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1mya63 | beer before liquor, never been sicker..... | Why do I feel as if I'm more intoxicated when I mix beer, wine, and liquor in the same day? More so, why does adding liquor to the beer in my belly lead to a worse tomorrow? I have friends at parties who will be fine mixing beer and liquor, but as soon as they smoke a J they are "obliterated." How does adding the third element increase their intoxication?
I mean we've all heard: "beer before liquor, never been sicker." Are you really in the clear with whiskey before beer? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1mya63/eli5_beer_before_liquor_never_been_sicker/ | {
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"it's really a myth that mixing alcohol makes you more drunk.\n\nThe thing is, if people are mixing drinks, it's very likely they are drinking more than they would usually. it's likely that is why the intoxication level is higher.",
"\"Drunkness\" is based on ethanol concentration in the blood. That's it. So mixing different drinks won't increase intoxication.\n\nThe saying comes from the bloating feeling associated with beer, people tend to feel more sick from drinking harder spirits while bloated."
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3disw6 | what is this whole res thing | I keep seeing people talking about RES and I'm not sure what it is | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3disw6/eli5_what_is_this_whole_res_thing/ | {
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"It's the Reddit Enhancement Suite, a browser extension that lets you customize how you view/interact with Reddit. It's great for filtering out specific kinds of posts. ",
"[Reddit Enhancement Suite](_URL_0_) \n\nIt's a browser plugin which greatly improves the Reddit browsing experience on desktops."
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f22fjd | what happens at subatomic level when we touch things? shouldn't electrons repel from each other due to their negative charge? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f22fjd/eli5_what_happens_at_subatomic_level_when_we/ | {
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"Atoms never touch each other when things touch.\n\nThe atoms get pushed back (due to the nuclei having similar charge) and we sense this force as touch."
]
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||
uscdh | why are there so many different citation manuals (e.g. mla, apa, chicago, etc.)? | I tried Googling and Wikipedia-ing, but they were only able to explain the major differences between the manuals, not the rationale behind having so many different ones. By the way, here's the [Wikipedia article](_URL_0_).
My rationale for asking? I'm just curious. But thanks for your help! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/uscdh/eli5_why_are_there_so_many_different_citation/ | {
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"I think this explains it well for a 5 year old: [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)"
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"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Style_guide"
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[
"http://xkcd.com/927/"
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|
25k93y | why do we use hours, minutes, seconds to measure time versus increments of a decimal system? | Seems like the world uses an "English" system to measure time when it should be using a "metric" system. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/25k93y/eli5_why_do_we_use_hours_minutes_seconds_to/ | {
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"A metric time system was proposed back when the metric system started being a thing, but people didn't really like it. \n\nThe way humans perceive time is so variable depending on circumstances, the sort of precision that decimal systems can provide aren't really that important I guess. \n\nThe 24 hr/60 minute/60 second system is a bit unwieldy at times, but all of those numbers are easily divisible into various chunks, and I think that quality fits much better into how people generally use time. \n\nAnd when higher precision is required, say for science or whatever, it's easy enough to just use seconds and decimals (nanoseconds,etc.).",
"100 has only two prime factors: 2 and 5. So it's divisible by 2, 4, 5, 10, 20, 25, or 50.\n\n60 has three prime factors: 2, 3, and 5. So it's divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, or 30. So it's much easier to slice a 60-minute hour into convenient fractions than a 100-minute hour.",
"I seem to recall reading that it has to do with the sexagesimal(base-60) number system of the babylonians.\n\n_URL_0_",
"Because tradition. Minutes and seconds have been used for thousands of years.",
"Thank the Mesopotamians",
"We use the duodecimal or dozenal system of measuring time most likely because there are 12 lunar cycles in a year. From there is makes sense to continue breaking things down by a base-12 system.\n\nMany systems of measurement used to be dozenal (and some still are) but were replaced by decimal systems. \n\nThere is no real reason we use a duodecimal system for time as opposed to a decimal system. As others have mentioned, a decimal time system was introduced by the French but never adopted on a large scale.\n\nMany will agree that the duodecimal system has great advantages when it comes basic arithmetic as demonstrated by AirborneRodent. You should try thinking in terms of a dozenal system some time. After a little while you might wonder why we use a decimal system at all.\n\n_URL_0_"
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3rz1er | what dimension does science say we exist in presently? how do scientist know? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3rz1er/eli5_what_dimension_does_science_say_we_exist_in/ | {
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"We exist in 3 spatial dimensions and 1 time dimension.\n\nWe know this because we invented the language of math and physics that describes these dimensions. \n\nThe spatial dimensions are the x,y,z coordinates we use in any description of 3 dimensional location in space. For example, we can describe the position of a place on the surface of the earth by saying it is a certain number in latitude, a certain number in longitude, and a certain number of feet above sea level. These three numbers can accurately describe that exact location in space. \n\nBy adding the 4th dimension of time, we can now even more accurately locate the point. You could say to someone \"meet me on the 4th floor of the building at 93rd street and Lincoln Avenue at 4:00 p.m.\" and someone would be able to accurately locate you because you gave them all the four dimensions they need.\n\nWhen scientists talk about other dimensions, they aren't talking about mysterious other universes alongside our own, they're talking about mathematical concepts where you add more information to more accurately describe something. The cool thing about math is you can add as many extra dimensions into your calculations as you want, you aren't just limited to three. ",
"According to [M-theory](_URL_1_), the Universe consists of 11 dimensions. We can only perceive 3 of them (4 if you count time) because of [compactification](_URL_0_). (Translation: Our perception smushes multiple dimensions together so the appear as if they are a single one) \n\nIt's important to note that M-theory and its parent, string theory, are both highly theoretical. They make mathematical sense but nobody's been able to figure out an experiment to prove or disprove them. "
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7fh92g | virtual particles please. | I understand the basic concept behind them but would like to know more. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7fh92g/eli5_virtual_particles_please/ | {
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"Virtual particles are particles that *cannot* be measured but *must* exist. Take, for example, two electrons interacting with each other. Because they have the same charge, they will repel each other. How do they \"know\" they have the same charge? How do they \"know\" that there's another electron nearby repelling them? They share a photon.\n\nThe photon carries the electromagnetic force between the two electrons, transferring momentum between them and sharing the information to each of them that they exist. That photon has to be there. That photon is how the electrons communicate - it's how any charged particles communicate. That photon is also undetectable.\n\nYou detect photons by having them interact with charged particles. But the photon is already interacting with two charged particles. It can't make a pitstop through your detector. If it gets detected, it's absorbed, and the information it was carrying between the two electrons is gone. It's not like you \"aren't allowed\" to detect that photon, you just *can't*. As far as anything other than the two electrons is concerned, the photon doesn't exist. And in a shaky kind of way, it really doesn't exist. Does something exist if you can't measure it?\n\nThe math that describes the interactions of particles says that the virtual particle exists. It has to. But it only exists long enough for the math to work.\n\nThey can be visualized by [Feynman Diagrams](_URL_0_), which show the interaction of particles. This one shows two electrons coming near each other, exchanging a virtual photon, and then leaving the interaction. The squiggly line is the virtual photon. Notice that the photon doesn't leave the diagram. It goes from one electron to the other, but it doesn't go in or out. It can't. If it did, it could be absorbed and detected somewhere else. Anything in the middle of a Feynman Diagram like that is a virtual particle.\n\nAlso worth noting slash just kind of neat: virtual particles don't just go from one place to another or \"exist\" in a continuous, rational kind of way. That virtual photon might spontaneously become an electron-positron pair, and then those will annihilate each other again to become the photon. The virtual photon can take literally any possible path through space to get from one electron to another. And an electron can spontaneously emit a virtual photon and then reabsorb it again. Any of those things can happen any number of times, and it doesn't change the outcome of the interaction between the original two electrons which are the real particles. Anything in-between is virtual.",
"A key point I see missing in many of these responses: these particles can exist on account of Heisenburg's uncertainty principle (a derivative of the approximation of all particles as wave functions). \n\nThe lesser known relationship ΔΕΔt < = hbar/2 (the uncertainty in the energy of the particle times the uncertainty of the duration of this particle is less than or equal to planck's constant divided by 4π, which can be derived from the more familiar ΔpΔx < =hbar/2) provides a means for these to exist:\n\nif we consider the rest mass (and \"kinetic\" energy, but assuming they are not moving only the rest mass needs to be taken into account) of the virtual particle to be the uncertainty in the energy (ΔE), then these particles can exist for a certain uncertainty of time Δt such that the product of these two is less than or equal to hbar/2.\n\nsources: krane \"modern physics\" (you can probably find a pdf of it online), intro modern physics class"
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1245bb | imaginary numbers and i (square root of -1) | I took a look over the simple wiki page.. And though it made me get it a bit more, I'm still almost as confused as I was when I didn't know yet. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1245bb/eli5_imaginary_numbers_and_i_square_root_of_1/ | {
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"Let's start with the number line, and say we have some number. What happens when you multiply that number by another one? You \"stretch\" away from 0 if the second number is bigger than 1 or less than -1, and you \"squish\" towards 0 if the second number is smaller than 1 and bigger than -1, right? You can also flip which side of 0 you're on if the second number is negative. So we'll think of multiplication by a real number as a stretch or squish and maybe a flip.\n\nNow imagine a big sheet. It goes on forever in all directions. Let's pick a point on this sheet and call it a \"complex number.\" Now I can label the point by two real numbers - how far to the right/left of 0 I am and how far above/below 0 I am. These are the \"real\" and \"imaginary\" parts.\n\nThe thing that makes these complex numbers different from just a pair of real numbers is that you can multiply them in a really cool way. When you multiply our complex number by another complex number, it both squishes/stretches the number towards/away from 0 and *rotates* where the number is.\n\nSo remember how -1 \"flipped\" a real number? We can think of that instead as taking our number and rotating it half a circle around 0.\nReal numbers are stuck on a line, so the only rotations you can get from multiplying by real numbers are 0 and half a circle. But with complex numbers you can get any rotation you like! And they're really easy to manipulate, too. If you multiply a ton of different complex numbers together and want to know the result you just add up all the rotation angles and multiply all the (real) stretches and squishes.\n\nNow, you say, what's this got to do with square roots? That's where you hear about imaginary numbers! Well, the imaginary number i is a rotation by 90 degrees (a quarter circle) with a stretch/shrink of 1 (no stretching). What happens if you take i x i? I said you multiply the stretches and add the rotations, so you get a stretch of 1 x 1 = 1 and a rotation of 90+90 =180 degrees. But remember, we just realized that we can think of -1 as a rotation by 180 degrees with no stretch... So i x i = -1. This means that i is a square root of -1.",
"[This](_URL_0_) is the best explanation I've seen.",
"IAmMe1's explanation is awesome.\n\nA few other notes that I always found helpful:\n\n1. There is one and only one imaginary number: i == sqrt(-1)\n2. As others have said, the term \"imaginary\" is awful. You could just as easily call it the igloo number or iguana number and it would mean just as much\n3. One thing that helps make the idea of the \"imaginary number\" authentic is a \"proof\" that the imaginary number MUST exist. As you may know, the number of roots to any equation is equal to the highest power in the equation:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThus, for x^2 - 64=0, there must be 2 solutions: x=8 and x=-8 are the two solutions\n\nFor x^3 - 64, there are three solutions: x=4 is one solution, and there are two other numbers. \n\nBut if you try to draw the function on the cartesian plane, you can't visually find the other two y=0 intercepts. The reason why you can't find it is because the roots do not exist in the real number domain. So mathematicians, when they plugged the function into their \"root generating algorithm\" decided that if you ignore the ridiculousness of sqrt(-1) and just continue anyway, you can get the other two values with some good precision (albeit, they contain sqrt(-1) in them: -2+3.4641 * sqrt(-1) and -2-3.4641 * sqrt(-1)).\n\n**Edit: Not all quadratic equations have real solutions. Eg. x^2 + 1 never crosses y=0 if you draw it on a graph, but since you know there are two roots, you just set x^2 + 1 = 0 and you discover that the two roots must be sqrt(-1) and -sqrt(-1). Or, i and -i if you prefer.**\n\n**Edit2: Cool! _URL_1_"
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"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casus_irreducibilis**"
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bvjjbh | why cannot there ever be a successful breeding between a human being and another animal? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bvjjbh/why_cannot_there_ever_be_a_successful_breeding/ | {
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"Huge over simplification; when you make a baby, its DNA comes equally from the mom and the dad. The DNA is a big set of building instructions, and a playbook of how to react to situations. For humans, we get every odd page from Mom, and even pages from Dad. Most of the time, the instructions still make sense. Chimeras, like mules, ligers, and tilons have building instructions close enough that it doesn't die instantly. \n\nImagine trying to assemble an F35, if the guide book has the instructions for an F16 in English in the evens, and an s300 in Swahili on the odd pages. \n\nYou might get somewhere, but will it fly?",
"Did you try ALL of the animals?",
"Because, the mechanics of genetics have some clear and simple nuances to prevent this from happening, so divergence of inherited traits doesn't result in cronenburg babies. These are long evolved over time.\n In short, this is complex life forms were talking about, Not a piers Anthony novel",
"All questions must begin with “ELI5”. That's in the sidebar."
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2j4dhj | how do they measure how much water travels through a a waterfall every minute/second? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2j4dhj/eli5_how_do_they_measure_how_much_water_travels/ | {
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"Geometry. The wall of water is a rough rectangle the width of the opening, and the thickness of the water depth at the edge. Drop a knotmeter in and you get the third dimension - speed of the rectangle (distance per time). So, assume a waterfall 100x1 feet at the dropoff, doing 8 kts (almost 16 feet per second). So, 100x1x16 feet go over the falls every second, or 1600 cuft."
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bqk8v8 | what's the difference between a technologist and a technician? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bqk8v8/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_a_technologist/ | {
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"Technician actually performs work/maintenance on machinery. A technologist studies said machines looking for ways to improve on it"
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1q3uy6 | why using the word "rape" is considered normalizing the issue while using the word "murder" is not. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1q3uy6/eli5_why_using_the_word_rape_is_considered/ | {
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"I think part of the problem is that the crime of rape is very different from murder. The act of sex can be something consensual or considered rape, depending on who is involved. The act of murder is always murder and always a terrible thing. In this respect, it is hard to \"normalize\" murder in the same way that you can \"normalize\" rape as people will generally all still believe murdering is a crime no matter how much we may say \"Oh shit, I straight up murdered that test.\" \n\nTV is sort of deceptive and portrays most rape cases as some guy jumping a girl in the street. In reality, it usually happens between two people who already know each other. Maybe they get a little drunk, the guy gets a little too aggressive and the girl gets too scared to say no. It is much harder to determine whether or not rape has occurred, and so \"normalizing\" the idea of rape is much more likely to make this kind of behavior seem more acceptable. ",
"I suppose if the word \"murder\" was used in the same way as \"rape\" is, you probably could consider murder being trivialized. Trying to keep any sort of bias out of it, the way I understand arguments about rape being trivialized are that using the word \"rape\" in such a casual, joking manner will eventually (if it goes on long enough) create the idea that being raped is not a big deal, therefore trivializing rape.\n\nIf we used murder in the same context (and I know some people do, but I don't think to the same degree), we could probably create the idea that someone murdering someone else isn't a big deal, as well.\n\nI think the difference in something like \"rape\" vs. \"murder\" is that rape is something that is in many cases survived, so someone that is a survivor of rape is going to be more sensitive to jokes about it than someone who was murdered (because obviously, being dead, they aren't going to care if you make fun of them).\n\nAs an example, let's pretend that you were mugged at gunpoint. It would probably be a traumatic event for you. If you were to later watch a movie or TV show where someone was mugged at gunpoint for comedic effect (I can think of an episode of Futurama where mugging was played for comedic effect), you probably wouldn't laugh at the joke, because you know what being mugged at gunpoint is like and you know that it's no laughing matter.\n\nThis is kind of the idea. Rape survivors are not going to think rape jokes are funny (for the most part; everyone has a different sense of humor, and there may be some rape survivors that make or laugh at rape jokes), and are not going to like the idea of someone saying, \"I raped you\" when all you did was beat them at a video game. It takes their personal experiences and invalidates them to some degree."
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as3glk | how does diabetes work on a cellular level? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/as3glk/eli5_how_does_diabetes_work_on_a_cellular_level/ | {
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"Really rough and basic: imagine your cell has a lock on it. Insulin is the key to open that lock. Depending on whether you have Type 1 (little to no insulin production) or type 2 (insulin cannot recognize the key hole and thus can’t let the sugar (glucose) into the cell), the sugar builds up in your blood and causes damage to your blood vessels and organs.The body does what it can to remove the excess sugar through your urine etc. "
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es4g5q | can you get your pets sick, or vice versa? | We were supposed to take home a new kitten tonight, but my son was sick (Possibly strep. Negative on the quick strep test but the doctor wanted to do a culture because the symptoms say strep.) So we had to reschedule. Between orange juice and ibuprofen, my son asked if he could get the kitten sick. I honestly don't know the answer. Can pets catch the common cold? What other illnesses can pets and humans share? Do I have to worry about his kitten getting strep throat? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/es4g5q/eli5_can_you_get_your_pets_sick_or_vice_versa/ | {
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"Sometimes. \n\nDifferent animals and humans have different bacteria and viruses that can get them sick. Some can affect both, while others only one. \n\nMost only affect one. I believe strep throat can be passed to cats though. \n\nMost diseases that can spread between animals and humans are larger parasites though. This is because they live in the environment of our flesh, with less specialization needed. Bacteria and viruses use our cells to help them grow, where as parasites are more like a bug or animal eating the meat to grow.",
"You can definitely get your pets sick under at least one circumstance:\n\n- If you have rabies, and you bite your pet.",
"There are some diseases that can spread from animals to humans, but many can't. Diseases that do jump between us and animals are known as \"zoonotic diseases\". Which disease can jump between species is often quite specific. Flu, for example, can infect pigs and birds as well as humans easily but is unlikely to be transmitted to cats. Ebola jumps from monkeys to humans. AIDS evolved from a simian (monkey) virus and then made humans their host. The list of known zoonotic diseases is pretty long.",
"Sometimes, but only with specific illnesses. Diseases that can pass between humans and animals are called zoonitic diseases, but most common diseases that humans get can't be passed to animals. It's usually the animals that get *us* sick. Infectious diseases tend to be very specialized in terms of what organisms they can infect, so the majority of diseases can't cross species. That means cats and dogs can't get the flu or a human cold (cats and dogs can get colds, but it's a different virus that humans can't get). Pets can pass some diseases to humans like rabies and certain parasites, but they can't give us common pet diseases like parvo in dogs or calcivirus in cats. Rest easy knowing that you can bring your kitten home and your son can't get it sick."
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fcvbgs | how does saliva become "sticky" sometimes? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fcvbgs/eli5_how_does_saliva_become_sticky_sometimes/ | {
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"Vape liquids are literally vaporized sugar water with flavors/nicotine.\n\nIt's just sugar alcohols and water. Also any kind of respiratory irritant will cause a bodily response and increases mucus secretion.",
"People aren't meant to inhale irritants. When we do our airways will increase mucosal output as part of our body's immune response. Mucous can be watery and thin or thicker. Thicker mucous is generally meant to trap any offending bacteria or foreign body to help us cough it up."
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3hsyw3 | why is tire pressure printed so tiny? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3hsyw3/eli5_why_is_tire_pressure_printed_so_tiny/ | {
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"Because that's not the pressure you should be going by anyway. That's the absolute maximum that tire should ever see. Your car's door jamb should have a sticker that shows the proper pressure that's been calculated for the load your car will put on the tires. If you use the pressure molded into the tire you're virtually guaranteed to be over inflating, often by close to 20 psi."
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1qpi32 | can someone explain what the vote for the "upton bill" is about? | I'm having trouble understanding what the upton bill is and what it has to do with obamacare? I keep hearing about it but I don't get what its about. Please eli5! Thankyou! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1qpi32/can_someone_explain_what_the_vote_for_the_upton/ | {
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"One thing the Affordable Care Act did was prohibit insurance companies from selling new policies that were not up to certain standards. This affected some people who had bought these policies after the original cut-off date.\n\nOne proposal, sponsored by Democrats, would let people who had those policies canceled keep them through next year. The Upton proposal, sponsored by a Republican, would allow insurance companies to keep selling those sub-standard plans to anybody until 2015.\n\nThe difference between the two is that the first bill would keep people from losing their health insurance now, while the second would pretty much let insurance companies continue selling health insurance that doesn't really cover anything -- a problem that the ACA was intended to solve in the first place.\n\nEven though it passed the house, the Upton bill isn't expected to pass the senate, or survive a presidential veto if it does."
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2rttnm | why is it, and why was it originally, seen as insulting for other people to have sex with your mother? why are 'your mom' jokes so insulting, yet little is said about 'your dad' jokes? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2rttnm/eli5why_is_it_and_why_was_it_originally_seen_as/ | {
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"Because of the persisting belief in our society that when a man and a woman have sex the man 'wins' and the woman 'loses'.",
"Because my dad could totally beat up your dad. So you best show the man some respect",
"I dated my friends mom for a bit. There's something about that person with the woman who gave birth to you. It's almost like they feel violated. It's easy to make jokes, but it's even better when it's true!",
"Traditionally, legacy was a very important thing. Your father gives you your name, your property, your occupation, and even your reputation (at least if you are a son, he does).\n\nKnowing who your real father is (and conversely, a father knowomg who his real sons are) was a pretty serious affair, and is part of the reason society is so uptight about female sexuality. Implying your mother is promiscuous , and that you may be some other man's bastard, that calls into question whether you are entitled to your father's legacy, and is a grave insult."
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3h5886 | why would people want to buy bonds with short maturity dates when the return is lower than the average inflation rate? | I was looking at CDs and bonds on scottrade and I realized that some of the short term bonds have returns below 1%. This is way below the average inflation rate.
Why would people want to invest in these types of short bonds. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3h5886/eli5_why_would_people_want_to_buy_bonds_with/ | {
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"Some accounts even have negative interest rates. \n\nIf you have a $1,000,000, what are you going to do with it? Ordinary bank accounts are only insured up to $250,000. If you buy real estate it's no longer easy to get if you need it fast, and can go down in value, and your paying property taxes. Put it in your mattress? What if your house burns. Sometimes you essentially pay to keep money stored and safe. ",
"If you leave it in cash, inflation would eat that even more. And it wouldn't be FDIC insured above a certain limit. So bond look good in comparison to that."
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3t625g | if there ia only one harvest season, how are most vegetables able to be sold year round? | I live in TN where the corn is grown. It grows in the spring and ia harvested in the fall. All the cornfields are nubs now. But corn is sold around the year. How can they sell it around the year if there is only one harvest season?
And why don't they do the same for pumpkins and watermelons? Those are only sold during specific times. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3t625g/eli5_if_there_ia_only_one_harvest_season_how_are/ | {
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"It's grown in other areas that have different harvest seasons, and then shipped around the world to supermarkets.\n\nYou can buy pumpkins and watermelons year round, as well, but when it's not the local harvest season the price goes up beyond what you might want to pay."
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9vifo6 | how do radical muslims interpret the quran in such a way that they feel compelled to conduct extremist acts such as suicide bombings? is there a certain passage that is misinterpreted? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9vifo6/eli5_how_do_radical_muslims_interpret_the_quran/ | {
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"Sadly it's not a misinterpretation at all...it's laid out pretty clearly and people are simply following what it says. Downside is that it was written ~1400 years ago when it was completely accepted that murder was the proper punishment for all kinds of innocuous things, and practically everyone believed in some form of magic; and now some people in the 21st century (large groups of them in fact) still take this collection of ramblings to be the perfect word of an all powerful being that created the universe and everything in it. Quite literally on the same level as throwing people in the ocean as an offering to Neptune or rocking a rain dance...which would be completely fine if their customs were making crafts, or simple introspection, or spreading goodwill, but in this case, the customs are converting or killing anyone who doesn't agree with them, or at the very least, siding with people who propagate these beliefs. All written by a bunch of people who's entire world view was a couple of hundred square miles at best. Great bunch of ideas to base your entire life around."
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64swn9 | if you owned land would the land underneath be still considered yours? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/64swn9/eli5_if_you_owned_land_would_the_land_underneath/ | {
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"Depends on the country. In some places the \"mineral rights\" (rights to dig up what's underneath) are sold separately from the land.",
"Generally, only up to a certain depth. Everything below that is what's known as \"mineral rights\". \n\nIt varies widely based on municipality and the history of the land but the majority of people do not own the mineral rights unless it was explicitly included in the sale of the property.",
"Mineral rights is a common thing through out Texas. When buying and selling land there you but the topsoil which is often considered 20 feet below ground. anything deeper are mineral rights and can be sold separately."
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3gnht9 | what is the difference between china's "devaluing currency" and america's "quantitative easing?" | Don't they both just involve using monetary policy as an economic stimulus (i.e. printing money)? It feels like politician doublespeak to me. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3gnht9/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_chinas/ | {
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"From my limited but hopefully growing background in economics, from what I know so far, it seems China is selling more yuan back into the Forex markets whereas the US is lending/giving money to the major banks instead. I'm going to look more into this to double check this. Please anyone correct if I'm wrong. \nOP check out /r/finance",
"Both involve printing money but they have different objectives and, thus, the printed money is targeted at different assets. Whereas in quantitative easing what is being usually bought by the central bank are toxic or long-term financial assets, devaluation is usually done by targeting more foreign currency or foreign short-term financial assets. The effects end up being similar in direction but different in magnitude.",
"Actually, neither one involves the literal printing of money. The Chinese have a fixed exchange rate and peg the Yuan to the US Dollar. With the devaluing, they moved the peg and now accept fewer dollars per yuan. This was done to make their goods cheaper in the U.S. with the hope that Americans will buy more stuff. \n \nThe Fed cannot print money, only the Treasury can do that. The purpose of QE was to increase the ability of banks to lend money by taking bonds the banks held and issuing an offsetting credit to the banks in exchange. This had the effect of increasing the bank's cash on hand. While the Fed did not print any paper dollars, they created digital credit out of thin air, which has the same effect as printing dollars. Keep in mind most \"money\" in circulation are digital entries, not paper dollars.",
"*Background*\n\nThe Renminbi is not a freely-traded currency. Instead, the currency operates off of a 2% trading band from a midpoint pegged to the US dollar – that is to say, every morning, the PBOC tells the world how many rambos can buy one dollar, and the currency is then allowed to fluctuate over the course of the day so long as it does not go more than 2% above or below the PBOC-set rate in the morning. This process is repeated every day, and while the PBOC says that it takes market movements under consideration when setting the morning peg, it is under no obligation to do so – ie even if on Monday the RMB dropped by 0.5%, on Tuesday the PBOC can set the midpoint higher than the Monday rate if they feel so inclined (for various possible reasons: to meet political goals, to encourage various policies, Xi lost a bet, whatever).\n\nNow there are two markets for the Renminbi: Onshore (CNY) and Offshore (CNH). The CNY is what the PBOC has direct control over. The offshore CNH market is traded in Hong Kong and does not have the same trading restrictions, although it is of course heavily indirectly influenced by PBOC policy. Essentially the CNH offers a window for what the Rambo would look like if it was more heavily influenced by market factors rather than PBOC say-so.\nNow, China politically is currently faced with two geopolitical problems tied to its currency and international trade: (1) the country has been suffering from weaker exports as demand for Chinese stuff drops and a more expensive RMB makes it harder for Chinese industrials to compete with cheaper exports, and (2) the Chinese government is lobbying to include the RMB in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Special Drawing Rights (SDR), a basket of currencies held by the IMF that are meant to be an international baseline for currency value (in theory; in practice everyone mostly still uses the US Dollar). They want (2) for international respect and greater global use of the RMB as a trade currency. One of the conditions for SDR inclusion is that China needs to show that it has attempted to liberalise its currency (ie allow market forces a greater say over RMB pricing rather than “it is what the PBOC says it is”). SDR inclusion is a very political process and while every IMF member has a say the US has the largest single voice in the matter.\n\nThe forced currency depreciation is an attempt to (at least partially) address both those problems. The fact is, the CNY rate has been overvalued by the PBOC. [Take a look at these graphs](_URL_0_), which show CNY vs CNH rates since last April. Top graph shows CNY (white) and CNH (orange) to USD rates; bottom shows CNY – CNH spread. As you can see, the market has almost constantly considered the CNY as overvalued. There have been downward pressures on the RMB for over a year now, which have been resisted by the PBOC because of a variety of reasons – in essence, the PBOC has been keeping their currency artificially high. The world, particularly the US, likes this, because it mitigated some of the Chinese export juggernaut and policymakers have been calling the RMB artificially low for years.\n\nBy lowering the RMB, the Chinese government is seeking to further encourage their faltering exports by making it cheaper for Chinese manufacturers to sell overseas, and by making their currency more in-line with market value. Along these lines, the RMB will most likely continue to depreciate: remember there’s still a 2% cap on CNY, while CNH dropped by 3%, meaning the market expects at least another 1% drop in the currency, probably up to around 3% more. The PBOC has also stated that future currency pegs will be based on previous market activity rather than the whims of the central bank. Whether that’s lip-service or actually true, only time will tell.\n\n*Repercussions*\n\nIronically, while the move itself is market-friendly (brings currency closer in line to market value, take markets into greater consideration when forming prices), the way in which the PBOC made it (ok guys we’re dropping it by 2% now) is very market-unfriendly and part of China’s usual tactics of taking a sledgehammer to a problem best solved with tweezers. And while the US in theory has always wanted China to ensure its currency is more in line with market value, the devaluation does actively harm US interests, particularly in the manufacturing sector (loss of jobs overseas etc), which is why the US Treasury still considers the RMB as undervalued when, you know, it isn’t. Also, you know, election year, and China is always a good bogeyman. As such, expect US politicians to go apeshit over this and accuse China of currency manipulation etc. They’ll also probably do whatever they can to delay Chinese SDR inclusion.\n\nDomestically, while this will boost Chinese exports, it won’t have that much of a long-term effect. The Chinese economy is suffering from systemic problems which cannot be addressed by a simple currency adjustment. That said, it’s a move in the right direction.\nThe flipside to this coin is China’s capital outflow problem. China has always had a problem with people trying to get their money out of the country, right? Well imagine that sentiment compounded by the idea that this money I hold will probably be worth less tomorrow than it’s worth today. Rich folk in particular, or those with international holdings, will try to move as much out as possible in order to retain value. The outflows could even amount to another liquidity squeeze which could further threaten overall economic performance.\n\n*What does this mean for me?*\n\nIn short: if you’re paid in foreign money, or using a foreign bank account to live in China, then stuff will be cheaper for you. If you’re paid in Rambos, travelling abroad will be more expensive. This is the same on a corporate level: it will be cheaper for foreign companies to set up in China, which might lead to an influx in demand for foreign staff. Likewise, non-SOE firms who have to pay staff abroad will retract as it costs more to do the same shit they’ve always done. SOEs don’t care as much because they essentially have infinite money, but private firms will have a much harder time of it. Commodity companies are also going to fare poorly as commodities tend to be priced in US dollars, making it more expensive for the firms to do their thing.\n\nGeopolitically, this will probably kick off another US/China pissing contest where politicians from other side say bad things about one another and presidential candidates say borderline-racist stuff to appease voters.\n\nIf you’ve got a large stash of RMB lying around not doing much, now’s the time to get it into foreign currency. Even if you convert it back in a couple months you’ll probably get around 5% extra moneys.\n\nCourtesy of /u/zhongwu"
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2rka6y | what is the big deal with stradivarius violins, can't the just make an exact clone of it by analyzing it? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2rka6y/eli5_what_is_the_big_deal_with_stradivarius/ | {
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"They're made of denser wood due to the \"little ice age\" which took place during their construction, and this supposedly gives them an unique sound.\n\nIn reality, the effect comes from their name. In double-blind tests they perform just as well (or worse) as your average violin.",
"It's can be cloned and improved upon, but the intangibles are hard to mimic. Here's a good Planet Money show about it: _URL_0_\n",
"they can make exact copies of a Picasso too, doesn't mean it is the equivalent to the original. Copies are always worth less than the original no-matter what you are talking about.",
"It is perception and hype. The same reason a painting goes from being a painting to a masterpiece. Some one could copy and improve a fine piece of art but we believe that the original is better because it was made by a master of his craft. ",
"My sister is a violinist, and I went shopping with her for a new violin. They can have two violins that are the exact same model, but they will bring you two of them because they will still play differently because of tiny differences in the wood, etc. They are incredibly delicate instruments- any minuscule detail in construction will change how they sound to a trained ear. \n\nIt doesn't exactly answer the whole question, but just wanted to give some context on why little details can mean a world of difference to the kind of people who physically cringe when they hear a note that's only slightly out of tune. ",
"Absolutely. You wouldn't believe the amount of folklore you find in the musical world.",
"[There's a Hungarian chemist who did a pretty good job duplicating it apparently.](_URL_0_)",
"Almost every violin made in the past 350 years is a clone of a Stradivarius.",
"Little known fact: Stradivarius is still alive and makes brass instruments _URL_0_",
"1. They're very complex instruments. Wood, design (especially arching), construction, wood treatment, finishing (treatment, primer, sealer, ground, probably color coats less important). \n2. The SOUND isn't what they are purchased for, it's for the player. Not that the sound isn't rather delightful. The purchased is for the nuances. Listen - really listen - to some of the LOC series on Paganini, to Bell playing on and talking about the Gibson. The response, range, power etc of great violins is astounding. I can only taste a tiny bit of this when I get to try one out, but it's highly clear that great violins are special. \n3. It isn't the ice-age wood - one can still get that wood.\n4. Blind tests are just that - most of the listeners are quite blind relative to folks who build and adjust and really listen to lots of violins of high quality. On the other hand, I've been chatting with people like that and had someone mention that a recording sounded like this or that - and was correct. Not just a Stradivari or del Gesu, but that something sounded like this maker or that. They really are quite distinctive.\n5. Most players, even very good ones, really can't use such things. They're fickle. Most like nice sounding, tractable, easy to play, uniform violins without nearly the top end power or variability of tone and so on. That's actually the market I'm working towards satisfying at the moment.\n\n_URL_0_ has lots of discussions, and do listen to the top players talk about their instruments. Many videos out there.",
"My cello teacher told me a funny story about a violin player who was known for playing a Stradivarius. It was all in the papers that this guy was coming to town to play his Stradivarius and people came to see him. He played his first piece and it was beautiful. It got a standing ovation. He then held up his Stradivarius and asked the crowed \"Do you like the way my Stradivarius sounds?\". The audience cheered. Then the violin player smashed the violin into a million pieces. The audience was shocked. Turns out it was just a piece of shit violin and the guy wanted to prove it was *him* that made the violin sound good, not the fact that it was a Stradivarius. He of course finished his concert with the Strad. ",
"There's no simple answer to this, but a *simplistic* one would be, \"Sort of, but not really.\"\n\nThere are many different things that make a Stradivarius what it is. One of those is age, and we cannot duplicate that artificially. All instruments change sound with age, and the only thing you can do is wait.\n\nBut *some* of the factors that contribute to the sound *can* be duplicated in newly made instruments, and in the last few decades we've come much closer to it, thanks to a chance discovery by a scientist who also happened to be an amateur luthier. We can identify and duplicate the woods and most of the other materials (glues and such) with pretty good accuracy. We have a very good idea of how they were made, so we can also duplicate that pretty accurately.\n\nBut it turns out that probably the most important factor in duplicating the Stradivarius sound is one too small to see -- without a microscope.\n\nA scientist curious about this very question obtained some shards of a Stradivarius that had been destroyed somehow, and examined them under a powerful microscope. What he discovered both shocked and delighted him, and led directly to the modern development of new violins that sound a lot like aged Stradis.\n\nPart of the making of any instrument like a violin involves bending thin pieces of wood. This is done by first soaking them in water. It turns out that by pure chance, the particular water that Stradivari was using to do this had a high content of metallic salts. As the wood dried, the wood was impregnated by these minerals, leaving millions of microscopic bits of metal in the pores of the wood that would resonate with it when the instrument was played.\n\nAll that is necessary to duplicate this is to identify the minerals involved, then soak violin parts in water with those minerals dissolved in it. Within a few years of the discovery, they were producing violins like that, with marvellous results.\n\nThe catch is that another important component of the sound is the aging of the wood, which gradually opens up the pores throughout, changing the sound. And that is all but impossible to accurately duplicate artificially. Something like it can be achieved with various chemical and other treatments, but if you really want an aged sound, you really need an aged instrument.\n"
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4blxbm | why cant we just stop media outlets from covering terrorism? wouldn't that effectively make it pointless? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4blxbm/eli5_why_cant_we_just_stop_media_outlets_from/ | {
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"Freedom of the press. \nIf you prevent the media from reporting something, that opens room for abuse. \nPolice beating that man to death? Fits most definitions of terrorism. \nThat government crackdown on dissidents? Terrorism. \nInvading another country? Terrorism.",
"I think ignoring the problems would be one of our worst strategies. I actually liked your post and idea and all, but if we ignore terrorism, were never going to stop it. These people have some strange ideas and fantasy about death, I don't understand why they have to bring others into it, but they do and will continue. As a pacifist I find this Islamic radicalism to be very disheartening as I can only see abolishing the religion all together as the only option. Even if you're moderate, your book speaks of death, gender inequality, and world domination. Violence should never be a form of communication. But the media will pass it along for its on greedy attention attempts for ratings. ",
"How would that be enforced? If you prevent the media from publishing news about terrorist attacks, why not other negative things? Like how badly you're doing in a war? Or how the quality of life in your country is less than in others? It's censorship which just turns the news into propaganda. ",
"This would not solve anything, and if anything it would make it work better than it does now. \n\nTerrorism works against the people doing it, as it solidifies the views and creates harsher decisions, the response to terrorism is not \"i should stop bombing them\", its \"we will bomb those fuckers even more\", and leads to more extreme governments who will then have more extreme actions against those groups.\n\nThere is a reason ETA, IRA etc accomplished nothing, terrorist does not work, especially if it starts creating outrage in the population who is then motivated to be politically active, which isnt the case in normal times. ",
"Taking a different angle... Real people died. Those people's families would tell their stories. These stories would spread by word of mouth (and the internet). Think about how inaccurate modern news stories can be in spite of all the technology available. Now imagine those stories spread by the telephone game.\n\nThe stories would still get out but would potentially be even more damaging.",
"The media fulfills a need of people to relate to news and stories, and they are free to do this.",
"Even if the mainstream media stopped covering terrorism, individuals would still share and reblog and make the news and videos and images go viral on social media. ",
"Silence would cause panic in another way. \n\nBut I do think that media have a moral obligation to stick to the important facts, not create emotions, not report rumors and stop with the topic once there is nothing really important left to report. Unfortunately almost all news outlets do the opposite, even changing their layout to create the feeling of an exceptional situation.\n\notoh I see no way this could be written into law without making that law dangerously exploitable",
"If you don't see why this would be far, far worse than terrorism, it's not something that can be explained to you.",
"If you know someone happened, ask yourself, would you rather have vetted sources of information or countless rumours where you don't know which is true. Some of these rumours will be worse and some better. Media coverage enables most of the rumours to be eliminated and in-turn eliminate most of the rumours that would make a situation seem worse or scarier than it actual is.",
"It'd also make news outlets useless since they are no longer reporting important events.\n\nCoveting up important world events to deprive the public of knowledge is a dangerous route as it impedes their ability to make an informed decision come election time hurting democracy.",
"You can't stop the spread of knowledge and information. Even in totalitarian societies \"word\" gets around.",
"Why is it that nowadays it is always someone else's fault for everything? I am curious of why this is. Why can't we just take responsibility for our own actions and ask the question, Why can't we just stop being the audience?",
"There's a difference between reporting that something terrible happened, and reporting that it happened + a full week of coverage + specials + interviews + really inappropriate intro graphics that say stuff like 'BLOODSHED IN BELGIUM' \n\n\nTell us that it happened, don't turn the criminals into celebrities.",
"It's the freedom of the press coupled with a drive for ratings in the 24 hour news cycle vs our morbid curiosity for the macabre.\n\nNo one looks away at a train crash. We all just stand their with our mouths agape asking \"how could this happen?\". Now imagine a channel on your TV that is constantly on the lookout for train crashes to show 24/7, hoping to \"outdo\" the one from before.\n\nNOW... imagine you're a psychopath who wants to live in infamy because you've always led a life of nothing. What could you do to get your name/cause/ideology in front of millions of people today?",
"Can we censor the news? No, that's a terrible idea.",
"Because journalists and large media groups don't understand the phrase \"Don't feed the trolls.\" ",
"As a former editor-in-chief: With all due respect to the victims of these latest attacks... Looking at only the statistics of casualty, terrorism is many times less \"dangerous\" than sugar, traffic and many other everyday occurrences. But it has a huge \"wow\" factor and thus as a newspaper you would face a lot of internal criticism for not writing about it.\n\nIt's a vicious circle: Extensive reports of political/religious violence feeds public fear. Fearful people click more fear-inducing headlines, and newspapers feel obliged to keep the headlines coming since they bring in HUGE amounts of clicks.\n\nIf newspapers actually reflected and informed about the big threats against society, we'd all be writing about climate change, mass extinction in the oceans and the global erosion of fertile soil. But way too few read boring stuff like that...",
"You can't prevent reporting on what happens in the world, but something that almost all news stations are guilty of now is giving constant breaking and unconfirmed reports, sensationalising and giving opinion on breaking events. Yesterday I was watching Sky news which is owned by Rupert Murdock and is strong supporter of Britain exiting the EU. Less than an hour after the attacks on the train, Sky news were using the events to push this political agenda saying that this was proof that the EU was incapable of keeping Britain safe from terrorism. \n\nIf news channels were restricted to simply presenting the known facts and nothing else without an emotional spin I think you could count this as a massive blow for terrorism.\n\nI tend to try and avoid rolling news (both on TV and here on Reddit) as you are going to hear half stories and misunderstandings that will confuse the facts, a good example being the panic that was ensuing after Nuclear power plants in Belgium were evacuated, but it later transpired was just the standard operating procedure for a level 4 state of emergency.",
"I've always watched the news before work and at 6pm, this year I decided to stop watching it, I unfollowed news media outlets on social media and to be totally honest, I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything. \n",
"The government shall pass no laws abridging the freedom of the press. \n\nHowever the consumer is always right. If you want to stop the media from covering terrorism, then stop being the customer of news outlets that profit from sensationalist reporting. You can vote with your dollars. If the news outlet can't sell advertising because their viewership is dropping, they will either have to cave in to the demands of their viewers, or go out of business. It's a simple concept, don't give money or views to businesses you hate, but it requires more discipline than many people can display. ",
"The press is also owned by a few large corporations who are in lock-step with various government agencies. They've been pushing this agenda for years, at the cost of the tax payer. I'm sure these same large media corporations are profiting in some way. The truth is probably much stranger than any conspiracy theory out there. ",
"News is a business, and like all businesses, they care about making money above all else. I completely agree that it would be better for them not to report terrorism, but these kinds of stories draw viewers/readers in droves. The only way to stop them would involve erasing a bit of the First Amendment, and I don't think that's a road people want to go down. All rights are a double edged sword, they give you the freedom to do things you like, and other people the freedom to do things you don't like.",
"As a lot of people have pointed out freedom of the press is a significant factor.\n\nThere are also other reasons. The point of terrorism is to spread fear yes bout the fear that they try to spread is not of than but of rather your own governments inability to protect you. Terrorism is not about winning a war as the terrorist know that they can't, it's about destabilizing a country enough to begin a war.\n\nIf you found out that a large amount of people had died and that the government was responsible for hiding the fact you would begin to fear what else the government were hiding.\n\nThink about this, if you can't trust the government to tell you the truth who can you trust. Not reporting terrorist activity makes it easier for terrorists to gain more control over the dialog as people seek answers. This makes it easier to portray themselves as freedom fighters.\n\nThink about the great firewall of China. The world largest and most effective censorship scheme. It is highly ineffective with millions of Chinese citizens still accessing sites they shouldn't. The problem is once people lose faith in the press and start seeking alternatives you can't ensure that the attentive media is accurate not bias. If people start trusting a source which is sympathetic to the terrorists that you just create more terrorists.",
"\"My daughter went to Belgium last week and I haven't heard from her. Oh well, she's probably just having fun!\""
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60cka7 | why isn't renting an apartment/house go under monopoly laws? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/60cka7/eli5why_isnt_renting_an_apartmenthouse_go_under/ | {
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"Because lots of different people rent or sell houses. No one company or person controls the market, which means its not a monopoly.",
"For starters.... Housing is not a RIGHT to be granted or taken away, because you have zero right to the product of the labor of another person. All this is despite what your teachers teach you. \n\nSecondly: in economics, you cannot view something as a monopoly based on another product... The products have to remain identical. If there were only one apartment complex in the county, with one owner, and you couldn't live Anywhere but there.... That's a monopoly. \n\nIt is dependent upon each individual person to make the decision to live within their means, and source housing according to their limited means and products of their labor. \n\nSomething is worth only what someone is paying for it. If the market in an area dictates that the rent will rise.... It's not monopolizing anything to raise the price of the rent. That's the basic supply and demand curves. ",
"First of all, you seem to not understand quite what a \"monopoly\" is.\n\nAnd secondly, you also seem to not understand the laws about monopolies.\n\nSo, let's start with the first point. A monopoly is when there is only one supplier of specific goods. A monopoly in the property market would be when there is only one landlord, and anyone who wants to rent a property has to rent from the same landlord. That clearly doesn't happen in the property market, because you have lots of choice of whom to rent from.\n\nAnd now to the second point: monopolies are not illegal. What *is* illegal is to make use of your monopoly in one field to gain an advantage in another field. So if there really was only one landlord, then it would be illegal for that landlord to insist that you only got cable from the cable supplier which is owned by the landlord - doing that would mean that the landlord was gaining an advantage in the cable market due to his existing monopoly in the housing market. *That* would be illegal, but having a monopoly in the housing market is not.",
"Because that is not even close to what the word monopoly means. Do you consider making you pay more than you want to be theft as well?\n\nYou may have a human right to housing, but you do not have the right to live in any particular place. If you feel your rent is too high, there are plenty of other renters in competition for your businesses. That is pretty much the exact opposite of a monopoly."
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1qkwg8 | the difference between feminism and women's rights. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1qkwg8/eli5the_difference_between_feminism_and_womens/ | {
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"Good luck finding two feminists that can agree on what feminism even means.\n\n...and that's before you bring in the trolls & misogynists shitting all over the thread.",
"Women's rights is a about equality, particularly legal equality and justice.\n\nFeminism is about advocacy of women's issues, which while a large part, is not limited to legal equality.",
"Go ask SRS, they are full of useful info. It's been proven to be useful. That's why they ban anyone who asks a question or disagrees. \n\nIn full, both groups are full of radical people who only care about first world issues and need something to cry about. "
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5tw9hl | what caused the deepwater horizon catastrophe? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5tw9hl/eli5_what_caused_the_deepwater_horizon_catastrophe/ | {
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"1) BP Co man tried to be cheap & reduced the number of pipe centralizers by a significant number. \n2) Halliburton was hired to pump cement to solidify the pipe. Head cementer noticed the discrepancy & noted it to the Co man. Insufficient centralizers can cause a poor cement job since the pipe bends & moves as it goes downhole. \n3) Co man told him to \"shut up & do his job\". Signed cementer's joblog & notation. \n4) Cement in a well job goes down the inside of the pipe then back up the outside of the pipe. Water is pumped behind the cement to clear the cement w or without a rubber plug. \n5) As the cement came up the outside, the pipe had bent & was touching the freshly drilled hole so the cement went around the pipe THICK on the other side but NOTHING on that side. Just as the cementer had predicted. \n6) After the pipe was perforated to allow product to flow into the pipe, no cement at that point in the pipe allowed it to shake & erode the hole. \n7) Very quickly the metal pipe burst allowing pressurized petroleum to escape OUTSIDE the pipe & blast up the outside of the hole outside the cement & all pressure control mechanisms on the rig. Pressure ratings on pipe require proper counterpressure such as hardened cement.\n\n- I got this during my 10 years in the oilfield including 6 in cement w several ex-Halliburton engineers & Senior Cementers who were given the full briefing when this happened."
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8d45ve | why is it possible for certain animals, particularly typical pets, to die from extreme stress? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8d45ve/eli5_why_is_it_possible_for_certain_animals/ | {
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"stress has an inpact on the body functions and chemicals up to a point that it gets dangerous to the body functions.\n\nit is possible for almost all animals including humans to die from stress.\n\nthe amount of stress needed might be different. in most cases it is a heart attack in humans."
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33sot1 | differences in pain? (example: stab, sharp pain vs. punch pain?) | Getting pinched or getting punched can hurt equally as much, but they feel...different. When you get pinched, have a shot, or get stung by a bee, it feels kind of sharp. When you get punched, hit your knee on wood/metal, or stubbing your toe feels different than that sharp feeling I described. Do these two things have names, and has anyone else thought about this before? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/33sot1/eli5_differences_in_pain_example_stab_sharp_pain/ | {
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"Part of it is the degree of pressure. A pinch stimulates nerves more accurately than a punch. A sting or stab is more centralized than a punch. If you were pinched at the same pressure as a punch, it would hurt more than a punch. Punches also aren't felt as deep. Think of scratching your skin. That doest hurt. If you scratched an open wound, OWW. Stabbing pains like pinching stimulate the inside nerves more directly. \nP.S. Pinching is pushing 2 places inside of you together ( like 2 spots in your arm) "
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1j10c7 | why do i stop being able to see properly for a brief period if i exercise vigorously? | Sometimes after running vigorously or doing stair climbing training, I become very sensitive to light right after and things become almost blurry, but more so, I can't see properly. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1j10c7/eli5why_do_i_stop_being_able_to_see_properly_for/ | {
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"I'd say this is more a question for your doctor rather than reddit. ",
"There's doctors on reddit... I think OP question is quite a common thing after working out. It happens to me too."
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1s23ob | why is it that some paintings are popular and others are not? | It seems like the quality of the art doesn't change much from a person selling their art on the street to a big time artist selling their paintings in a museum or a high class art show. Is it just the name of the artist that sells the paintings? If so, how does anyone actually become famous in the first place? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1s23ob/eli5_why_is_it_that_some_paintings_are_popular/ | {
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"As far as technique is concerned you're somewhat correct as there is an overabundance of artists with the appropriate training/ability to paint/draw/sculpt a masterpiece. The difference between an artist on the street and a big name artist in modern times is less about skill and more about creativity/subject matter. Granted, once an artist gains a name for her/himself, she/he will likely be able to pass off less inspired works but the initial emergence of an artist is due to their creativity. I'd consider this analogous to the music industry where there are an infinite number of talented vocalists and musicians but the ones who are most famous are the ones who create the most interesting music/write the most interesting lyrics (pop music notwithstanding)."
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7o98ks | why did south korea and japan become so successful after world war 2, but the philippines didn’t? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7o98ks/eli5_why_did_south_korea_and_japan_become_so/ | {
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"For 20 years after WWII, the country was plagued by Communist rebels and by corruption. Then a corrupt dictatorship took over. \n\nThis long period of terrible leadership hurt the country a lot.\n\nBy contrast, the US Army took over Japan and imposed order quite firmly. This was made easier by the country's centuries-long record of stable government.",
"The US poured most of its restoration efforts into Japan and SK to prevent them being under Communist Russia and to have a foothold in the East. The Philippines barely got any funding from the US relative to Japan and SK. \n\nAlso, Filipinos don't know shit about nation building and are selfish as fuck. \n\nSource: I'm form the Philippines.",
"Japan was an industrial powerhouse before and during World War 2. The defeat at the end of the war was a setback, yes, but not a permanent one. You can draw parallels with Germany which has also done very well. \n\nSouth Korea is different. It didn’t become highly industrialised until well after the war. It has always had a very good education system and people say that is why it has been successful. \n\nThe Phillipines had neither of those things so it is not surprising that it hasn’t done as well. \n\nAlso, it is rare for tropical countries to become highly developed, though there are certainly some examples. Though the ones that do succeed tend to have a unique advantage. e.g. Singapore is very well placed to control trade in the Straits of Malacca, and there is a lot of it. ",
"Kind of hard to build a country when Marcos stole all the money. Isn't 5 billion still missing?",
"One of the factors not mentioned so far is the fact that many Japanese and Korean (and Taiwanese, and more recently Chinese) immigrants to the West graduated college and ended up going back to their respective countries to use their newfound knowledge to build it up and to take advantage of opportunities rarely afforded to them in the West. I don't think Filipinos do this, maybe because their opportunities in the West are broader since they speak English more fluently (and also probably other cultural reasons). Filipinos are the most economically successful Asian demographic in the United States.\n\nKorea wasn't even successful after WWII per se. Even up until the 80's Korea was poorer than the Philippines.\n\nEDIT: [Source](_URL_0_) for dis-aggregated Asian-American earnings data. \n\n[Bonus source](_URL_1_) that shows Asian-Americans are the poorest demographic in New York.\n\nDisaggregation of data concerning Asian-Americans is an issue.",
"Japan was pretty much a modernized country before WWII and because of US aid they prospered after WWII. On top of that, the Govt. spent heavily on education, science, tech, and infrastructure which is why the country boasts a thriving tech and auto industry. \n\nS. Korea received a lot of reparations as well. In the 1980s, the Govt. replicated what the Japanese Govt. did and created ministries for technology and science. That’s why Korea has a thriving tech and auto industry as well.\n\nPhilippines is very different. Firstly, it has a colonized history- which Japan and Korea do not have. (Though Korea was colonized by Japan). Colonization is a big thing because the Philippines was basically a puppet for the Spanish and Americans- meaning everything from the islands was exploited and prevented industries to thrive. Plus, the Philippines is a heterogeneous society so race really affects social class. It’s a more stratified country and they way money is distributed is honestly why the Philippines is failing.\n\nLastly, education revolved around labor needs (such as nursing and health education) as opposed to science education that would have been responsible for innovations and an industry. \n\n\nBut believe it or not, the Philippines experienced it’s prime until the late 70s. The quality of life was high, literacy rate was high, and it was considered to be the 2nd richest country after Japan. ",
"America rebuilt them because being next to China and Russia they were strategically important.\n\nFor Japan, the US had a defense obligation too. Japan had its military disbanded and replaced with a very limited self defense force coupled with American presence in Okinawa. This left a lot of free resources and money for Japan to pour into the civilian sector.",
"SK and Japan invested in broad-based primary education, had relatively low inequality compared to other developing countries, and both also focused on developing a domestic industrial base instead of export agriculture and raw materials production. Both had strong, educated/specialized government bureaucracies that pursued both outwardly efficient trade policy but also heavily subsidized higher-tech domestic industries. The Park dictatorship in SK was corrupt, but in a less economically harmful manner than the Marcos regime in the Philippines. And the US both helped with aid because of Cold War concerns, and also largely ignored currency manipulation and industrial policy from both countries that made their exports more competitive abroad. And, both were careful to balance budgets and not overborrow, avoiding debt trap problems. Taiwan is a similar story.\n\nSource: I have a PhD in political economy and an MA in economic development. \n\nIf you want good reading, I recommend *MITI and the Japanese Miracle* by Chalmers Johnson; *Governing the Market* by Robert Wade; *Pathways from the Periphery* by Stephan Haggard; and *Embedded Autonomy* by Peter Evans."
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9jxszz | why does using a pillow feel comfortable when it makes your head tilted? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9jxszz/eli5_why_does_using_a_pillow_feel_comfortable/ | {
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"It's about supporting the neck more than the angle of your head. Ideally, you want to keep the spine aligned while maintaining that neck support so that your muscles are not straining to try to provide that alignment. So you're basically letting the muscles in your neck and shoulders relax by using the pillow. That is why it feels good."
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6cxv8x | why do you continue to sweat from running (particularly in hot weather) after taking a cold shower? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6cxv8x/eli5_why_do_you_continue_to_sweat_from_running/ | {
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"Your body doesn't stop sweating into your internal organs cool down. A cold shower is only cooling off the outside.",
"A quick, cold shower will help cool the outside of your body, but you may still have an elevated internal body temperature. Once the internal temperature stabilizes back to a normal temperature, then you will stop sweating.",
"Your muscles and metabolism are still working pretty hard. Your muscles need to rebuild since they are fatigued now (lactic acid, etc.) and your metabolism is still supplying energy at a higher rate since it hasn't had a chance to slow down yet. Additionally core temperature is still high. Your body is mostly water so it has a lot of energy density. It would take a LONG shower for you to cool your body down enough that you would no longer be sweating.\n\nI don't 100% know if this is true but the cold may kick in some metabolic function where your body is trying to generate heat so you don't freeze to death so the cold shower could also counteract itself.\n\nNote: I'm saying all of this as a runner with no formal athletic training / biology schooling so my exact terminology could be wrong but I generally understand how your body works when running after running on a school team for the last 10 years."
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2rn0mr | what are islamic extremists actually trying to accomplish by violent attacks, like the one today in paris? don't these attacks just embolden the majority against the viewpoints of the attackers? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2rn0mr/eli5_what_are_islamic_extremists_actually_trying/ | {
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"We can only speculate on their motives. They may simply want to lash out with violence due to anger or hurt regardless of its effectiveness. They may want to provoke an 'emboldened response' since such would likely embolden people on their own side, since a harsh response can create something of a recruitment drive for extremist organizations. They may be disturbed and have no rationale whatsoever, and religion is simply the guise their actions have taken on. "
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bwr0yy | can bees sense any ''human-made'' signals such as bluetooth or wi-fi? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bwr0yy/eli5_can_bees_sense_any_humanmade_signals_such_as/ | {
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"I don’t know what type of waves they can detect, but is it possible he was just responding to the vibrations of your head phones? Or perhaps his hearing is better than ours, so he could hear the music?",
"Do you wear hairspray? From my personal experience they seem to really like that stuff.",
"There does seem to be some suggestion that bees can detect (or at least are mildly affected by) radio waves. [This website](_URL_0_) compiles a large number of studies that have looked into effects of electromagnetic fields, and includes several studies on bees if you scroll down a bit. Some of these studies seem much more useful than others though, and I'd recommend actually looking at the primary material rather than just trusting the synopses on that page, which may be biased."
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1xq3ar | why don't we say "an user" instead of "a user"? | Or "an utensil". "An umbrella" sounds normal. Why don't we say "an user" even though it starts with a vowel? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1xq3ar/eli5_why_dont_we_say_an_user_instead_of_a_user/ | {
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"We determine whether a word should be associated with \"a\" or \"an\" by its sound, not by its spelling. For example, \"hour\" starts with h but it's silent, so the word actually starts with a vowel sound.\n\nUtensil and user both start with consonant Y when pronounced\n\nedit: But, of course, lots of people say things like \"an historic event\" because English is batshit crazy.",
"utensil and user start with a different sound than umbrella. one is an ''y' sound (also unicorn, uniform), the other is an uh' sound (also umpire, underweight)",
"Because the sound of the vowel actually doesn't start with a vowel so it sounds unusual. \n\nYou-ser.\nYou-ten-sil\nYou-knee-corn\n\nUm-brel-la. \nUn-want-ed",
"It starts with a vowel, but the actual sound you make for user and utensil is \"yuh\". The prescriptive, or artificial, rule is that you don't want to end a word with a vowel and start a new word with another vowel. The descriptive, or realistic, rule is that you don't want to end a word with a vowel **sound** and start a new word with another vowel **sound**. It's the same reason some people say \"an historian\", since making the \"h\" relatively silent is an acceptable pronunciation.",
"We use 'a' when the following word starts with a consonant sound, and 'an' when the following word starts with a vowel sound. \"User\" starts with a Y sound.",
"It's the phonemic sound that determines whether you use 'a' or 'an', not the letter which represents the vowel sound.\n\nThe 'u' sound in umbrella is clearly different to the 'u' sound in user.\nWhen you have a vowel sound like 'uh' (e.g. in umbrella), you use 'an'. When you have a sound like 'yoo' (e.g. in user), you use 'a'.\n\nThis idea is further illustrated in words like herb and historic.\n\nIn some regions of the world, you say herbs and historic with a noticeable 'h' sound, so you it would be written like 'lets add a herb to the dish' or 'what a historic event!'. In other regions, however, the 'h' sound in these words is silent. In this case it would be written like 'lets add an herb to the dish' or 'what an historic event!'.",
"Sounds like the influence from French? That language has \"un\" (which means the same as \"a\" and \"an\") and whether they pronounce the \"n\" as an \"n\" or a nasal sound depends on whether the sound of the next word begins with a vowel or consonant, as opposed to the first letter of the word."
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4262bd | why does radiation destroy human dna and make human life impossible but yet trees can survive and flourish? | For instance in Pripyat, there are many trees growing. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4262bd/eli5_why_does_radiation_destroy_human_dna_and/ | {
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"Human life isn't impossible in Pripyat. It's just not necessarily advisable, since you would experience a potentially increased risk of radiation-linked ailments like certain cancers. The overall background radiation in the region is not 'immediately human destroyingly' high.\n\nEdit: To more directly answer your question: In the same vein, heat can destroy human dna and make human life impossible. But what matters is *how much heat.* Not just any amount of heat or radiation is immediately destructive. You are *always* exposed to radiation, every day. But your body can generally handle low amounts. ",
"The destruction of tree DNA isn't nearly as devastating to a tree as it is a human. The main danger of radiation is cancer. Don't get me wrong, trees do get cancer, but because they are much slower growing cancer doesn't affect them in nearly the same way. Trees also don't have a blood stream so cancer in a tree isn't able to metastasize and move to other parts of the tree. (If you have ever seen those knobs on trees that look like bulges, that's tree cancer). \n\n**TL;DR:** because of the way cancer works and kills, it doesn't harm trees in the same ways it does humans, meaning it has little impact on them. ",
"Radiation is energy traveling in the form of waves or particles. All life is constantly exposed to radiation. These waves and particles are very small (smaller than atoms) and have the potential to strip electrons from other atoms (called ionization). This ionization of atoms is what ultimately can cause damage to biological systems.\n\nRadiation dose is measured in a unit called the \"rem\" which measures risk. 1/1000 of a rem is a milli-rem or mrem. People are exposed to about 1 mrem of radiation every day from background sources which include radiation from sources in and on the earth and radiation from sources from space. There are two types of risks from being exposed to radiation. Deterministic (if you receive a radiation dose on your skin of 200 rem you **will** get a burn) and Statistical (if you receive a radiation dose of 1 rem you increase your chances of contracting cancer in your lifetime by 0.08%).\n\nin order for radiation to cause damage to biological systems a **huge** number of ionization's must occur to the atoms in a cell and that damage must be damage that is unable to be repaired by the cells natural repair process. \n\nThe potential for damage is also dependent on the type of biological system being exposed. Rapidly dividing cells are more sensitive to radiation exposure. So a developing fetus is much more likely to suffer from radiation exposure than an adult. Your reproductive cells are more likely to be damaged by a radiation dose than your nerve or brain cells are. Trees, flora in general, are not rapidly dividing and are not complicated systems. You can physically cut a chunk out of a tree and it will repair and survive. You could shoot a bullet through a tree and it will repair and survive. \n\nI looked up some of the exposure numbers at Pripyat and, in 2009, the exposure rate, at the highest level, was about 1 mrem per hour. So spending 5 hours at this level would be about the same as the excess radiation dose you would receive by flying from New York to Tokyo. And people do that all the time without worry.\n\nAnother factor is that the statistical increase in your odds of contracting cancer increases as you grow older. Animals in the wild may have an increased chance of contracting cancer as they grow older, but they have a much lower life span, in effect making the cancer odds irrelevant. \n\nEverything I've said is with the assumption that the radiation exposure is external to your body. Ingesting, or breathing, something radioactive deposits the radioactive material into your body where the radiation can irradiate the cells around the deposition for a long period of time. The risk involved from an intake of radioactive material is much greater than the risk from being exposed to the radiation outside your body. That is why researchers who enter these areas will take precautions to prevent intake while simultaneously being much less concerned about the radiation dose from external radioactive material.",
"Pripyat is a bad example. Human life isn't impossible there, but they were forced to leave. Some people did stay. Also, animals survived there just fine.",
"It might be relevant to point out that a swath of trees did die from the radiation at Chernobyl. \n\n[Red Forest](_URL_0_)\n",
"Not impossible - humans could live in Pripyat. What would happen is that they would have much higher rates of cancer, and more birth defects. But if people lived there, had kids and whatnot and just ignored all the additional cancer and birth defects, the population would increase - because even if you have a ton of people dying from cancer from age 35 and up, there is still plenty of time to breed. ",
"As someone that works in a nuclear field (uranium enrichment) I haven't seen the specific reason why trees aren't hurt as much by radiation. /u/drewal79 has a good answer about why cancer doesn't affect trees as drastically. My answer explains why tree cancer is unlikely in the first place.\n\nIt all boils down to how quickly the cells divide (plants have a relatively slow growth rate/metabolism compared to animals). The slower the division, the more resistant to chronic exposure's effects. All cells can suffer from a large, immediate exposure to radiation. What is happening in these contaminated zones is low level chronic exposure.\n\nThere are three basic results from any exposure:\n\n-Immediate cell death\n\n-Cell sterilization\n\n-Cell damage that can be translated during division (cancer)\n\nThe likelihood of these results depends on the type of radiation (ionizing is the worst) and the energy level of the radiation (higher is worse)\n\nSolar radiation causes cancer using these same principles. Severe sunburns are similar to severe radiation exposure (except high energy exposure will penetrate deeper).",
"The radiation break down DNA, so it effects cells that rapidly divide the most, aka ones replicating that DNA. Tree cells do not rapidly divide. ",
"Most of these answers are incomplete. You, and many of the people answering your question, are confusing *radiation* (which generally comes in 3 flavors, alpha, beta, and gamma) with *radioactive material* (which generates the 3 kinds of radiation).\n\nWhen Chernobyl exploded it dumped massive amounts of radioactive material, or fallout, into the surrounding environment. That radioactive material is composed of unstable atoms which gives off alpha (high energy helium nuclei), beta (positrons), or gamma (high energy photons) radiation. That initial burst of fallout was so radioactive (that is it emits a large amount of radiation) that anything, be that animal, plant, or human, coming into contact with it was likely to get radiation burns and die in a short period of time. But that fallout was spread very unevenly via wind. It has also become less radioactive with time (ie: it puts out fewer high energy particles per unit of time) as the atoms degrade into more stable, but still radioactive, isotopes. Since that material was spread unevenly, there are a lot of places in Pripyat where the amount of exposed radioactive material is very low, and thus the levels of radiation are very low. It's safe enough in those areas for plants, animals, and people to live pretty much normal lives. There are other locations with high concentrations of fallout. In these locations, nothing can grow.\n\nThe true danger with visiting Pripyat isn't that there's a lot of radiation being emitted by the fallout there. The danger is in breathing in or ingesting that fallout. If you get radioactive material into your lungs or intestines, it's like placing a tiny atomic blowtorch there. Larger pieces (say the size of a grain of sand) can actually burn through your tissue. Smaller pieces (a fleck of dust, down to just a few plutonium atoms) will stick in your body and deal damage consistently over time as the atoms degrade over and over again. These smaller pieces of fallout will cause cancers.\n\nAnd that last piece is why radioactive fallout is more dangerous to you than it is to a tree. You have lungs. You have intestines. A tree doesn't. A tree doesn't have large cavities inside itself where lots of air, or food has the chance to deposit some bit of highly radioactive material. Trees also don't move, so if they weren't exposed to fallout in the initial explosion, or by the early contaminated winds, they're unlikely to have been exposed later. That means that in locations with low concentrations of fallout, plants have been able to grow quite well in the past several decades.\n\nNote that trees *do* take in significant amounts of water, and that water can have fallout suspended in it. That fallout can then be deposited into the bodies of the plants. This will kill some plants, while others are relatively unharmed. This was actually a vector for the irradiation of humans. Many people drank milk contaminated with fallout (radioactive iodine in this case) which was milked from cows which had eaten grass downwind of the Chernobyl disaster. That resulted in an increased incidence of thyroid disease in that population."
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2tnpnh | why does nasa launch its rockets in florida which is prone to a lot of rain? why not launch in arizona where rain is rare and the skies are very clear | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2tnpnh/eli5_why_does_nasa_launch_its_rockets_in_florida/ | {
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"Crashing in the ocean > crashing in populated areas. ",
"A couple reasons:\n- It takes less fuel to reach orbit the closer you are to the equator\n- The launch site is away from populated areas so debris doesn't hit people\n- Back when they built it, there wasn't anything else around it\n\nThere are a few other reasons, but there are drawbacks to launching from there as well. Also, that is not they only place they launch from, just the most publicized.\n"
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94veki | why can the sound volume of commercials on internet tv be double the actual show's volume? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/94veki/eli5_why_can_the_sound_volume_of_commercials_on/ | {
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"It is illegal in the USA for broadcasters, cable, and satellite providers to have louder commercials. The [CALM Act](_URL_1_) lays out procedures which must be followed. One problem is that some programs are 30 minute infomercials while the CALM Act applies only to commercials. You should register complaints at:\n\n_URL_0_",
"The commercials are allowed to be as loud as the shows. That means if the show has a gunshot, or an explosion, or a big dramatic music swell, then the commercial is allowed to be as loud as that. Thing is, the loudest sound in the show lasts for a few seconds at most, whereas the volume in the commercial is as high as that for the whole 30 seconds.",
"They compress the sound, making everything sound as loud as the maximum volume in a clip. \n\nUsually there are dynamics in a song or any audio clip. Some parts are played lower than others. Compression makes everything equally loud, removing dynamics but increasing the overall loudness. ",
"This was also the case on regular TV until the late '90s. Congress passed a law banning the practice. AFAIK the internet is under no such restrictions.\n\nWrite your Congressmonster and ask them to put forward a bill including internet content be included in the original bill. Not that it's a top-tier item at the moment, but it would be a relatively simple bill even in this period of rather epic inanity."
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"https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_form_id=33794",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Advertisement_Loudness_Mitigation_Act"
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823ken | what is derealization? | I tend to suffer from this a lot. Quite confused as to why and how it happens? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/823ken/eli5_what_is_derealization/ | {
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"It is usually termed depersonalization/derealization and in essence, it is the vague feeling that everything is just a dream, or that life has no substance. Its really difficult to remember how I felt, but withdrawing off valium and ativan, back in 2016 made me feel this way. Like nothing is real...",
"Derealization as a psychological phenomenon, independent of substances or medical issues, is usually a severe reaction to stress. It tends to be thought of as on the continuum of dissociation, with total post-trauma amnesia on the more severe end and “spacing out” on the the less severe end. It’s basically a mind’s way of disconnecting from distress in order to help us survive.\n\nIt can come about in relation to different types of stress. It’s a common symptom of panic attacks, which are severe episodes of fear activation. It’s common in PTSD and chronic, stressor-related distress like the effects of childhood abuse. I’ve heard of it happening to people with phobias. In and of itself, derealization is not harmful, but is pretty darn uncomfortable for most people and is a sign that something needs to change: either seeking out some support or mental health treatment, or getting the heck out of whatever situation is causing it (for example, if you are in ongoing traumatic situations).\n\nAs to how it happens, I don’t think it’s fully understood but it does have a lot to do with attention. Thinking about “zoning out” for a second, we can see our mind is wandering elsewhere from where we are now. The more extreme versions of dissociation likely are more fragmented or severe versions of attention being diverted away from the sources of distress. Much like we can withdraw from the source of physical pain, our minds can withdraw from the source of emotional pain by diverting attention away from it.",
"It's a psychological phenomenon. It can happen to people who suffer from mental diseases like schizophrenia, or people who have been through a big psychological trauma. Presumably it can also happen to healthy people, although I have not personally heard of this.\n\nIt means that the person has an experience where the surroundings and the external reality is unreal. Things around you suddenly do not seem real, and the person/patient may seem detached or zoned out to outside observers.\n\nDerealization is an example of the more broad subject of *dissociation*, which is a term used for general detachment from either the outside world or from one's own mind.",
"I can give a personal testimony. It feels like my mind goes into overdrive and I can't collect my thoughts properly. Things feel far away, foggy almost. It almost feels like playing a video game sitting very far away from the screen. It's scary as fuck 3/10 wouldn't depersonalize again. "
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urmam | how are teeth made and why can't your body make additional ones? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/urmam/eli5_how_are_teeth_made_and_why_cant_your_body/ | {
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"I also would like to know this, especially since I have seen pics of cysts and tumors on reddit, that had teeth inside them.",
"Simply put, we don't have the biological process developed for this to take place. This would be an extremely complicated process, even compared to everything else already in your body. Your body would have to be able to recognize when its missing actual macro-parts of itself and build it and grow it like it does from when you were created. It's just something we simply don't have and never developed.\n\n*Edit: I'd like to emphasize that it's not the building from scratched part that is the problem, as stated in a comment that is seen in tumors. What is the issue is the epicontrol of it all. Detecting when you don't have a tooth, when to build one, making sure you don't build one when you already have one (probably biggest problem, think cancer).",
"now all i can think of is \"newt chick\" from Heros (cheerleader), and how cool that shit would be...",
"Human bodies **can** make extra teeth. Tumors do it all the time.",
"This is how our teeth look when we are children. _URL_0_",
"Putting this in five year old terms is going to be tough, but here it goes...\n\nTeeth are formed from the stuff in your mouth above the jaw bone. They grow inwards and form under the surface by crystalizing minerals that make the hard surface of the teeth. At the same time, they form the roots that connect to the bone and anchor the teeth in place, much like a tree. Once they're ready, they are pushed out above the surface and you can see the top white part (called the crown) while the roots that anchor it in place remain below.\n\nSome parts of the part underneath are kept able to make another tooth, and when the time is right they begin to grow and bud off from the old tooth and can form a second one in the same way as the first. That's your adult teeth.\n\nSomehow, we're not really sure how, people lose that ability after the adult teeth form. These other parts that are held in place to make more teeth might be shut down or put to sleep so that they can't make more teeth, or they migth not be held back when you make your adult teeth. They might also not get something else in the body telling them to make more teeth after a certain time, but could make more teeth if they were told to. We know that if mice are changed in a certain way with genetics they can keep making teeth even when they should have stopped, so it might also be like that for people. [Here's a paper that shows this](_URL_0_) if you want to see pictures (from a lab I work in).\n\nWe also know that teeth, even though they look like hard not-alive things, actually have a lot of cells, and some of them (\"dental stem cells\") can help repair teeth over time, and some people are trying to use these to help your body make new teeth. No one's figured out how to do this yet though.",
"some very old people get a third set sometime in their 70s or 80s. its called Hyperdontia. : )\n"
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6wl5it | how the heck do keurig's actually work? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6wl5it/eli5_how_the_heck_do_keurigs_actually_work/ | {
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"They punch holes in the top and bottom of the capsule, and run hot water through it.\n\nAhoy, matey! Yer not alone in askin', and kind strangers have explained:\n\n1. [How Does a Keurig Work? | The Coffee Whisperer ](_URL_0_)\n1. [Inside the Keurig Vue V700, a Single-Serve Coffee Maker - Graphic - _URL_3_ ](_URL_4_)\n1. [JUST HOW DO THOSE K-CUP THINGY'S WORK? ](_URL_1_)\n1. [animated version](_URL_2_)\n",
"They work the same as a normal coffee filter - you have a container full of ground up coffee, you run water through it, the water absorbs all of the flavorings and oils and drips out the bottom into your cup.\n\nThe only difference with the Keurig machines is that the coffee is really finely ground, so that the water only has to stay in contact with it for a couple of seconds to absorb its flavors."
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"http://blog.crosscountrycafe.com/blog/bid/374738/Just-How-Do-Those-K-cup-Thingys-Work",
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctkiIOjoBzQ",
"NYTimes.com",
"http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/08/14/business/how-a-keurig-vue-works.html"
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6gsf03 | why does the surface of a stirred liquid calm before the rest of it? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6gsf03/eli5_why_does_the_surface_of_a_stirred_liquid/ | {
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"Well, water is sticky stuff. However its 'stickiness' is a factor of surface tension. Water wets glass, which means that it sticks to glass more than it sticks to itself.\n\nWhere the glass meets the water at the bottom of the glass, there's no surface, and one particle of water is as likely to press up against the glass as another particle is to slip away. At the surface however, where there's surface tension, there's a skin that clings to the cup. You can see it if you look closely - the water climbs the side of the glass a little bit. This is why the liquid in a straw is always a bit higher than the liquid in a glass. (Capillary action.) \n\nI'm not certain that I'm correct that the surface tension is what's adding more friction, but I think that's the case. \n\nEDIT: To add detail, there are things that water will bead on, and things that water will 'wet', and glass is one of those things that water will wet. This basically means that water doesn't maintain it's surface tension against the glass, which is why it leaves streaks as it falls down a pane of glass - surface tension is broken at the bottom, and the droplet loses water at that point."
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4jxkk5 | if i donate blood while high off marijuana, will the same chemicals that are making me high (thc,cbn,cbc,cbd) make the recipient high when they receive the blood? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4jxkk5/eli5if_i_donate_blood_while_high_off_marijuana/ | {
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"No. That made me think of a new question though. What is the difference between being high off Marijuana, and high ON Marijuana?",
"I give blood high all the time and I asked to make sure it's okay and the nurse said it was fine and that whoever would be receiving my blood would just feel a little happier haha."
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3om8n8 | what causes the fishy smell in clean dishes? | It's happened pretty much everywhere I've lived. Pull a clean glass, fill it with water, and within five minutes it smells like you have a trout swimming around down there.
| explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3om8n8/eli5_what_causes_the_fishy_smell_in_clean_dishes/ | {
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"Uhmm...have you ever cleaned them properly using piping hot water? That only ever happens if you don't clean dishes and such like properly as bacteria can fester in the water.\n\nEither that, or your water supply in the area is severely contaminated.",
"This is caused by gunk built up in your dishwasher that's contaminating the rinse water and/or blocking the flow of sufficient rinse water. It can be solved by cleaning the filters and, more importantly, removing mineral build-up in the machine."
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jy0rf | the poincare conjecture. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jy0rf/eli5_the_poincare_conjecture/ | {
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"I'm not sure it's possible to explain one of the Millenium Prize Problems to a five-year-old. The [Simple English Wikipedia entry](_URL_0_) on the topic may provide the insight you're looking for, though.",
"I’ll give this a try, but I’m not an expert, there might be inaccuracies:\n\n\nThe Poincare conjecture is about topology. That is, the study of properties which remain true when you deform an object.\n\n\nImagine a flat map of a country. The earth has a curvature, which has been flattened. So there’s a deformation in the map. This means some distances on the map can be bigger or smaller than the distances on earth. However, some basic properties remain unchanged: for instance, if you travel in a loop that brings you back to your starting point, you still have a loop on the map. If the country is in several separate pieces (like the U.S. with Alaska), you’ll have the same separate pieces on the map.\n\n\nNow, that’s just a mild deformation. It can be much more dramatic and still preserve topological properties. Two little circles drawn on a paper are a valid deformation of the U.S. map with Alaska.\n\n\nImagine now the surface of a ball. That’s a 2D sphere. Yes, you’re imagining a 3D object, but the *surface* is 2D. You can identify a point on it by two coordinates (for instance latitude and longitude). Many objects can be deformed to a sphere. For instance: the surface of a cube (flatten the corners and make the sides curved); or a bowl (move the surface of the inside upwards while the bottom surface stays in place).\n\n\nThe surface of a donut (a torus), on the other hand, can’t be deformed into a sphere, because there’s a *hole* in it. Basically, you’re not allowed to create or fill holes. A cup with one handle can be deformed into a donut; even the human body, considering the digestive system from your mouth to your anus, can be deformed into a donut. (Yes, I said “anus”, that’s funny to a five year old, but please stay focused).\n\n\nThe Poincare conjecture is about the 3D sphere. You think you can imagine a 3D sphere? Well, sorry but no, you can’t. The 2D sphere can be seen as the surface of a 3D ball (although the introduction of the 3rd dimension is not necessary mathematically, it allows us to visualize it). The 1D sphere is a circle, it can be seen as the border of a 2D ball. So the 3D sphere would be the border of a 4D ball. Wait, 4D? How can there be four dimensions? It turns out that mathematically we can use as many dimensions as we want. Each new dimension is just an extra coordinate. Unfortunately, our limited brain shuts down when it comes to visualizing more than 3 dimensions; probably because it is itself in 3D.\n\n\nI stated earlier that the 3rd dimension is unnecessary to define a 2D sphere, so can’t we consider a 3D sphere without referring to the 4th dimension? Well, the problem is that it has a non-Euclidian geometry. In other words it is “curved”. And our brain needs that extra dimension to imagine a non-Euclidian object in a “bigger”, Euclidian, space. You can, however, imagine what it is to be inside a 3D sphere: in whatever direction you travel, you’ll end up at your starting point! Imagine someone living on a 2D sphere: he lives in a 2 dimensional world. When he moves in a straight line he goes “all around” and ends up at his starting point. In a 3D sphere, it’s the same: if you move left, right, forward, backward, up, or down, you’ll end up where you started. Or, if you look through a telescope, in any direction, you’ll see... your back!\n\n\nSo what did Poincare conjectured? That a set of 3D objects, sharing some specific properties, can all be deformed into a 3D sphere. That’s it, now you can go and watch sponge Bob. What? You ask about the shared properties? Go ask your mother. Ok, ok, don’t scream, I’ll tell you.\n\n\nFirst, it has to be simply connected. Connected means it is in one piece (unlike the map of U.S.); and “simply” means it has no hole in it. Yeah, Poincare didn’t like donuts, he preferred muffins. I mean, what’s the point of paying for some food that has a hole in it? You can’t eat the hole, what a rip-off.\n\n\nNext, it has to be compact, which in this case means finite in size.\n\n\nAnd last, it has to be without boundary. This means you can move freely in you 3D object, you won’t encounter a wall with a sign saying “End of the object, no trespassing, return to where you came from”.\n\n\nAnd that’s about it! Now go and play outside.\n\n",
"I'm not sure it's possible to explain one of the Millenium Prize Problems to a five-year-old. The [Simple English Wikipedia entry](_URL_0_) on the topic may provide the insight you're looking for, though.",
"I’ll give this a try, but I’m not an expert, there might be inaccuracies:\n\n\nThe Poincare conjecture is about topology. That is, the study of properties which remain true when you deform an object.\n\n\nImagine a flat map of a country. The earth has a curvature, which has been flattened. So there’s a deformation in the map. This means some distances on the map can be bigger or smaller than the distances on earth. However, some basic properties remain unchanged: for instance, if you travel in a loop that brings you back to your starting point, you still have a loop on the map. If the country is in several separate pieces (like the U.S. with Alaska), you’ll have the same separate pieces on the map.\n\n\nNow, that’s just a mild deformation. It can be much more dramatic and still preserve topological properties. Two little circles drawn on a paper are a valid deformation of the U.S. map with Alaska.\n\n\nImagine now the surface of a ball. That’s a 2D sphere. Yes, you’re imagining a 3D object, but the *surface* is 2D. You can identify a point on it by two coordinates (for instance latitude and longitude). Many objects can be deformed to a sphere. For instance: the surface of a cube (flatten the corners and make the sides curved); or a bowl (move the surface of the inside upwards while the bottom surface stays in place).\n\n\nThe surface of a donut (a torus), on the other hand, can’t be deformed into a sphere, because there’s a *hole* in it. Basically, you’re not allowed to create or fill holes. A cup with one handle can be deformed into a donut; even the human body, considering the digestive system from your mouth to your anus, can be deformed into a donut. (Yes, I said “anus”, that’s funny to a five year old, but please stay focused).\n\n\nThe Poincare conjecture is about the 3D sphere. You think you can imagine a 3D sphere? Well, sorry but no, you can’t. The 2D sphere can be seen as the surface of a 3D ball (although the introduction of the 3rd dimension is not necessary mathematically, it allows us to visualize it). The 1D sphere is a circle, it can be seen as the border of a 2D ball. So the 3D sphere would be the border of a 4D ball. Wait, 4D? How can there be four dimensions? It turns out that mathematically we can use as many dimensions as we want. Each new dimension is just an extra coordinate. Unfortunately, our limited brain shuts down when it comes to visualizing more than 3 dimensions; probably because it is itself in 3D.\n\n\nI stated earlier that the 3rd dimension is unnecessary to define a 2D sphere, so can’t we consider a 3D sphere without referring to the 4th dimension? Well, the problem is that it has a non-Euclidian geometry. In other words it is “curved”. And our brain needs that extra dimension to imagine a non-Euclidian object in a “bigger”, Euclidian, space. You can, however, imagine what it is to be inside a 3D sphere: in whatever direction you travel, you’ll end up at your starting point! Imagine someone living on a 2D sphere: he lives in a 2 dimensional world. When he moves in a straight line he goes “all around” and ends up at his starting point. In a 3D sphere, it’s the same: if you move left, right, forward, backward, up, or down, you’ll end up where you started. Or, if you look through a telescope, in any direction, you’ll see... your back!\n\n\nSo what did Poincare conjectured? That a set of 3D objects, sharing some specific properties, can all be deformed into a 3D sphere. That’s it, now you can go and watch sponge Bob. What? You ask about the shared properties? Go ask your mother. Ok, ok, don’t scream, I’ll tell you.\n\n\nFirst, it has to be simply connected. Connected means it is in one piece (unlike the map of U.S.); and “simply” means it has no hole in it. Yeah, Poincare didn’t like donuts, he preferred muffins. I mean, what’s the point of paying for some food that has a hole in it? You can’t eat the hole, what a rip-off.\n\n\nNext, it has to be compact, which in this case means finite in size.\n\n\nAnd last, it has to be without boundary. This means you can move freely in you 3D object, you won’t encounter a wall with a sign saying “End of the object, no trespassing, return to where you came from”.\n\n\nAnd that’s about it! Now go and play outside.\n\n"
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37heyj | why is whatsapp so popular? | I can use Google Hangouts or GroupMe from me PC but not WhatsApp (I think recently there is an extension that allows this but it uses your phone as a server). Personally, I find other messaging apps to be a lot more reliable and have many more features. So why is WhatsApp so popular? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/37heyj/eli5_why_is_whatsapp_so_popular/ | {
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"Very easy setup. No account needed. Takes over from your phone number. It's literally like texting over wifi",
"Easier, account not needed. I don't know much about WhatsApp but there is a similar case.\n\nIn Asia there is LINE, which comes loaded with a heckaton of fun games and features. Heavy marketing by phone companies (LINE traffic does not count against data quota, for example) and use by corporate PR (similar to FB pages) make it all the more popular.",
"I can tell you why it's popular in my country:\n\nAll phone companies here charge SMS messages individually, but offer a flat rate for data consumption. Whatsapp means free text messages.",
"What others have said here are accurate but also WhatsApp is quite popular for two other reasons, particularly in developing countries:\n\nIt's available on every smart device out there, even on older Nokia and Blackberry smartphones. If you have a smartphone, no matter the year it was made, chances are WhatsApp can be installed on it. It also has a small footprint on one's smart phone, compared to say Facebook Messenger where it's much more resource intensive.\n\nAlso it uses very little data if you just text people and in many developing countries it's cheaper to have a limited data plan than to use SMS, and especially MMS (picture and video texts). Just looking at my WhatsApp data usage in the 11 months I've had it installed on my reformatted phone it's only used ~19 MB and that includes many pictures, videos and even calling via WhatsApp (just texts alone used ~5.5 MB, and that's for 10,000 messages). Ten thousand text messages, as well as numerous pictures, videos and voice chat using so little data is quite impressive and is much cheaper than SMS/MMS. \n\nOne key thing also is that international use is big as well, for instance I use WhatsApp for messaging friends and family in Belgium, Nigeria, the UK and many more places. \n\nMost people think of WhatsApp and smartphone use from a developed world perspective, most people have computers and tablets, however in the developing world it's a much, much different story. To buy a computer, as well as having an Internet plan for your home can be quite expensive, that is to say even if it's available in your area. Cell phone coverage however is a much different story, where coverage is almost everywhere in populated areas of a country, and smartphone data plans are much more affordable, for example while working in India I had unlimited 2G data for less than $10 a month, which WhatsApp is *surprisingly efficient* with.\n\nSo these are the many reasons why WhatsApp was popular, ironically when Facebook bought it (which was a very defensive purchase and an easy way to enter the developing world demographic but that's another topic) popularity for it surged, especially in developed countries where the major messaging platforms were Facebook Messenger and iMessage.\n\nSource: Started a nonprofit organization in Nepal/India tackling the issue of Internet availability in developing countries, did research in regards to it.",
"Apart from what has already been said: outside the U.S. you either have to pay for SMS individually (around €0.15-€0.30 in Europe) or have to pay for an expensive all-inclusive plan, which means you end up paying for things you don't get to use, like 5000 minutes of calls per month and whatnot. \n\nThe second factor that made it successful is that, unlike other companies, they focused on making a Java SE app which worked on shitty phones in places like Asia where people couldn't afford smartphones. Once people and all of their friends started using it then, even after smartphones became widespread, they were hooked.\n\nLastly, unlike SMSes, it lets you send group messages and it's a boon when it comes to getting people to agree on something (get-togethers, work shifts, etc.)",
"Because if you have their number you have them on Whatsapp. Instant win. The app itself is fast and minimalistic and without all the junk that for example Viper has.\n\n(In comparison, in my case like 2 people I know have Hangouts.)"
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3mqz75 | places like norway and iceland seem to have few to no trees, yet i've seen old dwellings and other ancient structures built out of wood. we're there forests at one time? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3mqz75/eli5_places_like_norway_and_iceland_seem_to_have/ | {
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"Correct. \n[Source](_URL_0_)\n\n*At the time of human settlement about 1140 years ago, birch forest and woodland covered 25-40% of Iceland's land area. The relatively tall (to 15 m) birch forests of sheltered valleys graded to birch and willow scrub toward the coast, on exposed sites and in wetland areas and to willow tundra at high elevations.*\n\nAlso, don't forget that trees can be moved from one place to another particularly by water.",
"Norway, and indeed much of Scandinavia, is covered with trees - timber is exported. Which is how it gets to Iceland. Many forested areas near the coast were cleared as the trees were used up, in both countries."
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kk0wq | - utilitarianism | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/kk0wq/eli5_utilitarianism/ | {
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"Utilitarianism is basically the principle that the best course of action in any given situation is the one which maximizes the overall well being or good of the most people. There are other types but pretty much its just the greatest good for the most people is rational",
"Utilitarianism is a moral theory based on a couple beliefs: \n \n1 Being good is a desirable thing to be. \n2 Actions/states of being are good because they bring more pleasure into the world. \n3 All humans are equal. \n4 We all make choices that effect the happiness of different people as well as ourselves. \n \nNow these premises can be argued for or against but they are the main tenants of Utilitarianism. \n \n1 is kind of just a decision you have to make by yourself. There are arguments out there on both sides but both tend to rely on the idea of human nature so they can get kinda sticky. \n \n2 is probably where the most interesting debates happen. I think it is best proved by example. Take health. The only reason it is beneficial to be healthy is because it makes you (or your family/loved ones happy). Money is only good when it brings happiness. Telling a lie can sometimes be a good thing when it increases the total amount of happiness in the world. Anything you think about being good can be reduced to happiness/pleasure. \n \n3 is rather self explanatory but very important to utilitarianism. Most often it is applied to one's self. Your interests should not be more important than anyone else. But at the same time, you should not sacrifice your happiness to other people unless they will be happier than you would have been. The total amount of happiness is what is important. \n \n4 is important because it leads to one of the differences between utilitarianism and other moral theories. All most every action we take effects others. Thus all most every action is a moral choice to utilitarians. \n \ntl;dr Utilitarianism is a moral theory guiding us to do things that lead to the greatest total happiness of the world. \n\n",
"Let's say you have a cake. If you eat the cake all by yourself, you will be very happy, but everyone else will be sad. But if you share the cake with everyone, and have some yourself, you will be happy and everyone else will be happy, too. Maybe you won't be as happy because you don't get the whole cake to yourself, but it's better to make everyone a little bit happy than to make one person really happy and everyone else sad.",
"Utilitarianism is basically the principle that the best course of action in any given situation is the one which maximizes the overall well being or good of the most people. There are other types but pretty much its just the greatest good for the most people is rational",
"Utilitarianism is a moral theory based on a couple beliefs: \n \n1 Being good is a desirable thing to be. \n2 Actions/states of being are good because they bring more pleasure into the world. \n3 All humans are equal. \n4 We all make choices that effect the happiness of different people as well as ourselves. \n \nNow these premises can be argued for or against but they are the main tenants of Utilitarianism. \n \n1 is kind of just a decision you have to make by yourself. There are arguments out there on both sides but both tend to rely on the idea of human nature so they can get kinda sticky. \n \n2 is probably where the most interesting debates happen. I think it is best proved by example. Take health. The only reason it is beneficial to be healthy is because it makes you (or your family/loved ones happy). Money is only good when it brings happiness. Telling a lie can sometimes be a good thing when it increases the total amount of happiness in the world. Anything you think about being good can be reduced to happiness/pleasure. \n \n3 is rather self explanatory but very important to utilitarianism. Most often it is applied to one's self. Your interests should not be more important than anyone else. But at the same time, you should not sacrifice your happiness to other people unless they will be happier than you would have been. The total amount of happiness is what is important. \n \n4 is important because it leads to one of the differences between utilitarianism and other moral theories. All most every action we take effects others. Thus all most every action is a moral choice to utilitarians. \n \ntl;dr Utilitarianism is a moral theory guiding us to do things that lead to the greatest total happiness of the world. \n\n",
"Let's say you have a cake. If you eat the cake all by yourself, you will be very happy, but everyone else will be sad. But if you share the cake with everyone, and have some yourself, you will be happy and everyone else will be happy, too. Maybe you won't be as happy because you don't get the whole cake to yourself, but it's better to make everyone a little bit happy than to make one person really happy and everyone else sad."
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6hxk9b | why do police helicopters circle instead of hover? | Yea, there's sirens and a circling helicopter a few blocks away. I wondered. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6hxk9b/eli5_why_do_police_helicopters_circle_instead_of/ | {
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"Because it gives them a constant overview. If they hover they only have one vantage point. If the cops wanted a stationary observer they could just send a man onto a building. ",
"Probably because they are looking for something. \n\nStaying in the same position is going to limit their field of view.",
"Circling means you're moving forward which is much more stable and easier than to constantly hover. Also, the vantage point thing.",
"Cop here:\n\nThey don't want to be stationary for safety reasons (they're a harder target to shoot at) and when they're circling it usually means they're looking for something. Moving around gives them a better view.\n\nHowever it can also be pilot preference.\n\nWhen I was working during riots, our city helicopter would swap out with the State Troopers'. \n\nYou could always tell which one it was because ours would circle, while theirs would sit completely still.",
"Helicopter pilot here. One thing that's being missed in the comments here is aircraft performance. It takes more power to hover outside of ground effect (meaning higher than 50') than it does to fly around in circles. It's not a question of fuel (although hovering is less fuel efficient) but rather on a given day with a given altitude, outside air temperature, and weight condition, do I even have the power required to hover? In many cases (for example in the military) we fly loaded up to our max gross weight with full fuel and have to fly around burning off fuel till we become light enough to have the power available to pull into a hover. In those cases we takeoff by doing a \"running takeoff\" just to get off the ground similar to the way planes do."
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bq2hp1 | how did old hand-drawn animation achieve such consistent color? | Mainly wondering how they avoided discoloration or the presence of brushstrokes. Thanks! | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bq2hp1/eli5_how_did_old_handdrawn_animation_achieve_such/ | {
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"Speed and skill. Each pencil drawing by an animator was traced in ink on to a transparent sheet. Once the ink dried it was sent to painting where the paint was applied to the BACK of the transparent film. Each section of color had to be completed quickly while the paint was still very wet so it would show no brushstrokes or the cel was ruined, but going outside the lines would also ruin a cel, as even though it would not obscure the line, it would still show the color in the next section over.\n\nIn the golden age of Disney the ink and paint department was a fleet women who's only job was to trace or paint. The inking girls were considered to be a higher caliber than the painting girls, as their work required a more steady hand, but the painting girls were amazing in their own right. One of the greatest accomplishments of that department was maintaining consistency in color and positioning on Snow White's blushed cheeks, which were done with *actual blush.* The effect was so time consuming it was never used again. They stuck to solid colors from then on out.\n\nEdit: I have been corrected below. The use of actual blush is an urban legend. The effect was achieved no less amazingly with a dye applied to each cel by a very talented woman from inking named Helen Ogger. See the post correcting me below for more detail.",
"There were whole departments dedicated to mixing the paints, doing nothing but ensuring every batch of colour matched every other. Cosgrove Hall had a pot of paint simply called \"DM's Nose\", used also for Duckula's tongue.",
"The paint is paint- as long as you have it thick enough to be opaque, it looks the same if you apply extra anywhere. This was also necessary because it was layered over a background. Anything not opaque would be partially transparent when laid over the background. So it had to be opaque\n\nKeeping the paint look *identical* was a big thing.\n\nThe backgrounds were often watercolor. It was not possible to anything other than scroll it around, it must be static. Because you can't repaint animation cells in watercolor with any consistency.\n\nThus the Scooby Doo \"secret door\" or \"something hiding behind a bush\" being so obvious. If it opened or the bush shakes, that's animation so it has to be painted cells laid on a static watercolor background.",
"Unrelated to actual painting per se, but not every color on the cel was redrawn. They'd use layers much like Photoshop and sometimes just change the head that moved slightly while using the rest of the drawing/painting from the previous cel. It's also why lots of cartoon characters wore ties.",
"Finally something I can answer! I have studied under a traditional animation cel-painter that worked on Disney and Bluth films, I can give some background. When studios wanted to get colors to always match up, there were whole groups of people that spend all day being color scientists. They do lots of research and science to make sure that the paint and colors are always the same by mixing chemicals and making sure to keep the recipe exact every time. When you are painting an animation cel, the technique is to let the blobs of wet paint skim across the plastic. Technically, the brush should never sweep across the surface of the cel to make a brushstroke, the brush is there mainly to push the blobs paint around. Think of it like you are pushing a drop of water softly across a tabletop, you run your brush against the surface of the drop to spread it gently until you finish filling the section you need. I'm not sure how to explain it more, it's a lot easier to do a demo but hopefully that helps!",
"My godfather actually worked as a color specialist in a small animation studio in Lithuania during 80s. He told me the stories how he spent countless days mixing paint so it would be consistent. Writing down the exact numbers of how much of every color he used to create one or another shade of required color. Also he did mess up couple of times, just by adding couple drops more than needed. He said that in hand drawn animation it's VERY easy to notice even the slightest change in the shade of the colour when watching the final result",
"I can’t speak for the golden age of hand drawn animation, but by the time I arrived in Los Angeles there was a shop called ‘Cartoon Color’ that sold animation supplies, including a spectrum of premixed colors that were renowned for their consistency.\n\nI believe the store—now closed—was in Culver City. There appears to be a moribund website associated with them as well.",
"If I'm not mistaken, Adam Savage (Mythbusters, [_URL_0_](https://_URL_0_), former ILM) has discussed this before and recalled the days where he would have to paint the different layers on the cell and work out what colour it would be based on where it is on the stack. The further down, the more the colour changed, so they'd need to know how many layers the image was and then adjust each layer to colour correct for it.",
"Excellent question, OP. Anecdotally, years ago (I'm in my 50's), I took a basic animation class taught by a guy who worked on Sleeping Beauty. He was the biggest ass I've ever met, and I don't think he actually did anything but tell (with obvious nostalgia) stories of the male Disney animators getting into friendly fistfights after work, playing pranks on each other, or making fun of any woman dumb enough to want to do what they did. In hindsight, I'm betting he had a very minor role and never got to see the inside of the studio again, which would explain why he never actually taught us anything.",
"Also the paint colors were available in slightly different variations to accommodate the layering of animation cels.\n\nIf a character had a blue jacket for instance the blue would be Blue 0. And if you were going to animate just the characters arm. You would separate and animate the arm movements on a cel above the previous cel but if you used Jacket Blue 0 the top layered cel would shift the color of the blue layer beneath it when photographed. So you would paint the arm with a slightly different blue, a specially formulated Jacket Blue 1 to accommodate the slight color shift and in the final result the two Jacket Blue pigments would appear identical.",
"RE the presence of brush strokes, they use a specific kind of acrylic paint that goes on very consistently. When I was really getting into sculpting I read about Cel-Vinyl paints that Kat Sapene (amazing sculpture painter) uses. Here's what she has to say about it:\n\n\"KS: I like to use animation cel-vinyl to paint my projects. It’s very similar to acrylic paints. But because it was meant to be used to paint animation cels (the individual frames that make up cartoons), the paint is very opaque. This means fewer layers of paint that need to be applied and therefore I don’t have to worry about paint buildup distorting the original sculpt. Aside from being opaque, cel-vinyl dries quickly, keeps its color over time, and is slightly flexible. The flexibility allows for handling without much chipping. And the paint is very versatile. It can be used for a wash, a dry brush, or even through an airbrush. I love it!\"\n(_URL_0_)\n\nSo I went to the manufacturer and got those paints! Sure enough they are extremely even and bold, and because they supplied the painting professionals their colors were always consistent.\n\nEdit: a words",
"Cel vinyl paint. It was all premixed and put into tubes, ready to be used by the colorists. so there was no need to mix colors when it was time to paint. that's where you would run into inconsistencies with paint color. \n\nThere were no brush strokes in the color because for one, it was painted on the back of the cels so the camera, and you the viewer was really just seeing the underside of painting behind some thin plastic. Also cel vinyl had a thick, almost glue-like consistency so it flattened out quickly and evenly when painting. Artists didn't need the built up layers that oils or even acrylic needs to get rich, even color. \n\n\nI painted a lot of artwork with cel vinyl, just because of those qualities. It was the best! Sadly the only company that produced cel vinyl paint, Cartoon Colour Company just quietly went out of business a couple years ago."
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1ywpcz | if stars we see now could actually by "burnt out" due to the traveling of light, will the major constellations (i.e. the big dipper) ever disappear? | If so, how long would that take? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ywpcz/eli5_if_stars_we_see_now_could_actually_by_burnt/ | {
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"Yes. Millions or Billions of years for most stars.",
"All stars have a life cycle, so eventually they will all die, but likely not for millions or billions of years. When the stars of the Big Dipper do \"burn out,\" we'll start to know about it 58 years later for the nearest one and 124 years later for the farthest.",
"Most stars we see by our naked eye are a few hundred light years away at most (with a few at a few thousand ly), so by the time we see them, they have only aged a couple hundred years. Since a typical main sequence star lives for at least 100 million years (our sun will live around 10 billion years), it is extremely unlikely that a star will be \"dead\" by the time we see it. For any given star to burn out, we will have to wait millions or billions of years, so if you estimate the number of stars in all the major constellations to be around 100 stars, we would expect to wait something like 1-100 million years before even 1 of them burns out."
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8dacox | how do transistors in a cpu work together? | Just wondering how transistors work when there isn't just one single one :)
Thanks guys | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8dacox/eli5how_do_transistors_in_a_cpu_work_together/ | {
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"First we'll need a reference image. [This is how transistors are arranged in a NAND gate](_URL_1_)\n\nThe top two transistors are ON normally and turn OFF when A or B goes high. The bottom two transistors are OFF normally and turn ON when A or B goes high. If both are low then Out is connected to Vdd and Out is high. If both are high then the top two are both off and both bottom ones are on pulling Out low to Vss. If only one is on then Out is high. This forms a NAND gate which only has a high output when the two inputs aren't equal, its the Not AND gate. An AND gate has a high output only when the two inputs *are* equal.\n\nSo where to A and B come from? They're the outputs of other gates! We can strap the 6 basic logic gates(AND, OR, NAND, NOR, NOT, XOR) together to form complicated things like [an adder](_URL_0_) which you can see takes 2 4-bit inputs and feeds it into NAND and NOR gates which feed more gates which feed more gates which eventually output the result of addition. All of this is done with transistors"
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338lqr | what does "cogito ergo sum" mean? and what is the importance of this statement? | The statement seems remains a possibility: Am I a brain in a vat? How philosophers answer it? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/338lqr/eli5_what_does_cogito_ergo_sum_mean_and_what_is/ | {
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"I think therefore I am.\n\nThe importance of it is that, while all other knowledge can be doubted, because we are inherently limited by our senses, being able to doubt yourself seems to prove that you exist by the very act of doing it. \n\nFor instance, I cannot absolutely prove that you exist. You could be a figment of my imagination, a hallucination of my senses, but I do not seem able to doubt that I myself exist in the same fashion, because my imagination, or my senses, are required for such figments/hallucinations to exist in the first place. \n\nIn short, it gives you a 'known fact' to start from and approach all other philosophy. ",
"Cogito Ergo Sum means, roughly, \"I think, therefore I am.\" It's an idea proposed by the philosopher Descartes. It's an important philosophical concept that influenced a lot of the philosophy that followed it. It's hard to simplify, but in essence, it's an important foundational statement that states that our ability to think about our own existence is proof of our existence.",
"It means \"I think, therefore I am.\" The whole quote is actually \"I doubt, therefore I think. I think, therefore I am.\"\n\nWhat this means is that if I doubt that I exist, I am thinking about whether I exist or not. If I am thinking, then I must exist in order for the thinking to occur. Basically, I have to exist otherwise there would be no thinking.",
"It means \"I think, therefore I am\". It comes from Rene Descartes he was a philosopher in the early 17th century.\n\nWhat he did was he came up with this thought experiment he imagined an evil demon, and this demon is on a mission to trick him about absolutely everything, even his own existence. The modern version would the \"The Matrix\". How do you know you are not living in a computer simulated dream world?\n\nIf follow it to its logical conclusion you find that the answer is you don't. You don't know, you cannot know. If you are in a computer simulation, or being under the spell of an evil demon, you can never prove otherwise. Any sufficiently high fidelity simulation is, pretty much by definition, distinguishable from the real thing and so you can never prove its not real.\n\nThe \"I think, therefore I am\" bit comes in because that's the one thing you cannot be tricked on. Even if the entire world and everyone in it, even your own body, is nothing more than a simulation you cannot be tricked into thinking you exist when you do not. The very fact that you are thinking at all is a state of existing.",
"I think therefore I am, meaning that you know you exist because you have the ability to constantly reaffirm your existence by knowing that you have a continuing thought process."
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8kh1pe | why there are rainforests along australia's east coast but not the west? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8kh1pe/eli5_why_there_are_rainforests_along_australias/ | {
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"The mountain range running the length of the east coast (the Great Dividing Range) causes moist air that's coming off the ocean to rise (called orographic uplift), when it rises it cools, condenses, and comes down as rain, allowing forests to exist. At least to the seaward side of that range. The west of the range, even tho it's still in the east of Australia, is in a rain shadow, and get very little rain also. \n\nThe west coast has no such mountain range, the air coming in from the ocean to the west doesn't have that lift so misses out on the rain.\n\nThere's also associated temperature, geology and soil differences that prevent forests from occuring in the west, but that's it in a nutshell. ",
"Essentially, because there is a mountain range (well...\"mountain\" by Australian standards) running along the entire length of the east coast. This causes rain to fall on the coastal side of the mountain range, and this provides enough to support a forest-type environment in places. \n\nIn the west, there's virtually no mountain range. There IS the Darling Scarp that promotes rainfall in the south-western 'corner' of Australia, which is where the city of Perth and the vast majority of Western Australia's population lives. There are in fact some small areas of forest in this small south-western corner that are well-watered.\n\nParts of western and north-western Australia DO get some heavy rainfall, but it's the seasonal monsoon. So it's extremely heavy rain for a couple of months and then parched dry for the rest of the year, not really conducive to the sustainable growth of forests."
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2otd11 | why do restaurants need to do 2 trips with my check? why can't they just give me the check with the tip line in the first place? | **Edit**: I just commented this but will leave it here for newcomers to see:
> Wouldn't it be much more efficient to give me the check with the tip line originally so my server knows exactly how much money to charge to my credit card? I just don't understand why I can't sign, tip, and give them my card in one smooth action? Why do I need to get my check, give them my card, have it returned, then sign, then tip? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2otd11/eli5_why_do_restaurants_need_to_do_2_trips_with/ | {
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"Letting you add a tip when you put your card in would not reduce the number of trips. They still have to bring you the bill, take it to the computer to process, bring it back to you, and pick it up at the end.",
"It's more fun to just pay cash. That way you can just drop it and book it out of there. You will then witness your waiter moving like you expected and ensuring that all is well. ",
"LPT: If you hand the server your credit card as you ask for the check, then there will only need to be one trip.",
"What do you mean by two trips? \n\nThe check is delivered to the table: this must happen either way.\n\nThe card is taken to the computer for processing: happens either way.\n\nCheck brought back to table: happens either way.",
"Because we don't know how you're paying. We bring you the check for you to look it over. Often parties will split it on a bunch of cards, etc. or pay cash! If you're paying by credit card, the computer will run the card and (given that the card goes through) will produce a receipt where the customer can write in a tip.\n\nClearly OP has never worked in a restaurant. Or paid in cash."
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751ph7 | what's the subconscious drive that gets you motivated to do something your conscious brain doesn't want to do? | Like when you're about to start the last rep or you need to get up and do laundry and you consciously think to yourself "I don't want to do this, I'm tired" but then your body autopilot starts doing the task like starting that final set and you think "oh screw it" and bang it out. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/751ph7/eli5_whats_the_subconscious_drive_that_gets_you/ | {
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"Humans have an instinct side, this decisions are made without our \"permissions\" and it represents what our reptilian side of the brain does.\n\nThe reptilian side of our brain represents our primary survival function. Your heart, lungs and other parts of the body survive thanks to this. This is the primitive side of the brain; it is involuntary, impulsive, and compulsive and it responds like any animal on danger: \n1) fight response, 2) flight response, or the 3) freeze response.\n\nSince the main goal of this part of the brain is survival, sometimes your body reacts over certain actions. From a natural perspective, if you see a Tiger in front of you ready to attack you, pretty sure your brain will trigger in automatically and run(flight response). This was a very basic example, but in First World Problems, you can generate these with other dangers such as \"If I don't do my laundry now, I won't have a dress shirt and I am going to get fired from work and I won't have money and I will starve\"."
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e7dshx | how does the shape of an airplane's wings generate lift? and how does the retractable wing flaps affect that? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e7dshx/eli5_how_does_the_shape_of_an_airplanes_wings/ | {
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"The shape of the wing when viewed from the side is called an aerofoil.\n\nAs the aerofoil moves, the wind / air splits into 2 streams.\n\nThe air passing above the aerofoil generates higher velocity (speed in simpler terms). Whereas the air velocity below the wing is low.\n\nWithout going into the intricate details of fluid dynamics, higher velocity creates a low pressure and vice versa.\n\nSince the pressure below the wing is higher (due to the lower air velocity) it generates lift, hence enabling the aircraft to be airborne.\n\nA similar concept is applied to the rear spoiler of a car (the opposite) to create downforce.",
"Because of the curvature of the wing, the air around it will have a different pressure under and above the wing. This is due to the fact that the air is deviated from it's trajectory. \nThe air on top of the wing will have a lower pressure than the air above the wing.\nThe pressure is basically the force that a fluid is applying on a surface. As the pressure is lower on top of the wing, the air will push the wing up, and the plane will fly.\n\nThe pressure difference is proportional to something called the lift coefficients. Wich means the higher the lift coefficient is the greater the pressure difference. Also, to determine the total lift of the plane, you need to consider the speed. For a plane, the lift coefficient is fixed (it depends of the geometry of the wing), but the lift will increase if the plane goes faster. \n\nConcerning the retractable flaps, they are just here for the lift off and to land. They are just here to increase the lift coefficient at low speed by making the air to be more deflected by the wing. They do that because during these phases, the plane goes slower than it goes during the cruise. So increasing the lift coefficient will increase the lift.",
"A wing makes lift in two ways, from the shape of the wing and the angle of the wing. Both of these push the air that the plane is going through down toward the ground. Pushing the air down pushes the wing up.\n\nSo let's look at those two ways. The shape of a wing is like a frown, lower at the ends and higher in the middle. As the air passes over and under the wing it sticks to the wing just a little, making it go the same direction as the part of the wing it is passing. Since the back of the wing is pointing down, when the air leaves the back of the wing it is pointing down too.\n\nThe flaps at the back of the wing point the back of the wing downward even further, giving more lift. So why don't planes fly with their flaps down all the time? Because that extra lift also gives more drag. So it takes more fuel to push the plane through the air, and costs more money. So the flaps are only used at takeoff and landing, when the extra lift is needed to make flying safer.\n\nGoing back to the other way our wing makes lift, the angle of the wing. This angle is called \"angle of attack\". The more you lift the front of the wing, the further the back of the wing points down. But if you point the front of the wing up too far, it will make a lot of drag. If you point it up even farther, the air won't be able to stick to the wing and the wing will lose a lot of lift. This is called \"stall\". So pilots limit the angle of attack to avoid these problems."
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32ojl1 | is it possible to see the iss from earth? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/32ojl1/eli5_is_it_possible_to_see_the_iss_from_earth/ | {
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"Yes, often without binoculars. On a clear evening, far from the city, with a cheap pair of binoculars you can make out the solar panels on the side.\n\n[NASA webpage providing estimated viewing times](_URL_0_)",
"Yes. At night, given the right time and place, it's pretty easy. It'll look like a star that's moving relatively quickly in a straight line across the sky.\n\nHere's where you can find out when and where to look:\n\n_URL_0_"
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av9j88 | emps | How do they work? And are the electronics that get affected by them permanently broken? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/av9j88/eli5_emps/ | {
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"EMP stands for electromagnetic pulse. It is a sudden massive burst of energy, which can be created through multiple natural and artificial processes.\n\nThe main way EMPs cause damage is a huge current flowing through electronics, which will destroy capacitors, resistors, diodes, wiring and circuit boards. The magnetic field created might also break inductors or other magnetically sensitive components.\n\nA lightning strike creates multiple EMP pulses when the current enters the ground. The electromagnetic energy spreads through the ground and is luckily stopped by circuit breakers before it enters your house.\n\nThe rapid release of high energy photons and charged particles during a nuclear explosion can also generate EMP pulses. There are even plans to use the earth’s magnetic field to focus and direct the EMP pulse, which allows an army to disable electronics on the other side of the earth.",
"Current in electronic components is designed to flow in very specific ways within certain tolerances. A strong electromagnetic wave can create current in wires and components, causing it to flow in unpredictable and sometimes damaging ways as well as affect the way some digital devices store memory. As a result, the devices may be left in an unknown state and thus unable to function until they are restored to a known state again. If too much current went into sensitive electronics, it could potentially damage them or even break them to the point where they have to be replaced.",
"Electricity and magnetism is related, so magnetic fields going across a conductor will cause electricity to be induce in conductor, and electricity running through a wire will cause magnetic fields to be generated. This is how and why things like electric motors and loudspeakers can exist. \n\nPulses of electromagnetism can be caused by solar flares and other solar activity. They can also be caused by setting off nuclear explosions at the right altitudes. It's also possible to make smaller, portable devices that emit short range pulses of a few dozen feet.\n\nThe exact effect of an EMP can vary. If the EMP is weak, and the wires subjected to it are short, the surge of electricity might be stopped by protective components at for example a transformer station, and if the wires from that transformer station into a household are much shorter, the electricity induced over this distance might not be enough to knock out electronics in that house. \n\nIf the EMP is stronger, the transformer station might be get damaged, but leave the things behind it safe. If it's even stronger, it might be able to induce a destructive amount of electricity into even the shorter power lines going into houses, possibly causing lots of material damage. \n\nEquipment that isn't protected against power surges may very well be permanently destroyed. ",
"The ELI5 here is listen to AM radio during a lightning storm. The radio will have static and popping from lighting happening around you.\n\nRadios work on the principle that moving electrons around results in changing magnetic fields, and changing magnetic fields result in moving electrons around. The radio towers vibrate electrons in an antenna, a EM field radiates out, and eventually vibrates electrons around in your radio antenna. The moving electrons in the radio are detected as a current which can be amplified and used to move electrons in a speaker coil. The moving electrons in the speaker coil create an EM field that pushes against a fixed speaker magnet, resulting in the speaker diaphragm moving around making music.\n\nWhen lightning strikes, that's a massive amount of electrons racing between the ground and clouds which produces a large expanding EM field (just like a radio antenna). That field hits your radio, and in the exact same way the radio waves induce a current in the radio to provide music, the lightning's EM field induces current in the radio which results in a sharp pop. If the lightning is close enough (basically ontop of your house), that induced current *could* be large enough to damage the radio components. There's also the fact that an antenna is just a big wire. There's plenty of smaller wires, circuit-board traces, and electrical chips and components inside the radio that behave exactly like the antenna wire, and also get current induced in them from the lightning. (and technically from the radio waves as well).\n\nWhen people talk about \"EMP\" they're usually just talking about bombs designed to create similar large pulses of EM radiation with the explicit purpose of having a large enough flux to induce damaging currents in the target electronics.\n\n\n"
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424833 | since there is a nautical mile, is there also a nautical feet, inch, etc? | There must be, right? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/424833/eli5_since_there_is_a_nautical_mile_is_there_also/ | {
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"I'm sorry to say, but there isn't. \n\n_URL_0_\n\nThat is a good reference, but I'll try to sum it up.\n\nA nautical mile is defined as 1,852 meters. So, from that alone you can see that it wouldn't have an immediate basis in feet or inches or any other imperial/US Customary unit. \n\nHowever, it historically originated from one minute of an arc on the meridian.\n\n",
"There are no nautical feet, yards, etc. A nautical mile is one minute (1/60 of a degree) of latitude. Using nautical miles makes it easier to find distances on charts that use the latitude/longitude grid. That being said, sailors will use a unit for navigation called a *cable*, which is 1/10 of a nautical mile. For smaller measurements, such as ship dimensions, depths, etc., sailors use metric or imperial units, depending on their preference.\n"
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47vaqj | how hindu religon / gods works | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/47vaqj/eli5_how_hindu_religon_gods_works/ | {
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"Do [these previous discussions](_URL_0_) help?"
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3hj83c | if it takes lawyers 3 years to learn the law, how can we trust a cop to learn it in 6 months? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3hj83c/eli5_if_it_takes_lawyers_3_years_to_learn_the_law/ | {
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"Cops don't need to know the bankruptcy code, or contract law, or probate law, etc. The part of the law they're generally concerned with is much smaller. And they don't need to be experts - anything they do is generally useless in the long term if the DA (a \"real\" lawyer) isn't willing to prosecute you.\n\nThere is a process (in Texas at least when I was a HS student, I'm sure there are similar setups elsewhere) called \"DA Intake\" where when a cop arrests someone, as part of the booking/charge process they would meet with some lowly assistant DA who was on call to determine what exactly to charge you with. Remember that once you're under arrest they have a certain amount of time to charge you (in front of a judge) or let you go.\n\nThe problem with cops is that **some** are assholes who abuse their power, not that they have a imperfect understanding of the law.",
"In overly simplified terms, a cop needs to know the enforcement of the law. What and how are you breaking law? And what's the appropriate action? Do you get a ticket or do you get arrested? They don't interpret the law as a judge or a lawyer would do. These others get lots more training in interpretation and other details of law. \n\n\nAm not a lawyer. Am not a cop. ",
"I think that the most direct answer to your question is that there is a lot more that goes into a law degree than the laws that a cop will ever need to enforce. If the widgets that I sell encroach on Apple's patents, I don't expect a police officer to draft official documents related to the lawsuit or come by to advise me on the court proceedings. I wouldn't hire a cop to head the legal division of my company, help manage my deceased father's estate, or draft and file patents for me, because none of these things are even remotely relevant to what a police officer goes through for their training.\n\n\nLawyers don't just spend 3 years memorizing laws in school.",
"I went to law school, and you learn all you need to know in the first year. The other 2 years are to make money for the university. I had my first job practicing at the end of my first year. There is a reason all the required classes are all in the first year. Law school is one year of required classes and 2 years of electives. It's all bullshit.",
"Police only learn basic criminal laws, Like traffic, theft, domestic dispute and assault laws, not civil laws. Basically just right and wrong. More like first responders to sort out who did what. Prosecutors and detectives and judges on the other hand....\n",
"Lawyers don't learn the law in three years. We learn it in three months studying for the bar exam and then we proceed to forget it as quickly as possible to avoid the terrible flashbacks.",
"Lawyers are expected to be experts in a wide body of general laws, and unlike other professionals do not take specialized boards (outside of post-licensing State Bar specialized certificates). A typical law school curriculum consists of 30, 3 semester-hour courses. The first year is a core curriculum usually consisting of Contracts, Civil Procedure (the procedure of civil suits), Torts (the substance of the laws civil suits are based on), Evidence, Property, Constitutional Law and Legal Writing. An average police officer needs to know 2 courses that are taught in law schools, Criminal Procedure and Criminal Law. These are simple subjects comparatively and constitute less than half of a semester's worth of law school material. Criminal Law and Procedure in many schools are not even in the first year curriculum. \n\nAlso, law schools don't necessarily teach the law. Law schools teach using the Socratic Method, which focuses on teaching students to apply the law to individual scenarios and emphasizes critical thinking skills over bare knowledge. A Socratic Method based style of teaching is based on questioning, and doesn't really \"teach\" anything. In a typical Socratic course, a Professor poses hypothetical questions and students are called on at random to answer based on their own individual research and sometimes are not even told whether their answer is right or wrong. Using more \"modern\" teaching methods, ie: power points and flash cards, the material can be covered much quicker. Under a more straightforward instructional style, the basic substance of almost any law school class can be laid out in a matter of hours. \n\nFurthermore, police are not expected to be experts in the law. For example, this is the general idea behind probable cause. PC isn't a rigid legal standard requiring an expert trained in the law to know with certainty a law was violated. Rather, it's a \"practical, non-technical\" standard that calls upon the \"factual and practical considerations of everyday life on which reasonable and prudent men act\". Further evidence of the lower \"bar\" for police officers are exceptions to warrant requirements where police and support staff are allowed to act more or less outside of the law as long as they do so \"reasonably\" or in \"good faith reliance\" on court staff.\n\nTL DR; Lawyers are expected to be technical legal experts. Police are not.",
"Police are Law Enforcement Officers, not lawyers. All they need to know is what is/isn't allowed and to be given a general set of principles (e.g. Maintain the flow of traffic, ensure this location is safe, prevent people from harming other people, etc.) and the tools at their disposal to enforce the law (tickets, arrest, shooty shooty bang bang, etc.)\n\nThe problem we've seen recently is a culture of many municipal police forces where LEO's feel emboldened/immune and so have no/little hesitation on how to enforce the law.",
"No idea. Our cops need two years to learn all law enforcement basics and even then they're not allowed to work on their own, but in huge teams. Just after that they're allowed to work as real cops.",
"You can't trust them. My civil litigation professor made it a point to inform us that the last person you should ask about the law is a police officer. He has not been to law school and any law that he purports to \"know\" will be colored by other non-lawyers. His advice was to never speak to an officer because nothing you say will help you if they already think you're guilty; ask for a lawyer immediately.\n\nAs for personal experience, there have been a few times where an officer has done something inappropriate (unethical) or illegal and I would have to call him on it and cite the legal authority (for example, an officer who threatened me with false arrest or an officer who didn't know that prank calling the police is a misdemeanor). I once had to file a complaint with internal affairs which ended up with the officer having to take retraining classes.\n\nIf you ever suspect misconduct by an officer, immediately request that he involve his supervisor. \n\nThat being said, I've generally had pleasant experiences with police officers and I appreciate the service that they provide and I acknowledge the incredible stress associated with the job.\n\nSource: Paralegal. ",
"It takes lawyers 3 years to learn how to *research* and *discuss* the law. It takes them a lifetime to actually try to understand it. And even the foremost experts of all time still disagree with each other on a regular basis on important questions. The bottom line is that the supply of people with the skill and money to be educated as a lawyer would never be nearly enough to also supply the entire pool of demand for law enforcement officers. Unless of course you want to raise cop salaries to exceed that of lawyers which is probably impossible due to budget limitations. The system is intended from the ground up to work even when some officers have a flawed understanding of the law. That is one reason why we have extensive appeals systems.\n",
"They are only taught laws that apply to their own work (i.e. search and seizure, etc.) and even that is in a perfect world. Since it is up to the courts to determine a person's innocence or guilt, the officer need only understand when they can and cannot cite someone, arrest someone, etc. Beyond that the courts decide if a crime was actually committed based on the evidence. That is why it is extremely important to bring every citation you are written to court. Even if you are guilty, often the court will reduce the charge just for showing up and offer you a lesser charge to get you in and out of there quickly. If you simply pay the fine then you are admitting guilt, which can cause major problems for you down the line. Don't let a police officer be your judge and jury; take your tickets to court. Even if you never see a judge you'll be happy to did. I reduced a traffic ticket to a non-moving violation with no points on my license and a lesser fine simply by showing up and pleading guilty to the lesser charge. Since it was a non-moving violation, they were basically offering to give me a slap on the wrist rather than drag the process out for a slightly larger fine and a moving violation on my record.",
"You don't need to have learned the law to know you're not allowed to drive 100 on the highway. \nYou don't need to have learned the law to know you're not allowed to take an item from a store without paying for it. \nYou don't need to have learned the law to know you're not allowed to beat your neighbor with a golf club for no reason. \n & nbsp; \nPolice officers don't need to know the intricacies of the law. Police officers just observe. If you disagree with any of their observations or judgments, you can take it to court, where you'll find the people who did learn the law. That's why police officers have the authority to investigate what they believe might be a violation of the law, but not the authority to actually sentence you.",
"**Lawyers** \n\n* Interprete the law\n* Defend the law\n* Create the law\n\n* Amend the law \n \n**Police**\n\n* Enforces the law",
"I am a law student, a big difference as far as I can tell is that we have to learn to read and understand the laws as written by the lawmakers. We have to learn to interpret the law in the (often complicated and convoluted) way it was written. We also have to study jurisprudence (court cases that further defined the law).\n\nMy best guess is that cops only have to know what the law says, and even then only in their relevant field. They don't actually have to be able to understand a written law book.",
"Why would you assume that a cop understands the law? If you get rid of that notion you can start to protect yourself in your interactions with the police. I'm not saying all cops are bad, just that enough of them are that you should assume you're going to be fucked EVEN WHEN you've done nothing wrong. If you're being questioned shut your damn mouth and ask for a lawyer.",
"Lawyers and police officers are a part of two separate branches of the law. Lawyers belong to the judicial system while police belong to Executive system. Again, those are two completely separate branches of the legal system. Legislative branch writes up the laws, Executive branch enforces those laws, and Judicial branch decides the punishment if there is to be one.\n\nTo enforce the law, you don't need to know every intricate detail of the law like you would if you are to decide someone's fate. Laws can be incredible complicated, especially when taking other factors into account. A cop can't sit and go through all of this stuff all the while potentially letting the suspect run amok. They take a suspect in based on what they see, hear, smell, ect. and let the next branch handle the intricate details.\n\nAs u/warlocktx stated: \"The problem with cops is that **some** are assholes who abuse their power, not that they have a imperfect understanding of the law.\" The question you've asked came from a post of a picture taken of a sign that was written in haste ignorance with no thought put into it. It was written in anger and served only one purpose; to get everyone who read it to ask this question and to discredit all police. Thankfully you asked others and got solid, thoughtful answers instead of letting it fester in your mind like so many others have done and are doing.",
"LEO of nearly 10 years. Thought I'd throw in my two cents. \n\nA lot of great answers here. I just wanted to add that for the prosecution of cases, we are usually assisted by DA or some similar type entity that went to law school and knows more than we do. I don't stand a chance against a defense attorney with even a year of experience after law school compared to my 10 years of LEO court room experience. That's not MY expertise. I don't expect that same defense attorney to be well-versed in disarming techniques or emergency vehicle operations. Could he do OK at some of it? Sure, but it's not his area of expertise. \n\nAlso, we just need probable cause for an arrest. Which is FAR below the level needed(proof beyond a reasonable doubt) to obtain a conviction in court. That's what the DA and defense attorney get to argue and bicker about while I sit there and watch. \n\nAt this point in my career, there are STILL things that I am learning regarding criminal law and the enforcement of the same. I've taken it upon myself to actually delve into the world of case law and learn from the mistakes/successes of others. If a well established case law says I can't (or probably won't stand a chance of getting a conviction) do something, then two things are important to me... First, there's no sense in violating any civil rights or eschewing any constitutional amendments for the citizen just to make an arrest. It's simply not worth it. Secondly, it's MY career and reputation on the line. All the stupid cases you read about in case law where the officer acted inappropriately or made dumb decisions? You'll never see State V ClitorasaurusRecks in the annals of case law. Work smarter. \n\nIf any young rookie cops are reading this, do yourself a favor. Slow down with trying to put everyone in jail you can. You have a whole career ahead of you and trust me, you'll make plenty of arrests. Putting drunk Billy in jail for the 5th time in a week just for being drunk is a dick move. And as a side note, you're screwing your beat partners by constantly being tied up booking him into jail. Anyways, you also need to LEARN the laws you are charged with enforcing. READ the statute. There's NO excuse for this. You know how mad you get when the cook at McDonald's messes up your burger? Well... You have the authority to take someone's freedom and if necessary, their LIFE. DONT fuck that up. \n\nEnd of rant. ",
"According to a lawyer friend, you spend 3 years in law school to learn to \"think\" like a lawyer, not learn laws.\n\nThis jives with my experience as I have known freshly minted lawyers who know fuck all about the law. ",
"Was pre law major, now I'm a cop. \n\nAs others have stated, as a cop I need to know the enforcement side of things. Because of my bachelors I do understand some civil sides of things, but for the most part I don't use the degree much. \n\nI don't know every statute. I don't know ever traffic law. I don't (for the most part) memorize statute numbers. \n\nI had a very good training officer who taught it to me this way: know what you can and can't do when it comes to detainment, reasonable suspicion, and probable cause. Always have a firm ground to stand on, don't catch yourself in a situation where you have difficulty explaining why you detained/arrested someone. \n\nIf you can make snap decision when it comes to reasonable suspicion, probable cause, and detainment you can be a good cop. After you have one of those \"foundations\" to stand upon, things can slow down, you can look up the statute, and ask yourself does the circumstance meet this? Do I have probable cause for arrest? Do I think there with be proof beyond a reasonable doubt at trial? \n\nWe are not required to ask the 3rd questions but I do. I \"write to convict\" and believe my reputation with the state attorney's office and career are worth more than taking someone \"because I had PC\". \n\nJust my opinion. Sorry if using the words \"reasonable suspicion and probable\" cause stir up slot of b.s., but some cops use them as intended",
"Cops are like EMTs. They don't need to know how to perform open heart surgery, just how to bring you to the guy who does. ",
"Police officers are supposed to maintain public order. They are also there to help arrest people when laws have been broken and find evidence for lawyers. Cops know the law surrounding these actions (keeping the peace, collecting evidence). Lawyers at the district attorney's office then prosecute based on the evidence the cops have found. They know the law surrounding the criminal justice system.\n\nPolice officers with only 6 months of training are often assigned to the keeping the peace role, rather than collecting evidence.\n\nSometimes, it helps to quote a long running tv show: \"In the Criminal Justice System the people are represented by two separate, yet equally important groups. The police who investigate crime and the District Attorneys who prosecute the offenders.\"\n\nLastly, the 3 years in law school only teaches the lawyer the basics of each type of law. A lawyer could graduate law school never having taken a criminal law course, although many of the other courses they are required to take will apply (like evidence). Most lawyers then spend obscene amounts of time learning which cases apply to which situations to ensure their client's interests are served. Similarly, police officers spend years on the force gaining experience in investigation and evidence collection.",
"Law students don't learn the law. They learn how to think like a lawyer and interpret/read the law.",
"Law student here:\n\nWe often say you don't learn the law in law school – it's just way too diverse to gain a full understanding. And a Mergers and Acquisitions guy doesn't need to know anything about divorce law. \n\nInstead, we learn how to think like lawyers. Then you begin to specialize. ",
"3 years? It's 5 1/2 years where i'm from.. A further 6 months of 'supervised learning' and then another 75 days of 'work experience' before you even get admitted. After that you are STILL restricted from certain things for 2 years.. \n\n3 years would be cool, but i don't see how anyone could get a grasp on the Law in that amount of time.. I kind of like the arduous nature of getting a Law degree from where i'm from.. It separates the good from the bad, and the wannabes from the people who actually want to work in the legal profession as contrasted from the people who watch 'suits' and think it's all big money and courtroom theatrics. ",
"Cops aren't lawyers. Cops arrest people, lawyers and judges fight out whether or not that person should be held longer. All cops need to know is the basics what people can and can't be arrested for and what requires immediate action. Lawyers need to know the intricacies.\n\nCops for instance know that you aren't allowed to attack anyone with a knife. They might have an inkling what the average punishment is but they would have no clue on what the legally extenuating circumstances are, how that person should be judged based on their past, and how to argue in favour of or against that person using legal arguments. All they know is; you want to stab someone - > go to jail - > legal system takes it from there.",
"It doesn't take Lawyers three years to learn the law. The first year in law school teaches you to think like a lawyer. Second and third years are spent applying that to soecific fields of law. It takes a few months of extensive study to learn how to pass the bar. And the rest of a lawyers career is devoted to learning the law so as to not sound like an asshole to clients or the courts.",
"I think it's hard to compare the two. That being said, it should worry all US citizens that their police officers are not receiving the same length of education as others in the western world. Despotically considering recent events with some officers acting unethical and sometimes breaking the law. UK, Germany, Denmark and Norway (to name a few) all require you to train/study between 2-3 years before becoming an officer.\n",
"How about you and other people stop rigging fucking questions with your manipulative titles. They don't need to learn everything about law as it is a wide field. They just need information that pertains to their duties ",
"Where I live, law school takes 5 years + 2 years in court before you can act as an independent lawyer. ",
"Neither lawyers nor cops \"learn the law\".\n\nLawyers learn how to work within the complexities of the legal system. They specialize in a certain type of law then learn the resources available to them to work within that legal space to increase the likelihood of the outcome they then market.\n\nCops learn to perform a job that includes public safety, processing individuals who commit crimes, and enforcement of certain laws in certain areas. Since a cops don't have to deal with many facets of the law, and since they don't have to be involved with the execution of the law, just the initial arrest, they don't need to be as educated in all the laws and nuances that those who will be involved in possibly months of years of litigation do.\n\nI think what you're really implying with this question is the popular social dynamic that we live in a police state or that police are a force for evil. Given the public outcry and media attention, your question is understandable but uneducated as it relies heavily on the outliers and not all the good folks who get paid jack to risk their lives every day.",
"Here in Germany it take 3 years to become a cop and it is connected to a bachelors degree in most states. ",
"Yeah! Like when that officer pulled me over for copyright infringement! \n\nThis is a really stupid question for ELI5. ",
"This is a fair question. I want to point out that your really don't \"learn the law\" in law school, if you mean people memorize or even learn specific laws. You learn more \"how to lawyer\" which is different.",
"Same as it takes doctors and nurses different amounts of time to learn medicine, or engineers and technicians different amounts of time to learn technology. Different roles, different requirements. \nThe question is of course hinting unsubtly at another question, to which I would add that some jobs have greater accountability than others. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to consider the various types of accountability, and which of the six mentioned jobs (lawyers, police, doctors, nurses, engineers, and technicians) faces what kinds of accountability.",
"Probably due to the fact that lawyers look at specifics, how a law was created, why it was, which cases helped it, the purpose of it etc...\n\nPolice only need to know how to enforce it and what it applies to.",
" > Don't post just to express an opinion or argue a point of view.\n\nBased on your title, text, and follow up comments it seems clear you posted in order to argue a point of view and so this has been removed.\n\nIt's also a subjective question. Asking \"how can we trust cops\" is asking for opinions.",
"They know the traffic code and a few other bits and the common sense stuff. It's not hard. "
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8ux9s2 | how does the koenigsegg gearless transmission work? | I understand how automatic, manual, CVT and dual clutch transmissions work, but I've been trying to understand how the Koenigsegg transmission works with little avail. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8ux9s2/eli5_how_does_the_koenigsegg_gearless/ | {
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"Basically its not a transmission at all... the engine is linked directly to the wheels through a differential type unit. Meaning that the ratio of engine speed to wheel speed never changes. Normally this won't work with gas motors because they make such little torque at low rpms that the either cant accelerate or cant reach decent speeds. That's where koenigseggs electric motor comes in providing the torque necessary to get the car moving.",
"This explains it quite well: [_URL_0_](_URL_0_) \n\nBasically it’s not gearless, it’s a single gear automatic transmission, plus a hydraulic clutch, plus electric motors."
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c03t9e | when astronauts play with liquids in space aren't they worried about water damage to parts from all the floating liquid? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c03t9e/eli5_when_astronauts_play_with_liquids_in_space/ | {
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kq7s0 | software patents and why they are "evil" | I'm not quite sure what a software patent is, and Wikipedia doesn't have the greatest information.
Is it like the creation of a file type that others cannot use (.rar where only winRAR can make but others can unarchive)?
Or is it like a process (the way VLC opens a video file)?
| explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/kq7s0/eli5_software_patents_and_why_they_are_evil/ | {
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"The term \"software patent\" isn't official. Informally, it's a category of patents that are applicable to software in some way. All patents, software patents included, are granted based off of a 18th century definition of the term: a \"device [with] no prior art\".\n\nAn *algorithm* is just a series of steps. Do this, then this, then this, and the result should damn well be this.\n\nSo are mathematical algorithms \"devices\"? If so, should mathematics be patentable? If not, how are software algorithms not mathematical algorithms?\n\nI won't go any further, because [Patent Absurdity](_URL_0_) does a great job of explaining software patents and explaining the problem in 30 minutes.",
"A computer program is a series of instructions, like a recipe.\n\nSuppose you're making dinner, and decide to mix certain spices together in a bowl then toast them in a pan.\n\nIt turns out well, so you publish it as part of a recipe. \n\nThen someone comes along and sues you, saying they invented the idea of mixing those spices together and toasting them. You protest that you didn't copy them, it was your own idea. That doesn't matter. The other guy thought of it first, and now he owns that technique for the next nineteen years. He can charge you whatever royalties he likes, or prevent you from using that technique at all.\n\nSoftware patents are like that. Patents are awarded for the sort of ideas that programmers come up with all the time, as part of their everyday work. \n\nGetting a software patent is a lot more expensive than coming up with the \"invention\" in the first place, so only large corporations can afford to do it much.",
"This is a podcast I like to listen to a lot (Planet Money), there's an awesome show just on software patents. \n\n_URL_0_",
"The patent system worked well for the past few decades, now companies such as Microsoft and Apple are using their vaguely worded patents to stifle innovation and guarantee that other companies can't produce competing devices due to a small similarity. \n\nCheck out this [link](_URL_0_): Apple more or less patented a rectangle with a button on it and has stopped samsung from selling devices in Germany, temporarily.",
"[Here's a transcript](_URL_0_) of a speech on how software patents are bad.",
"**Simple example of an evil software patent:**\n\nWhen a game loads, on a PC or a console, wouldn't it be nice to play some mini-game - like Tetris, or Pac Man - to pass the time? Well, game developers can't do that, because the idea of playing little games while big games load is patented by someone.\n\n**Another example:**\n\nEver played Crazy Taxi? You drive in a big open city, and you're guided to your target by a big arrow on top of the screen. Well, that arrow is patented by Sega and no other game developer can use it.",
"The term \"software patent\" isn't official. Informally, it's a category of patents that are applicable to software in some way. All patents, software patents included, are granted based off of a 18th century definition of the term: a \"device [with] no prior art\".\n\nAn *algorithm* is just a series of steps. Do this, then this, then this, and the result should damn well be this.\n\nSo are mathematical algorithms \"devices\"? If so, should mathematics be patentable? If not, how are software algorithms not mathematical algorithms?\n\nI won't go any further, because [Patent Absurdity](_URL_0_) does a great job of explaining software patents and explaining the problem in 30 minutes.",
"A computer program is a series of instructions, like a recipe.\n\nSuppose you're making dinner, and decide to mix certain spices together in a bowl then toast them in a pan.\n\nIt turns out well, so you publish it as part of a recipe. \n\nThen someone comes along and sues you, saying they invented the idea of mixing those spices together and toasting them. You protest that you didn't copy them, it was your own idea. That doesn't matter. The other guy thought of it first, and now he owns that technique for the next nineteen years. He can charge you whatever royalties he likes, or prevent you from using that technique at all.\n\nSoftware patents are like that. Patents are awarded for the sort of ideas that programmers come up with all the time, as part of their everyday work. \n\nGetting a software patent is a lot more expensive than coming up with the \"invention\" in the first place, so only large corporations can afford to do it much.",
"This is a podcast I like to listen to a lot (Planet Money), there's an awesome show just on software patents. \n\n_URL_0_",
"The patent system worked well for the past few decades, now companies such as Microsoft and Apple are using their vaguely worded patents to stifle innovation and guarantee that other companies can't produce competing devices due to a small similarity. \n\nCheck out this [link](_URL_0_): Apple more or less patented a rectangle with a button on it and has stopped samsung from selling devices in Germany, temporarily.",
"[Here's a transcript](_URL_0_) of a speech on how software patents are bad.",
"**Simple example of an evil software patent:**\n\nWhen a game loads, on a PC or a console, wouldn't it be nice to play some mini-game - like Tetris, or Pac Man - to pass the time? Well, game developers can't do that, because the idea of playing little games while big games load is patented by someone.\n\n**Another example:**\n\nEver played Crazy Taxi? You drive in a big open city, and you're guided to your target by a big arrow on top of the screen. Well, that arrow is patented by Sega and no other game developer can use it."
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3kvdm9 | what are the most likely effects of this super powerful el nino season? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3kvdm9/eli5_what_are_the_most_likely_effects_of_this/ | {
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"I remember in the 90's being in California and having a powerful El Niño taking us from a 10 year drought to \"normal\" in a month (it was referred to as March Miracle). \n\nThere's a lot that could happen or could not happen.While we know it will generate more precipitation, where that lands is going to vary. Also in states like California that are so parched, a large amount of rain will cause a lot of mudslides (less vegetation on the ground to hold things together).\n\nAs to if it will make a dent in the drought, that's also unknown. This is where the \"where\" matters. For example, rain falling in Southern California isn't as important as rain/snow in northern california as far as Los Angeles and the agricultural central valley is concerned (they get a lot of their water from Northern California). \n\nLake Mead in Nevada is 60 feet below normal, but rain in Las Vegas isn't really important compared to rain and snow in western Colorado (i.e. upriver) as far as Lake Mead is concerned.",
"Here in So Cal, the effects will be big, wet winter storms. The kind that we USED to get before the drought. Days of torrential downpours from mid-december to about mid february. This will mean an end to the drought. The snowpack in the sierras will finally return, meaning good water supply through the summer. There will also be more fog in spring. \n\nIn the Northeast, winters will be milder and drier. ",
"In Seattle, we're in a drought as well because we've only had a handful of rainy days this entire summer. Our glaciers in the Cascades and Olympics are nearly gone, and the snowpack from the previous winter left us in rough shape for the coming year. This coming winter doesn't look like it'll be any better, as the current estimates for this El Nino have it ending around springtime. That means that the Cascade winter-sports resorts won't be able to open (or have severely limited operations) and next year will be hairy as far as water availability goes as well. For a place that is used to a near constant drizzle except for July/August, this has the Puget Sound region on edge quite a bit.",
"Not looking forward to El Nino in south eastern Australia. Generally it means a really hot dry summer for us. Much depends on our spring, if we have good to great spring rain and a hot summer then it will be mayhem. \n\nBushfires, bushfires, bushfires as far as a the eye can see. ",
"Yo soy \"El Niño\". For those of you who don't \"habla español\" El Niño is Spanish for...the niño. ",
"As someone who lives in the desert of West Texas, seeing California's rainfall average look like our rainfall average is a bit surprising."
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ey4of4 | how can babies scream for a long time and not hurt their vocal cords but adults can easily hurt themselves when they cream for a few minutes? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ey4of4/eli5_how_can_babies_scream_for_a_long_time_and/ | {
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"When adults do what now?",
"Because most of the time, babies aren't screaming they're just vocalising. \n\nOpen your mouth, push air out by tensing your belly - that's what a baby does, it isn't actually engaging much in terms of it's tiny muscles. \n\nNow, if a baby is actually screaming (and you can tell the difference!) over sustained periods, like if they're poorly enough to be in pain/discomfort, it can damage their voices and they can develop all the normal stuff an adult would like Laryngitis.",
"First, babies may very well hurt their vocal cords, and that may contribute to more screaming - the natural \"this hurts, so stop doing this\" feedback loop takes time to develop.\n\nSecond, crying is different from screaming - adults can \"loud cry\" for a looooong time without irritation to vocal cords that might result from actual screaming for the same amount of time.\n\nThird, babies are designed by evolution to demand attention - they have no way to express pain or hunger or anything else other than through crying and other noises. \n Loudness confers an evolutionary advantage - a quiet baby doesn't demand attention the same way a loud baby does, and attention (food, tending to irritants and potentially dangerous conditions) enhances survival. Survival increases reproductive success. Reproductive success tends to propagate genes that foster that reproductive success. Infants \"hardwired\" to make loud noises when needing attention who are more likely to live to reproduce will pass on more of their genetic code FOR making loud noises in infancy than babies who aren't hardwired to make loud noises and therefore get less attention and therefore (on evolutionary timescales) tend to survive into adulthood less frequently and therefore tend to have fewer offspring, etc."
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5jtd4h | why is it so satisfying to peel something? | For example, plastic off a new screen. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5jtd4h/eli5_why_is_it_so_satisfying_to_peel_something/ | {
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"I'm assuming it's because when we were in nature and evolving and stuff, we would get some sort of dangerous stuff on us. The ones who would peel it off would live, so peeling stuff is satisfying",
"I'd assume that it triggers a smaller version of the dopamine rush we get when we get something new."
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1q8mzh | why do theists often deny evolution? what religious beliefs does evolution disprove? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1q8mzh/eli5_why_do_theists_often_deny_evolution_what/ | {
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"It pretty much ruins the whole \"Made in God's own image\" thing that most of them have going on...Nobody wants a god which therefore looks like an amoeba.",
"Any religion starts from the point of view that mankind is somehow special. Science practically starts from the opposing view. Or at least it doesn't assume anything about the role of humankind in the universe.\n\nIn any case, every discovery that science has made has turned out to reduce the importance of mankind. For instance Earth is not the center of the solar system, we're just a rock orbiting around the Sun. The Sun is not even the center of the universe. We are made up of the same atoms as non-living matter. \n\nEvolution does the same thing, it tells us that we are after all just another species of animal. And this doesn't sit well with religion. ",
"Huh, must depend where you are from. From where I am, there aren't many creationists.\n\nI'm from Canada btw.",
"Evolution throws some serious doubt to the Adam and Eve story. Specifically the compelling DNA evidence that mitochondrial eve and the last common male ancestor did not live at the same time. \n\nWithout a literal Adam and Eve, there is no original sin. Without original sin, no reason for Jesus to sacrifice himself, which is the entire basis of Christianity. \n\nSome Christians get around this by creative interpretation. ",
"The Catholic Church does not deny evolution and claim that is is compatible with Christianity and this view has been popular for a very long time.\n\n > Father Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti, Professor of Theology at the Pontifical Santa Croce University in Rome, added that 4th century theologian St Augustine had \"never heard the term evolution, but knew that big fish eat smaller fish\" and forms of life had been transformed \"slowly over time\". Aquinas made similar observations in the Middle Ages.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n"
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fnz9hq | why does depression sometimes cause cognitive dysfunction issues, such as reduced attention span, memory, concentration, information processing capability and executive functioning, that sometimes persist after a depressive episode is over? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fnz9hq/eli5_why_does_depression_sometimes_cause/ | {
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"Depression still exists in a depressed person's brain even after an \"episode\". Depression is more than just in your mind, it is like a mental disorder that actually causes physical changes in your brain's structure and neural network, and it is those changes that can cause the other symptoms you mentioned.",
"There are a bunch of reasons from a TBI (traumatic brain injury) that causes the depression in the first place with damaged dopamine receptors to “salience attribution”, a state of the brains rewiring due to the depression and the environmental stimulus (say if the conditions causing the depression cause the brain to “maladapt”), or “state transference” where the depressed patient cannot properly reframe/refocus due to projection of the episode onto future events akin to PTSD.",
"Unipolar or clinical depression is a mental illness and in itself causes your brain to function differently from other brains. Psychiatric medication and therapy will usually help. As far as I know depression cannot be cured.",
"Wish I knew. I'm taking SSRIs for my clinical depression and I feel a whole lot better but I'm afraid the cognitive damage has been done. That disease stripped my mind from a lot of ability. Fuck depression.",
"According to NiMH, depression is caused by many factors like genetic, biological, environmental, and psychological. Genetic would be your mother or father would have it, biological would be related to life so in this case it would be something about your life, environmental would be like if you grew up in an abusive household, and psychological would refer to your brain and how it works.\n\nThe last three I know of well because I grew up in households where people abused me physically and psychologically first hand. Mostly it was drunk step dads not being nice. The one threw a beer can at me and my mom. In my brain what happened was kid me at the time, went into panic mode when we got to our motel for the night because I was scared my stepdad would break the door down and beat us up. Things died down to 100% up until about a month ago, when I was fat shamed for eating 5 eggs because the eggs were small for an omelette, and when the guy's wife found out about it, I had stay at a motel for the night because he was so mad yelling profanities and such. As soon as I layed down on the bed, I was shaking a little because it was like I was reliving that traumatizing experience all over again. On top of that, the area around the motel gets real sketchy after dark. There were vehicles pulling in and out around 10pm. \n\nAlso during the time I had stepdads, I was bullied at school for being slow constantly so this resulted in a deeper depression for me even at one point I was close to committing suicide. The teachers knew about the bullies but did nothing to stop it much so it kept going. \n\n\nHarvard says that there are three parts of the brain that appear to play a role in what they call MDD (Major depressive disorder): the hippocampus, amygdala, and prefrontal cortex.\n\nMDD is also called clinical depression.\n\nThe body releases a hormone called cortisol which is released during times of physical and mental stress, including during times of depression. Problems can occur when excessive amounts of cortisol are sent to the brain due to a stressful event or a chemical imbalance in the body.\n\nIn a healthy brain, brain cells (neurons) are produced throughout a person’s adult life in a part of the hippocampus called the dentate gyrus.\n\nIn people with MDD, however, the long-term exposure to increased cortisol levels can slow the production of new neurons and cause the neurons in the hippocampus to shrink. This can lead to memory problems.\n\nThe prefrontal cortex is located in the very front of the brain. It is responsible for regulating emotions, making decisions, and forming memories. When the body produces an excess amount of cortisol, the prefrontal cortex also appears to shrink.\n\nThe amygdala is the part of the brain that facilitates emotional responses, such as pleasure and fear. In people with MDD, the amygdala becomes enlarged and more active as a result of constant exposure to high levels of cortisol.\n\nAn enlarged and hyperactive amygdala, along with abnormal activity in other parts of the brain, can result in disturbances in sleep and activity patterns. It can also cause the body to release irregular amounts of hormones and other chemicals in the body, leading to further complications.\n\nMany researchers believe high cortisol levels play the biggest role in changing the physical structure and chemical activities of the brain, triggering the onset of MDD. Normally, cortisol levels are highest in the morning and decrease at night. In people with MDD, however, cortisol levels are always elevated, even at night.\n\n[_URL_1_](_URL_1_)\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)",
"As a Veteran who medically retired due Depression and PTSD related to Traumatic Brain Injury, my personal sentiments have been that: \n\n1) In my case, brain structure and neurons were damaged because of multiple concussions, reducing overall cognitive faculties. \n\n2) The Depression has lead to lingering thoughts of wanting to end things (I’m using a euphemism here), and these dark thoughts can interrupt my everyday train of thought.",
"Mental illnesses are very very hard to really \"cure\". in reality most patients just learn to live with it and not fall into the old patterns that are etched into their body. they learn to avoid certain things and thoughts that trigger those old patterns. that takes some cognitive skill which then can't be spend elsewhere. another part of it is that we don't really know what depression is on an small scale, as in individual cells. we only know the symptoms on an whole body scale and some small scale parts of the process. people often say its caused by an serotonin shortage for example, thats false and is not the leading theory. it hasn't been for a long time. we know it plays an role in the expression of symptoms or causation. but what role? we don't have the vaguest idea. you could compare this illness to an major illness that needs to be operated on. you're going to have scar tissue and bodily functions will probably never fully return to normal. you'll feel like your body betrays you because things don't work like they used to anymore. things you used to be able to do suddenly cause things they didn't before. its really important to note that mental illness IS physical illness. there is no part of it that isn't an physical process inside your body as far as we know.",
"Could be ADHD. It's pretty common to be feel depressed and inadequate because of how ADHD fucks with your brain/life and makes everything feel much harder than it really is. Especially if you are undiagnosed and just think you're crap - basically what happened to me! Feeling this way causes you to feel depressed and unhappy, which is what you'll tell your doctor, and which can commonly lead to a diagnosis of the depressive symptoms rather than diagnosis of cause.\n\nI was diagnosed with depression when I was a child, and ADHD only a year ago; I was told it was really common for people with ADHD to be misdiagnosed with depression and anxiety etc, and now I am dealing with my ADHD and learning how to manage the things that come with it, I actually feel a lot *less* depressed because I feel like I finally have an answer. \n\nAll I know for sure is everything you describe in your question are things people with ADHD will struggle with - attention span, memory, executive function, concentration... \n\nMight be worth considering, especially if you have struggled with these things for a long time!",
"We don't exactly know why or even that it's depression *causing* those problems, necessarily.\n\nMental health symptoms are caused by a lot of different things, and we still don't fully understand all of them. Each individual needs to work with their own health provider to figure out what works to address the problems they're having.\n\nAs one example, you could have an underlying condition causing you to not absorb nutrients as well as you should. The resulting vitamin deficiencies can cause depression as well as causing cognitive difficulties. As a second example, you could have ADHD along with depression (it's very common to have ADHD struggles lead to depression), so once the depression is treated, the cognitive difficulties remain.\n\nBoth of the above examples are problems I personally have, so you can even have multiple factors at play. It took a few years working with good medical professionals to get it sorted out.\n\nThere are a lot of different possibilities, unfortunately, and I don't think we even know all of them yet.",
"I did a systematic review on the subject for my masters, all of the mechanisms are not fully known yet. What we found however was that there is a correlation between higher levels of neuroinflammatory markers and cognitive deficits in people diagnosed with depression. So basically, neuroinflammation is associated with cognitive deficits in depressed people. \n\nHigher levels of Interleukin-6 has predicted poorer performance in psychomotor speed in 2/3 studies investigated. \n\nHigher levels of C-Reactive protein have been associated with lower cognitive performance, however there is more research needed to investigate if there is actually a significant association between C-Reactive protein and depression. There were a number of other markers investigated but none were found to be significant-but that may be because the sample studies were not large enough to tell.\n\nBasically, more research is needed but neuroinflammation has been associated with cognitive deficits, and is a reaction to depression. Depression promotes and maintains neuroinflammation by diminishing the sensitivity of the immune system to the glucocorticoid hormones responsible for ceasing the inflammatory response. But also production of pro-inflammatory cytokines (ie: interleukin-6) has been thought to increase in response to negative emotions and exposure to stressful experiences.",
"A lot of people here are saying depression cannot be cured. Is that really true? Once you're clinically depressed, you'll continue to be for the rest of your life? That's... really serious.",
"As I learned in my Psychology class, Depression causes physical changes in your brain, causing the frontal lobe to shrink. The physical changes can lead to worsening of the depression itself, as well as causing issues to persist even after the episode is over.",
"Hi, I am a person who has major depressive disorder (I have very intense depressive episodes), persistent depressive disorder (I have had depressive episodes nearly constantly and have had them for about 2 years), season affective disorder (winter boosts my episodes, making them more intense), and panic disorder (I have intense anxiety episodes that usually end in a panic attack). This is my experience with it and how it effects me, but everyone is different. Mine comes from genetics and was passed down to me by my mother, and a traumatic experience (I would rather not talk about it). \n\nSometimes the answer to your question is my brain is simply too focused on making me feel like shit. It's hard for me to remember to take a shower when I'm trying to convince myself why suicide is not a good idea. \n\nThere are a lot of physical differences between someone with a normal functioning brain and a depressed one too. There are millions of chemicals that control what is going on at any given moment in the brain, so pinpointing the exact causes of any given mental illness is incredibly difficult. Psychiatrists have found that dopamine, serotonin, and cortisol most likely play a decent sized role in how depression effects the brain.\n\n The main parts of the brain you want to look at are the amygdala, the hippocampus, and the frontal lobe. The amygdala controls emotions, and tends to be overactive when shown negative stimuli, and underactive with positive ones in depressed brains. The hippocampus controls memory, and will actually shrink with people who have depression. The frontal lobe controls personality and even attention and some emotional responses. This shrinks too. This is what causes the problems you are wondering about. Once this shrinking has occured, there isn't a way to reverse it. \n\nSometimes depression isn't even caused by the brain. Some people with hypothyroidism (an underactive thyroid) experience symptoms identical with depression. Other underlying health issues can cause minor depressive disorders as well, so that makes it even harder to find the source of someone's depression.\n\nDepressive disorders don't have a cure, only ways of relieving symptoms. For instance, I take escitalopram, an SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor). This doesn't cure my depression, but is a mood booster, making the symptoms a bit easier to handle. And these symptoms persist even outside of episodes. I lose things and misplace things constantly, I often feel very fatigued, and I have trouble focusing a lot of the time. \n\nI will have these illnesses for the rest of my life. I am lucky to have a very strong support group to help me through the tough times. All I want to do is spread awareness for a real illness that people often ignore.",
"Stress and anxiety has an impact on hippocampus and amygdala regions, when overwhelmed dopamine (responsible for motivation) can also be reduced. On the severe end this can impact executive function in the long term.\n\nThese have a role in perception , emotional regulation and processing external stimuli or input.Depression can be a symptom of these, it can be a condition or a disorder and the latter is often co-morbid with dysfunction in these regions. This can be expressed as lack of enjoyment or desire among other symptoms i.e mood, flattened affect (expression), impaired emotional cognition & cognition, sometimes this can be presented as lack of empathy, and this can relate to symptoms coldness, bluntness and a sense of being withdrawn.\n\nWith hippocampus is related to perception. When stressed this can cause memory impairment and on the severe end can cause cognitive disturbances.\n\nThis part of the brain is often related to schizophrenia. When there are abnormalities in all these regions this can cause not only difficulties with relating to others, it can impair speech, memory, perception and/or attention.\n\nSerotonin and dopamine can play a part in reducing the cognitive impairment, lack of enjoyment increase synaptic transmission (a neurotransmitter(without neurotransmitter the information between neurons (information) is reduced). This will impact mood and pleasure, the latter can increase focus and reduce cognitive impairment by temporarily stimulating dopamine production through neurotransmitters.\n\nAn anti-psychotic can reduce severe perceptual and emotional disturbances for those who experience distress from major depressive symptoms and schizo- disorders. Second generation or atypical anti-psychotics can alleviate or sedate low to mild experiences in perceptual and emotional disturbances. This can also cause other symptoms to appear but the goal is reducing or alleviating the condition where it can become severe.\n\nThe reason why these can persist after treatments is the impact of stress can cause abnormalities or lesions in the areas responsible for processing emotion, memory and attention.\n\nPeople with PTSD or complex PTSD may experience all of these, people with ASD may experience stress with overstimulation - to much information, but will tend to have high tolerance to perceived pain and reduced fear due to reduced gray matter volume - responsible for sensory and muscle control and likely to have low tolerance to sensory stimulation that can result in being overwhelmed. People with ADHD may experience being overwhelmed and is often co-morbid with ASD (paired) with emotions and will experience lack of executive function related to the frontal lobe (front of our brains) or other regions that may cause sensory issues. A typical ADHD person will have reduced executive function, responsible for managing all of these symptoms, the non-typical person may acquire such symptoms and be treated likewise.",
"I know this is ELI5. However, for anyone wanting to read a review of this area, [*The impact of anxiety upon cognition*](_URL_0_) is a great overview of the topic.",
"Eli5 how fusion works would probably make more sense then this. Sorry but some things simply cannot be explained like one is five years old, and when they do they could make more 'damage' then a simple I don't know. It would probably be something like 'drugs rewire one's brain, so one gets addicted', and this answer about addiction would be ridiculous if it wasn't tragic. \n\nDepression is a symptom. There are theories or rather hypothesis about things causing them. For example there is a theory it could have something to do with immune system response. IIRC there's some research showing depressed people have a better chance of surviving an infection.\n\nAnyhow we still don't know a lot, or we actually know very little about neurotransmitters, our physiology, and long term consequences of a long term imbalance of particular neurotransmitters.\n\nAny eli5 answer you might get here is probably going to be an oversimplification of a very complicated guess, or a guess based on a very limited knowledge."
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a6ua46 | why law enforcement uses polygraphs but they are not admissible in court | If polygraphs are not reliable enough to be admissible in court then why do law enforcement use them to help eliminate suspects or possibly confirm their suspicions? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a6ua46/eli5_why_law_enforcement_uses_polygraphs_but_they/ | {
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"Because even though it might not be admissible In court, it'll flag people who are worth investigating further... and when you investigate those people further, you WILL find evidence that IS admissible in court.\n\nEg: \nCop: \"Did you kill her?\" \nMurderer: \"Naw!\" \nPolygraph: \"He's lying.\" \nCop: \"So, if I check inside your house, I won't find a murder weapon?\" \nMurderer: \"Hale naw!\" \nPolygraph: \"He's telling the truth.\" \nCop: \"And if I check your car?\" \nMurderer: \"Aw hell naw, bacon! There ain't nuffink in my motor! What is this?\" \nPolygraph: \"He's lying.\" \nCop: \"I'm totally checking your car.\" \n\nShort version - information gained by polygraph may not be admissible in court, but it can definitely still be useful when conducting an investigation. In this example, the cop might have wired up forty people, and asked them all if they killed the victim... and then only pressed further when the machine said that the person was lying about it.\n\nThat's the ELI5.",
"It is a useful tool for finding pressure points.\n\nThere are two types of modern police interrogations - reid method and interrogative. Interrogative - That is basically questioning people until you catch them in lies. Knowing which questions to ask is very helpful. Reid method is basically accusing them of doing something in a manner that follows a storyline.\n\nObviously, a trained liar has a better chance of passing a polygraph with discipline. Thing is that most criminals aren't highly trained or as sociopathic/anhedonic as is required to maintain the cool required to pass a polygraph in a simple criminal investigation. \n\nWhile the polygraph can be very revealing, it isn't considered admissible because of the technical arguments for guilt are easily refuted with arguments by the defense for \"innocent behavior\".",
"Mind games. \nPolygraphs make people nervous. It's harder to lie or keep a story straight when you're nervous. This means you're more likely to say something the cops find suspicious or incriminating - even if you're innocent. You might even get so nervous to confess to something you didn't do or some other bad thing you did do."
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4cb3bq | is it possible for there to be a solar system in a solar system? | If there was a solar system with a large central star could it have a smaller star orbiting it that in turn had planets orbiting the smaller star like moons? (I now it is possible for there to be multiple states in a solar system) I'm curious because I want to know if the solar system in Firefly is possible. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4cb3bq/eli5_is_it_possible_for_there_to_be_a_solar/ | {
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"Stars that orbit one another are fairly common. However, it's unlikely that any planets would remain in stable orbits. The tug from the other star would keep pulling them around. The stars don't even need to get all that close to cause problems. especially if there are any gas giants that can be knocked around, affecting the orbits of other bodies, exacerbating the effects.\n\nYou have to understand that, in our solar system, planetary orbits are elliptical, but only just barely. They're very close to circles. Another star, even if small, might pull a similar system's planets into highly elliptical orbits, making life unlikely to thrive because of the vast differences in temperature and tidal forces at different parts of the orbit. \n\nAnother potential consequence is that the planet's orbital speed is affected. A slow planet may spiral inward, potentially close enough that the original star's gravity tears it apart. A faster planet might be thrown from the solar system entirely.\n\nThese sorts of systems are just too chaotic to be good candidates for life, much less permanent civilizations. Given that Firefly also includes organisms adapted to life on earth, with our relatively-circular, stable orbit, it's unlikely that man would ever settle in such a system, except in the very short term.\n\nEDIT: spelling",
"I think /u/kouhoutek has it right. \nOur own solar system has planets, which have moons that are not generally ripped off by other planets. Jupiter is nearly but not quite large enough to do fusion in its core. Meanwhile, the whole Galaxy basically works like a much much larger version of the Verse illustration. The sun is slowly orbiting the core of the milky way, and here we sit on a planet that is very stable, not perturbed by the nearest star because it is too far away. These observations suggest that it is possible to set up a system of interlocking circles or ellipses that is at least stable on the scale of a human civilization -- ten thousand years is not very long when we are talking about stars. \nThere's not a reason I am aware of that would absolutely prevent a massive, sufficiently spread out binary or trinary system from having planets that orbit stars the way moons orbit planets in our system. There are a lot of reasons for it to be unlikely, though. One difficulty would be that you would need a LOT of material to make that much stuff, all close together, and you would need it to be initially distributed in clumps at the exact right intervals (or capture a passing star later). \nThe central star would have to be really massive, and distances would have to be just right. Stars other than the handful orbiting each other in \"The Verse\" would have to be hugely more distant from the Verse than the Verse is from itself. The odds of finding a patch of the universe that is both dense enough to form so many stars together and diffuse enough to orbit only each other... start to stretch credulity. \nI would put this in the category of possible but extremely unlikely. \nRecommend OP popping over to /r/askscience/ for a more rigorous answer. And keep asking folks there if they can distinguish their argument about why it would not work from an argument about why Mars can't have multiple moons (which it does).",
"It's fairly rare and uncommon, but it is indeed possible. The key factor here is the distance and mass (and therefore gravity) of the two stars. \n\nAn example system would be the Alpha Centauri System with it's 2 (3) stars. Although no planets have been confirmed yet, the distance between the two main stars would make it absolutely possible for planets to orbit around one star.\n\nThis doesn't only count for binary systems like Alpha Centauri. In binary systems, 2 stars are orbiting a common barycentre. Planets would also be possible in a system where a huge star is the main mass and a much smaller star is orbiting that star at a great distance with planets orbiting the smaller star."
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a2k7gp | how are sine, triangle, square, and saw waves used to produce sound? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a2k7gp/eli5_how_are_sine_triangle_square_and_saw_waves/ | {
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"Those waves are a representation of the sound. Let's take a square wave because that'll be a simple example, at 1000hz. So 1000 times a second there will be a high and a low on the wave. So 1000 times in one second, the speaker playing the sound will move to where however much the high side gives in terms of voltage through the amp, and the low side will go to it's spot.\n\nIf you had a scope that shows the sound waves, the noise coming out of the speaker (assuming a 100% correct playing of the sound) would show up as a square wave.\n\nSo pretty much the wave just shows how the speaker is going to move and by how much. And if you had something like a lie detector where it has those needles scribbling lines on paper, and the other end of the needle was connected to the speaker, it would draw that wave that you put into it."
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3t9wp5 | how are fetishes learned but sexual orientation is inborn? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3t9wp5/eli5_how_are_fetishes_learned_but_sexual/ | {
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"Your question suggests that we already know this is the case, but that's not really the truth. Depending on who you ask in psychology. You'll get different answers. A radical behaviourist might (but most won't) argue that all behaviour is learned, including sexual behaviour. A psychologist focuses on biological psychology might (but again, most won't) argue that all behaviour stems from genetics. \n\nMy personal opinion (and the generally accepted consensus in academic psychology), is that it's a bit if both. Some behaviour is inherited, some is acquired. It's not always easy to tell them apart, and I think this is such a case. You could argue that hormone levels and such would influence your sexual attraction and behaviour, and you could argue that you learn it from societal norms and exposure to various situations. \n\nWhat I'm trying to say is that there isn't really a definite answer right now. ",
"I think you ought to take this question to r/askscience . Most of these answers amount to mumbo-jumbo.",
"I think that despite what TV and movies may have us believe, fetishes often are inborn.\n\nMaxxters made a great [comment](_URL_0_) on this a few years ago:\n > Most true fetishes that men have actually are crystallized with them by the time they hit puberty. Much of the research points to it actually being something they're born with... that most men do not have fetishes due to events that occurred in their lives, although some do. Women, on the other hand, are much less likely to have true fetishes, but for those who do, it may not be with them for life, as it tends to be for men. There's a lot of evidence that women's sexuality is significantly more fluid than men's and they're much more likely to be affected by events in their lives that would cause them to have a fetish (but again, some may be born with it). You might be interested in reading my article on erotic plasticity.\n > \n > Edit: I just want to add that the article might be a bit infuriating for some people (that was my reaction to the research article I was summarizing when I first read it). But you simply can't ignore such a huge amount of research that is all showing the same conclusion. I believe Baumeister examined 108 studies for the article. Yes, there are holes in his theory, but there's a huge amount of evidence supporting it as well.",
"I am no psychologist, biologist, or scientist. But from personal observation of all other aspects of life. Neither sexual orientation nor fetiches stem purely from genetic or acquired sources. I think the answer (like most things) is that sexual orientation is determined by genetic variances that make you only prone to the phenomenon, which must be encouraged by a set of social and environmental factors that contribute to the end result. \nLike success, talent, and wealth it is not always about being born this way, but it also has a lot to do with being in the right place, at the right time. ",
"I have a fetish for late 80s- early 90s sitcom actresses. Elaine, aunt Becky, topanga, Fran Fine, you name it. I honestly think Fran Fine is the reason I like Jewish girls because I watched that show everyday at 3am. This has to be learned ",
"If you find the answer to either part of your question (fetish or orientation), please let the entire scientific and philosophical community know. They have been working on nature vs. nurture for centuries.",
"It's a combination.\n\nSexual orientation is influenced by environment. Some societies have cultures more accepting of a wide variety of sexual orientations, or different baselines, and so act differently. For example: the Romans had an active-passive society, and so penetration (getting a bj or buttfucking a dude) wasn't considered their equivalent of \"gay\" largely because they didn't recognize homosexuality as a thing. They recognized that you were a cock-sucking bottom.\n\nSome people were strongly pre-disposed to women, some to men, and some right in the middle or just indifferent. It's the same here in America, except that most men who aren't particularly attracted to men adopt a cultural behavior of social rejection of homosexuality, while most women who aren't particularly attracted to women are under the cultural behavior of encouragement of homosexuality and will experiment in moderately facilitating situations. Being attracted to the same sex or specifically repulsed by the idea of homosexual activity produces other results, but of course that's covered up if you're male and find gay sex disturbing--that's the same position you take if you simply don't find it particularly *interesting*.\n\nFor the most part, people seek social intimacy and sexual outlet. Strip away the cultural influence and you find a large number of men who just want to get one off, and will get some head easy enough, if you don't particularly disturb them--perhaps a nice, skinny, androgynous boy, not an old, fat, bearded man; or perhaps they don't care, and it's all the same if you lean back and shut your eyes while they suck. Not the favored fare, but it'll drain your balls.\n\nOf course, that whole social intimacy thing means you have to internalize the norms: if gays are the enemy of society and you're not particularly interested in gay sex, then you find gay sex gross and your friends aren't afraid to sling an arm around you and clink beer bottles.\n\nPeople want simple explanations. They want skin color to be a protein sequence on a gene somewhere, and if you swap out the negro for the mongoloid you get a Japanese girl. They don't like hundreds of combinations of genes, diet, exposure to sun, temperature, and the like causing the formation of thicker skin, longer legs, and denser muscles; but that's the size of it. They also want you to either be born gay or make a conscious choice, because then they can decide if it's social justice to back you or if they can hate you for being what you are."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[
"https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1blqou/redditors_who_are_into_sexual_fetishes_which_are/c97thqr"
],
[],
[],
[],
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] |
||
ae8kf0 | how can people with dark skin say they're, "half-white" and white people can say they're, "half-black"? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ae8kf0/eli5_how_can_people_with_dark_skin_say_theyre/ | {
"a_id": [
"edn74g9",
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"text": [
"No, race is a complicated and mostly made up categorization. It includes culture and characteristics beyond phenotypes including historical affiliation.\n\nIts not a good categorization, but its more complicated than just skin tone.",
"Differences are more noticeable than similarities within a group.\n\nWithin a population of white people, someone with mixed blood are not going to be called \"half-white.\" They are classified by how they are different: \"half-black,\" \"half-Asian,\" etc.\n\nThe same thing happens in fantasy worlds. We have mixed blood \"races\" described as half-elf and half-orc because the descriptions are human-centric. But for a bunch of elves, a half-elf would be considered half-human.",
"If you take race to be ancestry then it’s really about who your parents are. For example, Nazi doctrine defined everyone with at least 1/4 Jewish ancestors as racially Jewish regardless of religion or characteristics.\n\nIf you think of race as a generic heritage, then this has to do with assuming a mix between parents even though each offspring inherits a different subset of genes from their parents so multiple siblings could have different skin tones"
]
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[],
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||
2d00xv | why are nike shoes $150 or more and how do they enhance performance in sports? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2d00xv/eli5_why_are_nike_shoes_150_or_more_and_how_do/ | {
"a_id": [
"cjkpvhw",
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"score": [
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"text": [
"It's a fashion statement mostly.\n\nDon't get me wrong - there's some technology and research there, but not nearly enough to really affect, well, anything that much. You may jump a few millimeters higher through some new bouncy sole and lighter material. And there is some stability enhancements that will slightly reduce the risk of a rolled ankle. And some fabric may allow the foot to \"breathe\" a hair better.\n\nBut in the end, it's clever marketing. \n",
"It's all just marketing. They can charge whatever the market will bear. As for performance; the best thing you can do is find pair of shoes that's comfortable at a price you can afford."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
||
3vdga6 | why did the us care so much about not letting cuba, parts of latin america, vietnam, and other parts of the world become communists? | Why were we so infatuated to the point that American blood would spill all so these countries didn't become communist nations. But let's say we left them all to their own devices and they became communist, couldn't we still have had diplomatic relations with them, trade with them, etc? Or is the conspiracy theory answer of "Well it's not that we didn't want them to be communists, we used our influence to prevent that so we could make them our puppet nations and thus rape them of their resources" yada yada. Was it all because of the cold war and that we didn't want to lose these territories to the influence of the Russians? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3vdga6/eli5_why_did_the_us_care_so_much_about_not/ | {
"a_id": [
"cxmjx81",
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"score": [
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"text": [
"We were (and some argue still are) at war with Russia. Allowing a communist nation in our region of influence would give Russia a point that they could use to attack up directly faster than we could react, and it would siphon money and political influence away from us. ",
"Im actually taking US history and we're going over the cold war right now. The main political idea behind the Vietnam war and the other attempts to stop the spread of communism was called the \"Containment doctrine\". You see, the leaders of the US viewed Communism as an ideal that was bent on world domination. They viewed communists as fanatics that would stop at nothing short of conquering the world. Every country that turned communist was, in their eyes, another step towards communists ruling the world. In an attempt to stop that, the leaders of the US decided that anywhere communism tried to take hold, the US would go and fight it. The problem with this mindset was that it allowed the communists to choose the time and place of any conflict with the US, a fact they exploited many times, most notably in Vietnam.",
"Basically, the view was that the Soviet Union was trying to take over the world and that it had to be contained. The communist world was seen as a monolithic bloc. If a country became communist, it was considered to be merely part of a vast Soviet empire spreading out across the globe. Communists in Latin America and Southeast Asia were not seen by the U.S. as legitimate, but as puppets of Moscow.\n\nAt the time, World War II was still recentish. Everyone remembered the Munich Pact, when Neville Chamberlain gave away part of Czechoslovakia to satisfy Hitler's expansionist appetite, only for Hitler to turn around and demand more. People were determined to avoid that mistake with an expansionist Soviet Union."
]
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[],
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|
51x7bt | why is footage from camera that was attached to you always shaky while you don't see same shaky effect through eyes? | Hey, why is it that when we use camera without OIS attached solidly to our body - we get shaky footage even though it was moving at same speed/distance/direction/force as our head.
While through eyes everything looked smooth and seamless? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/51x7bt/eli5_why_is_footage_from_camera_that_was_attached/ | {
"a_id": [
"d7fk4j0"
],
"score": [
32
],
"text": [
"There's three things going on:\n\n1) Our eyes automatically counterbalance the effects of walking; as we step up slightly during our gait, our eyes look slightly down (pretty much automatically) to keep our field of vision somewhat stable. Most cameras don't do this, so it's shakier than an actual person's vision.\n\n2) Your brain screens out a ton of unnecessary or useless input. Remember, our retinas actually see a ton of blood vessels as well as a blind spot (and everything's upside-down), but our brain just removes all the unnecessary junk without us realizing it. Similarly, our skin is constantly sending all kinds of little signals to our brains as our clothes rub against it, the breeze blows, etc, but again our brain just filters it out. It's the same way with a decent amount of shakiness; our brain automatically stabilizes our view somewhat\n\n3) We *do* see some shakiness, more than you probably realize. First-person videogame movement started to feel a lot more realistic when they added \"head bob\", where the camera moves a little as your character walks. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
2yto4u | if diamonds are just compressed carbon, why cant we make a machine that just compresses carbon into diamonds | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2yto4u/eli5_if_diamonds_are_just_compressed_carbon_why/ | {
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"text": [
"We have them. They make industrial diamonds for saw blades and the like quite frequently. We produce diamonds all the time through a variety of processes, though it only recently we have been able to make gem quality diamonds of size in the laboratory. ",
"There's a pretty good overview of man-made diamonds at this Wikipedia link: \n\n_URL_0_\n\nBasically, we can and do make diamonds.",
"We can and we do.\n\nIt has only been very recently that jewelry quality diamonds have been possible to produce economically. The diamond mining cartels are doing everything they can to block their distribution.",
"We do and the diamond industry (i.e. DeBeers - evil fucks) went nuts because you can't tell the difference. Even an experienced jeweler with one of those monocle things can't tell the difference. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_diamond"
],
[],
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||
2zkl14 | why do three-pin sockets block two-pin plugs when this security measure can easily be bypassed by a three-pin plug key or using a stick to push the relevant lever? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2zkl14/eli5_why_do_threepin_sockets_block_twopin_plugs/ | {
"a_id": [
"cpjqzyw"
],
"score": [
7
],
"text": [
"Because you're supposed to be more afraid of the fire you're likely to start by doing that than proud of how clever you are for using the stick. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
4k2l4a | what are the main doctrines of christianity? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4k2l4a/eli5_what_are_the_main_doctrines_of_christianity/ | {
"a_id": [
"d3blac8"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"- Believe God exists and created everything\n- Believe John 3:16\n- Love God\n- Love people\n- Pray faithfully\n- Acknowledge the existence and reality of heaven, hell, and eternity\n- Don't be stupid"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
6aiaj3 | what keeps your skin cells in a human shape instead of them reproducing outwards indefinitely? | I remember in high school biology we were shown diagrams of what it looks like when someone gets a cut and the cells reproduce to fill the gap as it heals, but I'm having trouble understanding what makes them know they're done. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6aiaj3/eli5_what_keeps_your_skin_cells_in_a_human_shape/ | {
"a_id": [
"dhes9td"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"Oversimplified: Skin grows upward from a base layer - as you go further there's less and less blood supply, and cells aren't supported. The outer surface of your skin is substantially dead cells that form a protective layer.\n\nIn the case of injury, other tissues are involved, and chemicals help signal where repair needs to happen. An abscence of those chemicals means repair can stop."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
1tqn9d | why did humans lose fur? | Why did we lose the need for fur? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1tqn9d/eli5_why_did_humans_lose_fur/ | {
"a_id": [
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"_URL_0_ \n \nThis article brings up an interesting fact about humans and their long-distance running abilities. \n > “Ancient humans exploited the fact that humans are good runners in the heat,” Dr. Bramble said. “We have such a great cooling system” — many sweat glands, little body hair. \n \nHumans are outstanding long distance runners, and are (were) able to run down almost any animal. Part of that is our ability to not overheat during the run. Which is helped by not having fur.",
"There are a lot of ideas on this one, but two not very well known and in my eyes good ideas are:\n\n1. A combination of hair 'loss' (or reducing the thickness of the fur) to reduce the amount of parasites on the body and (later-on) sexual selection on hairless bodies. [nytimes,with even more theories](_URL_1_) \n\n2. This concerns the whole evolution of mankind and proposes we have an (semi-) aquatic ancestor. Almost all 'naked' animals have had (semi-) aquatic ancestors. (for example the elephant) [TEDtalk about this hypothesis](_URL_0_)\n\n\n**1. To prevent parasites from nesting and sexual selection 2. We evolved from 'aquatic apes' who lost their fur because they lived in water** ",
"Plot twist: We never had fur."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/health/27well.html"
],
[
"http://www.ted.com/talks/elaine_morgan_says_we_evolved_from_aquatic_apes.html",
"http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/19/science/why-humans-and-their-fur-parted-ways.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm"
],
[]
] |
|
6qmliu | what's the difference between a strategist and a tactician? | In an article I read today, putin was referred to as a good tactician, but not a good strategist. I thought the we're synonyms. To be honest.
| explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6qmliu/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_a_strategist/ | {
"a_id": [
"dkyev5o"
],
"score": [
15
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"text": [
"Strategy is big picture, tactics is more technical. A military example would be: \n\n\"let's move our armies to X area to damage the enemy's food supplies\" - strategy\n\n\"let's go this way and flank the enemy with our soldiers\" - tactics"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
3kpk1d | why do children so often cry on public transport whilst a private car sends them to sleep? | Children five and below whether in a buggy on a busy or quiet bus/tram/train in a parents arms or buggy, always seem to get agitated whilst in a car very young children tend to sleep, why? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3kpk1d/eli5_why_do_children_so_often_cry_on_public/ | {
"a_id": [
"cuzdkuw"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"Maybe its all the strangers comming off and on the bus. \nWhen its a car its just your family and you all the while. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
4rq6cc | the difference between curd and yogurt. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4rq6cc/eli5_the_difference_between_curd_and_yogurt/ | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"I like both cheese (curds) and yogurt and no one has answered, so I'll have a go at this. \n\nMilk is made of water, sugars, fat and proteins. When they're all flowing together as a liquid, that's milk or cream.\n\nCurds are formed when the proteins in milk get bunched together and tangled up so that part of the milk turns solid, and part turns extra watery. The solid part is the curds. The liquid part is called whey. If we press the curds together, they become various kinds of cheese. \n\nYogurt is formed when tiny, tiny microbes decide they want to live in the milk. The microbes are called lactobacilli. When there's such a crowd of them living in the milk that the milk gets thick, that's yogurt.\n\nMaybe for your sixth birthday we can make some cheese! Or yogurt! Go ask mom. ",
"Curd is made by coagulating milk through adding an acidic substance which causes the milk proteins (casein) to tangle up and form solid masses.\n\nYogurt is formed by bacterial fermentation of milk. Living creatures, tiny bacteria, eat the lactose in milk and excrete lactic acid as waste. This acid then causes the same sort of curdling process which makes the milk proteins clump together to a certain extent.\n\nCottage cheese is curdled milk which is drained but not pressed, leaving some whey and individual loose curds. Usually it is washed to remove the acidity."
]
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[],
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||
97cz7c | why is it bad for our body to shower daily, but it's okay to wash our hands many times a day? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/97cz7c/eli5_why_is_it_bad_for_our_body_to_shower_daily/ | {
"a_id": [
"e4797af"
],
"score": [
5
],
"text": [
"I think I'll have to disagree with your premise. Can you show evidence that your claim of daily showers being bad?\n\n"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
21i6vz | the difference between countries ruled by england (eg scotland/wales) and colonies of england (eg canada/australia) | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/21i6vz/eli5_the_difference_between_countries_ruled_by/ | {
"a_id": [
"cgd8qzo"
],
"score": [
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"text": [
"Scotland, Wales, England and Northern Ireland are all constituent countries of the United Kingdom. Although England is the largest country and home to the capital, England does not rule the other countries. in fact its the other way around as the other countries each have thier own governments while England does not.\n\nCanada and Australia are Commonwealth realms, in that they are both in personal union (the Queen of Canada, Australia and Great Britain & Northern Ireland are all the same person) and both members of the Commonwealth of Nations - the club founded for ex-members of the British Empire. They have no formal constitutional links to the United Kingdom and are not colonies\n\n\n"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
j3jz4 | can somebody please explain how the person betting $1billion that the united states will lose it's aaa rating will make money if that happens. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j3jz4/eli5_can_somebody_please_explain_how_the_person/ | {
"a_id": [
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"score": [
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"text": [
"You can [short sell](_URL_0_) anything. In this case, he shorted US government bonds.\n\nShort selling is the practice of borrowing a stock or bond (or anything) from person A and selling it to person B. Then after the price goes down (hopefully), you buy it from person C and sell it back to person A. Boom - you pocket the difference. \n\nExample: You borrow Microsoft stock from Person A and sell it on the market for $50, then when the price goes down to $40, you buy it back and give it back to Person A: pocketing an easy $10 minus the small interest you had to pay to Person A. The risk is that if the price goes to $90, person A (or more likely the broker you use) will demand you give the stock back (margin call), thereby forcing you to repurchase it at $90: losing you $40. \n\nIf you borrow money to make that first purchase (leverage), you can make more than you originally had - or go totally bankrupt if the price goes up."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_%28finance%29"
]
] |
||
3qm851 | why do some pencil sharpeners work perfectly and others simply mutilate my pencil slowly without sharpening the lead? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3qm851/eli5_why_do_some_pencil_sharpeners_work_perfectly/ | {
"a_id": [
"cwge5zo"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text": [
"There is 2 main factors to a good pencil sharpener. 1 - Blade sharpness, the sharper the blade the more smoothly you can sharpen your pen without the tip \"cracking\" and the sharper it is the sharper the maximum sharpness the tip can be. 2 - The plastic guider that guides the pencil into the blade, if the guider is of bad quality it may guide the pencil such that when you sharpen it the tip of the pencil does not touch the blade at all thus making the pencil dull."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
5gcajg | what happens if a wedding guest "speaks now" instead of "forever holding their peace"? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5gcajg/eli5_what_happens_if_a_wedding_guest_speaks_now/ | {
"a_id": [
"dar3jb1"
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"score": [
4
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"text": [
"Usually nothing. By that time if someone speaks up at that moment, they're drunk or delusional. \n\nBut, there is a good reason to do this. Marriage is a funny institution, so one cannot legally be married to two people at a time. I remember reading a case where a women had been trying to get her husband to sign divorce papers. He wouldn't and was ducking her for years.\n\nSo she showed up to the wedding and objected, on the basis that he was still legally married. The official couldn't go on with the ceremony, so he was forced to sign. It was a mess, but I've heard of it happening before (and it'll surely happen again)."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
fgknil | what happens to my feces when it’s at the gates but i’m driving and can’t stop to defecate? it feels as though it simply goes away and i get a bit of stomach rumbles | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fgknil/eli5_what_happens_to_my_feces_when_its_at_the/ | {
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"text": [
"What makes you feel like you have to poop (or pee for that matter) is that there are muscles in your stomach which you don't have any control over. Those muscles try to push the poop/pee against muscles that you do have control over, so you have to push back to keep the poop/pee in.\n\nEven though you don't have conscious control over those push out muscles, you do still have some unconscious control over them. When you're in a situation where you know you can't poop/pee right now, those muscles relax and stop pushing. This means that you don't need to push back to hold the poop/pee in anymore, and the feeling of having to go to the bathroom goes away. But the poop/pee doesn't go anywhere - its right where it was back when you felt like you had to go to the bathroom, its just you can't feel the poop/pee unless its being shoved forward against the muscles that you control.",
"So the muscular contractions called *peristalsis* moves the stuff down the pipe, including into the 'ready for pooping' area, which stretches as it fills up. The stretching sends signals to your brain that say \"man, you gotta get rid of this.\" If you resist the urge for a while, then it can get pulled back up into your colon tract by a reversal of those contractions.\n\nThis reduces the stretching on your backbasket which in turn reduces the signal, and allows the body to possibly get some more water/nutrition out of the stuff until the next wave of contractions pushes it back into position.\n\nYou don't want to do this too much, since it can contribute to making the mass hard and lead to constipation.",
"The peristaltic is called the muscle movements in your bowels that you're not in control over.\n\n\nThe peristaltic moves the stool through to the rectum, the part of the bowel that connects to the anus.\n\n\nWhen it is due - lol 🤭 - the inner sphincter relaxes and the peristaltic tries to push it out.\nLucky you have full control over the outer sphincter to prevent this.\n\n\nNow the peristaltic just doesn't keep pushing like in a tug of war - instead the brown rope gets pushed - it gets tired after a while and stops. It will restart after a while.\n\n\nYou could keep this tug of war going which is a really bad idea.\n\n\nSince absorbtion through the bowels is involuntarily, toxins and water from the stool gets absorbed.\n\n\nBoth are bad and the latter will leave you with a brick hard, not so smooth, bad for excreting shaped plug made of stool.\n\n\nGood luck getting that out without serious labour pain and a loose rectum."
]
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[],
[],
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7ii4rn | beyond the protection of fame and money, how do serial sexual predators like cosby, weinstein, or spacey get away without serving any jail time? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7ii4rn/eli5_beyond_the_protection_of_fame_and_money_how/ | {
"a_id": [
"dqyxd7t"
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"score": [
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"text": [
"You can only get jail time of you're convicted of a crime. A lot of the people accused of sexual misconduct are accused of behaviors which aren't actually criminal. They might be unlawful civilly, where they could be sued over it, or they might just be severely frowned upon, but you only get jail if you're convicted of a crime. What is and is not a crime is not open to interpretation - there has to be a pre-existing statute on the books, in effect, that spells out exactly what counts as that crime. \n\nEven when they are accused of a crime, sometimes they aren't charged with a crime because the statute of limitations has elapsed, which means they can no longer be charged for that, or the prosecutor lacks a good-fairh belief that the charge could be proven beyond a reasonable doubt - at which point the ethical rules forbid bringing the charge. \n\nCosby was tried for a criminal offense. He was acquitted: the jury did not believe the evidence proved him guilty *beyond any reasonable doubt.* Whether the jury felt that someone's testimony alone wasn't enough, or whether the long delay before reporting it made the jury question the accuracy or authenticity of the testimony, we'll never know, but the criminal court is not designed to convict everyone who's guilty - it's designed to convict the fewest number of innocent people possible. \n"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
yt865 | why can't they make space elevators with propellers on them to reduce tension forces? | The big problem with the space elevator idea is the huge forces pulling the cable upwards. Very hard to makes something that can withstand those forces.
Why can't they build into the cable some stations that have propellers thrusting the cable toward the earth to reduce this tension?
The propellers could be powered in the short term by a ground-based plant, but maybe in the long run by wind turbines also built along the cable. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/yt865/why_cant_they_make_space_elevators_with/ | {
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],
"text": [
"That would only work in the atmosphere, where the propellers have something to push: air. But the cable will experience the same amount of tension above the atmosphere, where there is no air for the propellers to push. The only real solution is to find a way to manufacture, in large quantity at reasonable cost, a material with the necessary tensile strength."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
bzere2 | what makes some color combinations more aisthetically pleasing than others? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bzere2/eli5_what_makes_some_color_combinations_more/ | {
"a_id": [
"eqrwopt"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"Mostly it comes to personal preference. I would recommend watching this video by Kurzgesagt about what makes humans 'like pretty things.'"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
2say64 | how do chinese speakers imply sarcasm? | In my very limited knowledge of the Chinese language I know that the inflection of a syllable changes its meaning, so how does one say something sarcastically? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2say64/eli5_how_do_chinese_speakers_imply_sarcasm/ | {
"a_id": [
"cnns33f",
"cnnuib8"
],
"score": [
21,
5
],
"text": [
"You can still stress syllables in Chinese without changing the tone. In addition in China people tend to be very creative with word choices and puns to imply sarcasm or even insults. \n\nSource: Native speaker. ",
"Chinese speaker here, though not extremely well-versed.\n \nMainly, one would imply sarcasm in exactly the same way as English. Just like how you would roll your eyes and go \"Riiighhhtt....\" There are only four inflections in Chinese - high, rising, low and \"severe\" are how I'd describe them. So that leaves lots of room for stress and tonal shifts - otherwise Chinese songs couldn't exist, or at least be far harder to write!\n\nDepending on where you come from, there may be colloquialisms which are used to ridicule people. There are lots of \"four-letter proverbs\" or chengyu, which are either very cliched or somewhat sophisticated in usage - when you hear these directed at you it's a safe bet it's in sarcasm. Chinese also has a ton of homophones, so in the pleasant event that you can imply something different with a same-sounding word, you get a lot of good puns and jokes out of that."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
|
3q80e2 | why do people that play hockey or other sports left handed prefer to golf right handed? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3q80e2/eli5_why_do_people_that_play_hockey_or_other/ | {
"a_id": [
"cwcynjb"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"Canadian kids starting to learn hockey are taught to place their dominant hand on the end of the stick. This translates to playing golf \"left-handed\""
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
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