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1vkq8q | why ice molecules are closer together than water molecules, yet ice of the same mass as water takes up more space. | I've been mind blown about this for quite a while. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1vkq8q/eli5why_ice_molecules_are_closer_together_than/ | {
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"They're not closer together, I forget what it's called and why they do it but at the very moment of freezing the particles basically jump away from each other. \n\nIt's because of this that ice evaporates faster than water, the molecules are already farther apart."
]
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|
ee8i0q | movie trailers show "festival award winner". how do movies win awards before they are released? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ee8i0q/eli5_movie_trailers_show_festival_award_winner/ | {
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"Most movies are finished long before they're released. They're shown at certain film festivals or given limited releases in a few major cities before they get into theatres everywhere."
]
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[]
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||
axuv3z | if you are alone with a tire in an empty space, if you spin the tire, will it go forever? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/axuv3z/eli5_if_you_are_alone_with_a_tire_in_an_empty/ | {
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"Is the tire on the ground or floating in a vacuum?",
"If you are in the vacuum of empty space, no air, no light, and no other objects, (no gravity) then yes it will spin forever, assuming there's no air in the tire.\n\nIf there's air in the tire, the air molecules inside the tire may move a bit and create some friction that would slow the tire down, bu that may take many years. \n\n\n"
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1xmpm1 | how did that consitition accommodate both federalist and anti-federalist viewpoints | thanks!
edit: its Constitution not consitition. TYPO | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1xmpm1/eli5_how_did_that_consitition_accommodate_both/ | {
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"United States 1.0, the Articles of Confederation, was a strongly federalist system. The central government in US1.0 could only act when the States were in consensus - which means each state had a veto on the actions of the whole country.\n\nUnited States 2.0, the Constitution, is a system that combines a strong central government that acts not by consensus but by majority, meaning that states don't have a veto over anything. However, it was designed with the core concept of \"any power not specifically enumerated and delegated to the central government remains with the States\". When adopted most people understood that to mean the central government was strong, but strictly limited. Outside those limits, it could not act or impose itself on the States, and the mechanism to expand the power of the central government was the Amendment process which was designed on purpose to require a very high degree of agreement (but still not consensus) between the States.\n\nThis was the compromise between people who wanted to retain the strong federalism of US1.0 with the anti-federalists who realized the government didn't work if it was tied to mandatory consensus. \n\nIn the 1930s facing the emergency of the Great Depression the central government broke free of these limitations. In a series of cases the Supreme Court reinterpreted the Commerce Clause of the Constitution to enable the Congress to legislate on any matter so long as the subject *might* cross state lines, or *might* impact interstate commerce. Since that definition is effectively unlimited, it meant the central government could make a law about anything, and it is no longer bound by the \"anything not delegated is restricted\" logic of the original compromise.",
"_URL_0_\n\nThe rest of your post history is trading pokemon, and then the same question posted to ask_politics and ELI5. This is blatantly you asking us to do your homework for you."
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3vl5hm | how did u.s. colleges not only get into football in the first place, but also become so extremely invested in their stadiums, teams etc. over time? | College football is really cool, but when it comes right down to it, football seemingly has nothing to do with education. How did they become so intertwined? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3vl5hm/eli5_how_did_us_colleges_not_only_get_into/ | {
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"Long story short sports are big money. Over the years they have gotten bigger and bigger by everyone wanting to one up everyone else. Football and emerged as the biggest sport over the years in America. Football being big money plus stuff like ESPN making a big deal over it has made people want to make it into the NFL at a young age. Schools aren't stupid so they have found a way to make money off of all of this. NFL has a deal basically with the American schools saying to be eligible to play in the NFL you have to have at least two years of college education. Long story short: Sports are big money, schools have found a way to make money off of it.",
"It all began back just after the Civil War, Rugby had just come over to the states, and sort of caught on at the elite Easter schools (most of which would form the Ivy League).\n\nHowever nobody could really agree on the rules, so interschool play wasnt really a thing. But in 1869 Princeton and Rutgers's clubs agreed to play each other on a mutually agreed set of rules and they had a blast so they decided to do so again a few weeks later. \n\nNow travel costs money, and the clubs realized people liked watching the games so they started having stands set up and admission charged. Then the schools saw that promoting it was a great way to get alumni energized and excited about their schools and willing to donate. Then the media saw that covering all this was a great way to sell more ads and to more people. \n\nThen schools all over the country read about and saw what the teams were doing for their schools out east and wanted in the game, so the midwest schools started playing each other (formed the Big 10), the south started playing each other, Texas all played each other, and the West coast schools got in too. \n\nAnd all of this before 1905 and the formation of the NCAA and legalization of the forward pass! So in a large sense college football in all its meaningful forms was in place even before 1900. \n\nGREAT book on it is The Opening Kickoff by Dave Resvine who works for the Big 10 Network."
]
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25sxlm | what are the results of the indian elections, and what does it mean? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/25sxlm/eli5_what_are_the_results_of_the_indian_elections/ | {
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"People are giving out pros and cons, but this means there is a bias.\n\nWithout bias, the elections have no meaning. A party has been elected democratically in India, and it is just like any other election.\n\nPros and cons, and \"what does the election mean\" come with perspective.\n\nIf you are not an Indian citizen you will have a very difficult time understanding the political aspects, unless you collect a large unbiased investigation on the history of politics in India.\n\nTL:DR This is not a ELI5 question.",
"The Bharitya Janta Party (BJP; rough meaning Indian People's Party) recorded a solid landslide, gaining a clear majority in their own right in the Lok Sabha (People's house, analogous to the House of Reps), and with their coalition partners control a solid majority of the 543 member lower house. The Congress party that previously held government has been reduced to a fairly tiny 50 or so seats, and their leadership is in somewhat disarray. Most of the remaining seats are taken up by minor regional and small issue parties.\n\nThe BJP is the conservative party, right of Congress. In American terms, it is a thumping win for Republicans. Note however the Indian political realities puts the BJP somewhere around the Democrats, while the previous government could have been described as borderline socialist.\n\nIndia hasn't seen a party with a clear majority for 30 years, so while the BJP are so far indicating they'll retain their coalition partners (mainly because they'll need them in the upper house, which isn't yet clear), they could push through their agenda without the compromises and delays that have dragged down politics in recent history.\n\nPM designate Modi specifically: as a former chief minister (governor) for Gujarat state, Modi achieved significant economic growth, attracting business from overseas and other parts of the country to an area that hadn't had such development for years. As a result, he has been seen to bring a pragmatic and business focused reform agenda. India's middle class has been complaining of rising inflation with (relatively) low growth, so the hope is that he'll control the former while encouraging the latter. Modi is the _first_ prime minister of India born after Independence, though at 63 he is no spring chicken.\n\nModi has his critics. He is seen as being passive in the face of sectarian violence against Muslims in his state 12 years ago, and he hasn't quite shaken it. The BJP's association with the religious movements (like any Conservative party) is troubling to minorities, particularly Muslims, but with 150 million Muslims in India and two neighbouring Muslim countries in Pakistan and Bangladesh, the BJP would be suicidal to actually do anything that would be anti-Muslim. Other minorities are considered small enough or inconsequential enough as to not be worth ruffling (no perceived threat from Sikhs, Jains or Buddhists.)\n\nAny more and you really start delving into history.",
"Holy. Fuck.\n\nIndian politics sounds a lot more complicated than American. ",
"\"Modi\" was elected prime minister (President).\n\nHe is pro-business, anti-corruption, and some people are mad because they say that he was slow to respond to a crowd attacking Muslims after Muslims launched an attack of their own."
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1lopv4 | why do whiskey/bourbon have more carbs than vodka? | I keep hearing that Whiskey and Bourbon have more carbs than Vodka but this doesn't make sense to me. All are distilled spirits and from what I understand Whiskey and Bourbon don't take on that amber color until they sit in barrels for many, many months or years.
Is it a myth or fact and why? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1lopv4/eli5_why_do_whiskeybourbon_have_more_carbs_than/ | {
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"_URL_0_\n\nThey don't have any carbs"
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|
fbgffu | what actually make the teeth grow and push through the gum? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fbgffu/eli5_what_actually_make_the_teeth_grow_and_push/ | {
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"Root resorption - simply put when the tooth is developed (which is an entire process) the adult teeth begin to push on the baby teeth which causes the roots of the baby teeth to shrink, become loose, and fall out."
]
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||
65hkvo | if vaping is just inhaling water vapor and some ingredients, why does the room get foggy with still smoke, instead of it just dissipating? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/65hkvo/eli5_if_vaping_is_just_inhaling_water_vapor_and/ | {
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"It's vapor of polyprolene glycol and glycerine. That stuff is a liquid at normal room temps. so when mechanically vaporized, it sticks around in vapor droplet form",
"It's not water vapour. The vaping fluid contains very little if any water, the main ingredients are glycerine and propylene glycol. That's what produces the clouds of tiny, tiny droplets that look like smoke. "
]
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2jbb2o | why is task manager more effective and faster rather than pressing the x or alt + f4 when something freezes? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2jbb2o/eli5why_is_task_manager_more_effective_and_faster/ | {
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"Because being able to end a program that won't exit by normal means is one of the features of the Task Manager. \n\nWhether you hit X on a program window or press alt+f4 you are essentially asking the program: \"will you please exit?\". Under normal circumstances the program will then go through whatever it needs to do before ending, like asking you to save unsaved changes for example. \n\nWhen you end a program through the Task Manager you're no longer asking nicely. Instead you're telling Windows that you'd like the program to exit and if it won't exit willingly Windows should force it to. The downside is that a program that is forced to exit might not be able to go through the steps it would normally do before ending. ",
"Imagine you are sitting in the library doing work and the librarian comes in and tells you that they are closing and that you need to leave. So you gather your things and leave. In this situation you are asked so you clean up the area you have affected. \n\nNow, instead imagine that the swat team comes up to you. Grabs you and throws you out of the library. You don't have your things and you never got a chance to clean up your things. \n\nThat is basically the difference. When you go through the task manager you are forcing that program to end so there is a risk albeit generally very small. "
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4aq1w5 | why do we have state troopers and municipal cops? | Why do we have state troopers and municipal cops? Can't we just have municipal cops patrol the the highways and allow them to chase criminals into other towns?
Or alternatively call them "highway patrolman" instead of state troopers... | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4aq1w5/eli5_why_do_we_have_state_troopers_and_municipal/ | {
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"They have different jurisdictions and enforce different laws. \n\nMuni cops are responsible for the city and enforcing city ordinances. They'll pull you over for speeding on a city street, for example.\n\nState cops enforce state laws on highways and unincorporated areas of the state. They'll pull you over for speeding on the freeway.\n\nThere are also county cops (sheriff) and federal cops (FBI), each with their own jurisdictions and sets of laws to enforce.",
"Policing for the most part, is controlled at the state level (in the US). As such, each state has different uses for its State Troopers/Highway Patrol/State Police. But for the most part, highway patrol/troopers specialize in policing major federal and state highways, controling motor vehicle laws, and protecting the State Capital. Doing this allows local police forces to focus more on community policing. \n\n > Can't we just have municipal cops patrol the the highways and allow them to chase criminals into other towns?\n\nWhat would be the point of that? Police aim to capture criminals, not dump them on the next town over. Also police departments are expensive, and often small towns can only afford a few officers, so they couldn't afford the equipment or manpower needed to patrol the roads many miles away from the town center. ",
"State troopers focus on enforcing laws at a state level and have no problem chasing people beyond municipal boundaries.",
"Municipal cops in the US *can* often chase someone into other towns. For felonies, they can generally chase into other states as well. But that means they end up far away from the place that they are actually paid to be protecting. An LAPD cop who ends up in San Francisco then has a long drive home, on the clock, during which he is not able to protect the city of Los Angeles. For routine patrol, having to stay basically within your city doesn't mesh well with how highways normally work -- it makes a lot more sense to have someone who can stay on a highway and not worry about remaining within city lines. ",
"While there are differences depending on where you live;\n\nA Police Officer works for a Police Chief which is an elected or conferred (by a mayor) position and is responsible for an incorporated city or township.\n\nA Deputy is appointed by a Sheriff which is elected to provide law enforcement to a County.\n\nA Constable serves a court jurisdiction and reports to the court.\n\nState Police work for the State and are responsible for state controlled areas like government buildings and highways.\n\nFederal law enforcement (FBI) is internal to the United States however they liaison with other countries (as do other branches of law enforcement) \n\nThere are probably a lot of other definitions and local differences.\n\nIMHO or K "
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7h2wy8 | can cycling in a well insulated room noticeably heat up the room? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7h2wy8/eli5_can_cycling_in_a_well_insulated_room/ | {
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"Yes. This is clearly evident when you get a large number of people exercising in an enclosed, insulated space.\n\nI remember Basic Training, ~40 people in a room doing Iron Mike's until the walls dripped with the excess moisture. Very clear increase of several degrees Fahrenheit.",
"People generate the equivalent heat of a 100 watt light bulb each hour. Exercising will increase this. And there is the heat from the laptop and any lights that are on. Add it all up for a couple of hours and it will get warmer."
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3z8woo | how propeller aircraft engines with different horsepowers but same rev speed make difference? | Let's say same aircraft is running with 200 hp engine at 3500 rpm. How would same aircraft affected if we run it with 400 hp engine at 3500 rpm? I am trying to understand how high power makes it faster while propeller speed is same. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3z8woo/eli5how_propeller_aircraft_engines_with_different/ | {
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"If you put the same propeller on two engines with different power, it will run at two different rpm's (speeds).\n\nTo run the weaker engine at the same rpm as the stronger engine, you must mount a less forceful propeller -- one that pushes less air per rotation.\n",
"Simply put, the more horsepower you have the heavier a propeller you can have. This can correlate to either the overall radius of the propeller or the amount of blades on the propeller. Both of which add weight and drag that the engine must overcome to spin it. Also adding more blades allows you to achieve the same thrust at lower rpm and a higher thrust at the same rpm as a propeller with less blades, as does making the blades themselves longer (though you can only make them so long before the blades striking the ground becomes an issue, see the [F4U-1](_URL_0_) Corsair for example)",
"Assuming both engines are running at full throttle, the only way the math checks out is for the 400hp engine to be moving more air at 3500rpm than the 200hp engine at the same speed. In order for this to be the case, the 400hp engine must be fitted with a bigger propeller, thus moving more air, and overcoming more resistance, at the same rpm. \n\nThis makes sense, since the propeller's ability to move air (a function of size and number of blades) is the limiting factor on the engine's speed. \n\nIf you were to take the big propeller from the 400hp engine and attach it to the 200hp engine, the 200hp engine could no longer reach 3500rpm at full throttle. Conversely (assuming the engine's tolerances were high enough) the 400hp engine, if fitted with the smaller prop, would reach much higher rpm at full throttle. \n\nEssentially, an engine's peak performance can be best thought of as the amount of air it can move at full throttle. Differences in propeller size allow an engine with more power to move more air at the same rpm as an engine with less power.",
"For a prop of given diameter and blade section (and tip profile and all the other stuff) you can change the amount of thrust it produces by changing the pitch of the blades.\n\nA shallow pitch will produce a lot of thrust at low air-speed, but will be incapable of pushing the air backward fast enough to cope with high-speed flight. A coarse pitch prop will impose much too much drag to be able to rev freely when the plane is taking off, making for very long take-off runs. The [Supermarine Spitfire S6B](_URL_0_) racer has, as you can see, a ridiculously coarse pitch prop, which meant it took ages to accelerate to take-off speed, but went like stink once up to speed.\n\nLater planes had variable pitch props. This allows the engine to rev freely (and produce plenty of power) for low-speed use, making for short take-offs and good acceleration. As the aircraft speeds up, the pitch can become steeper and steeper, to take bigger and bigger \"bites\" of air, allowing it to go fast. This is often automatic - the pilot selects and engine speed and the propeller adjusts the pitch and thereby the engine load, to maintain this speed.\n\nWhat's this got to do with engine power? Well, The engine doesn't always have to be at full throttle. You may need full power at fine-pitch to take off from a high-altitude field on a hot day, but throttle back once under way to lower power coarse-pitch.\n\nIt's like having a powerful engine in a car - you can use it to go faster, or accelerate faster, or pull heavier loads, but you don't *have to*."
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456iub | how does emptying the recycle bin on your computer work? | What happens to the files? Where do they go? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/456iub/eli5_how_does_emptying_the_recycle_bin_on_your/ | {
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"They stay right where they are! Sort of anyway. When you have a file on your computer, there is sort of a flag for the sector of memory containing that file saying \"do not write here. This bit contains a file\". When you empty your recycling bin, the flag just goes away, making it okay to write new files to that section of the hard drive.",
"Your hard drive is like a book with a table of contents in the front.\n\nWhen you write a file to the hard drive you've essentially written a page in the book, plus you've made an entry to the table of contents. Writing the page in the book takes some time, but there's no way around that.\n\nThen, when you delete it you go to the table of contents and you put an asterisk next to that entry that says \"Hey, this is in the recycle bin now.\"\n\nWhen you delete the file from the recycle bin you go to the table of contents and you erase the entry. Note that the page is still written with all the data, which is how un-deleting applications are able to restore files. At this point if you were to need to write another page you might select that page and write over it (our pencil in this case has the magical property of erasing whatever is already on the page as you write).\n\nThere's one more level of deleting, which is offered by some programs: you erase the entry in the table of contents, then you go to the page and you erase everything on the page. It has, in the past, been possible to still recover some data left on the page (hard drives are actually analog media, although they are used to store digital data). If you erase pencil from paper you're left with paper that is more blank than it is filled with writing, but under the right light you can see what was written before. Similarly, when you write all zeroes in a section of the hard drive you have a bunch of values that are closer to 0 than anything else, but a sensitive tool could tell the difference between a 0 that was overwritten with a 0 and a 1 that was overwritten by a 0. Modern hard drives tend to be too dense for this to work. To combat this some programs will write over the page with all zeroes, all ones, random combinations of zeroes and ones, and so on. This is obviously the slowest option, but for the very paranoid it offers peace of mind that the file has been completely deleted. "
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2bcuw1 | what kind of consequences will russia face if they are held legally responsible for the downing of mh17? | What sanctions will Putin have to face? And how could these consequences affect the ongoing battle with Ukraine? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2bcuw1/eli5_what_kind_of_consequences_will_russia_face/ | {
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"The sanctions will be decided by some kind of UN vote most likely, and then individual countries can pursue whatever sanctions they wish. There's talk in the US already of not even waiting, they're convinced Russia did it and they want to push unilateral sanctions on Russia, especially for the Russian financial sector.\n\nRussia's economy is hugely based off of oil and natural gas (which Europe is dependent on) so if the sanctions don't include oil and natural gas, Russia will probably be just fine and will continue doing whatever it likes. If the sanctions do involve oil and gas, and they last a long time, who knows, they might just pressure Russia to pull back and stop supporting the separatists. "
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4zeal7 | what are the specific ingredients in beer that make it high in calories and carbs? | I know beer contains basic ingredients like barley, water, yeast and sometimes hops but what makes some beer higher in calories than other beer? What gives them their high carb count? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4zeal7/eli5_what_are_the_specific_ingredients_in_beer/ | {
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"To make beer you let barley or other types of grain go through a process that extracts its starch and makes it into sugar. The wort you end up with have been sold as sweet energy drinks and is comparable to soda. The wort is then further put through a fermentation process where the sugar is being converted into CO2 and alcohol. Different factors determines how much sugar and alcohol you end up with. However even if you end up without sugar the alcohol is being broken down in your body producing energy."
]
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3ok7vn | why is the menstrual cycle the same as a calendar month? | Is it coincidence that a calendar month ended up being the same length of time as a menstrual cycle? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ok7vn/eli5_why_is_the_menstrual_cycle_the_same_as_a/ | {
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"It is not. It is much closer to a lunar month, with a twenty eight day cycle. Everybody is a little different of course, and birth control can be used to regulate a woman's cycle to some degree. ",
"It's coincidental. See this specific part of the Wikipedia article on menstruation:\n\n > Even though the average length of the human menstrual cycle is similar to that of the lunar cycle, in modern society there is no relation between the two. The relationship is believed to be a coincidence. Light exposure does not appear to affect the menstrual cycle in humans. A meta-analysis of studies from 1996 showed no correlation between the human menstrual cycle and the lunar cycle.\n\n_URL_0_",
"Periods don't run like clockwork sadly, some women may find them to be slightly irregular i.e. sometimes a week late, sometims a week early, 3 days long or even up to 7 days. "
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45jzvy | equinox isn't equal | The 2016 pring Equinox will occur on March 20, but where I live sunrise and sunset will be nearest the same times on March 16 (7:43AM - 7:44PM). Why isn't the most equal day on the Equinox but 5 days earlier? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/45jzvy/eli5_equinox_isnt_equal/ | {
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"The equinox isn't necessarily defined by when the days are most even where you live (rise vs set time) but rather when the sun crosses the celestial equator and appears in the north hemisphere in the sky. (For the north hemisphere) The autumnal equinox occurs when the sun crosses in the other direction. For the southern (ergh sorry, autocorrect nailed that word) hemisphere, the equinoxes are reversed"
]
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2l8nfb | why do softer tires have better grip than harder tires? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2l8nfb/eli5_why_do_softer_tires_have_better_grip_than/ | {
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"text": [
"Because softer things deform and grip the imperfections in a surface. This isn't just tires, you'll probably notice that a softer a surface is, the easier it grips other surfaces. "
]
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[]
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||
1rv910 | what is hdr, and why do "we" hate it? | Almost every other picture on Reddit has someone in the comment section hating on it for too much HDR, or a link to /r/shittyhdr. I have no idea what it is, but apparently camera phones have it. Can someone please explain to me what the fuck HDR is? And is it ever a good thing? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1rv910/eli5_what_is_hdr_and_why_do_we_hate_it/ | {
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"HDR is a technique that combines photos taken at different exposures to get the most detail out of each.\n\n\n\nThis used to be done I image editing tools like photo shop but many cameras and phones can do it on the fly now.\n\n\n\nSome people hate it because the result looks artificial to them or they view it as lazy compared to taking one ideal shot.",
"HDR is a technique that is used to produce a wider range of brightness in photographs, it does so by taking several pictures and changing how much light is taken in each time.\nThese pictures are then combined into one photograph.\n\nThe reason the shittyhdr subreddit exists is because sometimes this isn't done very well resulting in light levels that look quite... bad.\n\nThe shittyhdr subreddit gives example of both [good HDR](_URL_1_) and [bad HDR](_URL_0_)",
"To add to what others have said, it seems like some people think the point of HDR is to produce a \"cool\" effect. It's actually intended to be used to produce photos that are closer to what a person would actually see with their own eyes if they were standing where the photo was taken. Often, especially in landscape photos, no matter what exposure you use to take a normal photograph, it will end up with certain parts looking either too bright or too dim in comparison to what our eyes would see. HDR attempts to correct this."
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"http://i.imgur.com/C6frpWS.jpg",
"http://i.imgur.com/WjAzf5w.jpg"
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5oet4i | what has to happen to our recycled items before they actually get repurposed/what does the cleaning process of these items look like? | What actually happens after our recycling is collected and ~*magically*~ disappears into the abyss? Inevitably food residue makes it onto a lot of recyclables which then somehow have to be cleaned. How do recycling facilities sort through those incomprehensibly massive quantities of containers (of vastly differing shapes and sizes and textures, also waste items mistakenly recycled) at such high speeds before they're ready for repurposing?
| explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5oet4i/eli5_what_has_to_happen_to_our_recycled_items/ | {
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"Newspapers: de-inking facilities separate ink from the newspaper fibers through a chemical washing process.\n\nGlass: A mechanical processing system breaks the glass into small pieces called cullet. Magnets, screens and vacuum systems remove metals, labels, bits of plastic, and caps.\n\nAny water etc left inside the glass bottle is most likeley going to be filtered out after the crushing of the glass. \n\n"
]
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2hnwpk | why are led headlights so bright? | Is it because the light emanates from a smaller area? Isn't safety compromised by hindering the vision of incoming traffic? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2hnwpk/eli5_why_are_led_headlights_so_bright/ | {
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"LED lights are more efficient at turning electricity into light. Most other lights use a lot of the energy in creating heat. \n \nLights that are too bright can be dangerous, but there's not a lot of standardisation for them. Some lights can have something on the front to diffuse or spread out the beam. "
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8gwhwn | why do batteries in parallel have a stronger current than batteries in sequence? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8gwhwn/eli5_why_do_batteries_in_parallel_have_a_stronger/ | {
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"Let's say that I have an entrance to a building with two doors that guests have to pass through to get in. Each one can let 1 person through every 2 seconds. If I put them in series, each guest goes through one, and then the next. The total rate at which people get through is still the same as each individual door. If I put them side by side though, they can both have 1 person going through at the same time, for a total of 2 people every 2 seconds. Now replace the doors with batteries and the people with electrons. ",
"Let's say you have two squirt guns. If you squirt them at the same time and there is nothing blocking the way, they will put out twice as much water as if you squirted just one. It's important to note that there is nothing blocking the way, so you are getting the maximum water (or maximum current). However, if there is stuff blocking it (say they both get combined into a small pipe), you may not see an increase in water flow because the small pipe size controls how fast the water flows. \n \nSo while putting two batteries in parallel can increase the maximum amount of current you can draw, the actual current is dependent on the load resistance and the supply voltage (similar to water pressure) at the load.\n"
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j4ohk | explain the p=np problem li5. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j4ohk/explain_the_pnp_problem_li5/ | {
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"The P=NP problem is basically asking \"Is it just as fast to solve a math problem as it is to check the answer?\" P and NP are a couple ways mathematicians talk about how fast certain kinds of math can be done. Some think these might be just as fast as each other, but they haven't managed to prove it one way or the other yet.\n\nIf they could prove that they *are* the same speed, then they can look at all the NP-speed math for ways to make it faster. This would in turn make computers way faster.\n\nMost mathematicians think they're not the same because nobody's ever found a way to do NP math at P speed, and that's something they've been trying to do even before they were called P and NP.",
"We could call the P problems easy solvable, while the NP easy checkable. Solving a sudoku is a NP problem, but checking the correctness of the solution is not.\n\nA P problem is sorting a list, or **checking if a number is prime** (a number is prime if it has no divisors except one and himself, 3 is prime, 4 is not), whereas in NP there's the **factorization of numbers** (find the prime factors of a number, 21 = 7 x 3, both 7 and 3 are prime, 23=23 x 1, because 23 is prime).\n\nAs you can see if you have the solution of a NP problem it is easy to check if it is correct: it's enough to multiply the numbers. It's difficult find that numbers (you cannot easily find the prime factors of a number, 263=?). This is not bad: we use the difficulty of this problem to get a secret message that is difficult to decipher.\n\nMost computer scientist thinks that** P=NP is not true**. So, they think that nobody will ever be able to quickly solve a sudoku. However there is not a proof, so the Clay Mathematics Institute is offering a prize of one million dollars for the first proof that P = NP (or P not equal NP).",
"P and NP are ways of grouping math problems.\n\nIf a problem is in P, it means that the problem can be quickly solved, without having to check every possible solution until you find the right one.\n\nIf a problem is in NP, it means that if you're given an answer to the problem, you can quickly check if that answer is correct.\n\nThe group of problems in NP includes all the problems in P (so, everything that can be solved quickly can be checked quickly). However, there are some problems in NP that might not be in P. These are the NP-Complete problems.\n\nNP-Complete problems are problems which, if we could solve them easily, would make a lot of calculations (and therefore computers) faster. But since we're not sure if they're in P, we don't know if it's even possible to solve them easily.\n\nBut if we could prove that P=NP, then we'd know that every single problem in NP (including the NP-Complete ones) can be solved easily, like the problems in P can. So we'd know that those really difficult problems have a fast solution; we just need to find it.\n\nThat's the basic idea behind P=NP. And since the problem is so important, there's also a one million dollar prize to the person who proves that P=NP (or P =/= NP).\n\nOn a related note, a lot the NP-Complete problems are linked to each other (they \"reduce\" to each other, to use the proper term). This is because, in order to prove a problem is NP-Complete, you have to compare it to an already-known NP-Complete problem.\n\nSince they're all linked, if we manage to prove that one of the NP-Complete problems is in P, we'll also prove that all the problems it's linked to are in P as well. This is because we can use our quick solution to the first problem to solve the ones it's linked to, giving them quick solutions as well.",
"Do you have a bicycle? Does it have a lock? If not, nag your parents to get you one, those cheap bastards.\n\nIf I told you the combination, how hard would it be for you to check if I was right? It's quick. Use the numbers I gave you and see if the lock opens. Easy! People have found a whole bunch of jobs that are easy like checking lock combinations and grouped them together and called them \"P\". It's a terrible name, really. Let's call them \"Easy problems\".\n\nNow, what about the problem of finding out the combination? That's hard. Unless it's a bad lock, it's a HUGE job to try and figure it out. You're going to sit all day and fiddle with the lock and hopefully you'll figure it out in the end. If you're clever, you'll try every single combination one after the other. That's called \"brute force\". Maybe it'll take 1 day to open your little bicycle lock, but I've got a lock which has got *20* numbers on it. Trying every combination would take you far too long.\n\nPeople have taken all those types of problems and put THEM into a group too. They called that group \"NP\". Another dumb name. Let's call them \"NP hard problems\". I need to leave the \"NP\" in their name because NP hard problems are special. Not every hard problem is NP hard.\n\nSo here's the thing. We know that \"easy problems\" are easy, because we can solve them easily. But we don't actually KNOW that \"NP hard problems\" are hard. We strongly suspect it. We think that \"Easy Problems\" are different from \"NP hard problems\". Mathematicians write this like P != NP.\n\nSo, we've got this group of \"easy problems\", and this other group of \"NP hard problems\". What happens if someone comes up with a wild and brilliant way of solving the NP hard problems? If they did that, they would instantly all become easy problems. We could say that \"NP hard problems\" are the same as \"easy problems\". Mathematicians write it like P = NP.\n\nSo there's 2 different possibilities. We've never solved an NP problem, but nobody has been able to show exactly *why* NP problems can't be solved easily. So that's the big unsolved mystery. Are they really hard? And why.\n\nWhat does it matter? Well, it matters for 2 reasons. First of all, all NP problems are the same. And there's a LOT of them. What do I mean they're the same? It means that if you find a way to solve one, you can use that way to solve them all.\n\nThe second reason is because a lot of what makes humans different to computers is being able to look at an NP hard problem and make some progress even though it's \"unsolvable\" for a computer. Proving something is like an NP hard problem. Checking the proof is like a P easy problem. Often, only humans can write proofs, and then computers can check the proofs.\n\nIf we discover that P=NP, that all these hard problems are really easy, we will very very quickly be able to ask computers to do things that today seem totally impossible. We're not just talking about faster and better computers. Compared to what computers do today, they would be able to do stuff that would look like magic.\n\nBut don't get too excited just yet. 9 out of every 10 scientists think that P!=NP, which means that hard problems are really very hard, and there's no easy shortcut to solving them. And the other scientist is on LSD and basically has no clue what he's talking about.",
"Some problems are easy to solve and easy to check if a given solution is right.\n \nSome problems are hard to solve and hard to check if a given solution is right.\n \nSome problems _seem_ to be hard to solve _and_ easy to check if a given solution is right.\n \nThe p=np problem asks if the third case really is separate from both of the first two.",
"Well, there is something in computer science that we call complexity of a problem. You have time complexity and space complexity. \n\nTime complexity refers to how fast the number of steps required to solve a problem increases with respect to the size of a problem. For example, the number of steps required to add numbers from 1 to a number n increases depending on how big n is. If n is 3, there are 3 steps, for n=5, there are five steps. Now look at the number of ways you can arrange n things. You can arrange 3 things in 6 ways, 5 things in 120 ways etc(if you dont believe me, try to find the number of words(even the nonsensical words) you can create with the letters A to E using each letter only once). So now we have a problem, ie writing down all arrangements of n things, where the number of steps required increases way way more faster than our initial problem where we added numbers. So this problem had more time complexity that the first one. \n\nNow there are different classifications of maths problems based on their complexity. One of these classes is the class P. The exact definition of P is not important here, but lets just say that all problems in class P are similarly difficult(here difficult means that they have similar time complexity). Note: This applies only to the class P, this does not imply that all classes of problems have similar complexity.\n\nNow there is another class of problems(NP). Take this example.\n\nIf you remember our example with 5 letters, it is easy to figure out whether a given word of 5 letters was formed from the letters A to E using each letter only once. Now this problem of verifying the word has a similar time complexity as our problem of summing from 1 to n. So the problem of checking out if our word was correct is in the class P. This would mean that our problem of creating all words was in NP. So all problems where, \"verifying its solution\" is a problem in P, are problems that belong to the class NP.\n\nNow, the big question that perplexes folks everywhere is, whether NP is the same as P? One way of putting it is, if we can easily verify if an answer is correct, then does it imply that it is similarly easy to find that answer itself in the first place? \n\nI hope this made some sense. Oh and btw, you are too young to learn about space complexity.\n\nPS Is there anything I missed? Does anyone want clarification on any other point? And yeah, I know that summing 1 to n is O(1), but I am using a naive for loop here. I am gonna assume the 5 year old kid is not gonna use 0.5*n*(n+1)."
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2ago42 | eli: how can a country simply write off debt of another country? wouldn't it put the country itself in deeper debt? | I don't understand the idea of writing off debt. How exactly would this work in real life? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ago42/eli_how_can_a_country_simply_write_off_debt_of/ | {
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"Say I owe Bob $10. Say it's been years since I paid Bob and keep telling him I'll repay him later. Bob can write of my debt by telling me to forget about the $10 altogether, so that I no longer owe him the $10."
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3m0mrh | how is the ceo of turing pharmaceuticals able to raise the price of daraprim (the aids drug) and make people pay the increase, without it being considered a monopoly? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3m0mrh/eli5how_is_the_ceo_of_turing_pharmaceuticals_able/ | {
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"Monopolies are not per se illegal. There is arguably nothing wrong here because anyone who wants to spend the time and money to manufacture a generic can do so. This is also not the only drug that can treat toxoplasmosis. ",
"It's not a monopoly because other people *could* produce the drug, they just aren't. An illegal monopoly is when you keep others out of the market, not when you just happen to have no competition."
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9b1hw0 | why are some electrical plugs so huge that they cover the outlets next to them? what is taking up all that space? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9b1hw0/eli5_why_are_some_electrical_plugs_so_huge_that/ | {
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"Many devices integrate a converter from mains-voltage Alternating current to a much lower direct current voltage in the wall plug as opposed to a block in the middle of the cable or into the decice itself.",
"Circuitry and electrical components that turn the electricity at the wall into electricity the device itself can use.\nIn the US it's approximately 120V AC current. My phone uses 5V DC to charge the battery. If I were to funnel 120V AC current into my phone without converting it I would damage my phone. \n\nAn electrical engineer would be able to explain it better but I can clear up some practical reasons for having large plugs at the wall.\n\nPortability is some of it and the rest comes from ease of use and ease of mass production.\n\nGoing back to my phone, it is a detachable device that uses a proprietary or universal cable depending on use case so it needs all of the electrical equipment at the plug since it can't count on the cord I use to have the proper parts in-line.\n\nMy laptop uses a special plug so it doesn't have to rely on cords that I provide, and they make it all one (mostly) continuous device. The big brick in the middle handles the conversion, in my case 120V AC to 19V DC, so it leaves the plug nice and compact. Expanding on that, a tower computer, a TV, or Blu-ray player have that part in the actual device most times so it can get away with \"universal\" power cords that only need to ferry the 120V AC to the unit and nothing else.\n\nThe big ones are frustrating at the outlet but it's probably also the sturdiest way to guarantee that it doesn't break. Big, sturdy block at the part of the cord that gets moved least.\n\nStealth Edit: Spelling, grammar, clarity.",
"The large component is the transformer. Household voltage can easily be stepped down to a few volts. However smaller the transformer, the lower the amps. If you look at all those power adapters around your house, you will see 2 numbers: volts (V) and amps (mA). The larger the amps, the bigger the brick.\n\nOf course, companies can slim down power bricks using more efficient transformers and other components but that requires cost. And of course, that cost is included in the equipment you’re buying."
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9el2xs | how does creatinine work in the body? | I know that creatinine can be measured to diagnose kidney or liver problems, but creatinine doesn't actually affect the liver or kidneys. How does this work? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9el2xs/eli5_how_does_creatinine_work_in_the_body/ | {
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"Creatinine is a metabolic byproduct that is produced in muscle tissue. Specifically it is used as an indicator of kidney function because the kidneys are the only organs that filter it out of the blood. It is formed in the body, usually at a fairly set rate and the kidneys will remove it at a set rate. Normally we expect creat levels in the bloodstream to be 0.5-1.0 in adults. As that number begins to rise, it indicates that the kidneys are not functioning properly. It doesn’t tell us specifically what’s wrong with the kidneys, it just tells us SOMETHING is wrong with them. Hence, they call it an indicator of kidney function. Usual follow up testing for elevated creatinine levels range from imaging, ultrasound and possible biopsy. It doesn’t indicate liver function at all to my knowledge. ",
"Your muscles make creatinine. Your kidneys get rid of creatinine normally. If your kidneys don't work right, the creatinine doesn't leave your body and so the levels rise. Doctors can check the blood and see what your creatinine levels are. People with less muscle mass have lower creatinine levels to start with, so it is important to remember if you've got some frail 90 year old woman, and she has a Cr of 0.8, that might be high for her; you need to know what her baseline Cr is. \n\nPeople with bad livers don't make creatine, which is the thing that comes before creatinine. So if the liver doesn't work, there isn't much of the starting product to make the creatinine. But it is tricky because people who have bad livers may also have bad kidneys. They also tend to have less muscle.\n\nFor a non-5-year-old answer, you can read \"The evaluation of renal function and disease in patients with cirrhosis\" by Francoz et al.\n\n"
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60bfmy | why do gas companies ever bother lowering their prices? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/60bfmy/eli5_why_do_gas_companies_ever_bother_lowering/ | {
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"If your competitor buys gas for a little less, they can sell it for a little less and make identical profits per volume. If they sell it for less, more people will buy gas there instead, which means more profits in the long run. \n\nTiny changes, sure they might not add up quickly, but if over a year or two your competitor had 50,000 more sales, that adds up to a lot.",
"Because there's more than one gas station in town. They could all leave their prices at $3 and people would still buy gas. However, if one company drops their price to $2.90 then they'll increase their market share. Perhaps everyone still buys the same amount of gas in total, but more people will choose to buy from the company with the lower price.",
"Not in economics in general but the fuel market is odd. Gas stations make little to no profit on fuel sales based on conversations I have had with some knowledgeable about the business. Its all about foot traffic. The stores know you have to stop in at some pretty high frequency and they want you in the store to buy all those extras (beer, cigs, candy, big money in soda fountain drinks). Most of them could not care less if you buy $8 worth of fuel or $100.\n",
"Gas is a perfect commodity -- people rarely are brand loyal and mostly shop price. So if any one station undercuts the rest it can expect most of the business. This they all lower their price to what t etc can or risk losing business to the station across the street, down the street, etc. for them to all agree to keep prices higher would be illegal collusion."
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4zm611 | why can an american go off to war and vote at age 18, but cannot buy a beer or a pistol until age 21? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4zm611/eli5_why_can_an_american_go_off_to_war_and_vote/ | {
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"Mothers Against Drunk Driving heavily lobbied the federal government to withhold federal highway funding from states that refuse to set the drinking age to 21. They caved. 18-21 year olds are easy to beat in a lobbying/political influence fight because so few of them vote and virtually none of them hold public office.",
"Because it's the law, is the simplest explanation. \n\nhow it became the law is this: the age used to be 18 (although was set by the states, so depends on the state), but was changed because of a group called Mothers Against Drunk Driving. It was founded by someone who's kid died due to drunk driving. And they lobbied Congress to push that to 18, because kids were getting drunk, driving, dying, killing their friends, giving booze to high school kids, etc. So Congress passed a bill tying federal highway funds to changing the drinking age, and this was upheld in Court - that it's ok for federal money to have strings, and eventually all the states changed their laws because they wanted that extra road money. \n\nSo that's the direct reason; the indirect reason is that way more teens here drive; in Europe, people can drink before they can drive, and need to drive way less. So people are older and more experienced with drinking when they do get a car, and don't need it as often, leading to less 19 year old drunk driving. \n\nAlso, yes, we do view alcohol differently (historically); we're the only Western nation that outright banned alcohol during prohibition. ",
"If you want to be a cynic, you could say that it's in the government's interest to recruit immature people to the military, but it's not in the government's interest to have a bunch of drunk drivers crashing into shit or a bunch of hot-blooded youth shooting each other. \n\nRaising the drinking age does somewhat reduce the drunk driving rate overall, though part of it is just shoving the problem forward by a few years. No one really knows the \"best\" way to introduce people to alcohol. America is more uptight about booze than most European nations for a long list of reasons having to do with religion and leftovers of the prohibition movement. "
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4uz5z6 | how do people get in the music industry? | Is just as simple as putting music on the internet and hoping someone important sees it. Or maybe get on one of those music shows and become famous from that? I never understood how some musical people become famous seemingly "out of nowhere". | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4uz5z6/eli5_how_do_people_get_in_the_music_industry/ | {
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"Some really do get discovered on YouTube etc. But much more often, they ask to perform at bars and other public locations, where they play hundreds of times, working on their skills in front of a real audience and gradually improving (and moving to better venues). Once they get decent, some hire an agent to help get them better gigs and maybe even a deal with a record company.",
"Not out of no where. Start small. Play local venues. Play shows where record labels come out to see you. Put shit out on youtube to get noticed",
"The best way is to have connections to people already in the music industry. Otherwise you're just hoping to be in the right place in the right time, so that someone really important will hear you and think you're better than all the other good musicians they've heard.",
"Just find a Reddit thread where someone is asking a question like yours, then post a comment which includes a link to a video of you playing some music. That's all there is to it!\n\n\n_URL_0_"
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3rosp0 | what is so special about henrietta lacks and why is she contaminating things? | As the question states. I have read some of the Wikipedia and the TIL thread. But I'm on morphine post surgery and it's confusing me. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3rosp0/eli5_what_is_so_special_about_henrietta_lacks_and/ | {
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"Henreitta Lacks died of cervical cancer back in the 50s. \n\nThe cancer that killed her made her cervical cells immortal. Almost every other cell we know about stops dividing after about 500 divisions. This is known as the [Hayflick limit](_URL_0_). \n\nHer cancer cells don't stop dividing. This makes them ideal for use in scientific experiments, which require human cells and repeatability. If I want to reproduce your experiment, the best way is for me to start by using the exact same cells you did. "
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2jvueg | what is "bad gas" (or "bad diesel" in my case) and what are the complications it can cause for a motor vehicle? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2jvueg/eli5_what_is_bad_gas_or_bad_diesel_in_my_case_and/ | {
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"There are a few forms of bad diesel. Water or possible algea contamination being most common. Most diesels have a water trap that needs to be emptied every oil change. If the water is allowed to remain I've seen it rust out the fuel system internally. Diesel fuel has a lubricant in it and due to the lack of lubricity in the water it will start wearing down your pump and or injectors. Just replaced 10k worth of high pressure fuel system due to this. Algea will form if the diesel fuel sits in the tank for a long time usually will plug up the filters first.",
"(For non-diesel; not sure if it applies to diesel.) There is an \"perfect\" oxygen to fuel ratio that changes depending on contaminants. Vehicles are designed for a specific ratio, though the O^2 sensor can deal with a certain variation. \"Bad gas\" (defined as fuel that significantly deviates from the standard) can cause decreased fuel economy, harm to the O^2 sensors, and with extreme [cases] cause failure of the catalytic converter. If the contaminants are particulates (as opposed to most commonly nitrogen), over time the fuel filter can become clogged, causing damage to the fuel pump, and soot buildup in the engine."
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bkcdjn | what was the original purpose of the invention of the internet? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bkcdjn/eli5_what_was_the_original_purpose_of_the/ | {
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"The internet has taken a lot of forms over the years. It began with the developement of ARPANET ( Advanced Research Project Agency Network) which was funded by DARPA (Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency) for the sole purpose of having a defense network that could function in the time of a nuclear war.",
"There's another story that ot was invented at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. That's where the Large Hadron Collider is. Every second they record terabytes of data. So they needed a way to efficiency transfer it. They came up with what you could call and Intranet which later became the Internet\n\n_URL_0_"
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34iamd | why do people from low social classes tend to be conservative? | (def) conservative: holding to traditional attitudes and values and cautious about change or innovation, typically in relation to politics or religion.
It's a known social phenomenon that people from lower social classes tend to have more conservative values. I would think it would be the opposite since left-leaning policies tend to be more supportive of social programs designed to help the poor.
Is it because they are less educated? Is it a product of the environment they grew up in? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/34iamd/eli5_why_do_people_from_low_social_classes_tend/ | {
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"Where do you get this from? I dont think the data transfered for example it is proven the poor areas of america almost always vote Democrat. Blacks also always vote Democrat. Highly populated areas typically poor inner cities always vote democrat. I dont think I understand .... ",
"I'd like to see your source for lower classes being conservative. If you're looking purely economically I don't think the Democratic base would back that claim. \n\nI think you have a false equivalency in your brain about what conservatives want/believe vs liberals and about the relative education (being a correlate to economic status) between the groups. Given that false equivalency, can't really answer your question. Being a conservative isn't just about keeping the status quo, it's about keeping what you earn, being responsible for yourself and your own actions, and keeping the government out of your affairs. \n\nLiberals - conceptually the original ones - were about the same thing, but they have become very different. The emphasis on government solutions/mandates to solve problems (real or imagined) has grown substantially in the last 100 years and continues to do so. That the plight of minorities and the inner cities has only gotten worse under Democrat party management is a pretty ironic historical reality. Especially given their almost unwavering support for that party."
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7m0edd | why are schools strict on females showing shoulders and exposing skin? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7m0edd/eli5_why_are_schools_strict_on_females_showing/ | {
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"Because they seem to believe the archaic and stupid notion that all teenage boys are slavering hormonal beasts and the mere sight of even the tiniest bit of skin will put them into a lust filled rage and they won't be able to learn. You know, since the only education that matters is the male's.",
"Because a teenaged girl can always come to school naked enough that anyone would understandably complain, and while that is an edge case, the rulebooks need a threshold to forbid, and this threshold has to be arbitrary.",
"There's another reason that I don't see mentioned. It's much easier to keep kids from misbehaving when there's a somewhat strict dress code.\n\nIf a kid walked in with a T-shirt that says \"F*** the police\" and short shorts, you can bet that the conversation is going to be about her instead of algebra class.\n\nObviously this is an extreme case, but the more expressive kids are, the more likely they are to cause problems. This is the same reason boys can't wear hats in many schools. "
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ekggc5 | why does the same water feel a different temperature to your body than it does to your head? for example when in the shower? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ekggc5/eli5_why_does_the_same_water_feel_a_different/ | {
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"Nerves are distributed unevenly over our whole body, google human homunculus and you'll get the idea",
"Because some parts of the body have more nerves in one area than others. The hands/feet and face are notable ones because they are used quite often.",
"On top of what other people have mentioned the water will get cooler as it drops through the air to the floor. If you sit down in a shower the water will feel cooler than when stood up. I would think that as your head is the nearest to the water source it feels hotter as by the time it's reached your body is has cooled slightly.",
"Fun fact: you can’t actually sense temperature; not in the way we usually think of it.\n\nInstead, you sense the transfer of heat into or out of your skin. If different parts of your body are different temperatures, they will feel the same temperature differently.\n\nThere are a couple of experiments you can run to illustrate this:\n\n1. Get three bowls of water, big enough to stick your hands into. Fill one with icy-cold water, one with hot water, and one with luke-warm water. Put one hand in the cold water and one in the hot water, and hold them there for a minute or so. Then put both hands in the medium water at the same time, and notice how each hand reports the temperature of that water differently.\n\n2. Leave a block of wood, a piece of metal, and a plastic object in a room for a while, so they end up being the same temperature. When you feel them, they will feel different temperatures, because the different materials transfer heat more or less efficiently.",
"Your head (probably) has hair on it. It absorbs a little of the heat before it gets to your scalp, giving you more time to adjust to the temperature. It then stays wet, keeping the old water there longer to mix with and cool the new hot water. It's the same way a cold shower is more tolerable on your head than on your bare skin.\n\nWhen you feel heat it's the difference from your skin's current temperature. Which is why you can sit in a hot tub comfortably once you've adjusted, but warm water on cold feet feels like fire.",
"I’d imagine it’s because those body parts are different temperatures to begin with, no? For instance, my feet are always always freezing and a nice hot shower that feels great on my body and head is unbearably and agonisingly scalding on my feet",
"The shower is a bad example; your head is literally closer to the shower head, giving the water less time to be exposed to the air and cool down.",
"Yeah, I've been doing the cold shower thing, out of necessity because my water heater died, and I can eventually tolerate the icy water everywhere but my head, it hurts like hell up there!! I can hardly rinse the shampoo.. Would love to know why.",
"Because of your brain.\n\nYour brain consumes about 20% of the energy used by your body. All that energy use generates heat. The heat is released through blood vessels in your head.\n\nThe blood vessels in your head can also be a conduit for further heat loss or gain. Like u/Nova_Saibrock mentioned, you feel differences in temperature, not absolute temperature and since your head is smaller than your torso, it is more sensitive to temperature changes.",
"What you feel is not the temperature itself, but how fast heat is transferred in (hot) to your body or out (cold) of your body.\n\nLook around you and find some wood (or a book) or glass (table top of drinking glass), or maybe something metallic. Since they're in the room, all 3 of those are at \"room temperature\", but if you put your hand on them, they will feel different \"temperatures\". Metal will seem colder because it's able to remove head faster from your hand (heat conducts faster in metals, so as the heat leaves your hand, goes into the metal, and conducts away, to make room for more heat to leave your hand, so you feel colder). Wood will probably feel the \"warmest\" since it doesn't remove heat from your hand that fast (insulator).\n\nThe same happens on different parts of your body. The skin has different layers and depending on which part of the body you look at, it'll have different size of the fat layer which acts as an insulator of sorts. The more fat there is, the longer it'll take the neurons to feel like heat is leaving the body. Head/Forehead has less fat, so if the hot water is hitting it, heat will go in and the neurons will know right away and tell you it's hot. The same water hitting the body might dissipate some of the heat into the fat layer before hitting the neurons.\n\nThere's also the whole notion about wet-bulb temperature which is what you actually feel and can be colder than the actual temperature. (for example, you're in a pool, at a certain temperature, and leave, and immediately start shivering even though room temperature isn't that cold. You're feeling the wet-bulb temperature.)\n\nThis might be more than a ELI\"5\", but i can try to answer more questions in further comments!",
"I'm no expert on this, but I would imagine that the difference in temperature of different parts of the body plays a big role.\n\nParts of your head are likely closer to 35 degrees, while extremeties like hands and feet can fall below 25 degrees. Logically, 30 degree water would thus feel cold on your face and cold on your feet.",
"Relative temp. If the water is cooler than the skin/flesh it's touching, it will feel colder as the temp of the water drops. For example, if the temp of our mouth was normally 32 F, ice wouldn't feel cold and normal temps would feel like it's on fire. The same concept works for hot water.\n\nThe reason it feels different is because your body and head are different temperatures. 98.6 F is normal CORE body temp. Doesn't mean that's the temp of your skin everywhere.",
"Different parts of your body are different temperatures so they feel less or greater effects from the same temperature.",
"Well if you're talking about the shower the water is literally warmer by your head than it is by the time it gets down to your body. There's a lot of surface area on the droplets of water that come out of a shower head so it cools off plenty fron the time it comes out of the shower head to the time it hits the floor. Try submerging in a bath, does it feel different to you then? It doesn't for me.",
"Because YOU are different temperatures on different parts of your body.\n\nThat means the difference between you & the water is different, and that's what you feel.\n\nExample: \n\nWhere the water feels cold, you are hot.\n\nWhere the water feels warm, you are cold.\n\nBut the water is the same temperature (unless you change the shower)",
"I thought it was because your head is closer to the shower head and feels the water just as it exits and your legs are futher so they feel the water after its had time to cool down in the air."
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9y4lgl | what does 4k oled mean, and how does it differ from regular 4k? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9y4lgl/eli5_what_does_4k_oled_mean_and_how_does_it/ | {
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"it is a 4k tv but with a better screen. The screen is better because with oled the pixels can turn off. This means that you get better blacks. Instead of there being a glow from the backlight even on a black screen the screen is actually just off on any part of the screen not displaying something. Think of a smart phone that has a always on display. ",
"4K means 4K resolution; 3840 x 2160 pixels or 4096 x 2160 pixels.\n\nOLED is an LED technology which has a very low black level (can be very dark) and terefore giving much more contrast and \"life\" in the image.\n\nMost likely the 4K (without OLED) is a normal TFT or LED display, while the OLED has the OLED technology in it\n\nI hope I helped"
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169lq4 | why does 'water' keep coming out of my nose when i have a cold? what's the purpose? | I think you can all relate. It's the stuff that's just transparent, no green/yellowish goo, just almost water... | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/169lq4/eli5_why_does_water_keep_coming_out_of_my_nose/ | {
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"This question actually has a really cool answer. The stuff that's coming out is a result of your nasal mucus membranes going into overdrive. These membranes regularly generate a little bit of mucus to help flush dirt and things out of your nasal passages. However, when you have a cold, they go a little nuts and run like crazy.\n\nSo the question is, why do they generate *so much* watery mucus? The answer is that the cold viruses specifically evolved to cause your nasal membranes to do this, because it's a more effective way of spreading themselves to others! Imagine a cold virus that didn't cause you to snot all over, or cough, or sneeze. How would it spread to other people? It would be a lot more difficult. So viruses that caused your nose to spew all sorts of liquid ended up becoming more widespread."
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yt6jx | as a non-american, what exactly are electoral colleges and how do they affect the us presidential election? | I often hear the phrase being used as the election looms ever closer, and know that they are a large topic for discussion, am I right in thinking that they are linked to certain states? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/yt6jx/eli5_as_a_nonamerican_what_exactly_are_electoral/ | {
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"In the US the president is not elected by popular vote, instead he is elected by the electoral college. The representatives to the electoral college are decided by each state. Each state get's one electoral college member per member of congress they have (so the smallest states have 3 members, while large states like California have 55).\n\n\nMost states are winner-take-all, so that whoever gets 50%+1 of the vote gets all of the electoral college votes for that state. What this means is any state with a fairly partisan lean (like California for the Democrats or Texas for the Republicans) isn't really contested by the presidential candidates. That's because convincing hundreds of thousands of people to vote for you won't actually do anything if all it does is cause you to lose by 5% instead of 10%. What that means is there are only a handful of states that are 1) Close enough that campaigning can change who wins the state, and 2) Large enough for the electoral votes to really matter. Right now those states are Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida. There are other smaller swing states that can help (Virginia, Nevada, Colorado), but the rule of thumb is that if you can win 2 out of the 3 big swing states you win the election.\n\n\nPennsylvania leans a bit more towards the democrats, and Florida leans a bit more for the republicans, and Ohio sits in the center. That means Ohio is really the only state you need to win (because if you win Ohio is highly likely that you'll win the other more favorable state as well). Now this sounds really bad, that only 1 out of 50 states \"really matters\", but voting in individual states aren't independent (generally) of each other. Basically Ohio acts like a good sample of the country as a whole, so arguments that convince Ohioans to votes for you generally gets Americans in general to vote for you. Still the electoral college allows for situations where the person that got the most votes doesn't win (Such as Al Gore in 2000), because narrow victories in swing states are more important to running up the popular vote count in large states."
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1ecdbj | why human immune systems cannot adapt to diseases like cancer, aids, etc. but can adapt/evolve to other illnesses that would've otherwise killed us centuries ago? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ecdbj/eli5_why_human_immune_systems_cannot_adapt_to/ | {
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"The main way the immune system recognizes threats is through the presentation of antigens. Antigens are proteins on the surface of cells. With most disease-causing things, the body can react to the antigens and recognize it as a threat. \n\nCancer is a large group of diseases where the body's own cells undergo slight changes, then grow uncontrollably. Because a cancer cell is formed from pieces of the patient's own body, it's really difficult for the body to recognize the bad cells. \n\nAIDS is the result of a virus called HIV. HIV is hard to fight off because it changes (mutates) really quickly. It's very difficult to recognize the virus if it keeps changing what it looks like. And as if that wasn't bad enough, HIV specifically attacks immune cells. These two factors make it so most people have very little chance of fighting off HIV and AIDS without medical help. ",
"I can't speak to cancer, but for AIDS, one large factor is time. If AIDS had hit centuries ago, firstly it would stay localized, and the population it afflicted would likely either developed resistance through a mutation, or slowly die out. \n\nThis has actually happened in Northern Europe, by accident. A small percentage of the population there carries a mutation that is beneficial to some other disease that was once common, and happened to give resistance to HIV. If HIV had spread to the whole human population, this group would survive and the human population would then be resistant.\n\nOur immune system itself cannot become immune to HIV at this point because of what /u/upvoter addressed, it mutates extremely rapidly, and with billions of copies of the virus in an individual, the immune system cannot keep up with all the variation. The immune system itself is geared towards the specific virus in a large immune response, and as it mutates so quickly, by the time it has the ability to combat, there is new mutation. ",
"It's not the whole of the story but your immune system is strongly focused on \"Self\" / \"Not Self\". Things that are recognised as \"Not Self\" get attacked whilest \"Self\" get a pass. \n\nCancer is a \"Self\" cell that's gone wrong and AIDS actually attacks the immune system preventing it from working at all (the Immune Deficiency part of the name)."
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3so9um | why don't companies bring back those discontinued products people miss so much? | I'm talking your Surges, Hi-C Ecto Coolers, Fruitaburst Gums, French Toast Crunches, basically anything on those listicles of awesome stuff we'll never see again. Even if only for a limited time they could make a killing. Just get their marketing team to hype the hell out of the re-release for months before they actually did it. You could get people lining up in the street for the right product with the right marketing campaign. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3so9um/eli5_why_dont_companies_bring_back_those/ | {
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"You assume that they haven't already considered and ruled out doing so behind closed doors. And sometimes they do, sometimes even on a recurring (annual/seasonal) basis.\n\nBut the bottom line is that the product was discontinued for a reason, and that reason was money. The hypothetical \"right marketing campaign\" you mentioned would be expensive, far more so than what they believe the product could bring in. From a profit point of view, a small, vocal fan/user/consumer base just isn't enough to justify the cost of reproducing an unsuccessful product."
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bha4dc | what makes a meat "processed" | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bha4dc/eli5_what_makes_a_meat_processed/ | {
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"Processed meat is any meat that is preserved by any of a number of methods, such as smoking, curing, salting, or addition of chemical preservatives. Examples of processed meat are bacon, salami, pepperoni, obviously bologna and hot dogs, most lunch meats, etc."
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aj1hip | the difference between a pun and a play on words. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aj1hip/eli5_the_difference_between_a_pun_and_a_play_on/ | {
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"A pun is specifically a joke made using the multiple meanings of a word or exploiting that some words with different meanings sound the same. A play on words is much more broad as an exercise of wit where words are the main focus. It encompasses puns as well as double entendres, phonetic mix up, etc.",
"Puns are a specifc type of word play. Just like how a duck is a type of bird. \n\nPuns specifically use the sound and meaning of a word. Where the humour in explicit in the statement. \n\nFor example \"a boild egg every morning is hard to *beat* \" or \n\"the light was too bright in the chinese restaurant so the manager decided to *dum sum*\" \n\nThose are puns. \n\n\nBut you have other word play like double entendres is something that could be understood more than one way.\n\nThose \"thats what she said\" jokes are double entendres.\n\n\"Is it in yet?\" Definetly not a pun. But it's a double entendre. "
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3w2ncx | why do actors fake eating on tv and movies, rather than just eating the food? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3w2ncx/eli5_why_do_actors_fake_eating_on_tv_and_movies/ | {
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"Cos they have many takes to get a scene right and the food is cold by the time they get to it. Or theyre tired of eating it by take 20",
"I'm no expert, but I assume they'll need to re-do every act tons of times and they don't want to buy a dozen bananas, let alone forcing the acter to eat a dozen bananas.",
"Sometimes the scene has to be re-shot numerous times for the best take. They don't want the food to diminish for every take, so they fake it.",
"A few different reasons. Firstly, as mentioned by other responders, there may need to be multiple takes. Secondly, often the food has been carefully prepared to look good, or to look some other particular way, and might not actually be very good to eat. Thirdly, there are situations in media in which it would actually make it harder to do the scene if the actor had to finish chewing and swallowing every time they were scripted to take a bite. There are probably other small reasons that vary from situation to situation. Need your vegan actress to eat a burger in a scene? Need your actor to eat a notoriously sloppy food without damaging makeup or getting stuff on their face? Need your extras to be ready to react quickly by gasping at something happening, and don't want any to have partially chewed food in their mouths? Etc.",
"Because a scene can be shot and reshot dozens of times. Think of how much food the actors would have to pack away.",
"Food is expensive. Every dollar spent on food is one dollar less for other things like lighting or clapper boards. Some actors have tried to improvise by bringing their own food to the production, but this breaks guidelines set by the MPDG, the motion picture dietary group. All food on the set must be provided by a contracted caterer.\n\nOne well-known exception is Kirstie Alley, who negotiates a never-ending buffet of chicken wings, scampi, and those little sausages on a paper tray that look a bit nasty (but damn are they good) any time the cameras are rolling in lieu of cash payment for acting parts. This generally breaks-even for what other actresses receive in traditional salary.",
"I have acted in plays before. One included food and drinks, and I ate and drank them. However, I was very aware of when my next line was so I wouldn't be talking with my mouth full or miss a cue. On stage, you only get one take."
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4xwjzh | what causes major isp's (brighthouse, comcast, etc) have frequent service outages? | I just had a service outage, second one in two weeks, that lasted for a few hours and it got me thinking. How do these massive companies have such unreliable services, and what causes their outages?
I also came here because all of my google results used some intense jargon that I didn't understand, and seemed to say that its mostly the consumers fault (Congestion, faulty router, and other things)
Thanks! | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4xwjzh/eli5_what_causes_major_isps_brighthouse_comcast/ | {
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"Simple. It's out dated technology that can't keep up with the demands of the country. Before anyone starts downvoting, let me explain. Coaxial cable have been delivering signal into our homes since before the internet was even invented. Then companies learned how to delivery internet using a infrastructure already laid down. (Coaxial cable) The problem is, this technology was invented for one way communication. Hence why your download speeds are hitting 100-150 Mbps and upload speeds of 10-15 Mbps. \n\nThis matters because of frequency issues. Farther away from transmitter you are, more static noise interrupts the signal. Keep in mind your connection is shared. Sure you have your own private hook up in your house, but your entire neighborhood/community shares a common access point. (The green boxes hidden behind bushes) Also Traditionally there's no redundancy incorporated into broadband infrastructures. \n\nTake all the flaws that come with old technology and now add human error. Some engineer fat fingering code, a frayed cable, people digging holes.....ect ect ect. Hope this helps. ",
"Hi i'm from a ISP in singapore.\n\nthere are multiple reasons that can create outage, from poor planning of network to physical damage of the network etc. i'm going to explain this in layman term bear with me.\n\nISP is basically a big version of a LAN, as you know, LAN consist of multiple computers and a router, but instead of multiple computers, we have multiple of servers (imagine that is about the range of near hundreds.) and instead of a single router, we have hundreds of switches and routers. if you don't know what is switch, it is basically something like a hub except that it is smarter then a hub.\n\nnow as we look further into this, in ISP we have different elements and cores, these are the servers, switch and routers in different functions. such as authentication, data hosting, DNS etc.\n\nlets look into 1 example of an element, for example the Diameter services, if let say there is only 1 server to cater this server and the server got a hardware failure, the entire network is busted. hence most ISP have at least 2 diameter with 1 running as primary while the other is on standby waiting for the primary server to clash and take over its' role. but what if both server clashed? this is why most ISP have site diversify the service which have 2 server (primary and standby) at site A and 2 server (primary and standby) in site B. \n\nthis is a basic model for most service in current times. some service require database to be hosted hence a model like this will consist of at least 8 servers, 2 router.\n\nnow, each server may clash, this can be due to wear and tear OR software misconfiguration OR error in patches. \n\nthe cable connected to them and each of these network equipment have a chance in failing. \n\nthis is why it is expensive to create an ISP and to maintain it, this is also why the cost of the subscription is expensive. \n\nnow expand out abit and look at ISP in worldwide point of view, each ISP is connected via both satellite and underwater sea cable, these connection may and often break.\n\nentire network systems are fragile in this sense. ",
"The ISPs in America are super greedy. Their profit margins are huge (the incremental cost on their part to server you internet is every month is less than a dollar), and they take most of those profits and give them to shareholders, CEOS, etc, rather than reinvesting in their companies equipment, infrastructure, etc.\n\nSince they don't reinvest, which is what any company concerned about competition does, their system rots, and occasionally goes down."
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8ju0hy | why is our immediate response to pleasure closing our eyes? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8ju0hy/eli5_why_is_our_immediate_response_to_pleasure/ | {
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"By closing our eyes, we increase the sensation by limiting distractions so we can focus on the pleasure more. ",
"For perspective, vision is typically 90 of incoming sensory bandwidth. Your example if not the only time people do this. Watch for someone trying to listen *very* carefully and you'll see them so the same thing. It quiets the visual centers of the brain."
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mv2v8 | the positions and opinions of the candidates of the 2012 us election to a non-american. | Ideally, I'd love for this to be as non biased as possible, though I understand that your personal feelings and opinions may get in the way of this.
Mostly, I'd just like to be able to understand what the r/politics posts are talking about when they mention the different candidates. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/mv2v8/eli5_the_positions_and_opinions_of_the_candidates/ | {
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"If you could clarify which posts you're most interested in it would be much easier. There's quite a long litany of positions each candidate holds.",
"If you could clarify which posts you're most interested in it would be much easier. There's quite a long litany of positions each candidate holds."
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1xaes9 | why is it that internet routers seem to "go bad" after a few years? | I've noticed that many of my routers start dropping connections, requiring constant restarts, and some have simply stopped working after several years of use. Is this a universal property of routers or am I just unlucky? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1xaes9/eli5_why_is_it_that_internet_routers_seem_to_go/ | {
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"Little of both. You gotta remember that thing is working 24/7 365 days a year unless you unplug it or lose power. Eventually the components inside just warp and burn out from usage ",
"Planned Obsolesce. In industrial design is a policy of planning or designing a product with a limited useful life, so it will become obsolete, that is, unfashionable or no longer functional after a certain period of time. This is so that you need to buy more, so that the company can take in more money.",
"Man, I had a WRT54G that I kept for years. Did everything I wanted, and I would've kept using it but I bought a Netgear with more user friendly options. Things I could have done with the WRT54G but didn't know how to at the time.\n\nKept the WRT, it's my mom's router since I moved away. It does everything fine except it's Wireless N. Have a friend who is trying to buy them on the cheap because he wants to mod one out and put it on his truck for wardriving purposes.",
"These routers are cheap. People don't want to pay that much money for a router and the companies want to make their profit. \n\nQuality routers can be made but they would cost much more money and they would be far too complicated for people to maintain. Cheap router customers want a router which works like a toaster -- anything more complicated than that won't work. ",
"For a lot of routers, especially cheap ones, I think it's mostly an issue of cooling.\n\nRouters are really just little computers, with a processor to make decisions about where to send traffic, and memory to temporarily store information. Like all computers, they have to be kept cool to function properly. However, they're expected to be cheap, small, and silent, so they don't get the big heatsinks and fans used to keep normal computers cool. They have to make do with convection, and small heatsinks if any. Because of this cost-cutting, the chips inside tend to run pretty hot, sometimes close to their rated limits.\n\nAs dust builds up, or the device sits in a warm location for months and years on end, the chips run hotter and hotter. At high temperatures, they are more likely to make a mistake and cause a crash. So if the problem is mild, you might be able to correct it by cleaning out the dust or even adding a cooling fan.\n\nIf the overheating goes on long enough, though, the processor can actually start to degrade. This is sort of like wear and tear on the engine in your car, except it's microscopic, and the parts are carrying electrons instead of moving. Once the degradation gets bad enough, a transistor or two in the processor might start switching incorrectly and sending a signal down the wrong path. This sounds like it should just make the device stop working completely, but there's some error-correction built in. On top of that, there are probably 500,000 transistors inside the router's processor, and not all of them are used for every decision. So the router will crash when it tries to use a deteriorated area of the processor (or store data in a deteriorated part of the RAM, which can also suffer damage).\n\nYou can prevent this issue by buying more expensive routers with (hopefully) better thermal control, and by making sure you keep yours from getting too hot. There's no reason a router *has* to wear out over time, it's just something that many of them end up doing.",
"I have a linksys WAG354G, more than 10-15 years old.\n\nKept for years in the attic with hot summer/cold winter, used and abused; still rocking...\n\nI just reboot once a week (when i remember to...), but definitely doing his job!",
"Consumer grade.\n\nSource: I' ma sysadmin and those crappy quality consumer grade routers are junk. Heat and poor quality don't mix.",
"Computer scientist, software dev, general computer guy here.\n\nOne comment pointed out that there's a lot to go wrong in your average router, and that they take damage overtime (especially from heat) and this is true.\n\nHowever, even if most of the router holds up, the RAM will just eventually wear out. Routers have some built in memory to store information in the buffer and routing process, and so it gets used pretty heavily. The RAM effectively has a maximum usage, and home routers with regular use tend to wear through this in about 2 years (average, obviously differing with quality, model, etc). Business routers last a bit longer (I've heard on average 5 years) due to improved memory quality. This is most often the cause of old-router-syndrome.\n\n\nRegards.",
"I've used the same WRT54G for over a decade and it's still rock solid.",
"There are lot of factors that determine the effective life of electronic equipment. They've been pretty well covered here, but here are all of the things that can cause cumulative damage.\n\n*Thermal fluctuations* - It isn't just heat, but the fluctuations that can cause damage through expansion and contraction, which can cause electrical connections to break. Imagine you have a small wire, and you bend that wire back and forth over and over again, it's eventually going to wear and break. Sure, an overheated unit is at risk of damage, but most equipment won't overheat with normal use in a controlled environment. The trick is to keep equipment at a steady temperature.\n\n*Poor Power Regulation* - If your router is experiencing undervoltage or overvoltage conditions, it will malfunction. If it is subject to power outages and surges it will take damage.\n\n*Whiskers* - Metal, over time, will form what are called [whiskers](_URL_0_). In electronics this causes short circuits. They're not typically big enough to cause immediate problems, but cumulative damage is certainly possible and well documented.\n\n*EMP* - EMP, or [electromagnetic pulse](_URL_2_) can come from a nearby lightning strike or from ESD [Electro Static Discharge](_URL_1_), which comes from power surges, electric motors, or even from touching the equipment.\n\nAll of these things can be mitigated. The some you can mitigate yourself.\n\nUse a good quality battery backup on all of your electronics. This not only helps with surge protection and power regulation, but it also helps with thermal damage because the device is powered up unless there is an extended outage. This means that the hot/cold cycles that come with brief power outages and under voltage conditions don't happen any more. A good UPS will extend the life of your electronics by a huge margin, especially if you live in a place that is prone to spikes, brownouts, and outages.\n\nKeep your electronics in a properly climate controlled place. Keep temperatures within a reasonable range, and don't fluctuate rapidly. This will help to mitigate thermal damage.\n\nDon't touch it unless you need to, and discharge any static before touching it.\n\nJust doing these things has saved me a lot of money over the years. I have equipment that runs like new even 10 years after I bought it. Even cheap consumer grade equipment. In fact, I generally replace my electronics because they're outdated rather than not operational.",
"90% (ok, not 90%, but very often) as was mentioned down there somewhere, its going to be the Electrolytic Capacitors drying out.\n\nPut simply, Electrolytic caps are strips of damp cardboard and aluminium foil rolled up and put in a metal can.\n\nOver time, the moisture in the cardboard dries out, and the electrical properties of the cap start changing...\n\nThis will progress from no impact, through to weird behaviour (as the cap approaches borderline functionality) through to complete failure. The weird behaviour can last a *long* time though, before dying completely.\n\nI work in broadcast, and just about the first thing you do when a piece of kit blows up is check the caps. Its amazing how often just going through a board and replacing *all* of the electrolytics will bring a unit back from the dead.",
"Before tossing a router out, it's not a bad idea to try updating its firmware first. \n\nI've had a lot of routers miraculously spring back to life after a solid firmware update.",
"I blame everything on RoHS. Using solder with a high tin content eventually leads to the device going tits up",
"I have had the same problem. my explanation is that its planned obsolescence"
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2yjpo2 | shouldn't bi-weekly mean twice in the same week instead of once in two weeks? | I have always been confused with the usage of bi-weekly. Shouldn't it be used to mean twice in the same week and not once in two weeks?
For example: Bicycle = two cycles(wheels) in one frame; Bi-sexual = on person with two sexual preferences; Similarly shouldn't bi-weekly mean twice in one week? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2yjpo2/eli5_shouldnt_biweekly_mean_twice_in_the_same/ | {
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"Yes, it should. Look at bi-annual vs biennial. The former means twice a year, the latter means every other year.\n\nThough it seems as though bi-weekly can actually mean either twice a week or every other week _URL_0_ which is even more confusing.",
"Goose - Geese; Moose - Moose;\n\nnice, nicer nicest; good, better, best;\n\ntow - towed; go - went; \n\nEnglish is weird like that. The word's origin determines a lot of its variations. It is almost on the verge of making no sense; but if you study the language deep enough you will patterns emerging. That is why spelling bee participants are allowed to ask for word origin and usage, and also why there exists a spelling bee.\n\nEDIT: seek - sought; peek - peeked;",
"It's misused a lot but it should mean every 2 weeks. \"Bi\" means 2, \"semi\" means half. Bi-weekly means every 2 weeks, semi-weekly means every half week (i.e. twice a week)"
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47ms94 | why hasn't the leaning tower of pisa fallen over? will it eventually fall? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/47ms94/eli5_why_hasnt_the_leaning_tower_of_pisa_fallen/ | {
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"Because engineers have anchored it. They drove a ton of steel piles into the ground and connected them to the tower with steel cables.\n\nIt won't fall any time soon. With enough money, material and care, anything can stand forever. ",
"it might have, but its been reinforced. they removed the bells to save weight, they had it supported by guy wires for a while, and most recently excavated under the high side to straighten it. At this point its considered stable."
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63ov95 | what does it mean to unlock your phone to another service provider? and why, depending on the brand, does it cost so much and take so long? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/63ov95/eli5_what_does_it_mean_to_unlock_your_phone_to/ | {
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"Most phones are *capable* of talking to other carriers that use the same networking technology. For example, in the USA, AT & T T-Mobile and I think a couple others all use the same GSM system. \n\nHowever, if you buy a phone through one of those carriers, they put a piece of software in place that checks who you're trying to connect to, and will block it if it's not AT & T or whoever. Why? Because they gave you a bargain/contract when you bought that phone through them, and they want you to stay inside their network.\n\nThus they make unlocking the device and leaving their network challenging and/or expensive. If you leave, they don't make money billing you.\n\nCell phones not purchased through a carrier company are unlocked and can be used with any compatible network. ",
"Many phones are locked to a single carrier. If I have a locked Verizon phone, I can't use it with Tmobile or Sprint or whatever. Some phones come unlocked, so they can use any carrier you have a SIM card for.\n\nSome phones can be unlocked, which is simply removing this restriction in some way. It's usually expensive and inconvenient because they don't want you to buy their product and then use it with a competitors service.",
"Most cellphones in the US are locked to a specific network (AT & T and T-Mobile for GSM, and VZW and Sprint for CDMA). Unlocking a phone allows that phone to be used on any network which uses the same technology (GSM and CDMA are not compatible with each other). I've had two cellphones unlocked for a total of $40, and after I paid the fee I was given codes to dial into each phone which unlocked them from their respective carriers (one was T-Mobile and the other was AT & T), and it took me about twenty minutes total. I've since gotten around that by using Google's Nexus phones, which are compatible with all GSM networks out of the box by design and intent."
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3b9x2a | how does 1080i work? | I just don't understand this. How can a TV not be able to maintain a consistent pixel resolution?? I get frame stuttering, but I've never been able to make sense of i resolutions. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3b9x2a/eli5_how_does_1080i_work/ | {
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"The i for \"interlaced\" means first your TV draws the even-numbered lines for the whole screen, then the odd-numbered lines. \n\nBy contrast in p for \"progressive\" mode your TV draws all the lines in order.",
"Interlaced video is to save size / bandwidth. Instead of making every frame full size, you delete half the rows from each frame alternating the even / odd rows. Now everything is half the size. Then the TV draws the frames skipping the missing rows. If things aren't moving fast it looks ok, otherwise it looks terrible. "
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a5q3a4 | why does the stomach flu (norovirus, rotavirus) present such intense, violent symptoms in most people? | Is causing intense pain, vomiting, and diarrhea beneficial to the survival of the virus, or is it just the body’s way of trying to get it out? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a5q3a4/eli5_why_does_the_stomach_flu_norovirus_rotavirus/ | {
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"Both. The pain is caused by the virus to basically make you immobile, noone wants to move much when in a lot of pain, vomiting and diarrhoea are two great ways to spread the virus to those taking care of you because you yourself are too sick to do anything. The Diarrhoea is most likely due to the virus' attacking the cells in your intestine causing them to leak water. That in combination with your body trying to berid most of the virus leads to those symptoms."
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9ms1o2 | what is title insurance | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9ms1o2/eli5_what_is_title_insurance/ | {
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"title insurance protects you from any financial loss due to problems with title. \n\nwhen you buy a house, it's recorded in public records. anyone that has a claim on the house is recorded as well. however, mistakes happen, reports get lost, public records might not be complete, etc. \n\nso if down the line, if it's discovered someone has a claim on the house, say it was sold to you \"free and clear\" by the previous owner, or some lien was discovered. title insurance would cover you. ",
"It's insurance that protects you if you buy a property and then later it emerges that the person who sold it to you (or the person who sold it to them) doesn't legally own all of it. It might happen that there was an assumption that only one person owned an area of land, but after you've paid for it someone new pops up and claims ownership of a part of the land because their great-granddad inherited it but never claimed ownership - the insurance financially protects you in case you have a legal challenge to your ownership or if you basically lose the land you paid for.",
"When one buys land, they depend on provenance of the land, to ensure that the seller really owns the land they're selling. That means tracing the ownership back to a governmental land grant (in parts of the US this may include a royal charter or the Louisiana purchase) and each owner between that and the current owner is researched, but land records may not be perfect, and as a result two people may have good reason to believe they own the same land. \n\nIf someone comes with a competing claim to own the same land, the courts decide whose claim is correct. However, you may lose if they're claim is senior to yours, and even if you win, the court case may cost lots of money. \n\nIf you lose your claim to land with your home on it, you can go after the seller, but they probably don't have the assets to make you whole. \n\nTitle insurance protects people from the risk that the seller doesn't have a full claim on the property they're selling. ",
"I am an attorney who has done some real estate work. \n\nAlright, so when you buy real property you are given a deed. Most people who buy land have a mortgage on the property. Different states handle this different ways. Just to simply things, let's say that you buy a piece of land called \"Blackacre.\" \n\nWhen your offer to purchase is accepted, you can have a title company do a \"title search.\" The title company goes down to the deed office and looks at the seller's deed. They look for easements (which are rights to use a part of someone's property for some purpose), liens (which entitle the person filing the lien to some amount of money), and they make sure that the deed is correct. Further, they make sure that any liens or mortgages were properly released when they were paid off. Then, they look at the deed from the previous owner to the seller. The title search goes back as far as the laws of the state require. In some cases, it's back 40 years. In some cases, it's back to the founding of the state. \n\nTitle insurance protects you if there is a defect in the deed. For example, maybe the deed sells you the wrong piece of land. Maybe a mortgage wasn't released. There could be any number of issues, but title insurance protects you from that. \n\nMost people don't buy title insurance. Most banks who holding mortgages on houses buy title insurance though. If there is a defect in the title, a mortgaging bank will not go through with the purchase. Still though, someone buying property should invest the $100-200 for the title search, and then purchase title insurance just in case."
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6aorma | how are hummingbirds able to hover and fly in any direction? to clarify, what is going on aerodynamically that allows this to happen? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6aorma/eli5_how_are_hummingbirds_able_to_hover_and_fly/ | {
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"The little wings flap in such a way that there is more turbulence above the bird than below it. \n\nThere's a general aerodynamic principle (bernoulli effect) that means that quickly moving air is at a lower pressure than the air around it. \n\nThis means that the difference in air pressure holds the bird up. ",
"Pretty much in the same way as a helicopter, except the wings don't go all the way around, but move back and forth instead. While flapping they generate lift/thrust, which supports the bird in the air.\n\nThere is a lot of aerodynamically interesting stuff going on around the wings, and the birds make small adjustments to the wing angles to control themselves, but that is rather beyond eli5. Just ask if you want more details."
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3j1kte | why are new smartphone processors hexa and octa-core, while consumer desktop cpus are still often quad-core? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3j1kte/eli5_why_are_new_smartphone_processors_hexa_and/ | {
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"its 2 quad cores working together\n\n\nwhen your phone needs high power (for gaming, etc), it reaches in for the red bull pack (the powerful 4 cores) \n\nwhen your phone doesn't need power (music playback, browsing), it just sips the coffee (the 4 weaker cores)",
"The name of the game is efficiency. Virtually everything done on the hardware side of cell phones is aimed at the goal of lowering power consumption. \n\nUsually, the best way to go about it with a processor is to lower the clock speed. Lower speed means lower heat dissipation, which means the electronics perform more efficiently and use less power, so you get longer battery life (or more juice for the giant screen). However, lower clock speed means slower performance. So in order to get performance speed up while balancing efficiency, they use more cores. \n\nOn a desktop processor, the name of the game is performance. They still go with multiple cores, but they also use higher clock speeds. They try to cram as many cores as they can in there, but it gets more expensive and you usually don't need as many for the same performance (unless you're using an AMD chip)\n\nIn addition to that, you have to keep in mind the cast majority of processors for cell phones are ARM while many desktop processors are Intel. Intel is able to do some crazy efficient processing with just four cores, and doesn't need to cram as many as they can into one chip. When they do, you get the top of the line i7s and Xeons, which are too expensive for most desktops. ",
"Its still only 4 running cores at a time.\n\nDepending on the task, either faster ones are being used for intensive tasks or the power efficient ones for the everyday stuff.\n\nAnd pc have gone past quad cores for some time now in the higher budget window.",
"I don't see this mentioned anywhere.\n\nIntel's desktop CPUs use very wide cores which can get a lot of work done per cycle. Most smartphone cpus are narrower and spread the workload over more (weaker) cores. Apple follows Intel's method with only 2 cpus which are very wide. They can get a lot of work done per cycle while running at much lower clocks compared its rivals and are much more power efficient.",
"Today's smartphones do indeed have 4 cores, but there's more to it than that. \n\nThere are 4 high-power cores in the chipset which are used for heavy workloads, and then there are 4 lower-power cores which are used for more basic applications that don't require a lot of horsepower. These processors aren't all used at the same time; the phone dynamically switches over to the high-power cores when it needs the processing power, then switches back to the low-power cores when it doesn't. In this way, the phone can save battery.",
"Side question. How is my iPhone 5s seeming the same speed as a phone that has 4x the processors? \nA few friends have brand new android phones with way more ram and power. The speed difference is negligible in regards to opening apps, pages, etc",
"big.Little actually doesn't answer this question either. This is implemented on dual/quad core CPUs as well. \nThe real answer is ***marketing***. Apple doesn't have this same marketing pressure since their marketing is about brand image and usability rather than the technical numbers, and they stick with dual core 1.4GHz in their latest and greatest when their competition are pushing 4-8 cores running up to 2.8GHz. Yet Apple scores top in most benchmarks.\n\nHere's a direct quote from [Anandtech](_URL_0_):\n\n*\"As we saw in our Moto X review however, two faster cores are still better for most uses than four cores running at lower frequencies. NVIDIA forced everyone’s hand in moving to 4 cores earlier than they would’ve liked, and now you pretty much can’t get away with shipping anything less than that in an Android handset. Even Motorola felt necessary to obfuscate core count with its X8 mobile computing system. Markets like China seem to also demand more cores over better ones, which is why we see such a proliferation of quad-core Cortex A5/A7 designs.*\n\n*In such a thermally constrained environment, going quad-core only makes sense if you can properly power gate/turbo up when some cores are idle. I have yet to see any mobile SoC vendor (with the exception of Intel with Bay Trail) do this properly, so until we hit that point the optimal target is likely two cores. You only need to look back at the evolution of the PC to come to the same conclusion. Before the arrival of Nehalem and Lynnfield, you always had to make a tradeoff between fewer faster cores and more of them. Gaming systems (and most users) tended to opt for the former, while those doing heavy multitasking went with the latter. Once we got architectures with good turbo, the 2 vs 4 discussion became one of cost and nothing more. I expect we’ll follow the same path in mobile.\"*",
"**TL;DR: in general day to day computing, multiple ( > 2) cores are useless. Android phone manufactures are instead taking advantage of their users being spec-conscious but technically uneducated - so they sell them an inferior product that sounds better.**\n\nWhile everything in these answers is technically true, their stated effect is far less significant than what I'm going to describe. \n\nMarketing. People who buy android phones typically think they're faster and more powerful than iPhones (they almost never are - just look at any benchmarking app right after the iPhone comes out; they're always the fastest). That's why, even though android phones always boast ridiculously high specs, they somehow manage to perform similar to - if not worse than - the iPhone. 16MP camera? That's gotta be awesome, right? Turns out your pictures are too grainy because your sensor isn't large enough to take advantage of all of those megapixels. In fact, they make the image *grainier* because they let less light through.\n\nIt's the same story with processors. Basically, programmers have been trying very hard for a very long time to take advantage of multiple core processing and they still *haven't figured out* a way to do it that doesn't cause make the company programmer jump out the office window. Here's a breakdown of what needs to be done to take advantage of a given number of cores: One core - nothing extra to take care of. Two cores - complicated operating system that does multitasking. Four cores - processor intensive tasks like compiling code that can be easily threaded. 8 cores - useless outside of a server setting or other specialized computing.\n\nIn conclusion: iPhone - two cores, wildly better single core performance, still good at multitasking. Octa-Core android - 8 cores, inferior single core performance, and small increase in efficiency in multitasking.\n\nEdit: on mobile, grammar.",
"The ELI5 answer is energy consumption. The processor of a mobile device is specifically engineered to only utilize as much cores as necessary. Newer processors also have different capability cores that vary in their power consumption, for example two of the cores will be very slow and power efficient, used to run background tasks and normal operations, then when you actually use the phone for high demand tasks the other two will be utilized.",
"There is a planet called Armintel filled with workers doing math for a living. Of course they are not all the same on how they do their work, but they all can finish any work they are assigned to do (they all finished the same degree). Currently very prevalent on this planet are the ordinary, average workers. But they're not only average, they're super lazy! They like to go get a nap as soon as they finish working, and because they're average, they tend to do things slow (scientific studies say their hearts beat slower), not to mention their intolerance for longer stress, leading them to deliberately lower their productivity to spite their bosses. The sad thing is, all of these *qualities* are innate to them, brought upon by evolution. And because they are so prevalent, and they make babies quickly, management tend to gather them in large numbers, dividing hard problems and handing them out as those workers crunch their way through the numbers.\n\nBut as said, this planet has a diverse people, and a very opposite of the lazy workers are the hardworking ones (but they have a dirty little secret, as we will see). Their hearts beat *FAST* (a few of them even take dru.. medicines to hasten the pumping!). They can work on hard problems for a much longer time before stress takes a toll and make them take things slowly. And they have four arms to chalk up the equations! And they always bring a large clipboard to take notes, compared to the post-its used by the lazy ones). Unfortunately, they are also slow to reproduce (lots of stillborn babies) and so are much more expensive to hire. Management tend to hire them in a small bunch, often in pairs, four for more demanding work. Also, they heat up and heavily sweat inside the small room they work in, greatly compounding workplace stress which could become intolerable.\n\nSo commonly on this planet, the easy work are often given to the lazy ones, with the hard ones to the hardworkers.\n\n**TL;DR: I'm a trying hard to explain something to a 5 year old entrepreneur.**",
"I'm surprised I didn't see anything about VMs and licensing in these comments. From a software licensing perspective, many companies charge per core, which would drastically increase cost with an unnecessary proliferation of cores. It makes more sense to have more powerful cores to run more complex software and environments.",
"Basically when we design a chip we see at what the application is. In the computer or even a laptop we have a lot of space compared to what we are having on the mobile device. When we look at cores, not all the cores are same. PC cores have a rich instruction set as compared to the ones in mobile devices. Thus when we want to some piece of work in a PC that one core is enough. That one core has a lot of power consumption as well. On the other hand in a mobile device we have a number of 2,4,6,8 smaller cores that divide the job and do it. These cores too have different purposes, some are optimized for graphics while some are optimized for pure computation. It all comes down to the application. In a desktop those 4 powerful cores are more than enough to get the job done. Whereas in the mobile we need more low power cores.",
"Read the history of the ARM processor and the history of the Intel x86 processor. Very different approaches to computing and silicon that have resulted in very different hardware platforms.",
"There are six and eight core desktop processors I am writing this comment on a desktop with 6 cores right now. In fact Intel even makes server processors with up to 18 cores. _URL_0_",
"8 cores, 4 active at a given time, one set uses low power, one is fast mode. It depends on the OS to be able to tell it to switch and takes ~60000 clock cycles to switch between set's.\n\nNow, looking at a Quad-core would be like comparing the number of cylinder's in a car but neglecting the RPM (clock speed) and horse power (instructions per clock cycle). These aren't really good analogues though.",
"Eli5: what is this question asking?",
"Marketing, mostly. We've already seen this battle in the desktop sector between AMD and Intel, and AMD didn't win because despite having more cores (8 vs 4), their per-core performance, as well as power consumption, was/is terrible. (Actually it's a little inaccurate to call it a battle, because Intel won by not playing; they just made better CPUs with fewer cores and let AMD's marketing team make fools of themselves.) \n\nThe top-rated comment is correct in that big.LITTLE is a power-saving exercise, but I honestly doubt that any smartphone really needs any more than 2 cores at any given time. Eventually the smartphone manufacturers will figure out that people want more battery life instead of MOAR CORES that they can't use, and this willy-waving of \"how many cores can we cram into a 5\" smartphone without causing it to melt when it's powered on\" will stop.",
"Consumer desktop CPUs come from Intel and use Intel Architecture, smartphone processors come from various companies who use ARM architecture. Intel uses various techniques to conserve power like variable voltage scaling. Arm implements a system where a big processor is used when speed is needed but switches to a little processor when power conservation is needed. \n\nSo, you have competing technologies, however, Intel is still trying to break in to the Mobile space but owns the desktop space, and ARM owns the mobile space, although I don't think they are trying to break into the desktop space.\n\n**TL;DR: Two different cpu architectures from different companies owning different spaces.**",
"**TL;DR Energy efficiency!** \n\nOne important factor is frequency (the GHz). It's a complex equation, but think of it like this: doubling the frequency more than doubles the power consumption. At some point (remember Pentium 4) the CPUs became ridiculously hot, and multi-core became de facto. \n\nIn a desktop, you can afford to have fewer, faster CPUs (which runs single-core programs faster), but in a smartphone, you want to save battery life at all cost (and thus make the apps utilise all cores, efficiently).\n\nI'm a electrical engineer.",
" EE Here Every Answer here is off a little\n\nCell phones use ARM cores or other small [RISC](_URL_0_) based cpus. The philosophy behind RISC is to use a simplified [instruction set](_URL_1_) (low level code) that makes the [processing pipeline](_URL_4_) that the instructions go down less complicated, faster, and smaller. The downside is that you may have to use 2, 3 or more instructions to accomplish what big boy intel does in 1.\n\nIntel uses a [CISC](_URL_3_) architecture that takes the the opposite approach with a hugely massive instruction set that has instructions for every type of thing you could invision doing with the cpu, meaning you need the hardware to interpret and process all of that, it has a long pipeline (20+ steps vs 3 in ARM) and is backwards compatible (seriously) going back to the 1980's . The addition of [hyperthreading](_URL_2_) is more complexity and silicon.\n\nKeep in mind as well, that the component price of even an 8 core cell phone cpu ($50, < $30 at volume) is a fraction of the cost of a high end desktop cpu ($800+).\n\n\nIt is much easier (in terms of making actual silicon) to stack RISC cores in your MPU and there are lots of parallel system tasks that cell phones need to do continuously that makes it marketable, it also helps that the kernels running the android flavors of linux have been multithreading efficient for years. Additionally, Intel and AMD do not really license their cores or designs out, on the other hand ARM has a widely used softcore (for FPGA/ASIC), silicon design, and other licensable IP for all their products that people like TI, Qualcomm,, etc license, make, and sell to cellphone companies which increases the competitive pressure among manufacturers to stand out.\n\nTLDR: RISC vs CISC has come again boys",
"Marketing is the right answer. 8 cores sound better.\n\nIn practice:\nOnly 4 cores are ever used: the more efficient 4 when saving power, and faster 4 when speed is required.\n\nThat's like buying a car and paying for 2 engines and only using 1 of them at a time. It's a waste.\n\nProper design would've been to have cores that are efficient, yet scale to high performance, and just have 4 of them.\n\nMoreover, multi-core is more suited for multi-tasking purposes. Since 90% of the time, a phone is probably only handling 1-2 tasks, it really only needs 2 cores.\n\ni.e. Instead of spending silicon space for 6 extra cores, they should've just improved a dual core setup. This means making 8 cores is mostly because it sounds better for advertising.",
"It's cheaper to pay eight kids to do eight jobs than it is to pay four adults to do eight jobs more effectively. In this case, the pay is energy, the jobs are phone processes, adults are desktop processors and kids mobile processors. ",
"This thread reminds me of those budget and people that believe their 8 core £100 CPU is better then a solid Intel 3/4 core",
"Mobile processor cores are very weak compared to desktop processor cores. A dual-core desktop processor is often faster than a quad-core or octa-core mobile processor. \n\nA single desktop core can handle multiple jobs at once just fine, while a weak mobile core can't. So instead of making them more powerful, which would produce more heat and require more power, they just divide the processor up into more of them, because mobile apps don't require lots of power to run, and more cores means more things can run at the same time.",
"The cores are weaker then the quad ones.\nIE. AMD 6300 has 6 cores\nan i5 4690k destorys it with 4 cores"
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bdftu7 | how do bike/car stuntmen learn to do it without dying? | So I saw [this video](_URL_0_) where the biker drove and made a jump from the ramp , went spinning in the air then landed un-harmed. While I understand this is due to him practicing it multiple times , possibly for months or years, I do not understand how do they practice such dangerous moves without risking death.
& #x200B;
Even when you start with your first jumps while learning without any spinning a newbie is very likely to crash with his bike a few times how do they survive it?. For more fancy jump the danger increases even more one miscalculation and you'd hit the ground instead instead of the landing ramp, this might happen more than often while they learning it.
& #x200B;
So how do they keep safe from falling and hitting things with such speed and height while learning, because I doubt you can learn anything without failing a few times . | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bdftu7/eli5_how_do_bikecar_stuntmen_learn_to_do_it/ | {
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"Firstly, they can practice with safety equipment. You can have mats and nets and other things to soften the landing of a failed attempt.\n\nAlso, they start with smaller, safer types of tricks and work their way up.\n\nLastly, failing isn't necessarily a death sentence. Just broken bones and stuff. So they try - and fail - without dying, but not without injury. Evel Kinevel is reputed as having broken every bone in his body.",
"[Here's a quick video showing one method to safely practice stunts](_URL_0_)"
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2rv1fh | how do chinese people alphabetize? | EDIT: Oh shit, I need to get bored in class more often. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2rv1fh/eli5_how_do_chinese_people_alphabetize/ | {
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"I don't know that much chinese, but spoken chinese has a phonetic alphabet, and it has characters to represent the sounds. From there, there's some convention to organize which sounds go first.",
"They use the Pinyin system to \"collate\" a series of words that basically \"Englishes/alphabetizes\" Chinese. Its what you read when you learn Chinese as an English speaker (eg: Ni Hao). There many other ways, but this is the one I'm most familiar with. ",
"China, Taiwan and Singapore use a system called [Pinyin](_URL_0_) which transcribes the Manderin pronunciation of Chinese characters into the Latin alphabet and is alphabetized similar to in English.",
"Weeeee don't? We don't write chinese with any sort of alphabet system, words are written by different 'parts' of the word. There's no order to these parts, you just have to know them. In Chinese dictionaries, they list words by these simple parts, so if you know generally what part the word has in it and how many strokes it takes to write the word, you can find it in the dictionary.\n\nFor example, the word heart in chinese is 心, which has 4 strokes. It's also a very basic 'part', in the word for love, which is 愛 [(bigger image here)](_URL_0_). You can see that the word love has the part of 'heart' inside it. But it also has the 6 strokes on top of it that cover the 'heart' (another part with another name) and the bottom 3 strokes that represent another part.\n\nedit: This is also my knowledge from a traditional chinese writing POV, which has many more strokes than simplified chinese. I have no idea how simplified chinese works, but I assume its the same.",
"As per Wikipedia, via Google: \n\nWe have to start off by disregarding the term \"alphabetizing\" and instead use \"collating.\" Collation is the process of assembling written information into a standard order. Using the English alphabet, we'd call this process alphabetizing, but that's really just a specific form of collating. \n\nNow, lots of writing systems that don't use our alphabet have developed their own ways of collating written information. Japanese hiragana and katakana, for instance, use a syllabic structure based on their speech sounds. So you would learn the speech sounds in a given order from least complex to most complex: a - i - u - e - o, ka - ki - ku - ke - ko, sa - shi - su - se - so, and so on. Each syllable is comprised of a consonant attached to a base vowel.\n\nIn Japanese Kanji, the characters are generally collated by \"stroke order\" -- that is, the order in which you are supposed to make each stroke which comprises the finished character. The same is true of Chinese Hanzi. \n\nGranted, it can get more or less complicated from there, depending on which writing system you use. Traditional Chinese may, for instance, be collated differently from Simplified Chinese.",
"Just like everyone else; the English alphabet doesn't change if you're Chinese...\n\nOn a more serious note, there are two ways:\n\n1. You group in radicals (i.e. the radical 女 means \"woman\" and makes all characters that contain it have a feminine quality:\n\n- 妈 = Mother\n\n- 姐 = older sister\n\n- 好 = good\n\nWithin radicals, you group by number of strokes needed to write that radical:\n\n- 女 takes 3 strokes to write\n- 木 takes 4 strokes to write\n\nTherefore, words that contain 女 as a radical come before those that contain 木 in a dictionary. For a complete list of radicals in the order they come in a dictionary: _URL_2_\n\n2. The other way to alphabetize is quite modern since it's a western adaptation. Every character in mandarin Chinese can be pronounced using the western alphabet plus an accent, so in dictionaries that use this classification, they'll convert 女 to \"nǚ\", 妈 to \"mā\", 姐 to \"jiě\". It would work just like an English dictionary, j coming before m, 姐 would come before 妈.\n\nNow to classify accents, they follow this simple order:\n\n- Flat accent (horizontal line above the letter you want accented) comes first: - (e.g. ā)\n\n- Ascending accent comes second: / (e.g. é)\n\n- Valley accent comes third: v (e.g. ě)\n\n- Descending accent comes fourth and last: \\ (e.g. à)\n\nThere are of course special cases like ¨, but that's more advanced, and not incredibly relevant to the main question.\n\nThird way, mentioned by someone else that I didn't know about (probably the most ancient of all 3 methods): _URL_3_\n\nEDIT: WOW THANK YOU FOR GOLD!\n\nEDIT2: The proper word for \"accent\" is \"tone\" as some have pointed out. Also, for tones in Cantonese: _URL_0_\n\nEDIT3: changed \"neutral accent\" to \"flat\"\n\nEDIT4: Some have asked why 木 takes 4 strokes, when you can technically do it in 3. The ^ in 木 isn't a legitimate stroke (based on millennia of customs). List of legitimate strokes: _URL_1_\n\nEDIT5: Added \"sort by stroke\", 3rd method.",
"I'm Chinese and I think the reason learning how to read/write Chinese is so difficult is because there isn't really an alphabet. If you want to learn the language then you have to literally memorize 1000's of characters each with their own specific meaning. \n\nIt's pretty inefficient and even my parents who were born in Taiwan sometimes don't recognize certain letters and forget some because there are so many.",
"Actually, this is not a complete answer. While China *does* use Pinyin which is basically Chinese pronunciation in Roman leters and can be categorized in alphabetical order, there is also an alternative \"alphabetical order\" which is older and was used in the Olympics opening ceremony: 一 丨 丿 乀 乚\nIt goes in this order and has nothing to do with the 'radicals' or the number of their strokes. It breaks down in detail of this order: 一一，一丨，一丿，一乀，一乚 etc. \n\nThat is why 韩国 South Korea (first stroke 一) is before 美国 America (first stroke 乀) in stroke order and in the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony.",
"Long time lurker, first time poster. So let's get started shall we?\n\nI speak Mandarin as my second language, and am more familiar with the simplified version. There are two types of Mandarin: simplified and traditional. Trust me, the traditional version is much more convoluted than the simplified one.\n\nFirstly, in Mandarin, there is probably no equivalent of alphabetization, at least not in the conventional way. This isn't really surprising, since the characters descended from pictograms - images that convey a message. Thus, you can see that Mandarin characters more closely resemble pictures, rather than the normal alphabets that we see in English. Now then, how do we depict Mandarin characters?\n\nMost simple characters consist of a left side and a right side. In some cases, both sides tell a story. For example, the character 话 is made up of 言(this is the traditional version of the left side) and 舌. The left tells us that this word is related to speech, since 言 means speech. The right is the character for the tongue. Put them together, and you get the character for the English equivalent of word. Speech from the tongue = word.\n\nThen again, it isn't always so simple. For some characters, only one side tells a story. I'll take the example raised by /u/pudmedcentury. 姐 is made up of 女 and 且. 女 tell us that this character is referencing to something feminine. However, as far as I know, 且 does not give any meaning to 姐. For the record, 姐 means older sister, which addresses the feminine portion.\n\nSome characters operate in a different way - up and down. The character 烫 which means hot or scalded, is made up of 汤(soup) and 火(fire). In the past, people probably got scalded by hot soup most frequently, leading to this character. Fire + soup = hot (or if you are unlucky, scalded). \n\nThere are many more orientations to Mandarin characters, including single words (e.g. 人 which means person), top-left-right (e.g. 森 which means forest), left-top-bottom (e.g. 祸 which means disaster). As usual, some parts have meaning, some parts don't (as far as I know). There are just too many to list, and as such, I don't think that Mandarin characters can be alphabetized in an English sort of way.\n\nHow then do Mandarin dictionaries work? Every character has a pronunciation, which is translated to English alphabets. So 森 is sen, 人 is ren, 烫 is tang. Basically, all the characters are arranged in alphabetical order, which makes the foundation of the dictionary. However, every translation normally has 4 tones. In Mandarin we call them 声(shēng), or sound. In speech, the 4 tones of the same translation sound different, with each tone having many characters. So 汤(tāng - first tone), 堂(táng - second tone), 躺(tǎng - third tone), 烫(tàng - fourth tone) all sound different and have different meanings, 堂, 糖, 塘, 膛 (táng) all sound the same, but have different meanings. Characters in dictionaries are first arranged by alphabets, and within same translations, arranged by tones. This is probably the closest that we have to alphabetization in Mandarin.\n\nThere are many more aspects to Mandarin, like the fifth tone (ü) and the sequence to writing Mandarin characters. This is an incredibly complex language to learn with an incredibly large amount of vocabulary. Feel free to ask any questions or correct any mistakes that I made, or even to ask for the meaning of any characters that I used. \n\n",
"A Chinese dictionary is sorted by number of strokes.",
"I remember seeing a documentary on rural Chinese life (I think it was called Up The Yangtze, but I am unsure), and this topic came up in it. It was sometimes very problematic for some organizations/businesses when their secretaries would pass away, because the secretaries would organize files and documents in a way that (surely) made sense to themselves, but would take a great deal of time for someone else coming in to interpret and figure out, primarily because there was no one set way to organize things.\n\nThe best ELI5 answer is already given, I just thought it was a nifty contribution (and the documentary was really interesting)!",
"A follow up question that is somewhat related: Do Asian countries that use symbols have a tough time developing IT? It seems that coding would need to be changed pretty significantly to work for these countries.",
"This is an interesting question/post because I think it demonstrates how language very strongly affects (and potentially restricts) thought.\n\nAt the crux of this question is an inquiry about imposing order on a set of letters, and how that 'translates' to imposing a similar schema of order on a set of logograms.\n\nI would pose a couple related questions:\n\n1. What is the 'purpose' of alphabetizing letters? Is there some logical rationale for the ordering of letters in a specific manner?\n\n2. Whether there is a purpose, is there a related rationale that would be applicable to syllabograms or logograms? Letters do not have any inherent meaning. Syllabograms may, but are closer to letters in that they are (nearly) meaningless. Logograms are morphemes, unlike letters or syllabograms. Logograms can be associated via meaning and related context, unlike letters or syllabograms, which *may* only be ordered by the associated phoneme.",
"So do western letters and phonetics seem like a really weird concept to native Chinese speakers?",
"\nOur Student ID# were given out in order of stroke numbers in our last names. If people have the same last name (which is common), proceed to first name. So you'd have the 王 (Wang), 呂 (Lu) ahead of 張 (Chang), 劉 (Liu), 關 (Guan).",
"If you look up a Chinese dictionary, there are usually 2 \"table of contents\".\n\n1. By radical (and then by number of strokes)\n2. By mandarin pinyin",
"Alphabetization is for alphabets with letters. Chinese doesn't work that way. All of the other explanations are good (the ones by stroke & radical apply - if you've ever picked up a Chinese dictionary that's entirely in Chinese and isn't organized by Hanyu Pinyin, you'll see what they mean), but FYI \"alphabetization\" is a western concept. Chinese characters are put in order for the sake of a dictionary/organizational method in order of increasing complexity, and within that, by tone.",
"I've always wondered what a Chinese computer keyboard looks like. ",
"As various commenters have said, there's really no good way to arrange a Chinese dictionary. It is perfectly possible for serious scholars of the Chinese language to be unable to remember how to write \"[to sneeze](_URL_0_)\".\n\n(I rambled on further about this and related concepts [a while ago](_URL_1_).)",
"Most people are used to writing according to stroke order, so it's pretty easy. The rule of thumb is that Chinese characters are written right to left and then up and down. So 十 ten is written 一 丨 mouth 口 is written 丨 乛 一 a character which uses both of these 古 ancient would be 十 and then 口 so the entire stroke order would be 一丨丨乛一",
"I asked my parents this. This is strictly from their time (1970s-1980s).\n\nThey arrange names by rank of how well you preform in school. Think of it as our GPA system but the names are public.\n\nOur alphabet has 37 \"alphabets\", as a kid I remember a bit.\n\nIt goes \" b p m f d t n l ...\" Then we have the vowels \"a o e I u ü\"\n\nIn the Chinese dictionary there are two ways to find the character.\n\nThe old fashion way is finding the \"root word\", then find the number of stroke it has. The dictionary will have a section with a category of the root word plus the remaining strokes of the character.\n \nFor example \"hello\" is 你好\n\nFor \"好” the root word is \"女”，which is 3 strokes.\n\nYou would look under 3 stroke root words, find \"女” under a category with a page number\n\nAfter u go to the page number, it will categorize the remaining strokes . Since the remaining word is \"子” it would be under \"3 strokes\" \n\nYou then find \"好” with a page number. That page number is the definition.\n\nOr if you know the pronouciation, just flip to the \"hao\" section\n\nThe current Chinese dictionary are sorted like America alphabet A-Z\n",
"Just because some people have described alphabetization schemes that are possible and used in some special cases (dictionaries) here, does NOT mean Chinese normally have a way to order shit so you can find it. Hence I feel your question isn't being answered in an honest way. \n\nCase and point: I've spent HUNDREDS of hours collectively in a ton of Chinese bookstores browsing both books and CDs. When I've looked for something specific I could never find it on my own, they're not ordered by Pinyin or anything else. Shit is just thrown around haphazardly within shelves that specify different categories around the book store. Basically, bookstore workers memorize where books are and that's how they help you find them. Music CDs get thrown in two categories: Male Singers, Female Singers, they don't even have genres because Chinese artists will put out 1 album with everything from Back Street Boys to Rap to Rock on the same album (absolute whores). \n\nIt is MADDENING.\n\nOh and the other thing is that Chinese are trendy motherfuckers, so it is not as big a problem as you'd expect in a bookstore, even a GIGANTIC one. The selection is limited, because they have 20-40 copies of so many titles. I've gone looking for books published 5~10 years prior and when I told the store personnel how \"old\" the book was they looked at me like I was mad. Once a book has sold out, it seems, it is gone forever. There is no concept of once a book has been published you should be able to find it until the end of time, like we believe in the west. Chinese speake EXTREMELY derisively about things that are \"old\". They are a bunch of trend worshippers, blindly following what is \"cool\" or \"hip\" or \"in\" at the moment. (Of course not EVERYONE, just observing a trend which is much stronger there than in the West where being called \"trendy\" is a huge insult. It seems in Chinese you can't even use the word 流行 as an insult.)",
"All you need to know is how to break up each character into the 5 types of strokes 一 丨 丿 乀 乚 and the order they are written in. \n\nChina 中国\n\n中 = 丨乛一丨\n国 = 丨乛一一丨一丶一\n\nIn an \"alphabetical\" list, 国 would be first because of the 4th stroke.\n\nEDIT: the five stroke categories\n\n一\n\n丨（includes 亅）\n\n丿\n\n乀（includes 丶）\n\n乚（includes 乛乙ㄅㄣㄥㄑ and other stokes with change of direction）\n",
"For the organization of Chinese characters in a non-romanized system, pubmedcentury is right. But as a real linguist specializing in Chinese let me just clarify something. People don't SPEAK simplified or traditional Chinese. Those are writing systems - people in Taiwan and Hong Kong typically learn how to READ/WRITE traditional and people in Mainland and Singapore typically learn how to READ/WRITE simplified. The language we as English speakers typically call Mandarin is called 國語 guoyu 'National Language' in Taiwan and 普通话 putonghua 'Common Exchange Language' in China; so people SPEAK those languages which are more or less as different from each other as British English and American English (mutually-intelligible with minor differences in pronunciation and words). The system of how characters are organized in these systems is more or less the same - as pubmedcentury describes. Characters have had simplified variants since the beginning of Chinese writing and the terms \"Traditional\" and \"Simplified\" are 20th century coinings. At the onset of the Cultural Revolution on the Mainland roughly 20% of people were literate, so Mao and his circle of policy planning people decided to formally reduce the number of strokes for about 2,000 characters (they had two formal revisions). At present literacy in Mainland China is at about 85% and most of the completely illiterate people are elderly. In Taiwan and HK the literacy level is super high, I think at least 95-97% if I remember correctly.\n\nWhat is the bigger point I am trying to make? Well, this is a polarized debate and many people want to say one is better than the other. The point is that they are equally difficult systems in which to become functionally literate. Mainland, HK, and Taiwanese school children become functionally literate around the same time. On the other hand I won't argue against the point that Simplified is generally easier to write (when I was an undergrad I learned Simplifed in the States and Traditional when I studied abroad in Taiwan for a summer), but this mostly has to do with speed (less stokes, quicker to write), the underlying principles and organization of Chinese characters do not differ between Simplified and Traditional.",
"what if you were weird and wrote your symbols with different amounts of strokes \n\n\nI just thought of this because I write my lower case \"e\" and \"b\" different from the rest, probably because I'm left handed",
"Often Chinese characters are made up of more basic characters. \n1. Split the word into it's most basic characters.\n2. Take either the most left or top basic character unit, and count the strokes it has.\n3. Look up that basic unit in the dictionary. Then flip to the page with all the characters that begin with that basic unit. \n4. Now look at the rest of the word, excluding the basic unit character you just used. Count how many strokes it has. \n5. Flip to the appropriate page for the number of strokes. And now find the word. \n\nDone. ",
"There have been various schemes tried. No on has, in any Western sense Alphabetized Chinese.\n\nAlphabetical languages is one thing the Chinese continue to secretly admire about the West. \n\nAs one older Chinese immigrant who came to the US the same year my mother came here from Germany, 1956, told me, \"If you can figure out how to alphabetize Chinese, you'll make BILLIONS!! not Millions, BILLIONS!!"
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"http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/radicals.php",
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9rf4ad | why do so many water droplets stay in place on a glass shower door after you are done? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9rf4ad/eli5_why_do_so_many_water_droplets_stay_in_place/ | {
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"Water molecules would kinda prefer to be close to other water molecules rather than to air molecules so they gather together in drops (you can Google water surface tension if you like). While the shower glass may look smooth to us its tiny bumps seem rough to the little water droplets so they cling where they are rather than running downwards, plus the tension which draws the water molecules towards each other as droplets isn't over powered by the force of gravity pulling them downwards"
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f2gktp | whats the difference between sugar in fruits, sugar in sweets, sugar in normal food (like potatoes, meat) and raw white sugar that i buy in supermarket? which one is worse for my health? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f2gktp/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_sugar_in_fruits/ | {
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"They are all sugar. \n\nThe only difference is that some foods (fruit for example) also have fiber in them, which very slightly slows down the rate at which your body absorbs the sugar. But that hardly matters unless you are diabetic. \n\nAlso some foods like fruits and potatoes have vitamins and minerals in them that are good for you. That doesn't make their sugars any less sugars. \n\nIn terms of calories, their sugars are for all intents and purposes just sugar. Try not to consume too much sugar.",
"Sugar is a category of molecules, including monosaccharides (one molecule, like glucose or fructose), disaccharides (two monosaccharides stuck together, eg 1 Glucose + 1 Fructose = 1 Sucrose), and polysaccharides (many mono or disaccharides stuck together, eg Starch which is a whole bunch of glucoses).\n\nThe sugar you find in fruit is mostly fructose. Fructose is a lot sweeter than glucose or sucrose, which means less of it is required to create the taste of sweetness. Many artificial sweeteners are fructose-based. Fructose is also less versatile than glucose in terms of what the body can use it for. \n\nThe sugar in sweets is typically sucrose, as is raw white sugar. Sucrose is broken down into 1 glucose and 1 fructose in your small intestine. The glucose is subsequently stored in the liver, whilst the fructose behaves like fructose. Generally, you need more sucrose to create a flavour of sweetness than you do fructose, however, sucrose is also *waaaaay* easier to make and also quite a lot easier to work with, which is why it's the go to sugar for things like baking. \n\nThe sugar in things like potatoes and meat *tend* to be glucose-based polysaccharides. In potatoes, this is starch. This kind of sugar you probably hear referred to most often as \"carbohydrates\". They're the carbohydrates that don't count as \"of which sugar\" on food labels. These sugars take quite a while for your digestive tract to digest, and are also very easily stored by the liver (the first stop of the blood after the small intestine, where glucose is absorbed), meaning that these large glucose-based polysaccharides are much less of an issue for blood sugar levels than sucrose is. Also, these polysaccharides don't taste sweet, which means they don't activate the brain's dopamine very much, and thus it's much harder to over-eat. \n\nBonus round: Lactose sugars found in milk and other dairy products are even less sweet than glucose, but is pretty much identical to glucose in terms of function since the body rapidly converts it into glucose. However, most humans can't actually digest lactose at all. \n\nNo sugar is directly worse for your health than any other. The real danger of sugar is that it can be addictive, and as a sweet substance, is also something we can be prone to eating far too much of just by accident. Sucrose in particular dissolves spectacularly well, so you can pack a *ton* of it into pretty much anything you want, like coke.",
"There are several types of sugar, the main ones being fructose, glucose and galactose. Sugar in fruits is mostly fructose. Raw white sugar and sugar in sweets is sucrose (which is half glucose and half fructose). Sugar in potatoes is eventually broken down into glucose.\n\nThe ones that are worse for your health are the ones that come already stripped out of the plant cells, so that eating it is like a junkie injecting it straight into their veins. The fancy term for that is **acellular carbohydrates**, because they aren't packaged in cells the way the fructose from fruit and the glucose from potatoes comes. Your digestive system absorbs the acellular carbs in one massive hit as you eat them rather than over hours as your body breaks down the fibre around the sugars in other foods.\n\nSo the 'bad' sugars are white sugar, things with white sugar in them, and sugary drinks. \n\nThe 'good' sugars are ones which come inside wholefoods like fruit, potatoes etc etc."
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30o9pc | why are med schools and residencies so selective when there is a national shortage of doctors? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/30o9pc/eli5_why_are_med_schools_and_residencies_so/ | {
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"Because lowering the standards causes more harm to society than the shortage does. ",
"Because a sudden influx of tons of shitty doctors doesn't really help the problem of a shortage of competent doctors.",
"Wow, I'm so lucky the dropped the standards for becoming a Doctor, otherwise I would never have made it. So anyway, I'll be preforming an epend... apetand.... a procedure an you. This might fix the problem, I hope. If not we'll try something else. Hell, the body has 2 of most things for a reason so I can probably take most of them out.",
"That's why all your HMO doctors seem to be from other countries.",
"Because medicine in the us is a racket. The ama intentionally restricts the supply of mds because this makes doctors less numerous which has many effects, one of which is to make them easier to control. For all the posters mentioning some elusive standards, when was the last time you had to see a doctor for something that mattered? There are shit doctors / medical people all over the us.",
"Becasue that's what the medical profession wants.\n\nMore doctors means lower salaries for those who are currently doctors. It's supply and demand. Professions in general do this - lawyers, dentists etc. In fact, at least where I'm from, the average dentist is paid more than the average doctor.\n\nAs George Bernard Shaw said, \"A profession is a conspiracy against the laity\".\n\nObviously, professional organisations like the AMA present themselves as an organisation dedicated to the health of the nation. This is true to a good extent, but not their only reason for existence.\n\nMuch like unions, they exists to benefit their members.\n\nOften, however, things which are primarily done for self interest are presented as being for the good of the public, as this is obviously easier to sell.\n\nFor example, there clearly has to be basic standards for doctors. Yet there are plenty of people who could otherwise be competent doctors who are prevented from doing so. Also keep in mind that a limit on the number of doctors is not the same as a basic standard.\n\nYou could put forward a basic standard, which a greater or lesser number of people could meet. However, when you set a quota, the basic standard of successful applicants can differ.\n\nYou could, for example, require a basic score of, say 65 on the GAMSAT (the Australian and UK equivalent of the MCAT, a test which determines entry to medical school).\n\nYou might have 100 people meet this standard, or 20 people.\n\nWhat schools do, however, is instead set a number of places, like say, 100 places. Consequently, a score of 52 could get you in, or you might need a score of 75 to get in.\n\nIt all depends not on how you measure against some basic standard, but rather how well you do compared to others.\n\nHere's an example of how it has worked in practice.\n\nThe AMA (the *Australian* Medical Association) lobbied for certain standards on the test which foreign doctors are required to sit in order to become licensed in Australia.\n\nThis test was very difficult (even many Austrlalian trained doctors couldn't pass it). This was mostly because the AMA doesn't want too many foreign doctors coming to Australia, as this would lower the salaries of local doctors.\n\nObviously, there has to be some basic standard - you don't want incompetent doctors coming in. But the test was far too difficult if the intention was just to serve this purpose. The reason the AMA wanted the test was to reduce competition.\n\nThe problem was, even though the test was incredibly difficult, lots of people still kept passing it. Consequently, the AMA lobbied to make the test even more difficult. But people, who really wanted to be doctors and so would work hard to meet the standards, would still keep passing. This went on and on, with the test getting more and more difficult, but with people still passing, until the AMA just came straight out and asked for a quota on the number of foreign doctors allowed into Australia.\n\nClearly, a quota does nothing to address the competence of these doctors - all it does is reduce the number coming in.\n\nThis is common in many areas. Take, for example, some food imports.\n\nNow, once again, there obviously have to be some standards - you don't want poisoned, unhealthy food coming in.\n\nSo the agricultural industry lobbies for these standards. Sometimes, however, they simply ask for a complete ban on imports.\n\nWhile, on the face of it, setting standards is good, the ultimate motivation behind this is not to ensure the health of a country's food consumers, but to reduce foreign competition. If foreign food, which is of a similar quality but is a lot cheaper (Western farmers need to make more of a profit than, say, some poor farmer in Africa who lives in a country with a lower standard of living), consumers would tend to buy that over food made within the country.\n\nIt would benefit consumers, but would cost producers.\n\nPolitically speaking, however, a small concentrated group with a lot to lose (like farmers) will put in more effort and have more political influence than a large diverse group (like consumers) where, although the aggregate benefit is great (greater than the aggregate loss experienced by the producers) the individual benefit for any one individual is small.\n\nSaving 20 cents on a tomato won't cause me to lobby politicians, but a producer losing millions in profits will lead to them exerting whatever policital influence they can have. ",
"There are a two reasons:\n\n1. Restricting the supply of doctors drives up doctors' salaries.\n\n2. Hospitals need to pay for wages. If for example the Government cuts hospital funding, the hospital can't hire more staff.",
"There's actually a shortage of residencies at the moment. There's a disconnect between the amount of medical graduates and places to match them to.",
"There's not a shortage of docs. There is a shortage of primary care, internists, and emergency medicine specialists, yes, and that's because they all pay the least. The general public has a gross misunderstanding of the years (12 or more) of training it takes to become a physician, the incredible long hours (sleep? What's that?), the conflicting governmental regulations, and the near-constant threat of being fired if a patient you didn't write another narcotic prescription to complains to administration (it's happened to 4 docs I know personally). Docs graduate from residency with about $200,000 of debt and if they want to live somewhere other than Butthole, USA, they won't be paid anywhere near enough to enjoy the life they worked so hard for. More than 90% of the emergency med and primary care physicians I've met the past 5 years (well over 100 ppl) are looking for an escape route from medicine. They're miserable, they feel taken advantage of by the hospitals or groups they work for (and they are), and their options are very slim. They're stuck. And they're telling every college-bound person they know \"Don't go into medicine!!\". Yes, healthcare in this country is broken, and residencies and med schools are the least of our problems. "
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1lp9mt | why don't companies like boeing and rolls-royce use robots in their manufacturing processes? | I recently toured Boeing's manufacturing facilities, and the guide told us that every single part of their aircraft is assembled by hand. And other companies that make high-quality machines or vehicles, like Rolls-Royce, swear that they can make a better product when robots aren't involved; they say that the human can, for instance, paint a car better than a robot can. But I fail to understand how a human can be more accurate and do a better job than a robot; after all, isn't that why robots were invented?
Any insight on this? On what humans are capable of doing from a manufacturing or industrial standpoint that robots still can't do? Thanks! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1lp9mt/eli5_why_dont_companies_like_boeing_and/ | {
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"While every industry has different manufacturing challenges, in complex and technically difficult builds I imagine having robots would be difficult for a few reasons. A robot why automated and efficient, may not always perform the best job. An analogy would be a robot grilling steaks, while it may be able to have repeatability it would be hard pressed cook each steak to the optimal tastiness given natural variation. Another challenge to specifically high-demanded quality industry is high tolerances, would you rather and highly trained team of technicians build your plane or a robot who is oblivious when it messes up. ",
"Huge amounts of automation are used.\n\nAutomating final assembly of these parts would be hard. If they made millions of engines, they would do it. But assembling a few per day is easier and more cost effective to do with people.\n\nIt's a matter of cost vs benefit. Do you spend millions automating something, or pay hundreds of thousands on labor?"
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94zye7 | why is plastic so bad for the environment if it's raw material literally comes out of earth ? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/94zye7/eli5_why_is_plastic_so_bad_for_the_environment_if/ | {
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"Plutonium literally comes from the earth, too.\n\nEverything item we use comes from the earth. Some, however, are toxic.\n\nPlastic is made from petroleum, and petroleum isn't good for the environment. ",
"it is difficult for it to decompose, it can be toxic if it is in the form of microplastics used in cosmetics and generally has really bad effect on animals since they frequently eat it/get stuck in it\n\nchemically speaking i cant say much more, but generally if it decomposed faster/in an easier way it would be much much better. ",
"Oil, the raw material for plastic is a fluid, the big problem is that plastic is too durable and does not exist naturally, but does not behave like rock. It does not bream down like organic matter, but is not an inorganic molecule. Peat and pitch two close natural materials are toxic for animals but they tend to stay in place unlike plastic which floats in water and disperses. Because of its flexibility and the inability to break down it clogs gills and airways killing animals who would not normally die from biological materials ingested the same way because they would break down. \n\nTo make things worse the monikers and plasticisers act like hormones to many animals and so muck up animal development.",
"The raw materials are converted into something nature has never experienced before. There are no organisms capable of processing it, so plastic trash might as well be everlasting rocks, but with no positives and countless negatives for the environment (especially marine life).\n\nThe problem is that plastics are less robust than rocks. They break into micro-sized fragments which are absorbed by marine animals. Imagine eating a mouthful of sand with every meal. That will screw up your digestive system. Also, plastics can be made in Long thin shapes like plastic bags / ribbons. These can tangle easily, and choke animals to death, or block their digestive tract. Because it doesn’t degrade, there is no option but to slowly die.\n\nIf an organism evolved to digest plastic, there would be less problems with plastic trash. Floating bits would break down into hydrocarbons and become feed material for plants. Unfortunately, evolving an organism capable of doing so will be slow.\n\nLook up the Carboniferous period. The exact same thing happened with wood lignin. When woody plants first evolved, nothing digested wood pulp and it just littered the entire world. Literally miles deep of coal rocks were formed from this wooden layer not decaying and slowly being compressed. Eventually some fungi evolved to digest it and now we don’t worry about “wood pollution”.",
"It isn't a \"raw material\" that literally comes out of the Earth. It is a highly processed material that is extremely hard to break down."
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5a3crr | why are large objects cgi in a normally 2-d animated movie or tv show? | I've noticed this and it's always weird to me. For example in The Iron Giant that's a 2-D animated film, the giant is CGI. Why is this? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5a3crr/eli5_why_are_large_objects_cgi_in_a_normally_2d/ | {
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"It's cheaper to animate. The hardest thing to animate is movement so that takes time and time=money. Why the giant is a cgi model is because it's easy to make it a 3D it model. Robots, cars and aircrafts are the things that mostly gets to be cgi in 2D animations because their movements are much easier to calculate and manipulate in a software were humans and animals are much more complex. And cgi metal does not look as weird as cgi skin."
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1ud7vr | why do reditors get so upset over reposts? | Not everyone is on reddit 4 hours a day every day and they might miss some interesting posts; in which case, a repost from last month might be helpful | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ud7vr/eli5_why_do_reditors_get_so_upset_over_reposts/ | {
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"Usually it's not the repost itself that upsets people, it's the reposter trying to take credit for a repost as original work.",
"Search before submitting with keywords from your topic. The search box is in the upper right corner of the subreddit.\n\nThat's why. It takes about 5 seconds. That and 9 times out of 10 they're reposting something in the same bloody subreddit that they read it in the first place which is why you suddenly get 20 reposts all on the same thing the same day the original was posted.\n\nThat or they see something on the news, or in TIL, and they think they're the first person in the 8 hours since to post about it (in the case of TIL in another subreddit on that actual topic) as if they're the only person who saw the brilliance of it."
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2rvjlw | what is a purchase order? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2rvjlw/eli5what_is_a_purchase_order/ | {
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"It's basically a contract. A company or government agency issues a purchase order when they have approved the purchase of a product or service from a certain vendor for a specific price. It's like saying, \"We agree on the terms of this purchase and we will pay the price in this purchase order upon billing.\"",
"a number to both authorize and keep track of purchases for companies...",
"A document that outlines what you would like to purchase, how many, and at what price, that is given to a seller. When the seller accepts the PO it is a business contract.\n\nThe document is usually given a number so that number can be referred to when the charges are being processed at the buyer's place and money can be exchanged.\n\nIn my personal experience at medium or large-sized businesses, it seems like they are less often used for smaller transactions these days if your company has good controls on expenses, purchasing, and so on. YMMV.",
"So, to explain why you NEED a purchase order, understand this: Regular employees can't actually promise to pay for anything on behalf of their employers. If a store clerk at KINKO's tells a paper company he needs 1000 pages of regular paper, that isn't actually a promise to buy them from the company itself. If the paper company sends over the paper, but the employee says, \"nevermind, we found some in the back,\" the paper company is going to have a hard time collecting its purchase price.\n\nWhy? A regular employee can't actually make promises on behalf of a company in any major contractual way. Only a Vice President or higher, in general, can \"commit\" a company to do anything.\n\nSo to verify that a company, not just an individual, is agreeing to pay a supplier, it can provide a purchase order. Unlike an employee's promise, a purchase order can actually be used to show that a company is legally promising to pay for something.\n\nA purchase order basically says, \"We as a company intend to buy this item for this amount of money.\" It shows that it isn't just an employee making a promise the company has no intention of honoring, because to get a purchase order, certain internal requirements have to be met and approved.",
"A purchase order is essentially a contract, coming from the company that wants to buy something... issued to the company that has the product or service.\n\nTypically the steps in procurement are this (let's assume you are the company that is looking for a product):\n\n* You call up a Company X who sells Product X and ask for a quotation for 100 X's\n\n* You get a formal quotation that says 100 X's will cost you $100\n\n* You issue a Purchase Order (usually referencing the above quotation) saying I want 100 X's for $100 as per your quotation on XX/XX/XX date\n\n* You receive the 100 X's\n\n* Company X will send you an Invoice for $100\n\n* You pay company X\n\nThe gist of it is, Purchase Order comes from the purchaser (detailing what you want and for how much, as agreed) - Invoice comes from provider of goods or services (saying how much you owe, as agreed)",
"We are both companies, you want something from me. \n\n-You request a quote \n-I sent you a quotation with my terms etc. \n-You either request some changes, some clarification and I send an update quote or you issue me a purchase order which is basically a copy of what I quoted you with your business details on. \n\nAt this point we are contractually bound, I have to provide the goods, you have to pay me. Unless of course we decide mutually to change something or cancel it"
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8zad9w | why do objects kept in the pockets of trousers often make a white-ish outline in the material? | Frequently when I have worn tight or tailored bottoms, I find that my thighs have many of these marks from where a phone or keys have put pressure in the material. They're easy to rub out, but it always surprises how even in very black bottoms the marks are always very white? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8zad9w/eli5_why_do_objects_kept_in_the_pockets_of/ | {
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"The hard object in your pocket creates raised areas in the fabric, and they do not give way when you brush up against an object. When you move around, you are constantly brushing up next to stationary objects, and your pants being soft, just move out of the way. But the hard items in your pockets can't move, causing the fabric above them to be pressed hard against the stationary object. Since the corners of those objects are the most prominent features, they will have the greatest amount of contact.\n\nThe result is that material from the stationary object can be transferred to your pants in those locations. Material like dust, chalky particles, and lint can all be wiped away fairly easily. However, over an extended time wearing those pants with the same objects in the same pockets, you will find that the fabric will begin to wear thin, and the dye in the fabric will fade. This can result in permanent lines, and holes may develop at sharp corners.\n\nMy older pairs of pants have visible outlines for my phone and wallet, especially those ones I wore while working."
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wn9j9 | why should i switch from rgb to cmyk? | I'm an amateur graphic designer and all too often I'm told that I should produce my work in CMYK rather than RGB. However, RGB colours look far brighter and cleaner to me.
In fact, ELI5 - what the fuck is the difference between CMYK and RGB, not to mention Pantone and all that other stuff. Is it all to do with printing? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/wn9j9/eli5_why_should_i_switch_from_rgb_to_cmyk/ | {
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"Computer screens use [red, green, and blue lights](_URL_1_) in varying combinations/intensities to display colors, whereas printers use cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (\"K\"). By creating something in CMYK mode, you ensure your colors are more accurately represented when printed. If you never print anything, RGB mode is all you need.\n\nI don't know much about Pantone, aside from the fact that they make [these nifty things](_URL_0_)...",
"Use RGB for screens, CMYK for print. \n\nIf you send an RGB file to the printer he will either make the conversion himself with uncertain results or refuse to do it altogether. The reason for that is that he needs to separate your picture into four layers, one for each color, and print them separately, including black. In RGB there is no layer for black since it only means a non lit pixel on your screen.\n\nPantones are pre-mixed colors and require yet another layer. The problem with CMYK is that each printer might have his press calibrated slightly differently, or maybe his ink is older, or whatever can happen. Which means you can't be 100% certain that your work will be consistently colored. \n\nFor most people it's not a problem, the differences are often minute. But imagine you are Pepsi and you print material by the million all the time on every continent. You want your logo to be same blue every time and not greenish on some cans and purple-ish on some boxes. So you pick a pantone instead of a cmyk value for your blue, it is one color instead of a mix of 4 and every logo will look the same.\n\nThey are also very practical for effects impossible on screen, like metallic finishs. When you see something printed in gold or silver they used a pantone (or equivalent).",
"I have more practical knowledge, than theoretical, but here it is:\n\nCMYK takes away colours from white light of a piece of paper, while RGB adds colours to the darkness of a screen. If your work stays on computers (websites, icons ect) then use RGB. If you are trying to print something, then use CMYK + Pantone.\n\nTranslation between RGB and CMYK is not exact, so even if something looks perfect on a computer screen it may look like shit on a piece of paper. \n\nCMYK have some other issues with paint mixing (just like RGB will look different on different screens). You may get a beautiful shade of green with one brand of CMYK paints, but it'll look too pale with other brand. That's where pantone comes in. \n\nPantone is a catalogue of colours that have precise ingredients, so they'll always look the same. It's important if you have some sort of symbol that needs to look perfect everywhere. There is also no paint mixing, so you don't have to use that much of it. \n\nAlso, industrial printers (offset printers) don't use dots like normal ones, but plates. For CMYK you need 4 plates, but if your design has only 2 colours, then you may wish to convert them to pantone, so they'll need to use only 2 plates.\n\nTL;DR Basically CMYK is when you want to paint/print a picture, while pantone is when you want to have either exact colour of something or make simple graphic and save on paint/plates.",
"Well, heres the deal. The way images are made up on screen is with little dots of light that blink alot really fast, so fast that the image appears not to be blinking at all! Those lights are all made of Red, Green, and Blue. This is called **Additive color.** Basically the more you add the brighter it gets! If you go to your design program of choice, try adding RGB all the way to the top. Notice the more you add, the brighter it gets. Pretty neat right? So thats RGB, its pretty good for on screen work, meaning art that lives on your computer, television, ipad, etc. Its really just tons of little blinking lights, that are told what to do by the computer. They blink fast enough to trick your eye into thinking its an actual image. \n\nOK cool, but what does this have to do with CMYK? Well a lot and a little actually. CMYK is standard for printing. Why CMYK? Well its just worked out that way over a long history of time that I cant explain to a 5 year old right now, so sorry sonny just imagine a lot of smart people decided that was best, but the way it works is pretty similar in concept. You aren't seeing an actual image, you are seeing a lot of tiny dots printed over eachother to make blends. Go find a magazine and a magnifying glass and take a look up close. Go on, I'll wait...oh whats that, you don't have either because its 2012 and print is dead? Right forgot about that, ok so heres what you will see: [CMYK dots](_URL_0_)\nPretty neat, i think. It works the same way, with the the little dots, that tricks your eye into thinking its something its not. Its really just dots. This is called **Subtractive Color.** Basically, the more you put in there, the darker it gets. You can try this same experiment as the RGB in your graphic program of choice now. Slide up CMYK all the way, slider by slider. See, it gets darker. Huh...so what does this all mean?\n\nIt means to make an image on screen and to make an image on paper are 2 very very different processes. One is shining lights, the other is reflecting light. You need to convert your images, because they won't print right, and the color will be off. Now you asked why RGB is brighter? Because it is a color model designed around blinking lights. It's almost impossible to accurately show what CMYK images look like printed on screen. There are some companies out there that offer solutions to help make it more accurate on screen, but that only helps so much. To get an accurate image for print, you need to take test proofs on paper similar to how its going to be reproduced.(like if you are sending to a magazine, the same paper they have, or newspaper, etc) So it all depends on final output. Are you printing your image or does it live on a screen? \n\n* If its on screen, use RGB. \n* If its on paper, CMYK. \n\nLastly, when designing or color correcting for print, I highly recommend working the CMYK color model, because there are colors that RGB can make, that CMYK cannot. It's not impossible to print colors outside of CMYKs range, but its really tricky and expensive in most situations. \n\nSource: I'm an art director and designer for 6+years with a BFA in graphic design from a pretty decent art school.",
"Tdlr: printers use cmyk, use cmyk to get a printers best potential. Screens use rgb, use rgb to get the best potential of a screen.",
"Hey kiddo!\n\nSo there are these things called *primary colours*. They can be mixed together in different combinations to make almost every other colour! In preschool you learned that the primary colours for inks and paints are red, blue, and yellow... that's *almost* right, but you can get more colours if you switch blue out for cyan (which is a greeny-blue) and red out for magenta (which is close to pink).\n\nSo that's what the CMY in CMYK stands for: **Cyan Magenta Yellow**. If you add all three of these colours together, you get black! Since ink is expensive and making black from scratch wastes a lot of ink, printers usually include separate black ink as well, which is where the K comes from. It stands for \"**Key**\", but that doesn't really matter.\n\nAnyways, there's another set of primary colours that are used for light. CMYK is for when you're making art on paper, but if you use *lights* it's RGB! That stands for **Red, Green, Blue**, and if you had three flashlights with these colours you could make almost any colour by shining them on a wall together at different brightnesses. If you mix them all full-blast, you get white! That's how colours on your TV are made, with little flashlights called \"pixels\".\n\nNow for you really smart 5-year olds, think of *white* as pure light, and *black* as no light. **RGB are called additive colours**, since when they mix together they *add up* to be brighter and eventually make white . **CMYK are called subtractive colours**, since whenever you add a new one to the mix it *subtracts brightness* until it makes black.\n\nAlso, since you're five, I apologize for the years of annoyance that you are now destined for as your teacher tells you that the primary colours are red, blue, and yellow.",
" > I'm an amateur graphic designer and all too often I'm told that I should produce my work in CMYK rather than RGB. However, RGB colours look far brighter and cleaner to me.\n\nWell, yes, RGB looks brighter and cleaner, and there's a reason for that: CMYK is designed for printers, and printers aren't as bright or clean as computer screens. So what's happening in this case (probably) is that when you \"use CMYK\" you're instructing your computer not to use the whole range of color that your monitor can produce, but instead to try and approximate the color range of your printer using [color profiles](_URL_1_) for your printer and screen. The colors look less bright, but the point is that they will look close(r) to what your printer can print. If what you're trying to do is print your designs, it's no use to have them look really awesome and bright on screen if the printer won't be able to do the same!\n\nBut in any case, correct rule isn't to use CMYK always. Rather, the correct rule is to use whatever will match your output most closely. If you're designing a website, which will be read by people with computer monitors, then you want to use an [sRGB](_URL_0_) profile. If you're printing, then you want to use a profile for your printer. If you're doing both, then you want to use both—you may want to tune the output for the screen and the printer separately!\n\nAnother way of making the point: what matters is *making the output look as best as it can on each output device*; you choose what color spaces and profiles you use, and when you use each of them, based on that.",
"I'm about to save you a whole lot of confusion when it comes to learning color management. It seriously took me years of on'n'off study to nail this down, and it's absolutely shocking how many ostensibly authoritative sources out there are utter crap.\n\nThere are four basic concepts to color management:\n\n- color mode\n- color space\n- bit depth\n- color profile\n\nOften, these terms are used interchangeably because everyone \"knows what they mean\". In fact, the constant swapping of terms has led to a situation where no one ever knows what anyone else is talking about.\n\n**Color mode** defines how colors are represented numerically by defining the \"primaries\" as well as how the primaries interact. The primaries for a color mode are often colors, such as CMYK and RGB (cyan, magenta, yellow, black, and red, green, blue, respectively). This is not always the case, however. The primaries of the HSB color mode are hue, saturation, and brightness, not specific colors at all.\n\nAlso, how these primaries interact. RGB primaries are additive, and sum to white. CMYK primaries are subtractive, and sum to black.\n\nA **color space** describes the extremes of each primary for a particular color mode. This is why color spaces typically have the color mode embedded in their name, such as sRGB or Adobe RGB.\n\n**Bit depth** determines number of levels that can be represented for each color component between the extremes defined by the color space. Let's say you're working with sRGB color space, an 8 bit per channel (bpc) sRGB has 256 possible values for each primary. A 16bpc sRGB image has the same extremes, but more than 65000 shades of each of red, green, and blue to choose from. Higher bit depth gives smoother color transitions when using a gradient.\n\nA **color profile** defines a custom color space and a maximum bit depth for a specific device.\u0001 A “device” is anything that inputs or outputs color: a \u0002monitor, printer, projector, camera, scanner, etc.\n\nOften you'll hear people use color space and color profile interchangeably because a profile is a type of color space, it's just a color space for a particular device. That means when you need to specify a profile, you can stick in any color space as a placeholder. For example, when you go to print an image, that printer needs a profile specific to the combination of ink and paper you're using or it's not going to get the colors right.\n\nHowever, when you're editing the image on your monitor, you probably don't want to save the image with the color profile for your monitor because you might send it off to someone else that views it on a different monitor. Converting the image a bunch of times isn't good either because you start to get significant rounding errors, and one monitor might have a very limited range so if you do the conversion for it you lose a bunch of the colors actually present in the image. Instead, color managed applications leave the image alone and translate the color by loading the monitor profile in hardware.\n\nAnyway, hopefully this answers your question. Whether or not you realize it, whenever you print your image is getting converted to CMYK. This conversion is either being handled by you and you're controlling how it happens, or you're sending the image off to the printer as RGB and the printer driver is converting it invisibly and you don't have control of it.\n\nHaving said that, there are also printers out there that don't use ink, they use RGB lasers and expose photographic paper. In this case, whatever you had the print driver, it will convert to an RGB image because that's what the hardware needs. Hardware that allows you to use an additive color model typically can achieve a much wider gamut than CMYK devices because photographic papers are better at handling color than modern inks."
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5peo3m | how do ticket-less rallies like the women's march calculate attendance? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5peo3m/eli5_how_do_ticketless_rallies_like_the_womens/ | {
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"We know about how many people fill up each area from previous inaugurations. We also can calculate the metro trips too for some ",
"Although the task of determining how many people attend something as large as say, a political rally or a protest may seem like a daunting, almost impossible undertaking to do with any accuracy, with some basic information, it's actually not that difficult to get reasonably accurate results.\n\nThe most well-known method of estimating the size of a given crowd is simply called \"The Jacobs' Method\" as an ode to its inventor, Herbert Jacobs. Jacobs spent a few decades working for the Milwaukee Journal before retiring into teaching journalism at the University of California, Berkeley in the 1960s. He thought up his very simple crowd size estimate method after observing numerous Vietnam War protests outside of his office window.\n\nJacobs noticed that the area the students stood on had a repeating grid-like pattern, meaning he could very easily count how many students occupied a certain amount of space by counting how many students on average seemed to be able to stand inside a section of the grid. By doing this, he soon noticed some patterns.\n\nFor example, Jacobs found that in the most densely packed crowds, each person took up approximately 2.5 square feet. We should note that this is the absolute upper limit of a how dense a crowd can safely get, as in, you simply couldn't fit more people into a crowd this dense without someone being trampled or worse, which is probably why most, including some scholarly articles on the subject we read, simply refer to it as \"mosh-pit density\". In a dense, but more manageable crowd, Jacobs observed that participants had a comparably more roomy 4.5 square feet whilst those in a \"light\" crowd had a positively breezy 10 square feet to themselves.\n\nIn any event, once he had the approximate average number of students in each grid, he could then easily calculate the number of grids in an area occupied at a given density, and quite quickly come up with a very good estimate of how many people were in a given crowd. Thus, the now Gold Standard, and remarkably simple, \"Jacobs' Method\" was born.\n\nThis may sound like an overly simple solution but the truth is, it's strikingly accurate when done by non-biased observers, and modern technology has only made it easier. For instance, tools like Google Earth have made learning the exact size and area of a location, as well as dividing an area into grids, an almost trivial feat for just about anyone. And thanks to ubiquitous media coverage, any large gathering of people is going to have video or photographic footage (if not just scanning the Tweetosphere for people in the crowd who may have gotten a good shot and posted it online). So breaking things down from there is relatively trivial. Of course, one could get really fancy and take a photo of an entire crowd and use a bit of custom designed image processing software to programmatically count the people in a crowd for a more exact number, but the extra level of accuracy here over the properly executed Jacobs' Method isn't really typically that much, nor all that necessary.\n\nOf course, when giving estimations, sometimes the news media or the organisers of an event do like to fudge the numbers a bit. Perhaps the most famous example is that of the Million Man March- a mass gathering of African Americans (mostly men) that took place in 1995. As you can probably guess from the name of the march, event organisers afterwards were very insistent that at least a million men had attended, with estimates going as high as two million. However, the National Parks Service disagreed and offered up a much lower, but still extremely significant figure of around 400,000 individuals. But when something is called the Million Man March, 400,000 seems a bit of a letdown, even though it's logically very much not; getting 400,000 people (about 1.2% of all African Americans in the United States at the time) to show up at such an event in Washington DC is really quite a feat.\n\nNevertheless, the NPS's estimate incensed a key player behind the march, Louis Farrakhan, so much so that he threatened to sue the NPS. As a direct result of the brouhaha that followed, the NPS is now banned by congress from estimating the size of crowds in Washington, at least publicly. As they noted, if the President asks them for how big a crowd was, they're happy to crunch the numbers given footage of the crowd. They just aren't technically supposed to use tax payer dollars in this way anymore, so wouldn't share that information with the media who, of course, could quite easily come up with their own estimates.\n\nSo how many people actually attended the Million Man March? While an exact figure is impossible to discern, most researchers are in agreement that the original estimation of the NPS is pretty accurate. For example, in 2004 a pair of researchers, Clark McPhail and John D. McCarthy, worked out that in the location of the gathering there would have been space for a maximum of 1,048,206 people assuming that every inch of the crowd was as densely packed as safely possible at 2.5 square feet per person. In the end, from the pictures available of the gathering, they determined that the NPS's estimate of about 400,000 was quite accurate."
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6luigk | why does a weird wavy patter appear if a small chequered pattern moves across a screen? | *Pattern | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6luigk/eli5_why_does_a_weird_wavy_patter_appear_if_a/ | {
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"As always, there's [a relevant xkcd](_URL_0_) for that!\n\nWhat you're seeing is a [moiré pattern](_URL_1_), which happens when a repeating pattern (lines, dots, a grid, etc) is more fine than the sensor/resolution of whatever is photographing or displaying it. Think of aliasing in videogames, where an angled line has to be represented with square pixels and can end up looking blocky and \"jaggy\" as a result. Moiré patterns are similar in that the camera or screen just can't capture every detail of the pattern and so some of the pixels end up shifting around to try to approximate it as best it can."
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ffst65 | how does thermal imaging work? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ffst65/eli5how_does_thermal_imaging_work/ | {
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"You build a camera that can see the color of light just slightly lower than red on the spectrum.\n\nThen show the intensity of this light as a color scale. White for a lot of intensity, black for none.",
"Heat sources emit electromagnetic radiation with a frequency respecting to their temperature. The visible spectrum of EM radiation ranges from red to violet. The sun's surface is about 5000 Kelvin hot and our eyes happen to see this light. Infrared means that the frequency of the EM radiation coming from an object is below the visible specrum due to lower temperature than the sun, anyway it can still be detected and it's frequency measured pretty accurately.\n\nBut How do we get a picture we CAN see?\n\nLike digital cameras have light sensitive chips that render visible light directly to true red- green- and blue information in their memory, we can build a chip that detects light of lower frequency and renders it to any other colour and intensity value in real time.\n\nIt's just a microchip doing real time calculus, mapping the gathered frequency and intensity information to another color map we can display and see.",
"To summarise in a genuinely simple ELI5-way: all objects with any heat at all emit infrared waves. Thermal imaging simply uses sensors/cameras that \"see\" infrared instead of visible light, and converts it to light we can see.\n\nTechnically speaking, humans even emit visible light. It's just such a ridiculously tiny amount that you can't tell.",
"Electromagnetic radiation is a wave-like physical phenomenon that takes different names depending of its frequency, i.e. how fast the wave oscillates. \n\nThe radiation our eyes can detect we call it visible light. But radio waves, microwaves, x-rays, gamma rays, infrared and ultraviolet are all 'flavours' electromagnetic radiation of different ranges of frequency.\n\nEvery object emits spontaneously radiation, most intensely on a certain frequency that grows as the temperature grows.\n\nThat's why heated metal starts to glow read: at a certain point our eyes can pick up its 'thermal' radiation. \n\nEvery room temperature object emits in a range of radiation called infrared that our eyes can't see. It's just 'before' the red color, that's the first we can see. \n\nIf you build a detector, exactly like those of a regular camera, but tuned on the infrared instead of visible light, you can obtain a thermal picture. \n\nThen you convert it on a scale of visible colors on screen to make our human mind understand.",
"Most heat is transmitted as infrared light. Infrared light isn't visible to human eyes. It's relatively easy with modern technology though to make a sensor that can detect it. Attach that sensor to a computer and tell the computer to display the different levels of heat as different colors and boom: thermal imaging.\n\nBonus science: the discovery of IR is one of my favorite science stories. If you were to guess when IR was discovered what year would you think? Whatever your guess I bet it was a lot later than the answer: 1800. William Herschel discovered it by accident with a thermometer.\n\nHe had set up a prism to refract sunlight onto a table. He put thermometers down in each of different colored bands on the table because he wanted to see if there was a difference in the colors of light. He also wanted a control temperature for the ambient room temperature so he had an additional thermometer on the table just past the red light on the end. When he checked his readings he discovered that there was indeed temperature differences between the various colors. That was interesting, but what was especially surprising was that his \"control\" thermometer had the highest temperature reading of all. That initially made no sense, but with some additional expiramentation he determined that there most be an additional band of non-visible light beyond the red that carried a lot of heat energy. He called it infrared for \"below red\".\n\nImagine that. A guy discovered an invisible part of the electromagnetic spectrum by *accident* using a *thermometer.*",
"Actual ELI5:\n\nWhen things get hot, they let out tiny invisible waves,\n\nThese waves are captured by a special lens\n\nThe waves then hit a tiny special component, and the material gets hotter\n\nWhen it heats up, its electrical resistance changes\n\nEach tiny special component corresponds to a pixel on the display\n\nThe pixel just shows a unique colour for each resistance (/temperature)\n\nPut many pixels together, and you have a colourful picture of resistance/temperature values in the form of colour",
" \n\nThe analog value from the pixels detectors are converted to digital values, usually already in the chip. These digital values are going thought some calculation to correct for difference sensitivities in the pixels to get consistent values. So that a specific digital value always corresponds to the same temperature regardless of differences in pixels detectors. After this each value is mapped into palette that converts it to RGB that is displayed. The palette are usually selectable by the user. In addition to this there might also be some math converting the values to temperature if it is what you want. The detectors can be of different types. Very common today is bolometric detector elements. Each element are heated by the received radiation. And the change in resistance caused by this heating are measured. All this is made in real time. \n\n\n ( from somebody developing IR cameras at FLIR for 25 years )",
"A microbolometer is used for most thermal cameras. This is a fancy name for an array of a large number of temperature sensors.\n\nInfrared radiation is emitted by hot objects. This causes the individual pixels in the microbolometer to warm up. The change in temperature is measured by an electronic circuit, in much the same fashion as a digital image sensor measures the change. This is displayed using a defined thermal \"palette\" - hotter colours usually appearing brighter or more yellow/red.\n\nBecause the wavelength of the infrared light is much longer (8 to 13 micrometers compared to 450 to 700 nanometers - about twenty times larger) it is necessary to have much larger sensor pixels than an ordinary camera. The sensors also need to be kept apart from each other, so that they can produce an accurate image without the adjacent sensors causing too much interference. This means that thermal cameras generally have a low resolution. Most are under 160 x 120 pixels - which is about 400x less pixels than a smartphone camera (19.2Kpixels vs 8Mpixels). \n\nSome microbolometer sensors have cooling to reduce their sensitivity to changes in the environment. Other sensors use a shutter, which is made of metal, so its temperature can be measured easily by a separate sensor. This provides a calibration factor. The shutter needs to be put in front of the sensor periodically to measure the reference temperature and compensate for errors in the sensor. If you have heard a thermal imaging camera \"click\" and have the image update pause, this is because it is calibrating. More advanced thermal cameras have a continuously rotating shutter that means the image doesn't get updated. \n\nOther technologies are used for thermal imaging (old cameras often used vidicon tubes optimised for thermal applications) but microbolometers are how the majority of thermal imaging cameras function.\n\nFun bonus fact: Because thermal imaging cameras are valuable in military operations, they are restricted to 9 Hz refresh rate (9 frames per second) for consumer applications. This is ostensibly intended to stop people using them for combat operations. \n\nAdditional bonus fun fact: FLIR makes the most thermal imaging sensors and holds a patent on a thermal imager with more than 14 thermal imaging sensors in a row. To work around this patent, a competitor, Raytheon, deliberately disables every 13th thermal imaging pixel on their thermal imaging array. The missing pixels are replaced with estimates from the adjacent area. Patents like these shouldn't be granted, but it goes to show why when writing a patent application, you should consider how it will be worked around.",
"Step1: Thermal emission. Everything everywhere is constantly emitting photons based on its temperature. The energy distribution of the photons depends on the temperature of the object, but the sheer number of photons depends on the emissivity of the object as well. Things that conduct heat easier have a higher emissivity, so if you have a warm piece of metal and a hot piece of wood, simple cameras that only count photons in a small range could see them as the same temperature. That being said, most cameras operate this way because temperature emissivity separation is hard to do and relative emissivity is typically what you actually want. \n\nStep 1.5: The air is in the way. It both absorbs some of the photons from the object and emits some of its own that you will detect. There's no way around this, but if you know how much air is in the way you can estimate how far off your measurements are. It's not really a step as you basically just do nothing. \n\nStep 2: Reception on the focal plane. Different materials are sensitive to different ranges of photons. Silicon is great for the visible spectrum and near infra red. If you keep going lower in energy (with something like geranium) you start to get to the level where you detect photons emitted by objects around you just due to their temperature/emissivity. As the detectors on the focal plane receive photons they kick off electrons and build up charge. \n\nStep 3: Digitization and processing. The charge on each pixel of the array is read. This is the digital count value. There is some read noise associated with this process, but modern tech is pretty good at keeping it very small. The camera now uses its calibrated look up table to go from digital counts to temperature. If your camera performs temperature emissivity separation, it does that here. Most thermal cameras however just assume everything has the same emissivity and give the temperature that a black body (something that doesn't reflect and only emits based on its temperature) would be to give that number of digital counts.\n\nStep 4. Display. We've decided that the red- blue scale is a good way to convey temperature information to people, so we color the pixels for display between red and blue based on the calculated temperature and show it to a person."
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abfw81 | why are burmese buddhists so violent? | Of the 3 major schools of Buddhism, all abhor and denounce violence. Of course, there are always exceptions, but generally, that refers to individuals.
In Myanmar(also known as Burma), there is systematic brutality carried out by the Buddhist majority government against the Rohingya minority. Many watchdog groups have already begun using the word "genocide" in regards to this particular situation.
Why are the Burmese Buddhists so violent? And why target the Rohingya with such animosity? This is the only major news of 2018 that I could never understand. Please explain like I'm five. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/abfw81/eli5_why_are_burmese_buddhists_so_violent/ | {
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"They’re so violent because they’re human.\n\nIn Myanmar/Burma, the Buddhists are the entrenched conservatives. The Rohinga are the foreign interlopers to them that won’t let things be done the good and proper way. When social pressure and non-violent pressure didn’t get them to conform, those in power turned to violence.\n\nThe fact that they claim to be Buddhist is beside the fact.\n\nThe same type of people have caused violence to visible minority ideology groups that threaten their power base under the guise of pretty much every ideology out there.",
"Because Rohingya Islamic aggression towards Rakhine Buddhists has been going on for a very long time. How long? Since the aftermath of WW2. The Rohingya appealed to Pakistan to annex their territory, but Pakistan did not do so. Subsequently, many muslims fought in a separatist rebellion, and this rebellion stretched all the way to the 1990s, with terrorist groups later splitting off and growing (with reported help from countries like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan - worth noting that ARSA's leader grew up in Saudi Arabia, amongst its leadership is a committee of Rohingya immigrants in Saudi Arabia, and the group follows Islamic traditions, where recruits swear oaths to the Quran, address their leader as emir, and ARSA asks for fatwas from foreign Muslim clerics). \n \nIn the 1980s-1990s, the Rohingya Solidarity Organisation was the main group that attacked Burmese authorities. In October 2016, Harakah al-Yaqin, another terrorist group, attacked Burmese border posts, killing policemen, and another attack in November of 2016. Also, 24 August 2017, where the same group (now re-named Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army or ARSA) attacked police and army posts, resulting in 71 deaths. This was supposedly to drive out the Buddhists in order to create an \"independent\" Rohingya Muslim state/region. The next day, ARSA attacked the Hindus in the Kha Maung Seik village cluster, killing not just men, but Hindu women and children as well (in total 99). The men were separated from the women; the 56 men were executed first; then the women were raped, and they and their children killed. The declared aim of the ARSA militants was the ethnic cleansing of North Arakan of all but Muslim inhabitants.\n \nIn Rohingya-majority towns, there have been attempts by the Rohingya to subject all people, including the Buddhists, to Islamic Shar'ia law in the past, too. These attempts had to be stopped by the government.",
"It is the same reason as why Hindus have been lynching Mulsims in India for trading and eating cows. The religion itself is of not that much relevance as nearly all religions are religions of peace, the probably is people will go to extreme lengths to protect what they think is the correct path/religion. What is present is two groups that have different views, some of which may be offensive to the other group for a reason that does not seem that important to an outsider. If you add factors such as population sizes of each group, economic hardship, spiritual orientation of the countries leaders, eventually one group may end up in a bad situation."
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c5z493 | when a large company is broken up via anti-trust litigation, how is it decided who owns the new, smaller companies? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c5z493/eli5_when_a_large_company_is_broken_up_via/ | {
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"The same people who owned the larger company get an equal percentage of each of the smaller companies."
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2ago51 | if the countries debt is so massive ($17.075 trillion?) why don't the gov't just go all out and spend even more? the amount of debt doesn't seem to matter | Invest in things like clean energy and such, it seems that amount of debt will never be "paid", so why worry about it? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ago51/eli5_if_the_countries_debt_is_so_massive_17075/ | {
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"It doesn't seem to matter but it does. Technically the U.S. has a great credit score when it comes to paying off its loans. Our total debt is massive, but in the past the US has always paid off what it owes. If the US were to spend without check, it is more and more probable that they would in fact NOT be able to pay back the debt.\n\nEvery year when you hear about the debt ceiling, this is the government deciding whether to raise the amount that the US is allowed to be in debt, or to default on our loans. (Meaning we say we can't pay them off). If the US were to default, baaaad things would happen, and the results would be pretty catastrophic. Will the US actually be ever able to pay off its debt? Debatable. Someone with more economics knowledge than me can probably explain better but thats the main idea"
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3ud3ot | if we managed to somehow go beyond the edge of the expanding universe in a space ship, what would we find? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ud3ot/eli5_if_we_managed_to_somehow_go_beyond_the_edge/ | {
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"If the universe is finite then the answer to that question is very simple and this is why the Universe is so interesting: We do not know.",
"This has always interested me too. They say the universe is always expanding but what is it expanding in too?",
"it doesn't have edges; relativistic cosmology describes a universe that curves in on itself, it's just like asking what would happen if you drove your car far enough to go beyond the horizon. The best way to picture the \"expansion\" is like a balloon being blown up; draw two points on the surface of the balloon and they keep getting further apart.",
"1. A greater multiverse. Would we be able to perceive it, who knows? Maybe it's made up of matter and vibrations we can sense, maybe not. Also, touching a boundary on our universe may annihilate it, causing another big bang or crush. \n\n2. You become the edge by expanding the universe. You are a part of the universe and therefore contain the \"edge\" of the universe if you pass prior boundaries.\n\n3. The universe is curved. You never reach the edge but continue on endlessly. Where do you end up? Who knows. The universe may be cyclic and you could run into the big bang again, a big crush, or never see anything ever again.\n\n4. Dickbutt. Upon reaching the edge of the universe, you may in fact find Dickbutt, because we all have no clue what may lie there. Right after the big bang, the universe traveled faster than the speed of light so: we may never be able to observe anything resembling an edge until we develop faster-than-light travel, a better understanding of the science regarding the same, or gain a more concrete understanding of universal physics. ",
"I posted this 5 years ago in r/physics. My daughter (5 at the time), said \"Oh, dad.. I know... past the edge of the Universe is everything that hasn't happened yet.\"",
"I wonder if people are overthinking things, what if the universe is just a little cloud of dust in an infinite void.",
"The real answer to this is: Nobody knows. There is no science that predicts what is \"outside\" of \"everything that exists\". Anyone claiming otherwise is full of shit, and you would be better served asking this question on /r/askscience, to receive a similar answer to what I just gave you.",
" > If we managed to **somehow** go beyond the edge of the expanding universe in a space ship [...]\n\nHere's the problem with your question. That \"somehow\" bit, if we unpack it, means something like the following:\n\n* Our theories of physics say that it's impossible for us to travel fast enough to reach past the edge of the expanding universe.\n* But for the sake of argument, let's assume our theories of physics are false.\n\nCan you see the problem now? You're asking us to *make a scientific prediction*, but *without using our scientific theories*. No can do.",
"There is nothing beyond the universe, not even empty space. The big bang was not only the creation of matter and energy, it created space and time as well. The expansion of the universe is really the expansion of space. If you ask what space is expanding into, the answer is nothing - the expansion is just creating more space. \n\nIf this doesn't make sense it's because nothing in the world that formed our evolution is anything like this at a human scale. It is counter to our everyday experiences. The survival traits we evolved didn't need to deal with things on the scale of the universe so we have to really stretch our thought processes to wrap our heads around it."
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aw42l3 | the need to pee and proximety to the toilet? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aw42l3/eli5_the_need_to_pee_and_proximety_to_the_toilet/ | {
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"It has to do with \"Pavlovs Dog\", basically we're so used to or \"conditioned\" to associate the toilet with urinating."
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dam4td | how do political polling places find people to use for their data? | For example, I’ve been a registered voter for years and I haven’t once been contacted to participate in any particular political poll. I’m curious how the pollsters decide who to ask or if it is based on sign-ups instead? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dam4td/eli5_how_do_political_polling_places_find_people/ | {
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"This is a very valid question. Obviously they didn't do a great job of this in 2016.\n\nThere are different methods, from talking to people in the street \"randomly\" (that would depend on what part of town you're in, and time of day, etc). letters to houses and hope people answer randomly. The best method is by calling on the phone, but now with caller ID and lack of landlines, that is not as reliable as it once was. I know I don't answer anything that doesn't identify the caller, and I usually skip calls that are labelled as survey because in my experience the \"survey\" is instead going to be asking stupid things like internet access preferences, obviously on behalf of a particular vendor, not on a topic like national policy preferences. And sometimes people answer based on what they would do if they actually show up to vote on election day, but they never actually vote.\n\nOn actual election day, pollsters will stand outside certain voting sites and ask people who are leaving who they voted for, this is usually pretty accurate.",
"To add to the other answers here: polls are expensive, and pollsters generally try to ask no more than the number of people they need to get a reasonable margin of error (usually 1 or 2 percentage points). This number depends on their assumptions and how they choose the sample, but it's usually not going to be any more than 1,000 people. The necessary sample need not be proportional to the size of the population you're trying to measure, and in this case it's very small relative to the population of the US ( about 0.0003%). That means that they could conduct many, many polls but never call you personally. This is especially true if you live in a place where the outcome of the election is not much in doubt.",
"There are generally two types of surveys. Registered voters are the people that make up the voter rolls. So if a polling firm wants a universe of potential voters, they simply pull from the registered voter list and randomly contact them to conduct their survey. Who is a registered voter and where they live is public information, so at some point most political campaigns or polling firms pulls this info. Of course, not all registered voters vote, so each pollster prepares their own \"special sauce\" of what they call \"likely voters\", and they are those that are obviously registered but then have a propensity to vote in that particular campaign cycle, like a primary or general election, or municipal cycle election. From their they will target those voters, still from the registered voter list, to develop a more accurate sample. If you aren't likely to vote in an any given election, they won't contact you.\n\nAdditionally, in the last presidential election cycle, most pollsters used the traditional random sample method of polling. Every time they polled, they went to the voter rolls and pulled a new random sample of voters. They were mostly all wrong. Those pollsters that actually accurately predicted the results of the election initially picked their random sample of voters, but then every time they wanted to poll again, they contacted the same voters to see who had changed their opinions. This was found to be more accurate, at least in that cycle.\n\nSo, in short, they pull the data from the registered voter list from the respective board of elections. If they want more accurate data, they do more analysis on the registered voter lists to pull those that will actually vote in that given cycle. How they do this depends on the polling firm, making some polling firm more accurate than others.",
"I live in Canada and we have a Federal election coming up in the next month. I also do surveys, polls, focus groups, etc. online for beer money and have noticed lately that a lot of surveys and polls are dealing with political issues (who will you vote for, what policies do you like most, what politicians do you like / dislike). I've also seen some poll results in the media that closely match the questions I've answered online so I'm betting that is how many of these polls find people."
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7y9wxz | what is a viral vector? | I read Dan Brown's Inferno and was wondering what this is. How does it work? How is it different from a regular virus? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7y9wxz/eli5_what_is_a_viral_vector/ | {
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"a viral vector is how a virus transmits. Viral means it duplicates and passes from person-person thing to thing, vector is just a direction, colloquially equivalent to \"way\".\n\nSo airborne viruses use air as a viral vector, things like aides use bodily fluids. Malaria uses Mosquitos as a viral vector.\n\nSo not different from a regular virus, just how that virus goes from person to person.",
"A vector, terms of biology, is an organism that transmits something from one place to another. In the case of a viral vector, a virus is being used to transmit genetic elements or the production of some biologically-relevant component between cells or organisms.\n\nOne example of a viral vector would be a non-harmful virus (only a small fraction of viruses cause harm during infection), which has been genetically modified to deliver DNA encoding a protein that a person otherwise lacked."
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est3a6 | why is assaulting a cop more serious than assaulting anyone else? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/est3a6/eli5_why_is_assaulting_a_cop_more_serious_than/ | {
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"Part of the reason is that police carry weapons. It may also have something to do with Police represent the law, and an assault on a police officer is therefore an assault on the law (older thinking?). That is just speculation though.",
"I don't have a good answer but don't ever spit at an officer either! I did grand jury once and we had several instances where someone spit on a police officer and that was a felony.",
"Probably to help discourage people from resisting arrest. If you've been caught for petty larceny, is it really worth trying to run away and punch a cop in the process? No, that would carry a much harsher sentence then what you were originally caught for, its not worth it"
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4swimn | how do celebrities get social media handles with their names? do companies like twitter or instagram assist celebs in getting a marketable handle? | E.G., Zayn Malik getting the handle "Zayn" on Instagram or "ZaynMalik" on Twitter. Do these people have to make a settlement with whoever has the handle they want? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4swimn/eli5_how_do_celebrities_get_social_media_handles/ | {
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"Pretty much. They just message who ever owns one of those handles and just offers them money.",
"As it is, yes. \n\nPeople who deliberately do this are called \"squatters,\" and while not looked highly upon, companies will still give big cash to the owners for control if it's a particularly short and/or memorable name for the business. \n\nI do vaguely remember a way to kick people off of domain names through the official committee, but at that point you'd be better off hiring a lawyer instead of ELI5.\n\nFor stuff like social media handles though, it's pretty much impossible to \"force\" someone off a handle."
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2eh84l | why is zoe quinn being defended? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2eh84l/eli5_why_is_zoe_quinn_being_defended/ | {
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"The are uninformed and they try to fight misogony, thinking that the only side of the story is her getting harassed on the internet. Just lack of resaserch on their part.",
"She is a person in a creative field open to commentary by the internet. There are thousands of people in the U.S. alone who work in various forms of media that deal with mean comments and threats against their person. The true professional looks at this feedback and compares it to the quality of their product. The maker of any piece of media knows if it is of high quality within the bounds of their resources. The issue is that her game, \"Depression Quest\", is a sub-par, text-based game that was greenlit on Steam and given high critical praise by writers she was tied to romantically. And instead of dealing with the criticism of her product and conduct like a professional she claimed the victim card and demanded that any negative word about her be silenced. The white-knight syndrome of the \"enlightened male\" kicked in and we now have this cluster fuck.",
" > Don't post just to express an opinion or argue a point of view.\n\nThis post is better suited for /r/changemyview and so it's been removed."
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3x39r1 | how is it that for two months california has had a methane leak and it won't be fixed until spring? | Saw a post about this yesterday. The leak is huge and it's constantly spilling and will continue for months.
How/Why isn't anyone stopping it immediately? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3x39r1/eli5_how_is_it_that_for_two_months_california_has/ | {
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"In order to fix the leak, workers have to drill 8500 feet down into the earth, find the underground well, and pump it full of concrete. This process will take months, and can't realistically be sped up.\n\nEDIT: For a more detailed answer, see u/WalterLSU below.\n\nEDIT 2: More info with pictures:\n\n_URL_0_",
"I work in oil and gas at a large plant so I'll answer you what it PROBABLY is, though without knowing the details it honestly could be anything. First of all, shuting off machines cost industry HUGE money, in chemical processing plants like those used to refine and process oil and gas, if one machine goes down, often times an entire segment of the plant that goes down, every thing that feeds into that machine has to stop, everything that machine feeds into has to stop. If you only have 3 concurrent units running, that means that if 1 critical component goes down, 1/3rd of our plant goes down, 1/3rd of our production is down, you make 1/3rd less oil and make 1/3rd less money until that machine is back up. If fixing that methane leak involves taking something critical offline (probably true) then they will do their best to wait until that area of the plant enters a PLANNED outage so they can get a lot of their scheduled maintenance done at the same time that the plant is out anyway, they still lose money, but they get a lot done during that time. In the mean time they likely pay a daily fine for the leak, but that fine is far less than the revenue they would lose if part of the plant was down (for us, each 1/3rd of the plant is responsible for about $5 million dollars of revenue per day, if one is down they are losing 5 million per day, so you can imagine that the fines are a pittance in comparison. ",
"What would happen if we ignited it? Serious question haha. ",
"As a petroleum engineer, I can comment. I can't find all of the details, but they need to drill a relief well to intercept the original well and plug it off with cement. \n\nThey can't flare I believe because the leak is uncontrolled and flaring could be dangerous. A fire would not travel down into the reservoir. \n\nThey likely can't rig up on the problem well itself to run cement because of the leak. Flammability around big machines. \n\nThey should be able to reach 8500 feet in ~10 days but intercepting a small diameter pipe could slow that down significantly. I don't have direct experience with that portion. Then there's the plugging operation to pump cement down the relief well and into the problem well. At each step there's engineering and regulatory work needed that also can take time. In sure there's plenty of parties involved that can add a lot of red tape. \n\n",
"Permanently preventing a gas influx at a low depth is a challenging procedure. Conventional well control involves having a hydrostatic pressure greater than the pressure of the gas. This is typically done by controlling the liquid's weight, more weight = more pressure. Gas's hydrostatic pressure gradient is quite low; think of air pressure difference between Denver and Los Angeles (1 mile of vertical height) is the equivalent pressure of 5 feet of water. \n \nA typical gas well, are designed like telescope, larger shorter (in depth) outer pipes and smaller longer (in depth) inner pipes are cemented together. There is likely a leak between the deeper inner pipe to the more shallow outer pipe. So a high pressure is occurring at a low depth, which cannot be matched from a weighted hydrostatic fluid. \n\nDrilling a \"relief well\" is no easy task. Drillers are attempting to drill a 8000 foot well and hit a 7 inch pipe. Imagine standing on the top of a 30 story building, while holding a 300 foot piece of spaghetti trying to hit a Cherri-O on the sidewalk. So drillers need to go slower than normal to be sure not to go off course. Determining where the drill bit is at needs to occur more often. Also I believe they are restricted to working only day light hours, normal drilling operations are around the clock. At 8000' the hydrostatic pressure will overcome the gas pressure, which would allow a better chance for the cement to 'set up' properly. \n \nTurning everything 'off' doesn't work like you'd want. With well integrity concerns, the gas might find a new way out, by means of breaking different parts of the well/ground, if it's constricted at the surface, which would only complicate the problem. Solving the problem properly at 8000' is more important than a temporary minor mitigation. \n\nLuckily the gas well is isolated, about a mile from people. Even so, natural gas and the gas that gives natural gas it's unpleasant odor, are not harmful. ",
"Californians are exotherms (ie: cold blooded). They stop working when temperatures drop below 60^o F.",
"why dont they just drop a nuke on it? the nuclear fission will burn off any gas and seal the hole. ",
"We have a methane leak?",
"Because people are ignorant to methane. They don't care that it is worse for the climate that CO2, or that we produce a shit-load of it :P \n\nPeople just think methane smells bad, and that's what it does. No harm no foul. ",
"Grew up in Porter Ranch, and still have family there. SoCal Gas and Sempra Energy have operated for 30 to 40 years in Porter Ranch with zero accountability. Local and state politicians have been and are more concerned about contributions and re-election than actual safety (otherwise Sempra's normal operations before the gas leak, which involved Sempra releasing tons of methane regularly into the air) would have been curtailed or stopped. Environmental companies are ineffective in preventing a catastrophe like this, and more geared towards capitalizing on donor sources, media attention, and compromising with big polluters, than dismantling the industries that cause such disasters. Finally, the justice system is a self-serving, corrupt, and wasteful mess (example, BP's spill, largest oil spill in history, resulted in a MISDEMEANOR, and closer to home, the Exide battery recycling plant took decades to close down, and the structured deal protected the shareholders more than anyone else.\nAlso, SoCal Gas covered up the enormity of this industrial disaster, and are only acting because the residents of Porter Ranch (and local grassroots SavePorterRanch) have been holding community meeting and rallies, which are finally getting media attention.\nFinally, natural gas is invisible. If this was more cinematic, like lava flow or a hurricane, it would have received national media attention immediately.\n",
"[Why don't they just nuke it?] (_URL_0_) ",
"What people are having physiological reactions to is called mercaptan. Which is added to the natural gas so people can smell a leak (methane is odorless).\n\nMethane is lighter than air and most of it is rising in the atmosphere, while mercaptan is a heavier molecule and is highly odorous (on order of 1 ppb).\n\nThe leak is over a mile from residential neighborhoods. The question that should be asked is why a residential neighborhood was allowed to be developed by local government close to the largest natural gas storage facility west of Mississippi...",
"This sucks, I live in the area. They are relocating 2500 families for 6+ months. It's affected my business so I know it's hurting a lot of businesses along with the families of course.\n\nWe've already lost out on just over $1k of monthly income due to this and the number is increasing.",
" > Uncontrolled build-up of methane in the atmosphere is naturally checked by methane's reaction with hydroxyl radicals formed from singlet oxygen atoms and with water vapor. It has a net lifetime of about 10 years, and is primarily removed by conversion to carbon dioxide and water.",
"I live in Porter ranch and it's gotten so bad a young girl was in the ICU. Some residents' pets have gotten sick as well. Sadly, SoCal gas doesn't put much effort into trying to solve this issue. The rumor was they tried to cover the smell by using some kind of odor-neutralizer, which failed. Now, mind you, this is in the end of the valley on top of hills and mountains. There are homes practically right by it, very close, actually. So I hope it gets fixed asap but the most we can do is to file a complaint and have the gas company pay for our hotel fees. Several residents weren't getting covered for this at first, so they moved out with their own money. It sucks because generally, this is a nice neighborhood. Average income is highest in the valley and all of LA right after Beverly Hills and has really nice people here. But it's definitely not worth living in this nice neighborhood when shit like this happens.",
"California is desperately trying to show the world how environmentally friendly they are and that's why they've fucked shit up once again. It is taking a while to fix things because they aren't used to solving problems, only talking about or causing them. They're basically the west coast version of Florida with more nonsense"
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258lzc | when a body decays, where do those white maggots(?) suddenly come from? | I just watched a video (Thanks r/WTF) where a dead pig decays. After some time you see white little things eating away from the inside.
Where do they suddenly come from? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/258lzc/eli5_when_a_body_decays_where_do_those_white/ | {
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"Flies are really good at detecting rotting meat, land on the meat to eat and breed and lay eggs, then the eggs hatch into maggots. Flies are tiny and quick so you won't really see them on a timelapse video.",
"Flies. Flies lay eggs, those eggs hatch, and fly larva is what we refer to as \"maggots.\"",
"Well this one is wrapped up",
"In the past there was actually a theory of spontaneous generation because they didn't know maggots morphed into flies etc. Look it up, it's pretty interesting."
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3c4u8e | why is the world not on a universal time? in other words why is it not "13:00 pm" all around the world - some would come to see it as daytime afternoon, others late afternoon, and yet others early morning. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3c4u8e/eli5_why_is_the_world_not_on_a_universal_time_in/ | {
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"The military uses this for large scale operations, in their use of \"Zulu Time\".\n\n\"Zulu\" time is that which you might know as \"GMT\" (Greenwich Mean Time). Our natural concept of time is linked to the rotation of the earth and we define the length of the day as the 24 hours it takes the earth to spin once on its axis.\n\nAs time pieces became more accurate and communication became global, there needed to be a point from which all other world times were based. Since Great Britain was the world's foremost maritime power when the concept of latitude and longitude came to be, the starting point for designating longitude was the \"prime meridian\" which is zero degrees and runs through the Royal Greenwich Observatory, in Greenwich, England, southeast of central London.\n\n As a result, when the concept of time zones was introduced, the \"starting\" point for calculating the different time zones was/is at the Royal Greenwich Observatory. When it is noon at the observatory, it is five hours earlier (under Standard Time) in Washington, D.C.; six hours earlier in Chicago; seven hours earlier in Denver; and, eight hours earlier in Los Angeles.\n\nUnfortunately the Earth does not rotate at exactly a constant rate. Due to various scientific reasons and increased accuracy in measuring the earth's rotation, a new timescale, called Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), has been adopted and replaces the term GMT.",
"Because, in day to day use, for most people, it's far easier this way.\n\n12pm means the same to everybody around the world (language barriers notwithstanding). It's noon, midday. It's the time when the sun is at its highest point. It's about the time where people have lunch.\n\nIf I travel outside of my time zone, I am able to immediately relate to the time, no matter where it is that I go. If somebody wants to meet me at 4pm it clicks instinctively that it's nearing the end of the day, that I might be having dinner with this person, that it might start getting dark while we do whatever we're doing.\n\nIt's easier to preserve the *meaning* of a time than it is to standardise its occurrence.\n\nContrast this with the time of year, which is standard around the world. When somebody relates coldness to January or droughts to August, that clashes with my understanding of those seasons. It's not drastic - I can easily understand what they mean - but it takes a second to create that logical reasoning, as opposed to an instinctive understanding. It's not much, but it's an inconvenience."
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coqey5 | the whole jeffrey epstein situation | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/coqey5/eli5_the_whole_jeffrey_epstein_situation/ | {
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"So he was charged with sexual trafficking of minors and was awaiting trial in jail. Two weeks ago he was found in his cell unconscious with neck injuries, he was placed on suicide watch and released a few days later. Today he was found dead, reported hanging himself. Those are the facts. \n\n\nWhat's odd is he was taken off the suicide watch at all. He should have stayed on it and there are even doubts about it being a suicide. So that leaves us to ask why would he be taken off suicide watch? \n\nIt is all strange we will see what happens as more facts come out. As of now the US attorney general has ordered an investigation into the matter."
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tvz1t | [meta] what if i told you that you could get the most out of [eli5] if you brought an already correct answer to a question that interests you, but you just need someone to *explain* it to you. | **IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER** (I know people are misunderstanding the post because of my clumsy title): I am only suggesting a way to get the most out of the subreddit. a thing YSK.
When you bring an already correct answer it makes it much easier to figure out what level of understanding you are seeking It also helps to make sure you are getting the answer to a question that you had *intended* to ask and not just the question as you phrased it.
**EDIT:** I like the suggestion of not downvoting correct responses. In order to effectively explain a concept to someone else you need two things.
(1) Correct answers to begin with.
(2) Great explanations of those correct answers.
So I would not initially up vote a correct answer, but if it leads to a great explanation, then I would go back and up vote the parent to make sure the pair, a correct answer and a great explanation, rise to the top.
**EDIT 2:** Imagine you are reading a textbook or assignment on say mitosis and the material you are supposed to be learning is hard to understand. Instead of just posting "What is mitosis" you post "can someone help me with this explanation of mitosis?" You will be more able to get an explanation you understand that covers the material you are supposed to be reading about.
Again, I am only suggesting a way to get the most out of the subreddit. a thing YSK. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/tvz1t/meta_what_if_i_told_you_that_you_could_get_the/ | {
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"Another suggestion, stop down voting correct answers that are hard for you to understand, even hard for anyone to understand. Save your down votes for \"bad explanations\" of correct answers or \"incorrect answers\". \n\nThis subreddit should be about up voting great explanations of correct answers, and downvoting correct answers stands in the way of that. Leave the correct answers alone and just ask questions about them, eventually it can lead to a great explanation of a correct answer to an interesting POST. Up vote that response. ",
"I also think that OP should state what level of understanding they already have. I see questions all the time that are just \"Help I don't get *this topic* help please\". I could write you a six page paper on the topic if necessary, or I could give you a short paragraph explaining it, depending on your current understanding and how in-depth you need the answer to be. If OP asks a question from a school class, they should state if they're in an AP, Honors, or standard class.",
"I disagree... a lot of times entire concepts are too large or complicated to be boiled down to even a high-level answer. For example, \"how did WWI start?\" is an question with no high-level answer that could fit into a copy/paste. It would basically be an entire wikipedia page. This policy would only discourage people from asking questions.\n\nI do agree with another response, that posters should indicate what their current level of understanding is so that answers can better be tailored to them. It's frustrating to attempt to write an answer for an actual 5-year-old when it turns out they have a high school graduate's level of understanding.",
"Would that be something you might be interested in?",
"That's what I do pretty much any time I come to ELI5. Have some upvotes.",
"This is what I've been arguing for for a while. Ask here if there's already an answer to your question but you simply can't understand it.",
"I cannot understand what it is you're getting at with this post. \"Bring an already correct answer\"???\n\nI want to understand...but can't.",
"Do you believe my being stronger or faster has anything to do with my muscles in *this* place? \n\nYou think that's *air* you're breathing right now?",
"I feel like this WAS one of the coolest subreddits I've ever seen. There are some real smart motherfuckers that answer questions here, but I feel like the substance of the questions reflects laziness rather than misunderstanding. Like they want an answer that is personally rendered to them instead of reading a few articles on Wikipedia, realize they still don't understand it, then rephrase their question to something more specific. I'm probably ranting, but I really don't want to see such a cool subreddit getting \"dummied down\" (kind of ironic, huh).",
"[META] Can we stop with the goddamn meta posts and posts about what the subreddit should be used for? Then maybe the subreddit would see some actual use for questions.",
"As a five year old, I'm having trouble understanding the title of your post. Could you perhaps put it in the form of a Laurence Fishburne image?",
"Apparently most of the users of this sub ARE actually 5 years old. It seems every other day you guys have top posts that are just trying to figure out how to use the sub right. ",
"I think a big problem with this reddit is that while the rules suggest citing sources, it's rarely done, and so the answers are entirely unreliable. imo the rules for citing sources in this sub should be as strict as r/askcience... \n\nSome teacher came in here with questions from her third grade class, and just said Thanks! and accepted all answers posted and presumably shared them with her class, which seemed kind of ridiculous to me. ",
"I almost needed an ELI5 post for this ELI5 post about ELI5 posts. Where's Xzibit when you need him?",
"Newbie question here that seems fairly out of place, but if we're discussing ways to get the most our of this subreddit..... Is it appropriate to post an answer?\n\nI tend to make pretty good analogies when I'm in school, explained for someone who doesn't get it (maybe not five, but someone with barely the basics) so they're not really You Should Know material, can I post things like \"Molecular Bonding Explained like you're Five\" with my analogy in the details section?"
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1tq100 | why does david cameron want mandatory porn filters for uk internet users? | I just dont get it. Why, when he is facing the potential breakup of his country with Scotland's referendum, why is David Cameron's biggest idea blocking internet porn? What does he stand to gain? What does he not understand about how these filters work? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1tq100/eli5_why_does_david_cameron_want_mandatory_porn/ | {
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"Information control. Australia's government tried to same thing a couple of years ago but it failed. Turned out that porn was just going to be the first step and then after that it was going to be everything the government didn't like. Whoever controls the information has the power. The idea is to get their foot in the door by saying it's about porn, specifically child porn (which it won't do anything to stop since you don't just find that with random searches) and then after that you just quietly expand it to cover everything else. "
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1c726r | what it is to default on a debt. what are the consequences? | I'm studying the bond market in an econ class, and the definition I was given of a bond is that it is a legal document binding the seller to pay the buyer at a given date and interest rate. That I get. But now, we're discussing how buyers sometimes calculate the expected value of a bond, by including the default risk. My question is: why is this acceptable? Does defaulting mean the bond seller simply can't, and doesn't have to pay the buyer back? Are there no legal consequences for promising to someone on paper to pay them money and then not do so? Does defaulting mean you are absolved from any payment whatsoever? I feel like the logical thing to do when faced with defaulting is to just postpone to the payment until you have the money needed to pay off the bond at its maturity. I just don't understand how defaulting can legally be an option. It just makes the whole thing sound like a game. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1c726r/eli5_what_it_is_to_default_on_a_debt_what_are_the/ | {
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"Let's forget about bonds for a minute, and think about a personal loan which you might take out from the bank (which is essentially the same thing on a smaller scale).\n\nNo one can force you to repay that loan. If you fail to pay it, though, then your credit rating will suffer. You will have to pay more to borrow in future, or you may find that you simply can't borrow at all. The bank may send bailiffs to your house to recover what they can (or, more likely, sell the debt to someone else who will send bailiffs round). If you are unable to pay, then you have options available to you such as bankruptcy, which is effectively an agreement that you'll pay what you can, and the bank will let you off of the rest.\n\nA bond is exactly like that. If a country fails to pay what's due, then it will find it harder to borrow in future, just the same as you would. You can't just send the bailiffs around - there is no legal way force a country to repay. But it's in the country's interests to pay if possible, if it wants to be able to continue to borrow at a reasonable rate and run its economy effectively.",
"There all kinds of legal consequence to defaulting. If the bond issuer is able, they can be forced to pay, with penalties. The problem is once it comes to defaulting, they have probably reached the point if insolvency, so legal consequences won't mean much."
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26ulna | how is the sat scored? | I recently took a diagnostic and got a 1720, however I don't get how it was scored. I got a total of 51 wrong and omitted and a 7 on my essay. How did this add up to 1720? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/26ulna/eli5how_is_the_sat_scored/ | {
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"It has been a while since I have taken the SAT and it might have changed more since I have taken it. First there is a raw score. For this score in the multiple choice section, you get a point for each question you get right, zero points for questions that you did not answer and lose 1/4 of a point for every wrong answer. For the essay, two graders will give it a score ranging from a 1 to 6 where 1 is terrible and 6 is fantastic. They will then combine the two scores together. Once all the raw scores are calculated, they will standardize them based on others who have taken the test. So, if your raw score for verbal ends up being at the 50th percentile, you will get a 500 for verbal. If you are in the 99th percentile for verbal, you will get an 800. After adding all the section scores together, there will be the final score\n\nTl:Dr they give you a raw score and then standardize it with others. ",
"I never took the SAT, but I presume it was scored that way because of the curve as recorded in previous years for your diagnostic test scoresheet.\n\nIf it works like I think it does, here is how it would break down:\n\nA 1720 would put you in like the 80th percentile.\n\nBasically you are going to get like one person who gets everything right on the test for every 1000 people that take it. Those people get a 2400, they are in the 99.9th percentile.\n\nYou got 51 wrong. In whatever year your scoresheet is keyed to, those who got 51 wrong scored in the 80th percentile. 79 out of 100 got more than 51 wrong, 19 out of 100 got less than 51 wrong. Because of the curve, 80th percentile is a 1720.\n\nWhat could happen is that as a whole, the people who take the exam for real at the same time you do might score better overall or worse overall than in previous years.\n\n\nBasically, your score is not directly tied to your number of right/wrong answers, but rather your right/wrong answers are compared to everyone else. After you are ascribed a percentile, you are dropped appropriately on the curve, which shows you your number score."
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7zhdcc | describe the process of gaining weight. from ingestion to digestion and so on. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7zhdcc/eli5_describe_the_process_of_gaining_weight_from/ | {
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"When you eat food, your body breaks down the larger nutritious molecules into simple glucose molecules. Glucose is the fuel that your body uses. The body takes a few steps to do this starting with physically grinding up the food with your teeth, then chemical breakdown with your saliva, then further chemical breakdown with stomach acid, and then further breakdown in the small intestine. Each type of nutrient molecule (carbs, fat, protein) is broken down with a different process, but in the end, the molecule is broken up into much smaller glucose molecules, which are absorbed into your blood through the small intestine.\n\nThe glucose molecules travel through the blood to enter individual cells where they are used to perform different functions in the cells. Your body needs a careful balance of glucose in the blood at all times. If glucose levels are low, cells can't function. If glucose levels are high, cells can be damaged. \n\nBecause of this, our body has a way of storing glucose molecules for later use. If the glucose levels get too high, the insulin hormone is released. Insulin pulls glucose out of the blood, and stores it in a molecule called glycogen, which is basically lots of glucose molecules chained together. Glycogen molecules get stored in the liver and muscles. Therefore the levels of glucose in the blood will decrease once insulin is released, thus saving your cells from damage.\n\nIf blood glucose levels get too low, the hormone glucagon is released. It does the opposite of insulin. It breaks off glucose molecules from the chains of glycogen, thus bringing your blood sugar levels back up. Glucagon and insulin keep your blood sugar levels balanced.\n\nSo now how do we get fat? There's only a finite amount of storage space for glycogen molecules. If they are full, then the body will start converting the medium-term storage glycogen molecules into long-term storage fat molecules. The fat molecules get stored in different locations throughout your body (exactly where is largely determined by genetics and gender). If your glycogen levels get low, then your body will convert fat into glycogen. This process takes a while, which is why it's not a good idea for the body to convert fat directly into glucose, and glucose directly into fat.\n\nSo knowing this, what does this tell us about losing weight? We should avoid foods that have lots of glucose molecules. These foods cause our blood sugar to spike, which causes an insulin release, which stores the energy, then causes our blood sugar levels to drop, which causes us to feel hungry again. The glucose molecules don't spend enough time in our blood to be used by our cells before being forced into storage. It's better to eat foods that \"burn\" slower, like long-chain carbohydrates (found in fruits, vegetables, and whole wheat bread), fats, and protein. These molecules shed glucose molecules into the blood slowly, thus they don't trigger an insulin response. This keeps your blood sugar levels more balanced, and keeps you feeling full longer.",
"You might find this interesting as well:\n\n_URL_0_"
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aq5qcc | what is being woke and what does it mean to be woke? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aq5qcc/eli5_what_is_being_woke_and_what_does_it_mean_to/ | {
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"Being \"woke\" is slang these days for being \"awakened to the truth\" so to speak. In lamens terms, being aware of global issues that are usually ignored by the ignorant.\nVeganism, global crises, conservation, the meat trade, government conspiracies etc are all things that \"woke\" people stereotypically are concerned about, as opposed to the average population that go on living their daily lives blissfully ignorant.\n\nWoke people tend to do research and look deeper into things that enlightens them to these topics "
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3tvfts | whats the difference between honey and syrup? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3tvfts/eli5whats_the_difference_between_honey_and_syrup/ | {
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"Honey is made by bees. Syrup is (at heart) made by plants -- though cooks process the heck out of it before we put it on pancakes."
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9baj0n | how does the finance industry benefit society? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9baj0n/eli5_how_does_the_finance_industry_benefit_society/ | {
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"Depends which part you are talking about. You can get a financial advisor which will help you manage your assets and set you up so you can retire. You can deal with people that forecast costs a business will have to spend so you can plan for it. You can buy stocks and bonds which help 1 party get money for a large project and the other party can earn interest. \n\nFinance basically deals with anything related to money and helping manage those. Managing money is a benefit to society because it let's people be more efficient with what they have. ",
"At the most basic level, it would suck if you couldn't deposit money at a bank and had to keep all your money in a room in your house. One fire or break in and you've lost absolutely everything. And then you couldn't borrow any money to start over because, again, no banks.",
"i cant afford a house now.\n\nbut i could pay for it, in time.\n\nso how about a loan, so i can buy a house, and repay you that loan with some extra.\n\nthis means, if done well, that people can afford property where before they could not.\n\n\ni have a great idea, i could be rich if i had the means. what if someone fronted the money, i could start up a company and introduce a new product for everyone to benefit from.\nthis means, if done well, that anyone with a good idea has a chance to make it happen.\n\n\nof course, this is not how it allways works, but that is the general idea. more homeowners and more ideas develop."
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ah7h8e | how does a company go about separating, like with activision blizzard? | How do you get both sides to agree to split? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ah7h8e/eli5_how_does_a_company_go_about_separating_like/ | {
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"I can’t say In activisions case. But my old company simply bought themselves a majority share. This means the company took all of their profits and bought back their own stock. In my old companies case it took around 10 years to complete but with enough capital a company could do it overnight.",
"The technicalities get incredibly complex with the number of legal issues.\n\nUsing your example, Activision Blizzard is one company. There are no \"*both sides*\" to agree and \"*Activision Blizzard*\" is just a name. Blizzard as we knew it is in effect a subsidiary of Activision Blizzard. \n\nNow the term \"*splitting*\" is too wide. I am assuming you mean a complete split of Blizzard as a separate entity. \n\nOne key idea is that shares = 'ownership' in a company. So Activision Blizzard ultimately holds enough shares in Blizzard as a separate company to have a decisive say on how it ought to be run. The specifics get very technical, but the general principle is that many issues relating to the running of a company, such as appointment and removal of directors, are empowered on the shareholders. \n\nHow do companies split? Right now, Activision Blizzard owns a controlling share of Blizzard. If Blizzard were to be 'independent' as its own company, then the Activision Blizzard owned shares in Blizzard would need to go back to 'Blizzard'. This will probably be by selling its shares to whoever wants or will run Blizzard as an independent company etc. so Activision Blizzard no longer has an interest over it. \n\nOf course the laws, rule, and logistics behind it are much more complex than above, but that is the gist. "
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82f2sa | why would a company spend money making offices in a leased spaced. doesn't the landlord "own" and benefit from all of the enhancements? | I've never understood why a company would spend money on a rented/leased (maybe there's a difference there) office space that they don't own. Wouldn't it be a better financial decision to purchase a smaller place elsewhere and renovate it so they own all of the improvements? Is there a benefit I'm not aware of? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/82f2sa/eli5_why_would_a_company_spend_money_making/ | {
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"There are two basic issues here. First, the benefits and drawbacks of owning vs leasing and second the issue of \"improvements\" as you put it.\n\nThe pros and cons of buying vs renting/leasing are well understood and have to be decided on a case-by-case basis. Generally leasing is better for cash flow because you can pay month-to-month instead of needing to put down a large down payment up front. Also, with a lease, you aren't tied to the same physical location forever. If you need more space you can easily move without having to find a buyer for your current space.\n\nAs to improvements, I think you have a misunderstanding here. When a company comes in to an empty space and builds rooms, offices, shared spaces, etc. they are doing it to their specific requirements. The next company to use that space would likely have a different set of requirements and so would want a different arrangement of the space. They usually have to tear out what had been built before and redo it. So, in that case, they aren't really \"improving\" the space because it's actually more valuable empty than being pre-built.",
"There are tax and accounting benefits to lease vs own. With a lease, the cost of the rent is an operating expense. With owning, it's a capital expense.\n\nOperating expenses can be written off on the year they occurred. Capital expense has to be depreciated over a period of time. I know you asked about building but let's use an example of a new machine at a factory. If they own it, it has a five year usable life, so according to IRS and gaap? 1/5 of the cost of the purchase can be written off each year. With lease of that same machine, the cost of the lease is operating expenses is a simple annual expense. \n\nBuilding and land have similar rules but the details of how are a bit more complicated, and I don't really know them.\n",
"Leasing allows you to pay for flexibility. Businesses often have needs that change rapidly from year to year, and leasing allows you add or change space more quickly and less expensively. It also lets you start a business more easily, as you avoid loans and big down payments.\n\nAs for the enhancements, who owns what and who pays for what is often negotiated as part of the lease. And just because a landlord owns enhancements doesn't mean they have any value to them. The fixtures for a sandwich shop isn't going to do much good for a pilates studio or a nail salon. The initial build-out is going to be an expense involved with any new tenant."
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1aetkc | why do conspiracy theorists care if drones patrol our cities? | Maybe I'm missing something but, I feel as if the only people who would care are the ones committing crimes. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1aetkc/eli5_why_do_conspiracy_theorists_care_if_drones/ | {
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"Do you care if the police install cameras in your house, your bedroom, your toilet, or your shower? Why? Unless you're committing a crime who cares?\n\nThe idea is that people like having privacy even if it isn't to commit a crime. I don't think you're a conspiracy theorist if you'd like to have some degree of privacy.",
"There's an old joke that goes:\n\n*\"Knock knock!\"*\n\n*\"Who's there?\"*\n\n*\"Gestapo.\"*\n\nImagine that we're sitting in a room, just you and I and I take out a gun, point it at your head and say \"Well, Sam, the gun's loaded and the safety is off and if the gun is fired, it will blow your head into itty bitty pieces. But don't worry, I'm not going to pull the trigger.\"\n\nDo you want the gun pointed at your head any way? Of course not, that's horrible gun discipline in the first place.\n\nIn any case, previous totalitarian governments and police states have utilized similar \"intelligence gathering\" techniques like, well the Gestapo. They were uniformly used to squash political opposition. You do not want government to have absolute surveillance. YOU need to draw the line because where does the surveillance end?"
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2mwj4y | why does every text to speech synthetic voice pretty much suck? | No matter how hard I look for a text to speech software they all have that robotic fake sound. Even Google and Apple with Siri have voices that are clearly fake and robotic. What it's so difficult about the language or the human voice that no program can imitate, are there any advancements in this area? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2mwj4y/eli5why_does_every_text_to_speech_synthetic_voice/ | {
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"We've been trying to get computers to understand natural languages for 50 years. We still haven't succeeded at that. And until we get that, we're not going to be able to get the cadence right. There's a ton of research in this area- companies like Google and Microsoft are throwing tons of money at it in addition to non-profits and government organizations funding basic research, and some of the greatest minds alive are working to figure it out. They're made a ton of progress in recent years, but it's still not enough.\n\nThe problem is that human languages don't make sense. English grammar can't be defined by a clear set of rules and there are too many exceptions in spelling and pronunciation."
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5kh4i6 | why does thinking about our subconscious actions make them manual? | For example:
You're breathing right? Now think about breathing.
You're also aware of your tongue now.
Oh, you're also blinking manually too. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5kh4i6/eli5_why_does_thinking_about_our_subconscious/ | {
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"It doesn't. Your breathing isn't manual. You're just aware of it. Being aware of your breathing does not put you in imminent danger of asphyxiation. \n\nPeople who buy into this myth are expecting their breathing to become manual, so they hold their breath and then choose to stop holding their breath...et voila. ",
"Because breathing that is mechanism of muscle tensing and relaxing change the volume of your chest cavity, allowing air to be sucked in or pushed out. Those muscle are skeletal muscle (intercostals and diaphragm muscle), which like any other skeletal muscle you can control voluntarily. \n\nHowever we have ourselves a Respiratory center in our brain stem, that controls our breathing rhythm (ventilation), because I'm explaining like it is 5, thus this center sends down signal to inspiratory muscles and then expiratory muscles after, again and again, in rhythmic speed. The rhythm is set according Chemical sensors in the lungs and some part of the blood vessels -- there's one in our brain-- that send signals to our respiratory center. (forgot where some of the other chemosensors is though, few google search might help you).\n\nIt's like breathing is supposed to be involuntary because you have a part of your brain stem that could control it, however since it's made of skeletal muscle you can override the brain stem control. The brain stem could also makes you feels in the need of air thus you manually increase your breathing as well.\n\nNow being aware of it makes you \"manual breathing\" because you are made aware that you can voluntary control of you breath, your sense around the chest increase because you made your brain aware of your chest, the movement, the skin touching with the clothes your on, the stretching of muscles when breathing), giving you the sense of manual control of your chest, and as well you start holding your breath for no apparent reason instead of continuing to breath normally. Basically, when you are aware, like any most people would do if being aware of something they just stop doing the thing and thinking about it. because you just hold your breath for a few moments, your brain feels you need to compensate for much air, thus it sends signals to increase breathing rhythm, which usually are voluntarily, like after you run and out of breath, the breathing becomes voluntary as ever because you need to get in much more O2 than usual. At certain range of O2 intake is automatic, but when the body need much larger O2 intake, it becomes manual so you can breathe hard and deep and fast."
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2ao8tc | how come my dog can sleep in crazy positions and not hurt her neck but if i sleep just slightly off my pillow or at an odd position my neck hurts all day. | What kind of voodoo allows my boxer to sleep upside down and contorted but I bend my neck the wrong way sleeping and I'm taking pain relievers for the rest of the day. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ao8tc/eli5how_come_my_dog_can_sleep_in_crazy_positions/ | {
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"Partially because we evolved to walk upright, that changed the way our spine works in relation to quadrupeds, and means we have a lot less flexibility in our neck than they do. The movement of our head is severely restricted, for this reason our neck muscles are a lot less powerful and developed than those of dogs. The other reason is exercise, dogs are insanely flexible and are constantly bending their bodies in crazy ways. The average modern human just walks upright or sits upright most of the day. \n\nI have 2 labs, male is 3 years old, female is 90 days old. The big guy uses the little girl as a pillow, and she doesn't even mind. She sleeps under the weight of the head of a 60kg dog, no problems. Sometimes she sleeps with her head hanging from the couch. ",
"Because the dog's skeleton and muscles are very different to yours. We have developed down very different evolutionary paths. \n\nIt's also one of the reasons why a dog can lick his balls and you can't. \n\nUnless you give him a biscuit. ",
"Lots of people commenting about our skeletons and whatnot. But have you ever seen a baby fall asleep with it's head in it's own butt? \n\nI think it must also have something to do with our muscles? Aren't modern human adults basically just tightened off elastic bands?\n\nMy yoga doing friends could fall asleep with her foot behind her head. When I try to tie my shoe, I start to cry. ",
"Here is a question: How do you know that your dog's neck doesn't hurt? Maybe your dog's neck does hurt, but because it is a dog, it is simply incapable of communicating it to you. ",
"Your dog isn't a whiny bitch, she keep her complaints for things that matter. Like where's my food, I want out, or get over here bunny.",
"That's probably because of two things. First is because dogs (i too have a boxer) have developed necks appropriate for hunting, which gives them a huge amount of posible ways to move it (look at your dog when it plays with a toy, how it moves it sideways violently) and a grand amount of force (big muscles). The other posible explanation is our posture and how we move, since bipedalism and (word for walking in four paws) make every movement diferent. Sorry for my crappy english.",
"Because we walk upright and evolution hasn't really sorted-out our how that works for our spine yet",
"Walking with an upright carriage and having a proportionallly enormous skull requires some dramatic evolutionary tradeoffs. For example giving birth is much more difficult, spinal injuries are much more common, youre not flexible enough to lick your nuts, your jaw muscles are not strong enough to kill prey, etc etc. The most important thing regarding your question is that your spine and neck are supporting much more weight compressively and are way less flexible, though there is a bit more to it. A dog is just built differently than you. On the other side of the coin, a dog has a fairly difficult time walking upright, cant perform calculus, and pick things up with his paws.\nI went for a long time like a year without sleeping in a bed, and your body seems to be less fussy about things like this when its not used to comfort on a regular basis.",
"Animals tend to ignore pain/wounds that would send most of us crying to a doctor. I've had dogs hurt themselves in pretty gruesome ways (running into fences flat out and losing teeth, getting hit by cars, shredding feet open on broken glass, etc) and completely not care, not even a whimper.\n\nHis neck might hurt just as much, he's just not whining.\n\nSide note:\n\nI had cervical kyphosis after an awesome mountain bike crash that resulted in me landing on the back of my head, upside down, with all my body weight. All the sudden, I would have crippling neck pain if I slept \"wrong\".\n\nAs it turns out, sleeping wrong wasn't the issue, being all out of whack was-sleeping weird just exacerbated it. It might be worth mentioning to a doctor. A stiff neck is one thing, recurring pain requiring pain medication might be something worth checking out.",
"You probably have neck cancer ",
"I don't know about the rest of you, but I can sleep in any position and still feel comfortable in the morning",
"The dog cant complain about it",
"How do you know she doesn't have a crick in her neck? Did she tell you? And if she did... did she also command you to murder the sinners? O^In ^this ^hole ^lives ^the ^Wicked ^King. ^Kill ^for ^my ^Master. ^I ^turn ^children ^into ^Killers.",
"Your dog runs around, rolls around, and is generally physically active repeatedly throughout the day. You are a fatass who spends most of the day in a chair.",
"Your Dog feels it, he just doesn't bitch about it. Suck it up princess.",
"Dogs have very strong necks. They have to support their head in front of their body. Our necks just hold it straight up.",
"Dogs don't have collar bones. They do get sore necks but not as often as we do and usually not just from sleeping wrong.\n",
"It does hurt her but she is not a little bitch.",
"Often times I see my dog sleeping on his side with his head at a 90 degree angle up against the wall....I shudder at the thought of waking up after a night of that.",
"How do you know your dog's neck doesn't hurt?",
"Because you are not a dog",
"Your dog is a lot younger than you are.",
"cause you're a complainer",
"You may have noticed many comments relating to hydration. You also have seen the comments about physical fitness. Finally, I want to highlight the remarks about sleeping position.\nI bet you drink alcohol. Not a lot, not like I'm trying to say you're an alcoholic, but often... A drink with dinner, or maybe a couple before bed.\nThose couple of drinks are causing you to sleep Hard, staying far too long in one position. They are sapping your hydration, causing joint stiffness and drying your connective tissue. The alcohol is causing inflammation of the nerves, and simultaneously rendering your natural pain dampening response ineffective. \nYou try to treat with pain meds, which are barely effective, but they are secretly taxing your liver, causing more inflammation, and further disrupting your natural pain dampening chemistry. It becomes a vicious cycle. \nThe liver, taxed beyond its ability, spend increasing amounts of effort trying to process toxins, during which time it becomes more inflamed and less able to process nutritive factors. The inflammation throughout the body increases. The joints deteriorate rapidly due to inflammation, poor hydration, and lack of proper nutrition from the liver. \nGive up the alcohol and see what happens.",
"Who knows, I sure don't speak dog. ",
"This is a dumb question OP. You should feel bad.",
"How would you know how your dogs neck feels?",
"How the hell do you know your dog doesn't have a sore neck? lol",
"You have a sensitive neck.",
"Because you're not a fucking dog.",
"My god I can't believe this question made it to the front page. ",
"She does she just doesnt bitch about it \nedit: pun punintended",
"How...how do YOU know your dog isn't in pain? When your neck hurts after a bad sleep, it isn't anyways evident on the surface because you just go about your daily business anyway...",
"Like some other people have said, it's an issue of fitness. Fitness is not just cardio, it's also things like stretching, posture and a bunch of other junk. \n\nThere is an emerging field, biomechanics, which is a combination of anatomy and physical therapy research, which is all about how your body is supposed to be used. Chances are that if you have a sore neck, you are not using your body well. Sure there are folks out there who are worse, but because you are riddled with minor problems from poor posture and repetitive stress injuries, you flare those up when you sleep weird.\n\nI know about all this, and am more than capable of avoiding all neck and back pain when I focus on it... but that doesn't mean I never let myself get headaches, or that I don't live with chronically tight shoulders out of laziness.\n\nIf you want more information I could blab on a bit and direct you to some resources.",
"Maybe their necks do hurt after sleeping like that, but they just can't tell you because they can't talk?",
"How do you know the dog's neck doesn't hurt?",
"Same reason they can lick their own balls and we can't. Flexibility.",
"Has your dog ever complained to you of a sore neck?"
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