, this is the close-range choice of sensor. There are additional undetectable options, such as no guidance at all, TV guidance (rarely used, and only against ground targets - basically the bombardier uses a camera in the nose to steer the bomb), and GPS guidance (only good enough for bombs used against stationary targets).\n\nLong-range missiles and tracking in general relies on radar or ladar; certain anti-ground ordnance relies on designated lasers, and there are similar dynamics for active and passive sonar, but we'll stick to radar as the most prominent example. Now, except for some exotic and finicky variants that piggypack on random radio waves - such as the very first one, using a BBC radio tower - features a source of radio-band electromagnetic radiation (illuminator) that is reflected from the target and then received to identify its azimuth and range.\n\nSo, you're emitting something - it's an *active* sensor. Using an active sensor is the equivalent of turning on a flashlight in a dark room - you *might* see something, but you'll definitely be seen by everyone in the room. Radars can be detected from roughly twice their effective range using a Radar Warning Receiver, or just a garden-variety radio; furthermore, they can be recognized, their position approximated, their type identified, and their activity determined by their emission characteristic. You can tell whether that idiot with the flashlight is waving it randomly, or it has it pointed right at you... or if there's a beam of red light edging towards your head. A radar in lock-on mode stops sweeping and maintains a focus on its quarry.\n\nNow, there are two principal types of radar-guided missiles. Semi-active ones are broken into two subtypes. One type carries the receiver system for the radar, but the emitter stays with the launcher; there, it's just a reasonable inference that the guy who wants to kill you and has a lock also has missiles in the air. The other type are anti-radiation missiles, and they basically target the *enemy's* radar signals; Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses is basically playing whack-a-mole with their AA. The other type, true active guidance, has the whole radar kit onboard the missile, so detecting distinct new radars is already bad news bears."
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3k6wdv | generally speaking, what are feminists trying to achieve? | Serious question. It seems like there are is a lot of contempt towards feminism, and probably a whole lot of understanding of what the central tenets of it are.
| explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3k6wdv/eli5generally_speaking_what_are_feminists_trying/ | {
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"Depends on the feminist. It's sort of like asking what Liberals or conservatives are trying to achieve, in that there are many factions and many different interpretations of even basic concepts. \n\nTo the extent there's a more general goal, my understanding is that it is to build a society that does not advantage any gender over another, with a special emphasis on bringing the historically disadvantaged group (women) up to the level of the historically advantaged group (men). Feminism as a theory is focused on how power is distributed in a society along gendered lines. It usually starts from the idea that there's an ingrained concept, \"patriarchy,\" that has privileged males over females by ensuring males wield disproportionate power. \n\nBut, there's a lot of disagreement on what all of this means and even more disagreement on what to do about it. Do you have to rework society at a fundamental level? is it enough to just create formal legal equality? should people care about cultural stereotypes and biases? Is there some uniquely \"feminine\" approach to power that would be preferable to the current system or is that itself a form of sexism? etc... ",
"In its simplest form feminism seeks to advance the status of women, for the most part its understood that they want equality with men, however there are radicals (as with any philosophy) who think differently",
"The feminist movement in general is trying to achieve equal rights, benefits, and treatment regardless of gender. Individual people calling themselves feminists may (and often do) have different agendas, but saying they represent all feminists is like saying Westboro Baptist represents all Christians or Twilight fans represent people into vampires.",
"I think you mean \"misunderstanding.\"\n\nFeminism seeks equality. That's it. Nothing else. Just that. Equality for the feminine. Recently, a user on another sub posted [this](_URL_0_), which is a nice write up of why feminism is needed.\n\nThe rest of the stuff you are hearing (mostly on the internet) is cherry picked straw feminism. Really, it is people with an axe to grind or political agenda that have no interest in actual equality that want to paint feminism in a bad light. What is done is finding examples of bad people that are also feminists or claiming to be, and then holding them up as an example of why feminism is wrong. This is of course a poor way of thinking of a movement, because defining anything by its extremities will quickly turn literally anything into a meaningless mash up. \n\nHere, let me ruin everything for you:\n\n\"I am an egalitarian and I think all white people should be burned at the stake\" There, I have ruined egalitarianism.\n\n\"I am a vegetarian and all children should be boiled alive!\" There, I have ruined vegetarianism.\n\n\"I am Redditor and think that genocide is how all wars should be ended.\" There, all Redditors are now genocidal.\n\nSee how these insane statements mean literally nothing? When we say \"Feminists want women to be MORE than men!\" what we're actually trying to do is subvert a message that we don't want to hear. Mainly, the message that women are not equal, the feminine is lesser than the masculine (men are victims of this too!) and that we've already settled the matter. ",
"Disclaimer: this is coming from a white male. If I'm wrong, I'm absolutely open to constructive criticism.\n\nFirst,\n > there are is a lot of contempt towards feminism\n\nI'd assume this is the same logic as black lives matter vs. all lives matter. Saying one (BLM) doesn't mean other lives don't matter, it's just calling attention to a sub group that is being neglected. Much better explanation [here](_URL_1_).\n\nSo what are they trying to achieve? Equality. For example, [pay equality](_URL_0_)."
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3mnj68 | why does a newton's cradle work the way it does? | Alright. Let's see if I can get my formatting right.
So why does a Newton's Cradle work? Why is it that when you pull and release one ball, it only moves one ball on the other side, and if you move two, than two on the other side move? I understand momentum, M1V1=M2V2, must be conserved. But why is it an equal mass moving? Who's to say that velocity won't be halved and twice the mass moved? Is there a law besides momentum, or is it that when this momentum equation is invoked it tries to maintain as close to initial mass being moved? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3mnj68/eli5_why_does_a_newtons_cradle_work_the_way_it/ | {
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"There's the energy explanation, but I can see why you'd find that one as unsatisfying as the momentum one. \n\nI think it helps to think of the balls as collections of atoms, and contact as the repulsion of the outer electrons if they get too close. When the first ball swings down and makes contact with the second, there's a localized repulsion, equal and opposite at both the first and second ball's surfaces at the contact. The repulsion on the first ball slows it down and keeps it still. Meanwhile, the repulsion on the second ball propagates through the rest of the balls. This \"compression\" that goes from the second, third, and finally to the fourth ball, is the \"conserved\" part, and that gets propagated all the way to the fifth ball, except this time there's no ball after the fifth, so the fourth ball just pushes the fifth by an equal amount as the first pushed the second. This is the physical explanation, without having to go too in depth with the physics."
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79wpfk | why do electronics crash when overclocked too much? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/79wpfk/eli5_why_do_electronics_crash_when_overclocked/ | {
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"They overheat. resistance in the various circuits becomes too high with increased temperature, causing them to get even hotter during continued use.\n\nEventually the boards/circuits will be damaged by the high temperatures and stop working.",
"If it doesn't outright overheat, the way a computer works is by organizing its action into clock cycles. Everything in the computer is designed to work within those cycles, so that when the next cycle starts, each part has finished it's share of the work and is ready to pass its result on and start on the next chunk of computation. At some point, speeding things up will cause some component to be unable to finish in time, and this can often lead to a catastrophic failure of the logic of the computer... i.e. it crashes.",
"Overclocking is essentially running the digital clock that controls sending the on/off at a higher frequency then it's meant to. This allows you to process data faster, however in the same way that driving a car for hundreds of miles wears down the components, this increased strain increases the rate at which the components deteriorate.\n\nIf you suddenly overclocked something to an absurd level, it would generate massive amounts of heat. Most electronics have a way to sense heat, and will shut down if the component gets too hot. Similarly drawing too much power can also cause the component to shut down.",
"As /u/1_km_coke_line indicated, one reason is overheating. Running integrated circuits at unusually high frequencies or voltages can cause them to get hotter than they were designed/tested for. Ideally when this happens, the OS or BIOS on the computer sees that things are getting too hot and throttles back or shuts down. Sometimes the heat rise happens too fast or too locally for it to get recognized in time and the computer crashes. In a worst-case scenario, there can be permanent physical damage due to the excessive heat. \n \nBut that's not the only possibility. Integrated circuits (such as a microprocessor) are generally designed to work in a kind of cadence, with the clock setting the beat. This avoids situations where different signals arriving into a sub-circuit at slightly different times cause it to change state when it shouldn't. The clock acts as a gatekeeper, basically saying \"OK, now is the time to evaluate the inputs and react accordingly\". This is called \"synchronous circuit design\". \n \nThe clock gets split up into different \"[phases](_URL_0_)\", and different parts of the circuit are hooked up to different ones. That way, when one set of circuits feeds into another set, they don't all try to change at once and get confused. \n \nWhen you overclock, you risk screwing this up. Things start happening faster than the circuits were designed for, and incorrect operation can happen. This is made even worse by the fact that overclocking heats things up, and circuits slow down as they get hotter. \n \nThis incorrect operation can cause data corruption and all other kinds of bad behavior. Including causing a crash. \n \nA third, much less likely scenario is that the clock circuit itself will misbehave when overclocked. The clock signal being fed into a microprocessor is fairly high frequency (although not as high as the internal clock frequency). If the overclocking is done by telling the motherboard to speed up the clock, the quality of the signal can degrade to the point that the processor isn't getting a \"clean\" enough clock signal to recognize it. But a lot of time this isn't how overclocking is even done. ",
"In transistors, there is something called propogation delay. It is the time it takes from the switching signal being sent to the time the transistor actually activates or deactivates. This is a very short period of time, but processors tend to act near the margin of stability.\n\nOverclocking does 2 things. It shortens the period of each clock cycle, which may outright exceed the propogation delay of the transistors (sort of like if you only left yourself 5 minutes to making a connecting flight, the signal won't make it from the first transistor set to the 2nd set). The other is the increased cycle rate increases the power consumption and therefore the heat of the processor. Increased heat leads to longer propogation delays. In our plane example, this would be like having to fly around a storm, lengthening the flight time. This is why you can overclock more at lower temperatures, things like liquid nitrogen shorten the propagation delay of the transistors."
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2484fz | why would someone be suspended from work with pay vs. without pay? | So I just saw the GG sherif meme on the front page about the Knox police choking and the first thing I thought was "was the second cop suspended with pay or without pay?"
In this circumstance I wouldn't be completely livid if he was suspended with pay, though he SHOULD have done something to stop it, but I've read other articles where the officer/teacher/doctor was "suspended, with pay, pending investigation".
So why are these people payed if they're not working and could be found guilty & fired after the investigation is over? Wouldn't it make more sense to do half pay(so they can survive) or full pay reimbursement if the alleged offender is found innocent? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2484fz/eli5_why_would_someone_be_suspended_from_work/ | {
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"It's easier to suspend with pay than do a reimbursement. They don't know how long the investigation will take in every single instance, and until then, having no pay can be a big imposition (especially if they are found not liable). So sometimes it's just easier to have a rule that covers the majority of situations.",
"With pay is like you are innocent until proven guilty. Without pay is like they caught you red handed on camera dancing on the semen soaked remains of your grandmother's recently ravaged and charred corpse screaming \"Hallelujah! I fucked her to death and then set her on fire and I'm glad!\""
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8pq9af | if the scandinavian languages (danish, norwegian & swedish) are mutually intelligible, why are they considered distinct languages instead of different dialects of the same language? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8pq9af/eli5_if_the_scandinavian_languages_danish/ | {
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"Its kind of a semantic argument, you could make the same point for Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. \n\nwhile it is a partially political distinction the many thing is that mutually intelligible is really hard to prove as a set concept. The main theory being that just because you can understand a few words doesn't mean you can hold a conversation. and there is a fuzzy line in there somewhere that splits dialects and languages.\n\nI wish there was a better answer but there is no golden rule.",
"If Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish are comparable to the closeness of Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, then I would say that Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish aren't mutually intelligible. ",
"They say the difference between a dialect and a language is that a language has an army. That is, if you have your own sovereign nation, then you can declare and enforce that you have your own language and you can make your own language rules and pronunciation and grammar. ",
"Languages are considered \"different\" primarily due to the politics involved in their respective regions. As such, the primary reason is that Norwegian (both Nynorsk and Bokmal), Swedish and Danish are primarily spoken (and taught) in three different countries, so the three are considered different languages.\n\nBut is there another reason, more related to language classification, that they're considered different? The three languages aren't spoken homogeneously by everyone in each nation; instead, they form a sort of dialect continuum. These continua are quite common in many parts of the world. For example, consider starting out in Switzerland, and being able to understand the Swiss German-speaking population. You make your way up north slowly, crossing into German states where Alemannic and Bavarian are spoken. These are slightly different from Swiss German, but with a little practise, you become easily fluent. Then, with the same results, you cross over into Low German, then Frisian, and then Dutch. But if you fly back to Switzerland, you may find that the language has now become almost incomprehensible. So where do you draw the line between what is German and what isn't? Arbitrarily. That is also what has been done between Standard Danish, Standard Swedish, Nynorsk and Bokmal.\n\nGoing back to the question, if the Kalmar Union still existed, where Denmark, Norway and Sweden were united as one country, we might have seen a different story, with the \"language\" being termed \"Scandinavian\", similar to how the languages of the Hindi belt in India are all termed \"Hindi\", while Hindi itself is a continuum. As it happens, the standardized versions of each language render themselves satisfactorily separate from the others, in the eyes of the people that speak them, and so they are three different languages.\n\nEDIT: removed percentage",
"The wiki's quite interesting on this. Basically there's no set definition and it's largely cultural. Denmark, Norway and Sweden argue that they are distinct cultures ergo they argue that their language is distinct. "
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3x81w9 | what is the appeal of shooting and watching a movie in 70mm? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3x81w9/eli5_what_is_the_appeal_of_shooting_and_watching/ | {
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"/u/aok51289 is partially right in terms of resolution, but very right in terms of difficulty and it being cumbersome, not mention expensive.\n \nThere are two types of 70mm, the kind The Hateful Eight is filmed on (5-perf 70mm) and the kind Interstellar, The Dark Knight, etc. are filmed on (15-perf 70mm, aka 70mm IMAX). \n \nAlmost all older movies were filmed on 4-perf 35mm film, this has an effective resolution of around 4K when you scan it at the optimal PPI (any higher scan is just a waste). \n \n5-perf 70mm is 25% taller (5/4) and 2x wider (70/35), making it effectively 8K, but keep in mind the height is only slightly taller. The Hateful Eight has an aspect ratio (width:height) of 2.76:1, making the effective resolution 8192x2968. \n \n15-perf 70mm (70mm IMAX) is 3x the area (15/5=3), and is 1.44:1, making it effectively 11.5K, with a effective resolution of 11796x8192. \n \nNow, can you see a difference between these, or even 4K; no, not unless the theater screen is 70ft-100ft tall, which is what the 70mm IMAX theaters are."
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l5eop | why do so many democrats/liberals like ron paul? | I'm Canadian, so i really don't get it. all i know is that he's a republican. Reddit, which i always assume to be mostly liberal, always talks about him like he's some sort of messiah. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/l5eop/why_do_so_many_democratsliberals_like_ron_paul/ | {
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"As a brit all i can seem to make of it is that he said he wants to stop the wars and he thinks marijuana should be legalized. I don't think most of them are taking into account his other views but i'm not really sure. ",
"Ron Paul runs as a Republican (presumably because it's virtually impossible for third-party candidates to get footholds in national elections), but many of his values are much closer to modern libertarian philosophy. Modern libertarianism in the United States is generally interested in minimal government and maximum personal freedoms; socially liberal, but fiscally conservative. I think it's the \"socially liberal\" part that many redditors identify with and support, often overlooking some more conservative aspects of his platform.",
"I'm on the hard left (in another country), I kinda like the dude because he wants to emasculate America's army and bring their occupying armies home.",
"I think it's because he's the only anti-war candidate, anti war on drugs candidate, anti imperialist, anti-patriot act, anti gitmo among other things.\n\nThey're not going to get that with a liberal candidate.",
"I'm an American liberal, and I think he's batshit insane. Despite his anti-war and anti-prohibition stances, he's still way too socially conservative, and certainly too fiscally conservative, for my taste. And he's batshit insane. ",
"Mainly because they are ignorant of his positions, most of which are antithetical to liberal values. ",
"He's not that popular, he has a vocal base.",
"because he sticks to his guns and hasn't changed his political agenda",
"Can anyone explain the effects of ending the Fed?",
"Really the only reason I have to like him is he has always been consistent on his political positions. I wouldn't vote for him based on a number of his positions, but at the very least I can respect him for not being pressured into towing party lines.",
"One thing about him that appeals to me is that he honestly seems to believe in what he says. I don't necessarily agree with a large portion of what he expounds on, but that fact alone separates him from essentially every other politician out there.",
"Because if you come off as a man of the people, young people will like you no matter what you stand for. Worked for GW Bush, worked for Obama, working for Paul & Cain now. When you're young, you don't want an authority figure. You want a guy you could see having a beer or smoking a jay with. A few years later, you realize that the guy you drink with is just as likely to throw you under the bus as the hardass you can't relate to, perhaps even more so, but when you're young, that escapes you. ",
"As a brit all i can seem to make of it is that he said he wants to stop the wars and he thinks marijuana should be legalized. I don't think most of them are taking into account his other views but i'm not really sure. ",
"Ron Paul runs as a Republican (presumably because it's virtually impossible for third-party candidates to get footholds in national elections), but many of his values are much closer to modern libertarian philosophy. Modern libertarianism in the United States is generally interested in minimal government and maximum personal freedoms; socially liberal, but fiscally conservative. I think it's the \"socially liberal\" part that many redditors identify with and support, often overlooking some more conservative aspects of his platform.",
"I'm on the hard left (in another country), I kinda like the dude because he wants to emasculate America's army and bring their occupying armies home.",
"I think it's because he's the only anti-war candidate, anti war on drugs candidate, anti imperialist, anti-patriot act, anti gitmo among other things.\n\nThey're not going to get that with a liberal candidate.",
"I'm an American liberal, and I think he's batshit insane. Despite his anti-war and anti-prohibition stances, he's still way too socially conservative, and certainly too fiscally conservative, for my taste. And he's batshit insane. ",
"Mainly because they are ignorant of his positions, most of which are antithetical to liberal values. ",
"He's not that popular, he has a vocal base.",
"because he sticks to his guns and hasn't changed his political agenda",
"Can anyone explain the effects of ending the Fed?",
"Really the only reason I have to like him is he has always been consistent on his political positions. I wouldn't vote for him based on a number of his positions, but at the very least I can respect him for not being pressured into towing party lines.",
"One thing about him that appeals to me is that he honestly seems to believe in what he says. I don't necessarily agree with a large portion of what he expounds on, but that fact alone separates him from essentially every other politician out there.",
"Because if you come off as a man of the people, young people will like you no matter what you stand for. Worked for GW Bush, worked for Obama, working for Paul & Cain now. When you're young, you don't want an authority figure. You want a guy you could see having a beer or smoking a jay with. A few years later, you realize that the guy you drink with is just as likely to throw you under the bus as the hardass you can't relate to, perhaps even more so, but when you're young, that escapes you. "
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3kgcol | how does a huge company with thousands of employees like apple keep their latest products undisclosed until they release it? | We get a few leaks, but nothing solid. With thousands working on the latest products, how come we don't hear anything? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3kgcol/eli5_how_does_a_huge_company_with_thousands_of/ | {
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"Apple has a very insular culture, strict NDAs, etc. \n\nInformation is very much on a need-to-know basis. If you're not directly working on a project you may have no idea that it exists. They use [codenames](_URL_0_) to refer to everything internally.\n\nThey even made their ad agency Chiat/Day create an entire new business just for them so they could exert even more control of the information and security. Then they had Chiat create an entire in-house production staff, and they only work with outside vendors when absolutely necessary or when products have already launched. ",
"As an Apple employee, everything is very secretive. As someone said, unless you're on the project, you have no idea.\nYour basic AppleCare and store employees find out, when consumers find out.\n\nThis goes with both Hardware and software."
]
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[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apple_codenames"
],
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|
1re4xm | why are broken escalators closed off instead of just being used as stairs? | I've noticed at many shopping malls that when an escalator breaks, it is closed off for use. Why aren't we allowed to use them as stairs? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1re4xm/eli5_why_are_broken_escalators_closed_off_instead/ | {
"a_id": [
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"It's still motorized heavy equipment, whether people think of it that way or not.\n\nThey'd rather not be liable if a brake or chain fails while you're standing on it and the stairs start sliding backwards.",
"They are a safety risk both because it *could* move with people on it, and because the uneven steps would be against code",
"Good question, Mitch Hedberg."
]
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[],
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3nrn75 | what would it take to reduce gun violence in the us? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3nrn75/eli5_what_would_it_take_to_reduce_gun_violence_in/ | {
"a_id": [
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"There seems to be a misconception. Mass shootings (like the ones you see covered on CNN), school shootings, etc - they are a very small percentage of the gun violence. Most of it happens the old fashioned way - in inner cities like Detroit or Baltimore, usually between rival gangs or just people who had scores to settle with one another. You rarely hear about this on national news (it is only when white, middle class people get killed then it gets lots of coverage).\n\nTrying to fix mental health will do little to stop this type of violence. Nor will stricter gun control for that matter. Criminals will still find a way to get guns. I think creating better economic conditions, ending or significantly changing the war on drugs, and improving underprivileged communities at the grass roots level will help. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
33ukpc | why are the individuals who work for the corporations (see: banks) that are 'too big to jail' protected from prosecution? why can't we prosecute the criminals and have new people come in to run the business that we can't live without? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/33ukpc/eli5_why_are_the_individuals_who_work_for_the/ | {
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"text": [
"Prosecute them for what? Just because a financial institution has troubles doesn't necessarily mean there is criminal activity.",
"It is very hard to build a case against individuals inside large institutions. By design, large institutions make decisions collectively, not by individuals. Occasionally you find someone who commits a a fraud, and those people do go to jail.\n\nThe higher up in these organizations you go, the better people are at creating ways to limit their personal liability. They don't sign memos that direct their employees to break laws. Laws are broken gently, by many people making many small choices that individually would be very hard to prove were \"illegal\" in a court of law."
]
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5k14iw | how does the printer know what to print? | That. You have a file in your computer, just some data, and you "send" it to print, but how does the printer recognise and print the exact same patron of letter or images?
Thanks | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5k14iw/eli5_how_does_the_printer_know_what_to_print/ | {
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"If you have a dot matrix printer, it's pretty simple. \n\nFirst you click \"print\" on your computer. The computer then creates an image representation of your file. It picks a resolution, then goes over every inch of the page and records how much red, green, and blue (or yellow, cyan, and magenta, will verify later) is in each part. But at the end of that process you have a picture of what you want to print.\n\nThen, the computer sends that information through a cable to the printer. The printer prepares a sheet of paper, and then goes through line by line, putting the correct amount of each color in each part (pixel). Although these are distinct \"dots\", they're so close together that from far away it looks like they all blend together."
]
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n5nqv | hybridization in chemistry | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/n5nqv/eli5_hybridization_in_chemistry/ | {
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"seriously? well, ok. \n\nLet's say you are a little kid and you have a little brother or sister. If I gave you both your own rooms, you would arrange those rooms however you wanted to arrange them. But if I made you both live in the same room, your stuff would be arranged differently. You would have to decide, together, how to arrange stuff. \n\nNow, let's say that you are a little boy and you have a little sister. Let's also say that all little boys are exactly the same and all little girls are exactly the same. If they are all the same, they will decide how to arrange a shared room exactly the same way, every time. \n\nNow, say that there are only five different kind of rooms that little boys and girls can share (s, p, d, f, and g). \n\nThere, that's my best shot. \n\ntl;dr: if two people live in the same room, that room will look different than it would look if those two people lived in different rooms. ",
"seriously? well, ok. \n\nLet's say you are a little kid and you have a little brother or sister. If I gave you both your own rooms, you would arrange those rooms however you wanted to arrange them. But if I made you both live in the same room, your stuff would be arranged differently. You would have to decide, together, how to arrange stuff. \n\nNow, let's say that you are a little boy and you have a little sister. Let's also say that all little boys are exactly the same and all little girls are exactly the same. If they are all the same, they will decide how to arrange a shared room exactly the same way, every time. \n\nNow, say that there are only five different kind of rooms that little boys and girls can share (s, p, d, f, and g). \n\nThere, that's my best shot. \n\ntl;dr: if two people live in the same room, that room will look different than it would look if those two people lived in different rooms. "
]
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[],
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4dwc6o | how do console exclusive games make as much profit as the rest of the games on the market? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4dwc6o/eli5_how_do_console_exclusive_games_make_as_much/ | {
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"There are two parts to this, resulting in the arguably making more money at the end of things. \n\n1) they are given money by the platform for the exclusivity. which will cover a large amount of expected sales from the competing platforms. \n\n2) at some point the exclusivity deal usually expires at which point they release to the other platforms, and gain more revenue. \n",
"1) The console manufacturer will pay them a significant amount of money for the exclusivity. \n \n2) Porting to other consoles requires a lot more work than people might think. It's not as bad as re-building the game from scratch, but it can still be a fairly onerous task. \n \n3) Double the consoles doesn't necessarily mean double the sales. Say you released on PS4 and you want to release on XB1. Many gamers will own both, and they're not going to buy your game twice, so by porting you're really only expanding your market to include people who own an XB1 but *not* a PS4."
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63253s | how does adware work? | So for example, I get adware that spams me with different ads for different companies. Now do the people who made the adware make money? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/63253s/eli5_how_does_adware_work/ | {
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"Adware is a piece of Internet connected software that is ether installed alongside something else you installed (opencandy), displays ads as part of the interface (Windows 10 apps, bittorent,) or displays ads outside the program and doesn't make it clear (comet cursor, bonzi buddy) \n\nSometimes the program sends a request for an ad, or has ads pushed to it. These are a little less frightening, since they simply show you an ad. Other types may change your proxy settings (a proxy is when your computer connects to another computer to get to the Internet, like a game of telephone) and this proxy injects ads into your web pages and may also redirect your search engine to one they made to collect data for more advertising. This one is a great deal scarier, since all traffic is going through a remote computer you were not told it would be going through that could also record your browsing data as well as passwords for things like banks and stores. \n\nAdware itself is mostly annoying, causing your computer to slow down by using its resources to display ads and by.. Well displaying ads when you are trying to use it. The real danger is that this type of software often includes \"backdoor\" access to your computer, letting the authors install any other software they want for payment. This could mean installing botnet software to attack companies and governments, this could be viruses or malware like cryptolocker which encrypts your files and holds the key hostage or software that uses your Webcam to spy on you to use as blackmail or to upload to a porn site. \n\nIn a security conscious environment, it's another program that could be hacked to gain entry to a system. Especially since most Adware isn't written very well. \n\nSo if you don't want your mom to find pictures of you stroking your harbl, keep your system clean. This includes your phone, as it's really just another computer. No brand or OS is truly secure against malware, malware sneaks into the app store and Google play all the time and may take days or weeks to be found. "
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9unypd | why do men get boners at random times? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9unypd/eli5_why_do_men_get_boners_at_random_times/ | {
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"Boners happen when a specific muscle relaxes, causing it to flow into the penis more than it can flow out. In order to let the blood out at a regular rate again, that muscle has to tense up. Sometimes that muscle takes a break and relaxes, causing an erection. You can get it to wake up again by making your body demand blood somewhere else. For example, if you squeeze your legs together as tight as you can for about 30 seconds, your body will say \"we need more blood in the legs\" and the muscle will tense up to allow the blood out and into the legs."
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3s6wa1 | the recent yale stuff | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3s6wa1/eli5_the_recent_yale_stuff/ | {
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"In a nutshell, it seems some Yale administrators sent out an email advising students against wearing offensive costumes. Some other faculty (Christakis) sent out an email to their housing community saying that censorship is bad (in very cogent/inclusive way). Here is a link to that:\n[Email](_URL_0_)\nThen a large group of students didn't take kindly to the email and are calling for the dismissal of the Christakis' from their positions at the university. \nThe Atlantic has an in-depth article about it all here:\n[The Atlantic](_URL_1_)"
]
} | [] | [] | [
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"https://www.thefire.org/email-from-erika-christakis-dressing-yourselves-email-to-silliman-college-yale-students-on-halloween-costumes/",
"http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/the-new-intolerance-of-student-activism-at-yale/414810/"
]
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||
j77tq | how are laserdisks analog? i thought all discs were digital. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j77tq/eli5_how_are_laserdisks_analog_i_thought_all/ | {
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"It has to do with the way that the video is put on the disc.\n\nThink about a record. The way a record makes sound happen is that a pin drags across a big groove that has high parts and low parts. Those high and low parts are the sound. They're all different sizes and lengths depending on how long the sound goes. \n\nBut on a CD, instead of mountains and valleys of all different lengths and sizes that are translated into sound, there are tiny chunks all the same size that either say \"0\" (off) or \"1\" (on). You may recognize that as binary language, This is digital.\n\nA Laserdisc operates *sort of* like the record player, except with a laser eye instead of a needle.\n\nFWIW, after Laserdisc had been around for a while, they added in digital audio. The video was always analog though.",
"It has to do with the way that the video is put on the disc.\n\nThink about a record. The way a record makes sound happen is that a pin drags across a big groove that has high parts and low parts. Those high and low parts are the sound. They're all different sizes and lengths depending on how long the sound goes. \n\nBut on a CD, instead of mountains and valleys of all different lengths and sizes that are translated into sound, there are tiny chunks all the same size that either say \"0\" (off) or \"1\" (on). You may recognize that as binary language, This is digital.\n\nA Laserdisc operates *sort of* like the record player, except with a laser eye instead of a needle.\n\nFWIW, after Laserdisc had been around for a while, they added in digital audio. The video was always analog though."
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2xu683 | why is the fifth string of the guitar standardly tuned to b rather than c (which would be consistent with the way that the other strings are tuned relative to each other, i.e. 5 half steps/frets)? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2xu683/eli5_why_is_the_fifth_string_of_the_guitar/ | {
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"Mainly because that was the way the viol, the predecessor to the guitar, was usually tuned (and the lute before that), with a major third interval between one set of strings, and tradition is how a lot of this stuff became the standard. \n\nBut also because it makes playing chords easier. Try playing an open E major chord across 6 strings tuned to EADGCF and you'll get what I'm talking about. A G major Barre chord would look like this.\n\n F: 2\n C: 2\n G: 4\n D: 5\n A: 5\n E: 3\n\nWhich would be really hard to fret.\n\nThey talk about it in a bit more detail on the wikipedia page [here](_URL_0_), too."
]
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6394us | why do so many educated people believe in religion? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6394us/eli5_why_do_so_many_educated_people_believe_in/ | {
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"Because intelligence and believing in a higher power are not mutually exclusive.\n\nSure most religions have many unattractive pieces and teachings that are more easily noticed with more education. They also have many \"plot holes\" that can't explain current events and seem to contradict currently believed \"facts\" about our universe and the world we perceive to live in.\n\nAll that said, we still don't know why we are here or how any of this happened, and to those questions religion has somewhat attractive answers that allow us to ascribe meaning to our lives. Regardless of intellect this is desirable and just like politics; I can claim to be religious without having to subscribe to all of my religion's beliefs.\n\nSource: Am atheist...wait. ",
"Because religion is intertwined with culture and family values and traditions. You can say the same about sports and being a fan of the sports teams that your father was a fan of. It's just passed on from one generation to the next. Education, particularly in the scientific fields, are going to clash with those religious values. Are scientists still religious? I'd probably say less than the general population, and those who are just look at it as part of their cultural heritage more than actually believing the word-for-word account of their God from thousands of years ago."
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3ocrmp | what would the big bang have looked like if you were able to view it from a great, great distance? | And would it have made a sound, if it were not surrounded by a vacuum? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ocrmp/eli5_what_would_the_big_bang_have_looked_like_if/ | {
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"I don't think it would be possible to see the Big Bang from any distance since it contained everything inside itself. Physics gets really confusing...!",
"You could not have viewed the big bang from a distance, because it filled the entire universe, and occurred everywhere at the same time. It was an expansion *of* space, not an explosion *in* space.",
"In a great 'distance'? There would be no distance prior to the big bang. Big bang would create the distance, time matter and everything in the universe.",
"Shows display the big bang often as a 'spot' expanding outwards. Because the key is expansion, and they want to display this. \n\nBut it's not a realistic image. The camera, in this case, is existing in 'nowhere.' There's no place the camera could be to film the big bang externally, because everywhere there was a 'where' there was big bang. \n\nIn reality, space is currently primarily believed to be infinite in extent, and it was infinite at the time of the big bang, it's just that it was more dense. 'Stuff' was packed more closely. But there was still infinity of tightly packed stuff in all directions. \n\nIt's just that over time more space has appeared between things. It's still infinite, but less dense. \n\nThe big bang itself isn't an explosion, or the creation of the universe, or an object floating in the vacuum of space. It's a time when the universe was very dense, and very hot.",
"There's a misconception that there was some big empty vacuum and the big bang expanded out into it. Actually, the spaces in-between the stars and galaxies are part of our universe and were part of the big bang expansion. You couldn't be floating far away in space and view the big bang. At any rate, even if there was some analog to your question you wouldn't have \"seen\" anything because there was no light. Light did not come into existence until about 380,000 years after the beginning of the expansion. "
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5oy20i | why does water taste terrible when you're sick, even though you're supposed to be drinking lots of fluids to get better? | When I'm sick with a bad cold or flu I'm always told that I need to drink lots of fluids. I can usually take a sip of juice or gatorade every once in awhile, but in general fluids do not sound good to me, and water is completely out of the question.
If my body is sick and really needs fluids to get better, shouldn't my body be telling me I need them by making me extra thirsty? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5oy20i/eli5eli5_why_does_water_taste_terrible_when_youre/ | {
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"It's a part of so called [sickness behavior](_URL_0_).\n\nImagine you're an animal living in wilderness and your food/water sources are scarce and require certain amount of energy to get to them. At the same time, there is quite high chance that you will fail in this task so it is wise to avoid search for them and invest all available energy into recuperative processes.\n\nMoreover, you can unintentionally provide essential factors (iron, zinc, vitamins) contained in food to pathogens which is a bad thing - your body makes its best to make them scarce to bacteria also on physiological level (e.g. lowering their concentrations and availability in the blood).\n\nIt's much more broad than getting food and water. While sick, you can also infect others, so staying at one place will lower sickness transmission.\n\nIt's a hard-wired response to infection and immune system changes motivational dispositions so you subjectively perceive that you don't need them thus fooling you to (not) do something."
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2pr8xd | what happens to the cars/money ellen gives away on her show? is it truly *free*? | I'm on a video watching spree and I've ended up watching the videos of Ellen when she gives away cars and money and even a HOUSE. It's very great.
However, surely it's not TRULY free. I mean surely the money has some taxes, or the car has insurance and tags and fees, among other things. When Ellen (or any kind of TV personality or celebrity) gives away these things like money or cars, do the people who get them have to pay the taxes and whatnot, or are they waived and it truly is free? Just wondering. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2pr8xd/eli5_what_happens_to_the_carsmoney_ellen_gives/ | {
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"I don't know about Ellen specifically, but I did read an article about Oprah giving away free cars. Basically, she got the cars for free from the manufacturer, basically as a form of advertising. If she had classified it as a gift, she would have had to pay the taxes on them. However, since she classified them as a prize, the recipients had to pay the taxes. Since a lot of them couldn't afford the taxes (I think it's something like 40% of the total value of the prize) the cars wound up getting sold.",
"It can depend on how Ellen reports them. Gifts are not taxable as the taxes have already been paid for by the gifter. Prizes don't work like that as they are seen as another form of income. What happens then is the giver of the prize writes it off on their taxes, and the winner pays for the prize in taxes. I don't know the instance that you are talking about, but when Oprah did it, the taxes on the cars were about $7,000. They can refuse the prize and not pay taxes. ",
"The items are tax free if the are calssfised as gifts. If they are classified as prizes then they are taxed. The classification depends on the person giving away the item. Ellen can claim the items on her taxes if she says they are prizes but she can't if she claims they are gifts so it really depends on how nice the host wants to be. Other things (like insurance on a new car) would almost certainly be covered by the person getting the item."
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3lf4l9 | - i used to remember my dreams almost every morning. now, i only remember one every few months. why? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3lf4l9/eli5_i_used_to_remember_my_dreams_almost_every/ | {
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"Do you smoke weed? I've noticed if I smoked the previous day I'm far more like to not have remembered my dreams. \n\nI've also heard apple juice promotes how vivid your dreams are. But I don't know how true that is.",
"if you keep a dream diary next to your bed and write down what you were dreaming just before you woke up, you will start to remember your dreams more. it has to be written down just after waking up or you will forget the dream fast"
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18f5vk | please: why are people hollering for obama to not raise minimum wage? | I see a lot of flak from folks claiming min wage shouldnt be raised. However I see in min wage jobs, people, (myself included) who are not teenagers, and trying to raise a family, and how hard it is to do on mere minimum wage.
What is it about raising minimum wage gets people so riled?
Edit: Hey guys - I appreciate the time you took to explain this. Thank you very much for your responses :) < 3 | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/18f5vk/eli5_please_why_are_people_hollering_for_obama_to/ | {
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"Some people think that there will be fewer jobs if the minimum wage is higher.\n\n(Some people, of course, just don't think that people *deserve* to earn more than the minimum wage.)",
"Because it will supposedly stunt job growth and prices will go up to counteract the raise in pay. The cost of living will go up because of it.",
"When I was 14, I worked at a small local family run grocery store. I made $6.00 an hour. (+/- 20 cents)\n\nI was 14. I didn't need more then $6 an hour. That grocery store was great because I wouldn't have been hired at any \"normal\" workplace, and they were able to give me and a bunch of other kids my age a place to go and work. \n\nI highly doubt that my work at age 14 was worth more then $6 an hour.",
"1. Raise minimum wage\n2. Raise prices (or lay people off) to compensate for increased labor costs\n3. Cost of living goes up as a result\n4. You're back where you started except now everything costs more. People earning (even slightly) above minimum wage won't see any pay increase and now effectively earn less. This means they also have less disposable income to dump back into the economy.",
"Personally, I think everyone should be paid a living wage. That means you should not have to dip into savings in order to pay for food, gas, or rent. \n\nHaving said that, raising minimum wage won't help in the way everyone thinks it will. \n\nSuppose I have cut my staff to the bone so I can afford to make my payroll. I have employees that I am relying on to work overtime. These employes are making minimum or slightly above it. Now the guys who are working overtime are costing me a lot more money. I can't fire them, but I can hire a part time employee to make sure no one gets overtime. So now I cut my overtime employee's hours back so I don't have to pay overtime (which I can't afford when it becomes a $3/hr difference). I also hire two more part time employees to make sure that no one gets overtime.\n\nThe other problem comes up when you hire new employees. You suddenly have to pay them $9/hour, but what about the employees you already have who are currently making $9/hr. Do you give them a raise to keep them the same rate above minimum? Do you keep them at the same rate as the new hires?\n\nYou result with your tenured employees having to work harder with less help and being paid the same as a new hire. ",
"If you raise minimum wage, unemployment will go up, cost of living expenses goes up, and nothing end up changing, just the number in the bank, your life will be the same/possibly worse.",
"Simple math. If the minimum wage is $7, then this is a $2 increase.\n\n$2 = $3,840 for 1 year.\n$3,840 x employees = Somebody getting laid off and the public now pays them unemployment while the rich still keep their tax cuts.\n\nHow many small businesses who have, say, 10 people, can afford to pay out $38,400 MORE for the same labor output next year because a liberal who makes a lot of money said they should?",
"Imagine you run a business, and you've worked out that you manage to pay a total of $90/hr., and imagine that minimum wage was $9/hr/person.\n\nSo, you can work out that you can afford to hire 10 people to work for you at $9/hr.\n\nNow the government comes along and says that you must pay people $10/hr., instead of $9/hr. But, you still can only afford to pay $90/hr total.\n\nAt $10/hr/person, now you can only afford to have 9 people working for you, instead of 10.\n\nThe numbers may vary, but the principle remains the same: higher required pay and the same (or, as happens in this economy often, LESS) money, means fewer jobs available, and thus fewer people working and more people out of work.",
"Rising minimum wage creates more unemployment while also raising the cost of living",
"One thing people are forgetting to mention is that a lot of minimum wage jobs are done by teenagers who come from stable middle class families. This only adds to their own wealth and doesn't solve the poverty problem.",
"1. Wages go down for skilled workers to accommodate the unskilled workers.\n2. Unskilled workers without jobs cannot get jobs because skilled workers barely make more than minimum wage. \n3. Eventually we end up with this economy. Kids go to college because they have no skills for a job. Everyone is making barely more than minimum wage and now has 30k debt. \n\nThis gets worse if we raise it. The only fix is for the baby boomers to die. ",
"Because they're uncertain of how it would affect business. \n\n**pros**\n\n* minimum wage workers save little and spend most of their income, which would put more $ in circulation. More spending means increased demand to buy and stimulates the economy and spending.\n\n* its 'fair' as the cost to live in the US increases.\n\n**cons** \n\n* increased costs for employers, they might not be able to afford the amount of workers they currently have and may be forced to lay off or fire people, increasing unemployment.\n\n* could increase inflation slightly as more money is put into circulation.",
"_URL_1_\nIn Ontario I believe the minimum wage went up from something like $6 to over 10 in 7 years, and it didn't hurt the economy. \n_URL_0_",
"Raising the minimum wage would mean additional costs for businesses of all sizes.\n\nConversely, raising the personal exemption amount on your income tax would mean everyone would get to keep more of their money WITHOUT additional costs for businesses. :)",
"Simply put: it raises the bottom line for businesses, and since no business owner would logically want to pay his employees more at cost to himself, they will raise prices to compensate.",
"You could pay a burger flipper 1,000,000 a year and all its going to do is drive up the cost of a car to a billion dollars\n\nThere simply isn't any great value, economically speaking, in unskilled no education required labor \n\nNot saying that to be mean, it's just the way the world has always worked and will always work ",
"I don't buy the fewer job argument, it is bull shit. The legitimate argument against minimum wage is that it just increase inflation. It doesn't matter if they make minimum wage 20 dollars an hour. That just means all goods and services become more expensive so in turn everything becomes more expensive. ",
"Companies also have to weigh profit versus demand. They CAN raise prices to compensate for increased labor costs, but this will be offset by reduced demand. It just depends on how short-sighted they are. They can keep prices where they are in the hope that they'll sell more goods at that lower price and, over the long term, make more profit. American companies are, on the whole, quite short-sighted.",
"Because there are a lot of dumb people who do whatever the republican party tells them to do.",
"Just read through this whole thread. I'm unsure of the truth to this answer and saw some semi insightful comments on this thread BUT where are the sources?!?!?!?! I understand the logic to their arguments but politicians and economic scientists don't just say shit like \"raise the minimum wage or don't\" without putting some time into the research. For that now I have to go do some sleuthing on my own. Find two legitimate studies from both sides of the argument and make up my own mind. Soon enough I'll be telling my Facebook friends the same thing because of their non sourced propaganda pictures they like and share. ",
"I'm seeing a lot of good concerns about inflationary factors, and the first-order budget issues that would affect employers.\n\nBut there is a 2nd-order effect: the people who are experienced employees, have gotten a past raise but are now paid the same as \"entry-level\" workers -- they will need raises also or else there is an incentive for them to leave and \"start\" somewhere else to get that raise bump.\n",
"Imagine you're the top guy at Walmart and you spend 100s of millions of dollars on payroll. The bulk of your employees make near or at the minimum wage. In fact, many of your employees earn so little that they are considered to be living in poverty and must seek out food stamps and other government aid in order to feed their families: _URL_0_\n\nThat being said, you could quite easily afford to pay all of your employees significantly more than you currently do. In fact, last year you made nearly 16 BILLION DOLLARS in pure profit, in part by smartly paying your employees the least amount you can get away with by law.\n\nBut despite making so much money, your \"investors\" (mostly wealthy folks who don't work at Walmart but who want Walmart to send them profits from the business so they can build bigger swimming pools) are still angry because while they are getting lots of extra money, its not enough extra money.\n\nThings are going swimmingly when suddenly Uncle Sam tells you that you have to pay your poor employees a dollar more an hour so they can afford things like dinner and soap and winter coats for their kids. So as head of Walmart, you now face a dilemma: Your investors are already unhappy because you only made 16 BILLION DOLLARS in proft last year and this news about increasing the minimum wage threatens to decrease your profits to 15.9 BILLION DOLLARS. So you do what you must: You hire a group of people to go out into the world (and to washington DC where bills become laws) and complain very loudly and very convincingly that raising the minimum wage is bad.\n\nThese people you hired complain so loudly and so convincingly that they convince lawmakers and citizens alike; they even convince some of the very same poor people who are being hurt by these policies in the first place. Before long, you have convinced enough people (rich and poor alike) that paying poor people more is a bad thing.\n\nIf all goes well, you have taken what is a simple issue of fighting poverty with decent social policy and turned it into a contentious issue to be fought over to such an extent, the basic point that millions of people in the world's richest country are living in poverty becomes lost in the fray.\n\nSo you see, despite keeping your employees poor by underpaying them; despite the fact that the US taxpayer must pay the difference when these people go to seek out much needed aid by way of medicaid and food stamps; and despite the fact that it is obvious to anyone with a 5th grade education that we're paying people too little to survive, you, the head of Walmart, know with completely certainty that you (and Walmart) have a lot more to lose by standing up to your investors than you do by underpaying your employees.",
"Wal-mart. Let's cut the b.s. about it hurting small business. Nothing in the beltway is done concerning the mini mart with 12 employees. It would be a drastic kick in the groin for a company like wal-mart who has been trying to keep unions out and suppress their workers for decades. See also; Lobbyists \n\nEdit: Just wanted to add, if we had adjusted for inflation over the past 20 years, minimum wage would be over $10/hr",
"Let's say that you're a teacher, and you have all the typical expenses of being an adult (house payment, food, family, etc.). Now when minimum wage is increased, it doesn't affect your salary at all, it only increases those that work for minimum wage. However, now prices of everything goes up because the min wage increase causes inflation. While the minimum wage worker has more money to pay for the more expensive everything (so nothing really changes), you now essentially have less money to pay for the exact same things.",
"if you raise minimum wage, you effectively lower the buying power of money. inflation.",
"I think minimum wage isn't the problem.\n\nI think that the problem is, there are plenty of large corporations making money hand over fist and it's all funneled to the top. \n\nCEO pay is frequently 50x, 100x, even 300x+ the pay of a regular worker.\n\n[Source](_URL_0_)\n\nI think what they need to do, instead of raising minimum wage, is to put a cap on the total earnings of senior management and company officers.\n\n",
"Government doesn't really have the power to set wages. Ultimately only customers set wages based on their willingness to pay for the goods and services rendered. A higher minimum wage rather than increasing wages simply makes less productive jobs illegal.",
"When minimum wage goes up so does the price of everything else. What doesn't go up is the wage of anyone making more then minimum wage. If you currently make $10/hr, you are making only $3 more then minimum wage. Ok, good for you. You can work one whole day to pay for a tank of gas to get you to work. Minimum wage goes up to $9/hr. So price of gas goes up because the rate of pay for the gas station attendant is $2/hr higher. Now you work a day and half to pay for the same amount of gas. EXCEPT you didn't get a pay increase, so you're only making $1 more/hr then minimum wage. (Oh and since gas costs more so does food because now it's more expensive to ship that food to factory and to the store.)"
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"http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/a-reason-to-celebrate-the-lowest-paid-in-ontario-just-got-a-raise/article1210598/"
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"http://www.aflcio.org/Corporate-Watch/CEO-Pay-and-the-99/CEO-to-Worker-Pay-Gap"
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3scxpb | how come you can't use a credit/debit card at a tollgate? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3scxpb/eli5_how_come_you_cant_use_a_creditdebit_card_at/ | {
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"1. fees. do you really want to subsidize amex or visa with dollars intended for roads and bridges?\n2. transaction processing / approval times are too slow - causes traffic.",
"The transaction cost is too high for small transactions like that, which is why many merchants have minimum purchase amount for card transactions. \n\nHowever, many states have electronic toll collection systems that can be billed to your credit card. I've had one on my car for over 2 years. Check with your state toll authority to see if it's an option where you live. "
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1bncp5 | how politicians can keep trying to create and pass laws that do nothing but prevent people from voting with no legal ramifications | Back in 2012 I kept hearing about laws being passed, or trying to be passed, whose sole purpose was to prevent a certain group of people from voting, or at least discouraging them from voting by making it more difficult to do so. How is that not illegal? How can politicians keep proposing laws like this with no legal repercussions? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1bncp5/eli5_how_politicians_can_keep_trying_to_create/ | {
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"You may have been hearing about the laws that created new requirements for voting. This is different from a law that explicitly bans people from voting (although convicted felons are unable to vote).\n\nThe best-known laws were those that would require ID cards at polling places to combat what lawmakers said was a serious problem with voter fraud. That is, these laws were supposedly designed to protect the institution of voting from people who might try to impersonate someone else and steal their vote.\n\nThe reason they barred people from voting is that there are segments of the population who do not have ID cards, and to whom access to an ID card is difficult. A lot of the controversy had to do with lawmakers wanting to enact ID laws at the same time that they were closing DMV locations - they were requiring IDs to vote and making it harder to get them.\n\nOn top of that, the people who tend not to have ID cards are generally younger people, poor people, and minorities - voting groups that tend to vote Democratic. And the majority, if not the entirety, of the lawmakers pushing voter ID requirements happened to be Republican. Knowing this, it could appear that Republicans are trying to make it harder for Democrats to vote.\n\nI'm not going to argue that this is what was happening, because I don't think that's your original question. But the basic facts, at least, are that a large number of Republican lawmakers were pushing for stricter requirements for voting, and that, in of itself isn't ~~legal~~ illegal. It might effectively make it harder, or impossible, to vote, but it isn't technically preventing anyone."
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6m4apk | what prevents a torrented game from being played online? | If torrenting includes every single bit of coding that goes in the game, how come it won't let you play multiplayer?
(I don't know anything about coding or connecting to a server) | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6m4apk/eli5_what_prevents_a_torrented_game_from_being/ | {
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"Most recent games require a key for activation. Either a number on the back of the box or a sign in required. \nIf multiple keys are used or the developers spot a key that's been leaked, it's simply denied access to login online. \nThink of the your name being that unique key, they deny access to 'John Smith'\n\nEdit - some torrented games include a patched file that skips the registration, which the bad guys have done for your convenience. This causes the same issue as above ",
"Everyone gets their own magic number when they buy the game. You want to connect to multiplayer you have to give them your magic number. Two people can't log in with the same magic number at the same time. If ten people try to log in with the same magic number at the same time then that magic number is 'revoked' and no longer works for anyone, including whoever originally bought the game with that magic number.\n\nSo the only way to fool this magic number system is to determine how the magic numbers are generated and generate your own, new, magic numbers for each hacked copy to use. This can and has been done. \n\nBut generally the magic number recipe is secret and carefully guarded. Very few magic number recipes are ever known. So hackers can not, for the vast majority of games, give you a new magic number that works.\n\nYou can publish your magic number on a forum. But then 10 people will try to use it, the servers will detect too many people using that magic number, and revoke it. Resulting in you not being able to play your game you paid in multiplayer. It's not in your interest to reveal your magic number to the public, so it's never done.\n\n#RealELI5"
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eavg6w | why do urinals need gallons of water to eliminate only a few mls of urine? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/eavg6w/eli5_why_do_urinals_need_gallons_of_water_to/ | {
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"To ensure the entirety of the urine is washed away and displaced requires that volume. Leaving any urine unflushed will create odours.",
"Because otherwise they smell RANCID.\n-I have a job as a janitor.\n-Men don’t always flush\n-🤢🤮",
"I didn't think urinals used that much water to flush. Holy shit I was wrong. Some older urinals apparently use up to 5 gallons of water per flush. \n\n [_URL_1_](_URL_0_)"
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58su89 | where does the term "concentration camp" originate? why did they choose concentration instead of extermination? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/58su89/eli5_where_does_the_term_concentration_camp/ | {
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"The official public line was that there was no extermination - just that undesirables were being rounded up and concentrated - like the US did with Japanese Americans in the same time period.\n\nIt was later discovered that even worse things were going on, and that these camps weren't just evil (like the American ones), but unimaginably evil. ",
"Auschwitz and other German death camps (a common term for them in the modern lingo) weren't the first concentration camps. \n\nConcentration camps were where \"undesirable\" populations were often kept to (in theory, at least) prevent spying, rebellion and so on. Literally speaking, the population was concentrated (brought physically closer) in these camps rather than being spread throughout a mixed population where they could spy, revolt and generally act against the wider population/government's interests",
"Concentration camps were not always meant to kill it's population, but merely a place fore the selected people. Most of the time the population would live there, sometimes it would be change to a work camp, however it is only when the people running it start killing the population that it becomes an extermination camp. Hitler, a horrible genius, knew he could round up the Jews, kill them, and have more Jews work and bury the dead ones. Concentration camps, historically, have never been good.",
"Concentration Camps are just that, places where you concentrate people. They have been used for thousands of years during war to protect and separate civilians, to hold captured enemy, and many other things. \n\nThe ones used by Germany during WWII were no different. Their original intent was to be a place to put undesirables until after the war when they could be deported outside the new German Kingdom. Then they got the idea that they could use them as a source for slave labor, and shortly after that decided that exterminating the undesirables was preferable to simply deporting them. \n\nThey did not become death camps until nearly halfway through their use during the war, and not all of them became death camps. That is why most modern historians differentiate between concentration camps, labor camps, and death camps. They are all very similar, and more often than not all extremely horrid but they are all slightly different in construction and intent. ",
"I also believe the term originated with the Boer War, when fighting against the widely dispersed Boers, the British Army failed at conventional warfare and seeking to remove the support for the Boers, concentrated the population into camps.\n\nThis of course caused vast problems as the British had unreliable supply lines, this was still in the pre-antibiotic age so diseases were rife and a sizable percentage of the Boer civilians died in the concentration camps. \n"
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jv9kx | the relationship between ron paul and the tea party? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jv9kx/eli5_the_relationship_between_ron_paul_and_the/ | {
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"Ron paul and the Tea party share a lot of similar views. The problem is the tea party has a lot of very right-wing members in it and Ron Paul differs on some key points between these extreme right-wingers. This difference of opinion with some of the very active tea partiers is why there is a disconnect between them.",
"Ron paul and the Tea party share a lot of similar views. The problem is the tea party has a lot of very right-wing members in it and Ron Paul differs on some key points between these extreme right-wingers. This difference of opinion with some of the very active tea partiers is why there is a disconnect between them."
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20ndv1 | what plays a larger factor in my wifi strength, my router or my device? | Also what other factosr strengthen or weaken WiFi | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/20ndv1/eli5_what_plays_a_larger_factor_in_my_wifi/ | {
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"Both. Wifi is a two-way street.\n\nPicture two people talking. If either one of them is hard of hearing, or has trouble talking, the entire conversation goes slower.\n\nHowever, it is generally much easier to boost the output and get better antennas for your wireless AP than it is for your device.\n\nOther factors that can affect wifi are interference (other devices like cordless phones that may be on the same frequency), obstacles (especially building construction), transmission power and antenna gain of either device, direction of the signal, software/firmware issues on either device."
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jf0sn | what are the end goals of communism and fascism. what are the policies and strategies used to achieve these goals? | I would also like to know things like:
Where does socialism end and communism begin?
How does private industry play into fascism?
How has fascism and communism evolved since WWII?
| explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jf0sn/eli5_what_are_the_end_goals_of_communism_and/ | {
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"Q: \"Where does socialism end and communism begin?\" \nA: \"Both socialism and communism are based on the principle that the goods and services produced in an economy should be owned publicly, and controlled and planned by a centralized organization. Socialism says that the distribution should take place according to the amount of an individual's production efforts, whilst communism asserts that that goods and services should be distributed among the populace according to individuals' needs.\" \n[source](_URL_0_) \n",
"Q: \"What are the end goals of ... Fascism?\" \nA: \"Fascists seek to purge forces, ideas, people, and systems deemed to be the cause of decadence and degeneration, and to produce their nation's rebirth based on commitment to the national community based on organic unity, in which individuals are bound together by connections of ancestry, culture, and blood. Fascists believe that a nation requires strong leadership, singular collective identity, and the will and ability to commit violence and wage war in order to keep the nation strong. Fascist governments forbid and suppress opposition to the state. \n[wiki](_URL_0_)",
"Q: \"What are the end goals of Communism?\" \nA: \"Communism is a kind of socialism that says that there should not be social classes or states. Communism says that the people of any and every place in the world should all own the tools, factories, and farms that are used to produce goods and food. This social process is known as common ownership. In a communist society, there is no private property.\" \n[wiki](_URL_0_)",
"Q: \"What are the policies and strategies used to achieve these goals?\" \nPropaganda.\nCommunists try to incite an uprising of the working class. It tends to work when the working class suffers a lot of abuse and poor working conditions, like it was following the industrial revolution.\nFascists use education to indoctrinate people from an early age. They teach that one should have allegiance to their nation over anything else. They emphasize the military as a key part of the nation. Sometimes they indicate that a certain race, religion, lineage, & c. are what makes someone a good citizen of their nation.\nThe key to getting fascism going is to point out someone else as a problem: some other race, some religion, another nation, etc. They rally the citizens around others like them, and point out those who aren't like them as the problem. For example, the Nazis targeted \"Jews, Romani (also known as Gypsies), Jehovah's Witnesses, people with mental or physical disabilities and homosexuals.\"\n(Source: wikipedia. Still.)",
"These are almost unanswerable questions but I will try my best! For the first two I think you are wanting to know what an ideal Fascist and Communist society is.\n\n**Fascism** \n \n* One party system\n\n* Removal of all opposition (politically and every other form)\n\n* War is progress (you better your society by crushing countries opposed to you)\n\n* Militarism in general populace to create a unity \n\n* Economics used are pretty much same used in the world now\n\n**Communism**\n\n* Run by a party's made up of working class (there tends to be only one party in Communist societies as it comes about by revolution)\n\n* No one owns anything, everything owned by the state and distributed by need\n\n* no classes (ie upper, middle or lower class)\n\n* Many, many different interpretations on how to achieve these goals, but no communist government has achieved them yet due to corruption during transition.\n\n\n\nSocialism is an economic model where as Communism is a shift in the structure of society. Socialism is the running of institutions (i.e. healthcare, benefits ect.) by the state so Communism uses socialism as its economic model but there is no other connection other than that. So calling socialism communist is like calling physics maths.\n\n\n\nIf private industry was given free reign it would naturally move towards monopolies as power was centralized by wealth (i.e. the best company in a certain field would accumulate enough wealth so that any competition, or opposition, would be destroyed). This is similar to what fascism is.\n\n\n\nThey haven't evolved, there are just different interpretations of each in different governments (I am equating dictator ships to fascism here). There are too many variables to explain without writing a 10,000 word thesis on each.",
"Q: \"Where does socialism end and communism begin?\" \nA: \"Both socialism and communism are based on the principle that the goods and services produced in an economy should be owned publicly, and controlled and planned by a centralized organization. Socialism says that the distribution should take place according to the amount of an individual's production efforts, whilst communism asserts that that goods and services should be distributed among the populace according to individuals' needs.\" \n[source](_URL_0_) \n",
"Q: \"What are the end goals of ... Fascism?\" \nA: \"Fascists seek to purge forces, ideas, people, and systems deemed to be the cause of decadence and degeneration, and to produce their nation's rebirth based on commitment to the national community based on organic unity, in which individuals are bound together by connections of ancestry, culture, and blood. Fascists believe that a nation requires strong leadership, singular collective identity, and the will and ability to commit violence and wage war in order to keep the nation strong. Fascist governments forbid and suppress opposition to the state. \n[wiki](_URL_0_)",
"Q: \"What are the end goals of Communism?\" \nA: \"Communism is a kind of socialism that says that there should not be social classes or states. Communism says that the people of any and every place in the world should all own the tools, factories, and farms that are used to produce goods and food. This social process is known as common ownership. In a communist society, there is no private property.\" \n[wiki](_URL_0_)",
"Q: \"What are the policies and strategies used to achieve these goals?\" \nPropaganda.\nCommunists try to incite an uprising of the working class. It tends to work when the working class suffers a lot of abuse and poor working conditions, like it was following the industrial revolution.\nFascists use education to indoctrinate people from an early age. They teach that one should have allegiance to their nation over anything else. They emphasize the military as a key part of the nation. Sometimes they indicate that a certain race, religion, lineage, & c. are what makes someone a good citizen of their nation.\nThe key to getting fascism going is to point out someone else as a problem: some other race, some religion, another nation, etc. They rally the citizens around others like them, and point out those who aren't like them as the problem. For example, the Nazis targeted \"Jews, Romani (also known as Gypsies), Jehovah's Witnesses, people with mental or physical disabilities and homosexuals.\"\n(Source: wikipedia. Still.)",
"These are almost unanswerable questions but I will try my best! For the first two I think you are wanting to know what an ideal Fascist and Communist society is.\n\n**Fascism** \n \n* One party system\n\n* Removal of all opposition (politically and every other form)\n\n* War is progress (you better your society by crushing countries opposed to you)\n\n* Militarism in general populace to create a unity \n\n* Economics used are pretty much same used in the world now\n\n**Communism**\n\n* Run by a party's made up of working class (there tends to be only one party in Communist societies as it comes about by revolution)\n\n* No one owns anything, everything owned by the state and distributed by need\n\n* no classes (ie upper, middle or lower class)\n\n* Many, many different interpretations on how to achieve these goals, but no communist government has achieved them yet due to corruption during transition.\n\n\n\nSocialism is an economic model where as Communism is a shift in the structure of society. Socialism is the running of institutions (i.e. healthcare, benefits ect.) by the state so Communism uses socialism as its economic model but there is no other connection other than that. So calling socialism communist is like calling physics maths.\n\n\n\nIf private industry was given free reign it would naturally move towards monopolies as power was centralized by wealth (i.e. the best company in a certain field would accumulate enough wealth so that any competition, or opposition, would be destroyed). This is similar to what fascism is.\n\n\n\nThey haven't evolved, there are just different interpretations of each in different governments (I am equating dictator ships to fascism here). There are too many variables to explain without writing a 10,000 word thesis on each."
]
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|
4kd85b | magnetic resonance imaging (mri) | How does it work? Most other explanations I found weren't too 'explanatory'... Pls halp | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4kd85b/eli5_magnetic_resonance_imaging_mri/ | {
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"Consider that the majority of your body is composed of water. MRIs rely on that fact.\n\nNow imagine an MRI machine as a giant magnet with an image capture device. Once you are placed inside of it, the magnet is turned on. This sends a bunch of energy into the water, and causes all of the water molecules in your body to rotate out of whatever position they were in and change into another orientation. \n\nThen the magnet is turned off. Now all of the water reverts to its original position and releases that energy placed into it by the magnet. Now the MRI machine absorbs that released energy into an image capture device and forms a picture based on the location of that water. The details of the image made of your body are produced because the water in certain tissues releases its energy at different speeds.\n\nEdit: MRIs are extremely safe as long as there is no metal in the room, which will be attracted to the powerful magnet. Also, unlike x-rays and cat scans, they do not increase your risk of cancer because they do not use ionizing radiation.\n\nEdit 2: This is a very ELI5 explanation -- there are more complete ones elsewhere in this thread.",
"The protons in your body line up to the magnetic field generated by the machine. Radiofrequency pulses knocks the protons out of that alignment. The protons recover to the original alignment at different speeds depending which tissue they are in. Pictures are taken at certain times in that recovery process which allows us to tell the tissues apart. \n\nThe big machine generates the magnetic field and the RF pulses. Smaller pieces of equipment are placed over the body to measure the change in energy states of the protons by measuring the voltage induced by that positional change. A computer does some math (inverse Fourier transform) to turn that data into pictures.",
"A superconducting magnet vibrates at a specific rate (for each chemical) and forces them to line up like tiny magnets. When the signal is turned off, all of the atoms switch back to their original position. That gives off energy which is detected by the machine.\n\n\nPS: metal is not a problem except that it may distort a reading. Titanium markers are routinely placed at biopsy sites for future monitoring of the location.",
"I think of it like ringing a bell to see what sound it makes. The body goes into a strong magnetic field, which is like holding a bell with your fingers to quiet it. Then we \"ring the bell\" by firing radio frequency pulses at it. Then we listen to the sound that comes out (more radio frequency pulses) as it rings.",
"Here is a simulation of how an MRI works that you can tinker with to get a better understanding of how the different components work together.\n\n_URL_0_ \n\nThis site also has a ton of other fun simulations for a wide variety of science subjects for many education levels.\n\n_URL_1_ \n"
]
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"http://phet.colorado.edu/en/simulations/category/new"
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2w0tmy | how do speakers of japanese, chinese and other languages with pictographic writing systems organise their dictionaries? | It seems simple, but speaking a language that uses letters in an ordered alphabet makes this easy— but with pictographic writing systems (as far as I know) there is no set order, so how do they do it? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2w0tmy/eli5_how_do_speakers_of_japanese_chinese_and/ | {
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"Japanese does have a common way of ordering their sounds. It is the order they use for their hirigana (Ka, ki, ku, ke, ko.) So some dictionaries get ordered in that way. (well, Japanese - english dictionaries do, at least).\n\nThen another way to order them would be by kanji radical. Kanji are made up of several reoccurring pieces called radicals. So if you would come across an unknown kanji, you could use a kanji dictionary and start looking up things on a radical base. Radicals, as far as I know, are ordered by stroke order, from least strokes to most strokes ",
"Japanese has the Gojuon, which is a sort of alphabetical order for hirigana. It's a 5x10 chart with rows representing consonate sounds and columns representing vowels with an extra space for the \"n\" sound. (The character that looks like a slanted \"h.\") In this arrangement, the \"ah\" sound is first and the \"n\" sound is last.",
"For chinese, we use the left-hand side of the characters (radical), by number of strokes it takes to draw them, plus some other things I don't remember anymore. Then you go by sound (English alphabetical order basically).\n\nIt's really no more difficult than figuring out alphabetical order, once you figure out the count and go to the radicals list, you've essentially cut it down to about 5 or 6 possible radicals so you can just pick it out by eye, go to the page, follow some things (I don't remember honestly, it's been years since I've last touched a Chinese-style dictionary, or even a regular dictionary), and then you just do alphabetical search.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nif you're worried about stroke order it's really as arbitrary as French or English spelling (perhaps less so, even).",
"Adding to the other comments about Japanese, they actually have more than one ordering used for their syllabary. I'm at work with no IME so apologies for not using the actual characters.\n\nThere's the Gojuuon that dictionaries use, which is organised with the bare vowels first in order a i u e o, then each consonant-vowel pair (not strictly correct but it works) in order. So you get:\n\n a i u e o\n ka ki ku ke ko\n sa shi su se so\n ta chi tsu te to\n na ni nu ne no\n ha hi hu he ho\n ma mi mu me mo\n ya yu yo\n ra ri ru re ro\n wa wo\n n\n\n\nThen there's the iroha, which is used in the same sorts of situation where we English speakers would use roman numerals, for instance as paragraph identifiers (e.g. \"page 16, paragraph ii\"), plus IIRC the names of the music notes use it. That ordering is based on an old poem that used every syllable once, though the language has changed since and it doesn't quite work if pronounced the modern way. It goes (and I had to look this up past the first line):\n\n i ro ha ni ho he to\n chi ri nu ru wo\n wa ka yo ta re so\n tsu ne na ra mu\n u wi no o ku ya ma\n ke fu ko e te\n a sa ki yu me mi shi\n we hi mo se su\n\nSo yeah, not exactly useful information but I guess something for you to 'TIL' about."
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6vyox6 | what causes random bursts of energy in a person? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6vyox6/eli5what_causes_random_bursts_of_energy_in_a/ | {
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"usually due to a surge in the hormone adrenaline (aka epinephrine), which is a fight or flight (stress) hormone. Adrenaline causes your heart rate to go up, blood pressure to go up, increase blood flow to your muscles"
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62bquk | the euphoric (endorphin?) feeling release of lsd | Title says it all, for people that have done it or understand the science behind it, what happens when you take LSD? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/62bquk/eli5_the_euphoric_endorphin_feeling_release_of_lsd/ | {
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"Haha, I just read a passage describing LSD use from my GMAT practice exam. \n\nSimply put, LSD contains and releases chemicals into your brain that simulate dreaming (norepinephrine and serotonin), when those naturally occurring chemicals that cause dreaming are produced when you sleep/hit the REM cycle of your sleep. \n\nI just wrote off the top of my head from memory, so anyone feel free to correct me. Tried to over, oversimplify it a bit. "
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1zw6s5 | zero-point field and it's potential uses? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1zw6s5/eli5_zeropoint_field_and_its_potential_uses/ | {
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"Zero-point energy is the lowest amount of energy possible in the universe. You would think that in totally empty space, there would be no energy, but there actually is a very tiny amount.\n\nCan we use it? No, probably not. If it's the lowest physically possible amount of energy, then that's it: we can't pull anything out because it can't go lower. If the lowest possible value that energy could have is \"1\" instead of \"0,\" there isn't really any difference. It just means we can never get down to 0."
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8dxqdd | how does hydrogen peroxide clean your ears? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8dxqdd/eli5_how_does_hydrogen_peroxide_clean_your_ears/ | {
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"I don’t know about the chemistry, but the dilute peroxide reacts with the dead skin/moisture/was in the ears causing effervescence. \nThis lifts and break off debris from the drum and canal walls making them easier to remove via suction. \n\nSource: I clean ears "
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embuo0 | how do krypton plasma globe work? | It's interesting how the light appears when the globe is touched... Was wondering the reason for this happening! | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/embuo0/eli5_how_do_krypton_plasma_globe_work/ | {
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"I must first explain capacitance. When you touch something to a voltage, it gains a little bit of electric charge. This transfer is quite quick, and the energy involved is pretty small for low voltages, but it happens. Now, if you bounced your finger between a positive and negative voltage, you'd effectively be picking up and dropping off little bundles of electricity every time you switch. How much electricity is moved every time is determined by how much capacitance you have.\n\nNow, instead of moving your finger, you can have one electrical contact that switches voltages really fast. Now the electric charge can flow in and out of nearby things without them being connected to anything else - electricity can flow without forming an actual loop. A high voltage alternating positive and negative causes electricity to flow back and forth from the center to the glass ball.\n\nBy touching the ball you add your body's capacitance and the electricity flows to your hand."
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11hsi3 | the motion tracking | How do things like the Kinect work? And how could they be made better? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/11hsi3/eli5_the_motion_tracking/ | {
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"Kinnect works by looking at your body and via software determining where you are in relation to your surroundings, then uses that info in the game.\n\nWays it could improve? Possibly with a second kinnect to allow for true 3D binocular vision, software improvements, and the understanding it sucks as a gaming controller and would be better suited in other applications. \n\nThe Wii and Move both use different methods, both of which arguably work much better as they track a nice simple controller and not a highly complex human body."
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2nf3oq | why is the guitar typically played with the dominant hand doing the easy bit (strumming/plucking the strings), while the less dexterous hand has to cope with all the more fiddly fretwork? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2nf3oq/eli5why_is_the_guitar_typically_played_with_the/ | {
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"If you think about it the picking hand does quite a bit more work than you think. Apart from just picking you have to control the dynamics of how you strum/pick the strings, hard/soft etc. This is especially true of finger pickers which requires alot of effort on the dominant hand's part.\n\nSource: Guitarist for over 10 years",
"A lot of it is carryover from the basic techniques of playing stringed instruments like the violin and cello, which comes back to what /u/ChurchillianGrooves said. The fingering is actually rather mechanical and rote, even given stuff like vibrato, slides, and such. But all of your volume, tone, inflection, comes from how you apply the bow to the stings. That's where all of the soul comes from. That's where you need your precision and deftness.\n\nSource: Cellist for 24 years",
"Thinking about it, it seems to me that in most circumstances, activities that tend to be done only with a dominant hand are usually relatively large motions, performed with at least the wrist, if not more of the arm.\n\nThrowing a ball uses the whole arm, with different motions from different parts, depending on the type of ball.\n\nBrushing your teeth or hair uses quite a bit of the arm, when you think about it.\n\nDrinking? Eating? Whole arm.\n\nA standard keyboard/mouse setup, like WASD+mouse for gaming, is very similar to guitar playing--wrist motions with the mouse, little fliddly parts with the left hand figners.\n\nSo look at guitar playing. Yes, the fretting hand has lots of little motions to make, but relatively little motion of the wrist or whole arm. Whereas the strumming hand is almost all wrist/elbow, and relatively little of the fingers (fingerpicking aside).\n\nI don't know if there's any science backing this up, but it looks like a pattern to me."
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4hzee9 | what happens to a human body when it hits pavement after falling a great height? does it splatter? or does the skin hold everything in without breaking? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4hzee9/eli5_what_happens_to_a_human_body_when_it_hits/ | {
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"It depends on the height, but it's either splatter or they will slap the ground and their innards are turned into jelly..\n\nJust watch a couple falling vids on r/watchpeopledie"
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1zocrb | lactic acid myth article. can anyone verify this article and give me a 5 year old explanation? | _URL_0_
mmk. so i just read this article and it basically says lactic acid is a myth. I have read so much on lactic acid so to find this out is a little unbelievable and the sources are either not there or i couldnt find them so can anyone give me a little insight? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1zocrb/eli5lactic_acid_myth_article_can_anyone_verify/ | {
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"well back in the day it was thought that when you overexercized your muscles lactic acid, a product of metabolism in poorly oxigenated conditions would be trapped in the muscles, cause pain, and be a sign of novelty in terms of the stimulus given to the muscle.\n\n\nthere were many theories surrounding lactic acid and body acidosis, about what you should and should not eat after exercise, how to improve tamponization, but they were mostly moot.\n\n\nit is know today that muscle pain is actually a product of pure outright inflammation, and that inflammation is the driver of muscle growth and recruitment of satellite cells.\n\n\ntl:dr: people thought lactic acid was some sort of measure of amount of exercise and indicator of muscle development, people were wrong. \n\n_URL_0_",
"TL;DR - bad science.\n\nThe lactic acid build up would occur in the muscle tissue, not the blood. When we exercise, for instance, our body breaks down glucose for energy. This causes pyruvate to be formed and lactate as a byproduct. This all occurs in the TISSUE, not the blood. If it were to transfer to blood, then you'd feel muscle cramps all over your body instead of, like, your calves from sprinting.\n\nCharged Hydrogen (protons) are indicative of acid. When bound to lactate, guess what that forms. Moreover, we have protons free flowing around our body, in our blood, in our brain, wherever we need ions... why aren't we having systemic burning sensations?\n\nLet me TL;DR this article:\nProfessor bought his degree, doesn't know basic biology."
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uipt1 | how do you play dungeons and dragons? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/uipt1/eli5_how_do_you_play_dungeons_and_dragons/ | {
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"I can give you a very basic overview. \n\nFirst off, you have the Dungeon Master. He's the person who creates the world and makes all the big decisions. Everybody else creates a character. \n\nThe Dungeon Master begins weaving the story, explaining to the characters where they are and what their goal is- a good DM will do this with lots of enthusiasm and flair!\n\nThe characters then make their own choices based on their religion, their background, and their skills. For example- a Human who hates Orcs would never say, \"I love Orcs! Let's be friends with this Orc!\" Instead, they'd be more likely to say, \"Kill the Orc!! I hate that guy!\"\n\nApart from the storytelling and role playing, there is combat. Whenever you come across a bad guy on your journey, the DM has created a character for him and will control him. If you decide to attack the bad guy, you must roll the dice a few times. \n\nThe first time is to figure out who gets to attack first- this can be a big factor in who wins a battle. \n\nThe second dice roll is to determine whether you hit him or not- if you roll below a certain number (which the DM knows but you do not), then you miss. If you roll a 1, that is a critical failure and commonly ends with you breaking your weapon or hurting yourself. Conversely, if you roll a 20, that's a critical hit and you get to do extra damage! \n\nDamage is the third roll. That's how you figure out how much health he loses when you attack him. \n\nNow, battles aren't the only place you get to show off your talents and skills! Often, throughout the story, you will have to do a skill check. These are used to figure out if you can complete a certain task and how well you do it. \n\nFor example- you need to lie to a bartender so he doesn't know you're looking for the treasure! If you roll a high speech skill check, you might say- \"We're not searching for treasure- we're just in town to sell our wares and buy new armor.\" If you roll low, you might say- \"We... uh... treasure? I never met the guy! Ahaha... we're definitely not treasure hunting. Nope. Not us. I don't even know what treasure is!\" \n\nThere are other skill checks, too- such as climbing, riding horses, swimming, and lots more!\n\nReally, the best way to learn is get a few friends and try it yourself! I highly recommend it!\n\nEDIT:\nIf you want to learn more, get help from current players, or join a group- check out r/dungeonsanddragons and r/lfg! \n\nANOTHER EDIT:\nAlso r/rpg! (Thank you, alienman911!) Also also r/dnd! (Thanks, DevilChicken!)",
"Get a group of 3-6 friends together. One of you will be the \"Dungeon Master\" and will be responsible for adjudicating the rules and creating the framework for the story you'll play through together. You can think of him sort of like the guy at an improv show who barks out stuff for the actors to do. Sort of.\n\nThe other players will each create a character that they will play, generally consisting of a race (human, elf, dwarf, etc.) and a class (fighter, wizard, rogue, cleric, etc.). In addition to that broad structure, the characters will have some stats that are either assigned or randomly determined (like strength, dexterity, and charisma), and some gear that they will carry. In most cases, they will also have some sort of backstory. Perhaps the fighter was raised on a farm, joined the military, and later left to become a mercenary.\n\nWith all this in place, the DM will give the players the beginning of a story to work through. The classic is \"you all meet in a bar and a mysterious stranger gives you something to do,\" but there are as many ways to start an adventure as you can imagine. Adventures will almost invariably involve some combat, which is handled through a fairly complex series of die rolls, which the players and DM attach some sort of narrative to. If, for example, the fighter takes a swing at a monster and rolls well, the DM might say something like, \"Your sword opens up a nasty wound on the monster's side, and he falls back, clutching it.\"\n\nThat's the basics of the game. There will usually be an end to the adventure, which may take one gaming session or multiple ones. If the characters stick together for multiple adventures, this is usually referred to as a campaign, and recurring themes, enemies, jokes, etc. may appear.",
"Well you don't play it with 4th gen.",
"It's make-believe with rules.",
"This isn't an explanation, but a plug for a [highly relevant subreddit](_URL_0_) where you can find lots of help with any rpg-related inquiries. The folks there are exceptionally friendly, and will answer questions about D & D and other rpgs.",
"I know this really isn't an explanation, but as blkstallion88 pointed out, DnD really is a game you need to experience. [Here](_URL_0_) is a great example of what you can expect when you get a bunch of friends together with a good dungeon master. Bonus! It's the writers of Robot Chicken!\n\nEDIT: It's a multi-part video series.",
"One person (who either volunteers or gets chosen by the group) is called the dungeon master and is in charge of creating the world and controlling all the badguys, shopkeepers, and other people in the world. Everyone else creates a character, choosing a race (like human or elf) and a class (like wizard or barbarian) and making a few other choices, like picking skills and spells and equipment. The dungeon master describes the world, and the players decide what they want to do.\n\nSpecific things, like how to determine if you can jump across a wide gap, or how hard it is to hit a dragon with a sword, or how much money it costs to buy a potion, are all listed in the rulebooks.",
"Ever watched \"Whose Line is it Anyway\"? It's like that. Only the rules aren't *completely* made up, many of the points do matter, and you use dice to decide some things instead of Drew Carey. ",
"how accurate is the D & D episode of community?",
"The DM is your storyteller and god of your world...if they suck the game *will* suck, but a good one can turn the experience into a journey of enlightenment and life-changing self-realization...or just one hell of a lot of fun.\n\nBad D & D is like playing WoW except you wait on dice rolls.",
"Not a short answer, and NSFW(language), but [this is completely necessary for a full answer.](_URL_0_)",
"You and your friends are sitting in a tavern drinking mead and a strange old man approaches you. \"I hear you all are seeing adventure\" he says...",
"It's like a ridiculously elaborate board game, so elaborate that you need a special player called the dungeon master whose only purpose is to administer the rules. If you are so inclined you can additionally invent personalities for each of your characters that you act out while playing the game.",
"Get a group of friends together, get them to roll dice and make up numbers, and also eat snacks and sometimes drink alcohol. You are playing D & D.",
"It's a set of guidelines to play in imaginary worlds with your friends. While there are lots of rulebooks available if you want them, in the end, they are simply suggestions. The most compelling aspect of play is the group's shared creativity, pushing the what-ifs forward. \n\nWith the right mindset, it can be a tremendous amount of fun!",
"You should watch the Community (tv show) episode entitled 'Advanced Dungeons and Dragons'.",
"Obligitory [Sir Bearington](_URL_0_) post ",
"First, it's not really a \"game\" in the traditional sense. There are elements of a cooperative game, and points to gain, but really, it's just interactive storytelling. It's like putting on a play, except even the director doesn't know ahead of time everything that's going to happen. So it's kind of like long-form improv.\n\nThe Dungeon Master sets the scene, and each of the players has a character they're playing the part of. \n\nInevitably, there are points where a decision has to be made. The characters tried this tactic - what happened? Did it work? Sometimes the DM can just decide, but other times it's all about luck, and that's when the dice come out. This happens a lot in combat - roll to see if you hit the bad guy, or the bad guy hits you, or how badly hurt someone is. But also in other interactions - roll to see how good a job you do persuading the guard to open the door... \n\nThere are predefined game effects - spells, powers, skills, that sort of thing - that the players have to decide when to use. The particular story almost always involves a particular quest they're trying to complete, or bad guy they're trying to stop. In a long campaign there are probably multiple interleaving storylines that pop up over and over again, just like in a long-running TV series. \n\nD & D was invented by guys who played wargames, so you can play it that way - with real paper maps and miniatures, tracking every combat maneuver on the table in front of the players. I like that style, as battles tend to be messy things that are hard to visualize based on description alone. How many movies have tremendous battle scenes ruined by lousy direction or cinematography? I'm not the best visualizer anyway. But other players prefer to do it all with words, not worrying about the precise locations of the characters next to each other, but just doing what makes sense whenever the rules involve a decision based on that stuff. They feel the wargamerly mechanics just get in the way.\n\nSo there are different styles. The players differ in how much they get into character (think of it as method acting vs non-method acting), how much they goof around during the game, etc. Some DMs like to set mood music, others just lounge around and lob exposition balls around the room. It's a wide spectrum, so there's probably a group that suits just about anybody..",
"Ask the slightly nerdier looking guy sat next to you who always seems to know what dice to use and when to change his stats. \n\nThat's what I did anyway and I managed to muddle through.",
"...and now I want to try out DnD.",
"This subreddit is really going downhill. This is not a question where you're trying to gain an understanding of something hard to understand, it's a question made from laziness and lack of motivation to look something up.",
"Oh shit, dude. You just opened a whole heap of nerd that no five year old can handle. DnD is and incredibly complex and content filled game, and I'd suggest just reading the rule book.",
"Rather late to the party, but I want to clarify when you roll the dice. It varies from game to game but a general rule of thumb is: Only roll the dice when there is a chance of failure and something important is at stake. \n\nGame Master (or Dungeon Master, these terms are synonymous) decides when rolls are needed. For example, most games have a swimming skill. Characters with higher skills are better swimmers. If the characters decide to go swimming because it's a hot summer day there's no need to roll the dice. Nothing is at stake and there is no interesting result of failure. \n\nBut if the characters have to swim across the raging river and reach the other side so they can stop the Evil Bad Guy from destroying the world, then the Game Master would tell the players to roll their swimming skill. A successful roll means they achieved their goal, the made it to the other side of the river. Failure can mean lots of different things and is usually up to the Game Master. A good Game Master will pick a failure result that is interesting and dramatic, "
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2gd8sv | if you ask a cop if you are being detained and he does not answer, can you legally leave ? | A lot of interactions: "Am I being detained?"
Then the cop is silent or avoids question outright. When do you know you can leave? (If it matters, state of Ohio) | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2gd8sv/eli5_if_you_ask_a_cop_if_you_are_being_detained/ | {
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"I would wait until they actually say \"no\", then ask if you can leave until they say \"yes\".",
"Legally, yes. But it would be an opportunity for the officer to misinterpret your leaving as resisting arrest, interfering with an officer in performance of his duties, failure to follow an order, jaywalking, assaulting him with your vehicle, attempted battery for walking near him, failure to provide identification, miscenegation, suspected gang affiliation, etc. \n\nRequiring a cop to respect your rights is a sure fired way to get arrested. And once arrested, probability of wrongful conviction is very, very high. "
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ct3o8e | how does bank money lending work? they let you borrow money that doesn't exist? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ct3o8e/eli5_how_does_bank_money_lending_work_they_let/ | {
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"They loan you someone else's money then you give them that money and some of your own money. This is how a bank makes money.",
"Here's my (very basic) understanding, via analogy.\n\nAlice gives $10 to Bob for safe-keeping (making Bob the bank, and Alice a bank customer). Then Charlie asks Bob the Banker for a $10 loan, Bob grants it, but with 20% interest, and gives Charlie $10. Later, Charlie pays back $12.\n\nNow Dana asks Bob for $11. Before Charlie borrowed money, Bob could only promise the $10 he had from Alice. Since Charlie paid it back, Bob can give Dana all $11, but expects to get about $13 back.\n\nAt this point, Bob promises to give Dana access to all $10, Dana has $11, and Bob the Banker has $1 but expects to eventually have $13.\n\nNow, Alice wants $1 of her money to buy a candy bar. Since Bob still has some cash, he can do that.\n\nWhere there's a problem is when Alice suddenly doesn't trust Bob and wants all $10 back. So Bob either screws over Alice and doesn't give her the money, or he gives Alice money from his own pocket (putting Bob in debt), and has to collect more money somewhere else.",
"The money does exist, but in effect, two people have it at the same time. Lets say that the only two people in the world are Bonnie and Clyde. Clyde has deposited $10,000 into the bank. Bonnie wants to buy a new house, and goes to the bank for a loan for $8,000. The bank happily gives Bonnie the loan and she buys Clyde's house for $8,000. Clyde takes his check and once again deposits it into the bank.\n\nClyde had $18,000 when only $10,000 existed at the begining!? You may scream. In a way...yes. Indide the bank vault, there is only $10,000 of cash. \n\nWhat if Clyde wanted to withdraw all his money? This would be called a \"bank run\" when a lot of people all try and withdraw all their money, forcing the bank to run out of current cash and likely force it to sell assets or close (or both). This has actually happened in the US in the past.\n\nA couple factors make this unlikely.\n\n1) Even the small banks are pretty large. If one or two people withdraw all their money, chances are its not even a dent in the banks cash reserve.\n\n2) The federal government mandates banks keep at least a certain level of cash on hand. This ensures banks are not operating completely without cash.\n\n3) The Federal government insures most legitimate bank deposits up to $250,000. This means that even if you think a bank may fail, you dont necessarily need to withdraw all your cash asap because its insured. You are protected.\n\n4) Banks have assets, just not cash. That $8,000 loan that Bonnie took out above? That is an asset to the bank, it is worth something. If something happened, the bank could sell that loan to someone else in order to get the cash it needs.",
"The full layman explanation is [here](_URL_0_), and is an easy read meant to be accessible to a wide audience. It's actually interesting and I encourage you to read it.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe short of it is once you're approved for the loan, the banks create it out of thin air. Banks don't need money to lend money, and lending has nothing to do with the federal reserve or fractional reserve.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe article briefly explains that banks must be profitable, and what that means, so that banks don't just make their own money and pay themselves. The system is meant to be semi-stable and self-regulated."
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5zqdjj | why do we use milli, micro, etc. seconds for small units of time but minutes, hours, days, etc. for large. | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5zqdjj/eli5_why_do_we_use_milli_micro_etc_seconds_for/ | {
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"because of tradition.\n\nthe concept of dividing days into smaller parts basically comes from ancient Babylonia. If I'm not mistaken they used a system based on multiples of 12, so a day was divided into 2x12 parts called hours (one group for day, one for night), then those were divided into 60 = 5x12 parts of an hour called minutes, then those again into 5x12 parts called seconds. and that's as small as it got back then.\n\nBy the time parts of a second really became a thing we used a form of the modern system. But since everyone was already familiar with the concept of days and minutes and the like, we kept that for multiples of seconds (like kiloseconds or so). similar to how the US still use their Imperial system for lots of non-scientific stuff.\n\n"
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4kgbzk | why do cats act like assholes? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4kgbzk/eli5_why_do_cats_act_like_assholes/ | {
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"You're imposing your own views on an animal that simply doesn't see the world the same way. You might see a cat knocking an object of a shelf and breaking it as an assholish thing to do, but for the cat its thought process is more like \"huh, I wonder what this is and what happens if I nudge it? Will it be fun to play with?\". The cat has zero concept of an object needing to stay on a shelf for some reason. It makes no connection at all between that object being boring when it hits the floor and you suddenly making noise; they're entirely separate events."
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3n305x | what is the benefit of "pre-purchasing" a game? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3n305x/eli5_what_is_the_benefit_of_prepurchasing_a_game/ | {
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"PC games: if the game is bought on Steam or some other DRM manager, the game is downloaded beforehand and installed, and the game is ready to be played the very minute it is released. \n\nConsole games: games bought in store have the possibility of being sold out before you have the chance to buy itit, even if you go in on the release date. Youpre-purchased copy is added to the numbers ordered by the store, and your name is written on it, so it is not sold to anyone but you. In reality, and in most cases, the company will order plenty for release. \n\nSource - worked for EB Games AU. Never again. ",
"Games companies will generally offer a little more for people who pre-purchase. An extra level, or some DLC for free. Occasionally you may get early access (be allowed to play the game before it is finished), which helps to fix bugs and perhaps change the gameplay to a way that suits you better.\n\nGames companies do this to raise funds, which they can use to develop the game (eg paying the developers and QA staff). \n\nHowever, the customer runs the risk of the game not being finished, or turning out to be a stinker.\n\nAnd since the game is likely to go on sale within 1-2 years, pre-purchase is quite an expensive thing to do. If you want the game ASAP and will be paying full price when it comes out, regardless of the reviews... then pre-purchase may be for you. If you don't mind the risk of the company going bust and your money vanishing."
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4brfns | what happens after insulin/dextrose pushes k into the cells? | In hyperkalemia, insulin and dextrose are commonly given to push K into the intracellular space. So serum K decreases, but then what? Does the K eventually move back out of the cell? Does it metabolize/degrade? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4brfns/eli5_what_happens_after_insulindextrose_pushes_k/ | {
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" > Does the K eventually move back out of the cell? \n\nYes, many cells (especially muscle cells, and liver cells to a degree) can take up a lot of potassium for an hour or so but eventually the cell will leak the potassium back out again. But this should buy enough time for the excess potassium to be excreted via the kidneys. If not, you can give more insulin.\n\n > Does it metabolize/degrade?\n\nPotassium is an element, it's already the simplest form you can get. So you can't degrade it or metabolize it. You can only excrete it (via the kidneys mostly, but also a little bit from sweat)."
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g1j0hq | why sometimes you can see the shadow of fumes or heat but not the fume itself? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/g1j0hq/eli5_why_sometimes_you_can_see_the_shadow_of/ | {
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"Gases disturbed by temperature have a different refractive index than the undisturbed gas, meaning long the light warps as it goes through.",
"All transparent substances have what is known as a [refractive index.](_URL_0_) This is a measure of how much light changes speed and direction when passing from one medium to another, commonly referred to as the light *bending*. Refraction is the reason someone looks very short when standing in a pool, for example, because the light being reflected off the submerged part of their body bends.\n\nWhen light passes through a flat medium of constant thickness and refractive index, such as a glass window, the rays of light will come out on the other side the same way the entered, only shifted a bit up, down, to the left or to the right. In physics and maths, this \"shifting without distorting\" is called [translation.](_URL_1_) This is why some completely submerged look normal, in contrast to when they stand in the pool. This is also the reason it is pretty much impossible to catch a fish with a net or a spear, or why you always seem to miss with the first aim when trying to pick something up from underwater.\n\nHowever, translation, i.e. shifting without distorting, only occurs if the conditions above are met. Constant refractive index, constant thickness, and flat surfaces. Guess what doesn't meet those criteria - that's right, flowing, turbulent gases.\n\nWhen something gives of fumes or is burning, the gases given off are of different temperature, flows in different directions, have turbulence, and so on, and so forth. Veritasium did a neat video about Schlieren imaging a while back in which you get to see awesome, slow motion videos of different gases flowing. You can look it up [here](_URL_2_).\n\nAs can clearly be seen in the video, the plume of gases given off by the match if in no way of equal thickness and with flat surfaces. It's pretty much the opposite. This mean that light passing through will inevitably be distorted.\n\nSo, to get to the core of your question - why can't you see this distortion in the fumes, but only in the shadows? Well, there are three main reasons.\n\n1) You actually can, it's just very, very hard. Trying to see minor distortions in a clear gas means you have to look very carefully, and probably very close. I would ***strongly advise against*** sticking your head too close to your grill or exhaust pipe.\n\n2) The shadow of the gas or fumes are usually projected onto a surface far away, such as a wall. This amplifies the effect, because the projection (shadow) is usually magnified. Think about how if someone stands right in front of a projector, their shadow appears huge compared to how big they actually are.\n\n3) The human eye is much much more sensitive to contrast at lower levels of light. You can, for example, very easily tell if someone is wearing two different shades of black. Spotting if someone is wearing to different shades of white is much harder."
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fjej1n | u.s. national guard | How does the National Guard work, and how do they decide what emergencies they are equipped for-- or should be equipped for? Why is it separate from other branches?
Edit:. Does anything change when the U.S. gets a different president? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fjej1n/eli5_us_national_guard/ | {
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"Back in the Revolutionary times, each state had it's own militia, under command of the state governor. Both under the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution, these could be used to help defend the nation from external threats. \n\nThey have always been separate from the Regular Army. The state militias eventually morphed into the National Guard. The states keep them trained and equipped, usually with generous help and monetary donations from the Defense Department, and in return can be called up if needed by the Federal Government. Usually, what happens is when regular army troops are sent overseas to fight, some NG units will be activated to replace them stateside until they return. But if the NG can also be sent directly to the conflict area, many were sent over to Desert Shield/Desert Storm.",
"The President is the wartime Commanderin-Chief, but inormal times, the NG is under the authority of the Governor of the state they’re based in. In special circumstances, NG units can be “Federalized” by the President for limited purposes. As far as training and equipping, NG units train with their active military counterparts regularly, are similarly equipped, and perform a multitude of combat, combat support, and especially combat service support (e.g., logistics, medical) functions.",
"There are special ops opportunities with the Army, Navy, and AF, though they vary from one service to another in number, function, and career potential.",
"The USNG is essentially a \"special\" militia; normally, the militias are run by the States, and the Feds are prohibited from operating them (under the 2nd Amendment). The USNG, however, is special in that the Feds help fund and arm them, and in return the USNG is allowed to operate and coordinate across state lines, and can be taken away from the States under special circumstances by the POTUS. 90% of the time, though, the National Guard regiments are run by their parent States, and are always brought out in times of unrest or disasters for all sorts of duties."
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re3wx | why have they not arrested the man who murdered treyvon martin ? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/re3wx/eli5_why_have_they_not_arrested_the_man_who/ | {
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"It's a case of he said, she said. Except, it's he said, he said. Except, it's he said, he dead.\n\nFlorida law seems to be written so broadly that even if you stalk someone and are told not to, you can still claim the stalkee threatened you to such an extent you need to defend yourself with mortal force. If there is no proof to the contrary, then you are fine. Most other states have better laws.",
"Innocent until proven guilty\n\n\nTo expand, new evidence is coming out that it MIGHT have been a legitimate case of self defense, eye witness people have said that he was attacked and the gun was pulled after that, injuries are helping his case hence why he hasn't been arrested yet - he might have a legitimate case. \n\nLike someone else said it's a case of he said she said and we simply have to wait till the investigation is over. "
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1xvdnh | why do athletes keep getting better? | Every year, people set new world records. In 1908, the 200m world record was 22.6 seconds. As of 2008, it was 19.3 seconds. Why does this happen? What makes athletes continue to get better over time? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1xvdnh/why_do_athletes_keep_getting_better/ | {
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"I don't really know, but perhaps when an athlete competes against someone better than him/her, he/she gets better. Like how lifting a 10-pound weight ten times won't make you stronger, but lifting a 100-pound weight ten times will make you stronger. As the competition gets better, everyone competing benefits.\n\nAlso, training equipment continues to get more sophisticated all the time. Everything related to training seems to \"evolve\" over time, too, like supplements they take and what not.",
"sports medicine and technology. i can elaborate, but this is the basic reason.",
"[asap science](_URL_0_) has an interesting video explaining why olympic records are always being broken that seems similar to this question. It's worth a watch. ",
"Couple of explanations;\n\n- if technology is involved (like ice skating), engineers like to push the limits of the athletes, creating innovative new technologies (like the \"klapschaats\" keeping blade on the ice longer and \"aerodynamic strips\" improving aerodynamics)\n- as technology and biology advances, we get better understanding of how/why certain things work the way they do. So new diets, etc are found throughout the years.\n- As sports are now more mainstream, more people are found to be \"extremely good\" at a sport. These people are \"nurtured\" into becoming the best they could possibly with training, dieting and technology mentioned previously.\n\nOf course everything has to abide by the rules."
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1wnwk3 | just to nip this one at the bud eli5: why snowballs don't melt when you hold a bic lighter to them? | So [This Video](_URL_0_) and other like it have been bouncing around facebook and youtube. It doesn't take a genius to realize that its a load of rubbish I just want to put it in a public forum.
I'm no expert but I imagine there are several things at play here
1) Butane in general just produces a sooty flame
2) The snow isn't melting right away probably not only because of the surface area involved but also because the snow is compacted.
But maybe someone here can give a better response, one befitting of the 5 year olds who think that "chemtrails" in the sky are producing some kind of new fangled toxic snow that doesn't melt. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1wnwk3/just_to_nip_this_one_at_the_bud_eli5_why/ | {
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"Igloos can have a fire burning inside of them, although it is not neccessary... Snow that has been made that is blown by wind is the most essential type of snow needed because it is great when compacted, it interlocks the crystals.. There are also air pockets that form, which act as insulators.\n\nTemperatures outside an igloo can be in the negatives, but inside can be as high as 61 degrees F when warmed by body heat alone. You can have a fire in there and have it mugh higher. The melting point of water is 32 Degrees F by the way... So how does an igloo not melt away then???\n\nWell the interior melts slightly but the constant melting and refreezing contributes and is essential to the overall strength and insulation of the igloo, for the inside.\n\nYou also have to take in consideration BTU.. or British thermal units... for ecample which has more BTU energy.. an ice cube or one match? The answer is the ice cube... why? Well, if you tried to melt the entire cube with one match, it wouldnt happen.. youd run out of flame and match before that happened....\n\nThe combination of the snow i see.. whic looked really wind blown, its was really dry and took alot of effort to compact... So the snow had really good insulation because of the heavy crystaization of the snow, allowing for airpockets. I would say the flame appeared to be 1/10th or smaller than the size of the snowball she held. also melting a portion of the ice does add strength to its overall insulation properties...\n\nThis type of snow would not accumulate beads or drops of water it would simply evaporate. The combination of the type of snow she was holding the flames size compared to the snowball, and the strengthening factor or adding heat or that type of snow made her lose her shit...\n\nAlso, a BBQ lighter prolly has butane or some other propellant, it does not burn anywhere near 100% efficiently and that's what she was probably smelling, the chemical change, the soot is normal for that type of lighter on all surfaces...\n\nI would say the humidity levels, temperature, wind etc produced a type of snow with great insulating properties that \"seemed\" to defy the laws of physics or look unnatural... everyone in alaska is laughing at you lady.\n\nThat is all.\n\n\n\n"
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fnxl65 | how does a vitamin a overdose kill you? | Like, what does it do to your organs to cause you to "kick the bucket"? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fnxl65/eli5_how_does_a_vitamin_a_overdose_kill_you/ | {
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"When you take in Vitamin A (in your diet or in a supplement) there are proteins in your cells that bind to and break it down or metabolize it. When you take in too much Vitamin A (typically chronically over time, see below), your binding proteins in your cells are not able to bind to all of the Vitamin A. That unbound Vitamin A floating around damages your tissues and causes your cells to lyse. The biggest effects are to the cells central nervous system. The biggest danger with Vitamin A toxicity is increased intracranial pressure from the expansion of the fluid in your nervous system (aka cerebrospinal fluid) that occurs when all of those cells lyse and the damaged tissues release their contents which contain harmful enzymes that further damage other cells. The outward symptoms of all of these things happening at the cellular level will be headache, confusion, and blurred vision.\nOther effects include: increased calcium above useful levels which leads to thickening of the bones over time; liver damage (because this is where all the Vitamin A will accumulate) which will lead to symptoms like fluid buildup in the abdomen (which is called ascites) and yellowing of the skin (which is called jaundice). Other symptoms will include skin dryness, skin peeling, and hair loss since Vitamin A is involved in epithelial cell turnover. Vitamin A1 is also known as retinol. \nThe acute toxic dose (the single dose that would produce toxic effects) of Vitamin A is around 12,000 IU PER kg of body weight. The chronic toxic dose is thought to be about 25,000 IU per day taken ever day over the period of multiple weeks.\n\nHowever, Vitamin A toxicity is very rarely fatal. I’ve only seen very few case reports. When it is fatal, it’s likely from very long term chronic toxicity that resulted in liver damage when in combination with other hepatotoxic (aka liver damaging) drugs or disease states.\n\nSource: Toxicology Textbook",
"Big fat shrug emoji on this one. As far as I'm aware, we simply don't know the answer to this yet. Current theories are along the lines of high levels of vitamin A altering how the body metabolises certain things, particularly other fat-soluble vitamins, but that's just a theory, and it doesn't come with any level of detail yet.\n\nAlthough, also as far as I'm aware, vitamin A overdose doesn't kill anyone directly, although other effects of vitamin A toxicity can increase the chance of becoming dead.",
"A did a little googling and I'll try and paraphrase what I've learnt. \n\nIt is a little mysterious, but high concentrations of vitamin A might mess with 2 types of body cells that control bone development. Your body will break vitamin A down to retinoic acid. In vitro studies (so in a lab conducted by a scientist; things might work differently in a living human being) show that retinoic acid stops cells called osteoblasts from doing their job, which is basically making new bone tissue.\n\nNot only that, it makes a second type of cell called an osteoclast work harder. Osteoclasts break bone tissue down. So, you'd have one cell going round nuking bone tissue and the cell that can rebuild it is not going to work as well. Probably won't kill you, but would be crazy painful and lead to bone conditions such as osteoporosis. \n\nAlso, all that calcium in the broken down bone tissue is going to leak out into the blood and wander off round the body leading to hypercalcaemia (high levels of calcium in the blood). This can lead to complications in the heart (possibility heart attack but certainly abnormal heart rhythm) and kidneys. \n\nInterestingly, archeologists have found skeletons with bone conditions that might have been due to eating too much vit A. The issue is eating the liver of certain animals as the liver can contain very high concentration of vit A.\n\nSo, we got achey, holey bones that dump a load of calcium in the blood causing problems for some vital organs... we're not in great shape! But what's that? Our mitochondria are in danger too? Nooo! Not the powerhouse of the cell! \n\nYep, as the meme reminds us, the mitochondria produce energy for cells so they can do their job. There is some evidence to show that vitamin A has a toxic effect on the mitochondria, but I couldn't find much on that. Needless to say though, if the mitochondria of a cell are affected, the cell is going to be in trouble. Depending on the type of cells effected, this could have pretty serious consequences. \n\nI hope that this was useful, or at least provides a basis for more research. I have a reasonable understanding of biochemistry and a loved toxicology lectures at university, so I really enjoyed finding this out and rewriting it! I'm not a real expert though (full disclaimer!) so if anyone spots a big error, please correct me!\n\nEdit: spelling, grammar and clarity"
]
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2pfq0m | why do we all not have bionic implants yet? | For example, what's stopping us putting sensors in our arms that could read blood chemical/composition/concentration etc? Please be as detailed as possible (ELI43), thanks. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2pfq0m/eli5_why_do_we_all_not_have_bionic_implants_yet/ | {
"a_id": [
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"score": [
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"It's not a complicated answer, sorry.\n\nThe tinier an electronic device is, the more expensive it is to make. And implants have to be as tiny as possible.\n\nThen there's battery power. We don't want electrodes hanging out, and wireless recharging just isn't good enough yet. Despite what science fiction has us believe, we can't power very much from the body's natural processes (unless you're ok with metal poisoning).\n\nThen there's avoiding rejection. Avoiding rejection isn't hard now, if you use the right materials. But the body will still want to remove that foreign object, so you end up with scar tissue and/or the device migrating. (Sometimes it won't migrate directly out, it will take a weird scenic route).\n\nLast: Surgery. It's not like getting a piercing, this is a minor surgical procedure, and there's always the risk of infection or malpractice. Is it worth the risk? (also, that increases the cost further if you want it done by a doctor)"
]
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[]
] |
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7nurr6 | how does a coffee maker make water very hot so much faster than boiling water over a burning stove? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7nurr6/eli5_how_does_a_coffee_maker_make_water_very_hot/ | {
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"Because a coffee maker isn't trying to warm the entire tank of water at once. It warms a small amount in a tiny but high powered heater; all it has to heat up at a time is the fairly slow flowing amount that is dripping through the coffee. \n\n \n\n",
"Less water and it puts the heating coil directly in the water. On a stove the heating coil (if electric) is beneath a pot it has to hope most of its heat goes into the pot then through to the water. There is a lot of heat lost to air. If you put the coil directly in the water then it goes straight into the water, and goes that much faster.",
"A typical drip coffee machine has a set of tubing that runs from the bottom of the reservoir, into the burner below the coffee pot, and back up to above the grinds.\n\nWhen water goes down this tubing, it passes a one-way valve, so that the water that gets heated never mixes back with the reservoir. This means that at any point in time, the coffee maker is only heating a little bit of water, which is significantly faster than boiling the entire thing.\n\nThat hot water is pushed up the tubing by the boiling action, and drips into the grinds. The reduction in pressure means the one-way valve will open up again, allow more cold water in, and more heating happens.\n\nEssentially, coffee makers are faster than a pot because they heat the water sort of 'sequentially', since only a small amount is needed at any given time."
]
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2rvjja | what exactly is knot theory and what are it's practical applications? | We have to do a project of Knot Theory, and every time I read it on Wikipedia, my brain says, WTF. Terms like topology are also hard to understand.
If anyone could help, that'd be great! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2rvjja/eli5_what_exactly_is_knot_theory_and_what_are_its/ | {
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"Knot theory is a field within mathematics that deals with \"knots.\" These knots are very similar to the knots that you use in your day-to-day life (e.g. to tie your shoe), but instead of joining two pieces of rope together and things like that, they all use a single loop of \"rope\" (it's imaginary rope so they can do whatever they want with it).\n\nKnot theory gives the tools to compare one knot to another and state that they are actually fundamentally the same, which is to say that if you physically had these knots tied in loops of rope you could arrange them to be identical without having to cut the rope or magically pass the rope through itself. For example, a loop of rope twisted into a figure-8 is the same as an open loop, but a loop of rope with an [overhand knot](_URL_2_) in it is a different knot.\n\nKnot theory thus provides a very simple form of topology to study—studying how shapes are laid out. For another kind of topology, you can look at the topology of surfaces in 3 dimensions, like the surface of a sphere, which is the simplest such topology. The surface of a cube is in some way equivalent to the surface of a sphere because you could reshape the cube's surface to be the shape of a sphere (or vice versa) without having to tear the surface or give it an infinitely narrow crease ([this](_URL_3_) video illustrates these rules better than I can in text). By contrast, a doughnut has a different topology due to the hole. You could then stretch and deform this shape in many ways and still have a shape that is [fundamentally a doughnut](_URL_0_) even though it looks quite different (note [this](_URL_1_) gif showing the equivalence of these two shapes when following rules of topology).\n\nMany of the applications of Knot theory and Topology in general are quite abstract and may be hard to grasp. However, fields like biology may make use of knot theory when studying proteins which have their function due to the way that they are tangled up. Unfortunately I have only an enthusiastic layperson's understanding of both knot theory and biology so I can't give a more precise tie in between the two fields. "
]
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"http://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0149/3544/products/doughnut_mug_300.png?v=1417629386",
"http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/Mug_and_Torus_morph.gif",
"http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/44/EdioHalveknoop.jpg/250px-EdioHalveknoop.jpg",
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_w4HYXuo9M"
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cpeysj | what are “anti-nutrients” and do they really render foods like whole wheat bread and beans unhealthy? | I read an [article](_URL_0_) while enjoying my wheat-clad sandwich that suggests, among other things, that whole wheat has a binding effect on nutrients eaten in conjunction with it that prevents those nutrients from being absorbed by the body. White bread, the article concludes, may be no less healthy. In the comments section a reader mentioned beans as also demonstrating this anti-nutrient property.
Can someone confirm/disconfirm this notion of anti-nutrients? Surely if this effect outweighed the benefits of eating wheat bread or beans it would be more widely discussed, no? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cpeysj/eli5_what_are_antinutrients_and_do_they_really/ | {
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"ewpd5ug",
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"This blog entry is written by a food writer, not by anybody who has had scientific training or has clinical qualifications. That's a red flag. The title is also obvious clickbait, which is another red flag. It also talks in all-or-nothing language, yet another red flag. There are red flags everywhere.\n\nFirst, yes, there are compounds in food which inhibit absorption of certain minerals and vitamins. BUT cooking and food preparation inactivate a lot of these and actually make the minerals more absorbable for our bodies' digestion. So while some absorption may be inhibited, it's not a black and white 0 or 100%. Probably somewhere in between. Third, some of these compounds have secondary benefits on other aspects of our health (e.g. gut bacteria). So this only looks at one function that the compounds perform. It also focuses on a single part of the food and says (good/bad) based on that. This would be like me saying that because wine contains antioxidants that we should encourage everybody to drink exclusively wine. Obviously, it's more complicated than that. Whole grains contain more than minerals and these \"anti-nutrients\" (a loaded word choice, IMO).\n\nBetter information: [_URL_0_](_URL_0_) (yes, *that* Harvard).\n\nEdit: I've seen a lot of these sorts of blogs/bad nutrition information point to studies that show medical conditions (e.g. goiter) resulting from consumption of foods containing \"anti-nutrients.\" If you look at these studies they almost inevitably result from lopsided diets which rely on a very limited range of foods providing nearly all the calories in a diet or consuming absurd amounts of a particular food or group of foods. If anything, this is an argument for diversified diets that include the full range of foods.",
" > Can someone confirm/disconfirm this notion of anti-nutrients?\n\nSo I was drinking the paleo kool-aide of antinutrients about a decade ago, and now I don't subscribe to and of that stuff (although I am still very much a believer in cooking your own food using whole food ingredients).\n\nThe 'anti-nutrient' in the article question is bran / phytates. [Here's](_URL_0_) a measured response to anti-nutrient fearmongering. If you are too lazy to click the link, here's a pertinent snippet from the introduction\n\n > Though certain foods may contain residual amounts of anti-nutrients after processing and cooking, the health benefits of eating these foods outweigh any potential negative nutritional effects. Eating a variety of nutritious foods daily and avoiding eating large amounts of a single food at one meal can help to offset minor losses in nutrient absorption caused by anti-nutrients."
]
} | [] | [
"https://www.thekitchn.com/whole-wheat-might-not-be-healthier-than-white-bread-252828"
] | [
[
"https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/anti-nutrients/"
],
[
"https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/anti-nutrients/"
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|
2gbjiq | how can we taste, touch, hear, feel, see in our thoughts? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2gbjiq/eli5_how_can_we_taste_touch_hear_feel_see_in_our/ | {
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"text": [
"Not to sound to much like Morpheus, but taste, touch, hearing and vision are electrical impulses interpreted by your brain. The brain can emulate the signals itself enabling you to perceive sensory information without an actual external stimulation. Examples of this would be when you think you've heard something but haven't, phantom pains, hallucinations etc.\n",
"Our thoughts are connected with the things we sense.\n\nLooking at our brain with a special scanner, the same places light up in our brain whether we're looking at something (a red apple) or just *thinking* about that thing (imagining a red apple.)\n\nLink: (_URL_0_)"
]
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[],
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"http://news.stanford.edu/news/2000/september6/hypnosis-96.html"
]
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||
26s0mz | how do people train for competitive eating? | Just saw a post about a 125lb woman who is a boss... Not some huge dude. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/26s0mz/eli5_how_do_people_train_for_competitive_eating/ | {
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"\"Many professional competitive eaters undergo rigorous personal training in order to increase their stomach capacity and eating speed with various foods. Stomach elasticity is usually considered the key to eating success, and competitors commonly train by drinking large amounts of water over a short time to stretch out the stomach. Others combine the consumption of water with large quantities of low calorie foods such as vegetables or salads. Some eaters chew large amounts of gum in order to build jaw strength.\"\nSource: _URL_0_",
"First of all Its all about stomach size and how you can expand it. Usually they start by eating larges amounts of food to loosen the belly (usually they eat a lot of lettuce) They never stop eating the days before the competition they might even have a good meal hours before the competition. Second you must control your gag reflexes which is no easy thing to do, once mastered is much more easier for you to swallow. But winning requires tricks, Drinking only water (soda tend to fill you faster), moving your lower body helps you to stop feeling full, separating the food helps to go for the easy swallowing parts, don't waste time chewing and remember every bite you take wash it down with liquid so you don't choke. Training is helpful but disposition is better. I know this because I won an iPad 2 eating a 1 Foot tall hamburger in 6.50 minutes (I was around the 190 lbs back then). I expect I was helpful."
]
} | [] | [] | [
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"http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_eating"
],
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|
2yd3rj | why can i focus on videogames for hours but have to take a break after half and hour of homework? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2yd3rj/eli5_why_can_i_focus_on_videogames_for_hours_but/ | {
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"text": [
"Because games are fun and homework isn't.\n\n/thread.",
"Because videogames are (probably) more enjoyable for you."
]
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[],
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||
eq6wua | how does the music industry and artists stay afloat with how easily music is accessible online? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/eq6wua/eli5_how_does_the_music_industry_and_artists_stay/ | {
"a_id": [
"feowlqv",
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"text": [
"You subscribing to fallacy argument of big music corporations.\n\nJust because someone pirated music it doesn't mean that he would have paid for it if he didn't have the option to pirate.",
"Merchandise. Percentages from subscription services.\nConcerts. Any endorsements they might have."
]
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[],
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3ei37n | if police cars must be set to factory default at all times why didnt the force pick something faster than a crown victoria in most cases, and more recently the ford explorers? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ei37n/eli5if_police_cars_must_be_set_to_factory_default/ | {
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"text": [
"What do you mean by \"police cars must be set to factory default\"? I'm pretty sure almost no police car is \"factory default\" - they need to install police radios/scanners/ways to transport prisoners/gun storage/a ton of other things.\n\nOften police cars are special police versions of regular cars.\n\nTypical factors tend to be:\n\nResistant to damage, especially multiple small pieces of damage like while doing pit maneuvers.\n\nLarge engine to weight ratio - gotta be able to go fast.\n\nLarge trunk space for gear.\n\nSpace up front for radios/scanners/equipment.\n\nAbility to transport those under arrest.\n\nHere's what seems to be a pretty knowledgable review \n_URL_0_"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"https://www.reddit.com/r/answers/comments/1y8d4d/why_do_most_police_in_america_drive_crown/cficj9q"
]
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||
a3cll3 | what exactly happens during a recession? is the fallout the same, but with different catalysts? | It's all we hear about on the news these days (housing market slowing, inverted yield curve, etc.). Having struggled through the 2007 recession while in grad school, I have my fair share of student loans, and CC debt. Is there anything Xennials can do to prepare? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a3cll3/eli5_what_exactly_happens_during_a_recession_is/ | {
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"Okey, recession means that the economy is shrinking instead of growing, it does not mean that the growth is slowing. For example instead of 2% growth it goes to -0,3% thus you shrink. \nTherefore the fallout is depending on the level of shrinking. A decline of -10% (extreme) has way more impact than a -0.2 shrink. \nThe key note here is prospects. When the economy is still growing ( albeit slower then before) companies will still invest their money, hire people and focus on growing. When the economy is shrinking, firms tend to alter their prospects and limit their investments, limit their hiring policy or in Most cases fire people and focus on consolidating. \nand as you said , catalysts are different.\n\nwhat you can do if you think the economy is going to shrink is to consolidate for yourself. that means reduce debts that are most expensive to have or pay those debts that you later on can use again if required. Reduce expenses and save money in case you lose your job. prepare yourself in case you get fired, or try to guarantee your job if possible. \n\n",
"Every recession is different so there is no one single thing that happens.\n\nIn simple terms I like the following theory but its not really the only one.\n\nIn good time people get confident, they look at their 401k, their house price, and its going up so they spend more; as do businesses . Hell they may even borrow money to spend in the form of credit. This kind of creates a positive feed back loop, the more they spend the more the economy picks up as businesses will hire people, those people will spend ect.\n\nThis sometimes tend to make asset prices over valued (your stocks in your 401k, your home price) So your 401k maybe worth 150K and your house 250K\n\nWell then reality sets in for varying reasons , maybe a whole bunch of houses got built so now there is a supply glut of housing and all these new houses that were build are sitting empty; and now housing market crashes, so now you realize your house is only worth 200k.\n\nAlso because all these houses are empty no one wants to build new houses as there is a glut of housing, so housing companies start laying off workers, people are no longer going to banks and taking our loans, no one is buying lumber, concrete, building supplies, appliances.\n\nSo now banks are laying people off, supply stores are laying people off, appliance manufacturers are laying people off , and this creates a feedback loop on its own as now those unemployed people are not going out to eat, to the movies, buying cars ect....\n\nEven the people that keep their jobs now they look at their house and its only worth 175k, their 401k drops to 75k and they feel poorer so they start saving more and spending less.\n\nThis is a very informative video by Ray Dalio\n\nHow The Economic Machine Works by Ray Dalio\n\n_URL_0_\n\nEdit \n\nWhat can you do?\n\nDo not over extend yourself and load up on CC or other debt during the good times, live below your means\n\nSave up 4-6 months worth of expenses in savings so if you do get laid off you do not have to sell when the market is down.\n\nThe most important thing is to keep you job, what happened to a lot of people in 2008 they were way loaded up on credit, they bought huge houses at huge prices.\n\nWhen they lost their jobs they couldn't afford their housing payments. Some then started cashing out their 401k as they did not have a savings cushion , this was the worst time to do this as stocks have just crashed so they were selling at the bottom of the market.\n\nThen they realized even if they needed to sell the house, they bought it for $250k but its now worth $160K so a lot of people just defaulted on their loans, stopped paying them.\n\nThis caused a lot of havoc with the banks, and made them insolvent .\n\n",
"I think the official definition of a recession is three quarters in a row with negative growth.\n\nIt means businesses will stop investing and expanding, and will do everything they can to cut down costs (including firing people).\n\nBest way to prepare is to cut down costs. Pay off your loans starting with the highest-interest ones, look over your daily spending and see what you can do without."
]
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[],
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"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHe0bXAIuk0"
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3rnuwz | why the pyramids couldn't have been used for grain storage | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3rnuwz/eli5_why_the_pyramids_couldnt_have_been_used_for/ | {
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"Egyptians knew how to write. They pyramids literally say: \"(insert important guy) is buried here\".",
"The pyramids have hardly any volume; if they wanted to use them as storage, they would've build more than a small burial chamber in the center. ",
"There is very little space inside the pyramids to store anything they need to be solid stone in order to hold up the whole structure. They would be completely useless to use to store something as bulky as grain. For more information on stone and the Pyramids - _URL_0_",
"[this](_URL_0_) is the map of the 3rd Great Pyramid. \n\nSee how the vast majority of it is solid stone? \n\nA huge mostly solid object obviously is a hilariously inefficient storage chamber. \n\n",
"Because the pyramids contain writing that says \"this guy is buried here\", if they were used to store grain they'd say \"this guy is buried here, also the room on the left has all the food\".",
"\"seems more logical than building giant funeral towers for dead people.\"\n\nEver see what people of wealth and power do in modern times? One would think a 210ft yacht would be used to transport large groups of people or objects across the ocean, but in reality, it's just a floating house for a single rapper. "
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btkkyo | how do whips make a cracking sound | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/btkkyo/eli5_how_do_whips_make_a_cracking_sound/ | {
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"text": [
"The tip, when you flip or crack it, breaks the sound barrier. So it’s all in how you crack the whip. There must be enough speed for it to break the sound barrier",
"It's a tiny sonic boom, like a little version of the bang your favorite plane makes when it goes really, really, really fast",
"Sound is made of wiggles in the air that move away from the source of the sound. It may feel like the wiggles move instantly, but they don't - they just move very fast. If you swing a whip slowly, you can hear a \"whoosh\" as the whip moves the air and the wiggles run away from it and reach your ear. But if you swing a whip really fast, the wiggles can't get out of the way while the whip is moving, so all the wiggles get gathered up and released at once. The big pile of wiggles is strong enough to sound like a crack.\n\nThe point at which wiggles can't get out of the way is called the sound barrier.",
"Simple answer: the tip ends up moving faster than the speed of sound and makes a sonic boom."
]
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3c63h8 | why do horror movies do so well with extremely low budgets? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3c63h8/eli5_why_do_horror_movies_do_so_well_with/ | {
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"1) Horror movies tend to take place in real-life settings because it hits closer to home. No LOTR fantasy world or Star Trek bridge means the budget is small for set locations.\n\n2) Very little CGI.\n\n3) Most of the movie is filmed in dark places, because darkness is scary. Low lighting sets means you don't need a huge budget for over-the-top elaborate furniture, props, etc.\n\n4) Horror movies rely on atmosphere, clever angle tricks, normal people dressed in normal clothes going to normal places, and a ghost/killer/demon that can be make with cheap blood/mask/clothes. None of these require huge budgets.\n\n"
]
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[]
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||
cwjiso | how are laugh tracks recorded for tv shows? | It often seems like there must be a live studio audience, but then the laugh track continues in cutaways to outdoor locations where they couldn't possibly have a live audience. Also, often some blooper reels still have a laugh track. So how does this work? Do they record two laugh tracks and splice them together? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cwjiso/eli5_how_are_laugh_tracks_recorded_for_tv_shows/ | {
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"text": [
"Stock sound effects are usually recycled. That include laughter sound effects and the famous *Wilhelm Scream*",
"The audio quality would be terrible if they just recorded the entire studio at once. Each actor will probably have their own microphone, and there'll be different microphones on the audience, which means the \"laughter\" is a different sound file to everything else and it can be placed around the episode pretty much wherever the editor wants it. There's also nothing stopping them dubbing a laugh track on afterwards in places where the audience didn't laugh enough for the director's liking."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
|
5iy5wp | why are most relaxing activities more enjoyable at night time, even if it's a saturday or sunday and i have the whole day off anyway? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5iy5wp/eli5_why_are_most_relaxing_activities_more/ | {
"a_id": [
"dbbux9r"
],
"score": [
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],
"text": [
"For drugs and alcohol, it might be because those things can feel very un-fun if you are awake when their affects wear off.\n\nFor the other things, I disagree with your premise. It's a preference. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
8ti7th | how bodybuilders get such huge veins. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8ti7th/eli5_how_bodybuilders_get_such_huge_veins/ | {
"a_id": [
"e17r5j4",
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"score": [
4,
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2,
6,
2
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"text": [
"From what I remember from my weightlifting days, body builders take supplements that make them more vascular, allowing the veins to have more blood flow. May account for the veins seeming larger than normal. Nitric oxide being one of those supplements, found in preworkout energy drink mixes. ",
"Low body fat has already been mentioned.\n\nSuperficial veins also increase in size due to increased demands (increased flow during working out) and of course there are drugs that increase overall blood volume. ",
"Do things that make your body need more blood for when your doing things. Because you got big muscles that need more blood flow going through them when your doing things, your veins will get \"yuge\" \n\nedit: not sure what i wrote but im sticking with it.",
"Everyone that's answered so far seems to be outside of the bodybuilding community and are mostly guessing.\nIts the combination of several things.\n\n * Firstly and most obviously is low body fat. The less body fat you hold the more visible viens are.\n\n * Less water held in skin. When you see pictures of stage ready/photo-shoot ready bodybuilders they've adjusted various supplements (mainly carbs, water, and sodium) to hold onto as little water in their skin as possible. This has a similar sort of effect of having even lower bodyfat.\n\n * Blood demand of muscles. Larger muscles need more blood therefore more blood going through veins.\n\n * Often, not always though, higher blood pressure. Being heavier than the average person means the heart has to work harder, and often (though not always) bodybuilders have at least slightly elevated blood pressure. Another side effect of this is the veins look more squiggly.\n\n * When you're seeing photos of them, they've normally done everything they can to make those veins pop out as much as possible then. They tense the muscle which pushed the surface veins a little further out, they may have taken a vasodilator to make them larger, had a bit o alcohol to thin the blood to allow more into the veins, and done a high rep workout in those muscle groups to get as much blood flowing through the veins as possible.\n\n\nAlso, some steroids have the effect of making you more vascular, however I do not know the direct mechanism behind this other than those I've already mentioned",
"I actually used to work with a bodybuilder who would regularily pinch off the veins in his arms while he flexed, to try and \"stretch out the veins to make them bigger.\"\n\nHis arms looked like a road map of Stockholm."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
fihy9l | why does it matter to know if i'm dealing with a crocodile or an alligator? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fihy9l/eli5_why_does_it_matter_to_know_if_im_dealing/ | {
"a_id": [
"fkh86dy",
"fkh8nr0"
],
"score": [
11,
11
],
"text": [
"Alligators are a lot more chill than crocodiles. Crocodiles are much more likely to attack a human. That's the main reason to know. Still, don't go messing with alligators. Aussie saltwater and the Nile crocs are pretty dangerous.",
"Alligators are more about protecting themselves and their young so, if you leave them alone, they will likely ignore you. Crocodiles are territorial, so if you're trespassing in their territory, they'll chase you even if you're otherwise trying to leave them alone.\n\nIf you're in the U.S., we only have alligators."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
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