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2srzam | what kind of people are on the committees for major awards like the oscars and how does someone get appointed to the committee? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2srzam/eli5_what_kind_of_people_are_on_the_committees/ | {
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"Sarcastic, but shockingly close to the truth answer: White older people get nominated to be part of the Academy by current old white members.",
"You can't apply, you have to be invited. If you work in the film industry in some capacity and your work has been critically acclaimed they'll invite you into one of the categories. It's the same categories you win awards for so actors, actresses, directors, set designers, writers, hairstylists- they all have their own group. Lately there's been a bit of a push to diversify because it's so predominately white men over the age of sixty. Unfortunately it's a body made up of thousands and you stay in for life so it's hard to change the demographics until people start dying. \n\nHere are some articles from Variety that have the new members listed: \n\n[2014](_URL_1_)\n\n[2013](_URL_0_)\n\nEdit: It's also important to remember the Oscars are only one thing the Academy does. They also work in film preservation and history, provide scholarships and grants for young filmmakers, work for better women/minority representation in the industry (they do a horrific job of it, but they do), and a more. The official mission is to advance the art and science of film. They started the Oscars in the '30s as a way to legitimize film as an art form and not just an entertainment. The idea was that they could reward films that didn't make a huge amount of money but deserved praise, so people would take it seriously like literature, painting, music, and theater. "
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"http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/academy-invites-276-new-members-576469",
"http://variety.com/2014/film/news/academy-broadens-range-by-inviting-271-new-members-1201243808/"
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||
kncg4 | why does white look pink after coming inside on a bright day? why does white look blue on a camera? | When you come inside after spending a lot of time outside without sunglasses on a bright day everything white inside looks pink. Why is that?
Why is it different for a camera - if you set your white balance to sunlight, whites inside look blue? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/kncg4/eli5_why_does_white_look_pink_after_coming_inside/ | {
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"It's all about white balance. White, unfortunately, isn't white. It's made up of a lot of different colors in combination so that it looks white. But there are lots of ways to subtly change what \"white\" is - and when you see two different \"whites\" together, it's easy to see that one may look pink while another looks blue. \n\nSo when you're out in the sun, your eyes get used to that particular white balance. Your eyes are really awesome at adjusting to different colors - you can tell what's green and what's red even if it's in daylight, shade, cloudy, etc. But it takes a short while for your eyes to adjust to a new white balance. \n\nYour camera, on the other hand, doesn't know that leaves are supposed to be a particular shade of green - you have to manually input a white balance into your camera. Sunlight, shade, fluorescent lights, and incandescent lights all have different white balances, and there are different settings for each one. ",
"It's all about white balance. White, unfortunately, isn't white. It's made up of a lot of different colors in combination so that it looks white. But there are lots of ways to subtly change what \"white\" is - and when you see two different \"whites\" together, it's easy to see that one may look pink while another looks blue. \n\nSo when you're out in the sun, your eyes get used to that particular white balance. Your eyes are really awesome at adjusting to different colors - you can tell what's green and what's red even if it's in daylight, shade, cloudy, etc. But it takes a short while for your eyes to adjust to a new white balance. \n\nYour camera, on the other hand, doesn't know that leaves are supposed to be a particular shade of green - you have to manually input a white balance into your camera. Sunlight, shade, fluorescent lights, and incandescent lights all have different white balances, and there are different settings for each one. "
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5p2658 | how is it that microscopes can see through an organism? | How is it that microscopes can see through an organism via "layers?" Like, my friend said that he can see through a fruit fly using a microscope (I think olympus bh2 or something) and see at different layers? I super don't understand how they do that. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5p2658/eli5_how_is_it_that_microscopes_can_see_through/ | {
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"The microscope focuses on a very thin plane. Everything above and below is blurred out. So as long as light is getting through then you can see an image.\n\nIf you think about it, MRI's get their pictures the same way. One layer is in sharp detail. Every thing else is taken out.\n\nI never tried to do anything but sex a fruit fly with with a microscope. It was a dissecting scope which was different.\n\nBut most of the time microscope images are transmitted light modified by the organism viewed. Thin slices are used to view bacteria. The slide is generally stained first to enhance detail. You can also view with reflected light.",
"It's possible that your friend sliced up the fruit fly or bleached it before looking through it. It's also possible that he was looking at fruit fly larvae, which are quite small and pretty see-through.",
"Slice it thin enough, and light will get through! You need a light source below the microscope shining up through the stage the slide is placed on of course. Can't see anything until you switch that on. \n\nIt's not just flies either, this technique can be done with any blood and tissue samples, plants, or even rocks if like I say, you slice them thin enough. Standard thickness for a rock sample on a slide is 0.03 mm, thinner than a human hair! That way light gets through and you can tell a lot from the colours and patterns it creates in the rock. ",
"In the same way that, if you take a picture of something through a glass window, you can either focus at the subject behind it or at the window (especially if it's dirty or has some water droplets)\n\nWhatever is out of focus becomes a blur. Also things at microscopic dimensions are usually more transparent"
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8c46ms | what is the mad cow disease? why can humans get it? | A good family friend had contacted this disease. Previously I had thought that this was a disease for cows (from the name), and thought it didn’t affect humans. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8c46ms/eli5_what_is_the_mad_cow_disease_why_can_humans/ | {
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"The Mad Cow disease is a thing called a Prion disease. It's a rare type of malformed protein which supposedly there is no cure for.",
"Mad Cow is a prion disease. Prions are misfolded proteins, large biological molecules that compose large parts of our bodies and do a huge number of things depending on their type. Being misfolded has two problems: Due to their new shape they don't do what they should. The other huge problem is they cause normal proteins to become misfolded as well.\n\nThis means that one bad protein will gradually spread the problem throughout the body, breaking all the similar proteins and also whatever those proteins did in the body. With Mad Cow it destroys the brain and causes it to become spongy, leading to loss of brain function.\n\nDue to the resilience of proteins and similarity to other structures of the body, prion diseases are generally speaking both untreatable and invariably fatal.",
"I'm sorry to hear about your friend. \n\nBovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (mad cow disease) and the version humans get (Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease) are both caused by a \"corrupted\" or misfolded version of a certain protein that both cow and human cells make, called the prion protein (PrP). The disease doesn't spread as a virus or bacteria, your body puts proteins together by using existing versions as template. If that template is corrupted, the new copies are corrupted too.\n\nIn the nervous system, misfolded PrP sticks together and grows into fibrous masses, destroying and displacing cells.\n"
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d028mi | what causes ‘the zoomies’ in animals? | My human kids get whacked out when they’re overtired, or when they get a belt of highly refined sugar.
What mechanism explains why my fur-bearing family members of all ages sometimes lose their marbles and run around wide-eyed and crazy-pants? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d028mi/eli5_what_causes_the_zoomies_in_animals/ | {
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"Children do not get hyperactive from ingesting sugar. If they become more active than before, it's because their blood sugar was LOW, before. \n\nIf high blood sugar made people hyperactive, diabetics would be the most physically active people on earth, which is the opposite of what is observed. \n\nIf your family members \" sometimes lose their marbles and run around wide-eyed and crazy-pants? \" then they are, indeed, crazy.",
"from what I've observed it's usually a form of stimming, where they have too much pent up nervous energy they haven't been able to find an outlet for and then ALL OF A SUDDEN\n\nkids do it too, think about christmas morning"
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7296mg | back in 2005 my speakers would always do a little bark before i got a text message, but not anymore. why did this happen and what changed? | Title text | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7296mg/eli5_back_in_2005_my_speakers_would_always_do_a/ | {
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"The phone used 2G GSM(or another similar system) in 2005 and today you are likely using 4G\n\n2G GSM Time-division multiple access to share a channel with 8 or 16 other cellphones. That mean that is transmit in short burst and the stopped tramsitting. There was buliple burst per second and it those burst that was picked up by the speaker.\n\nLater standards uses Code-division multiple access among other thing and then the cellphone will send the whole time but how the signal is shaped lets the tower to determine the signal from each cellphone.\n\nThe continual transmission will not induce sound in the speakes",
"What changed is that your phone now communicates using Wifi and 3G/4G radios instead of a GSM radio. Because of how the GSM radio works, it causes interference with speakers in some cases. The others don't have that issue."
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35hflz | what is the difference between inflation and deflation (in terms of currency) and how are they caused? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/35hflz/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_inflation_and/ | {
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"Imagine a market with one guy selling apples. All the people in his village want apples, so that there is more money than goods. The price of each apple is now 10$. Now a lot of people notice that selling apples might be lucrative so new apple stands are popping up left and righht and every one of them wants to sell their apples. Since there are so many apples now and the demand for apples stays the same each apple is now worth less money, say 5$. \n\nInföation starts when a country is printing more money than new goods are generated. For our example that would mean everyone now has 10.000$ and only wants to buy apples. Of course our stands figure that 5$ for an apple seems way underpriced now, so they rais their price to 100$. Thats basically inflation. \n\nMote money generated while not the equal amoount of goods networth is created.\n\nDeflation happens when prices are dropping rapidly. Our 100$ apple is only 90$ the next day and a week after that 70$. People figure they will still keep dropping in price and therefore they wait in spending their money because they will have way nicer deals next week and so on. That is basically the opposite of inflation. Aount of money stays the same while more goods are created. So every penny is now worth more than a dollar last week."
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44m6bt | how do brands (e.g. audemars piguet, hermes, etc.) get to where they are today? why does their brand cost so much? at which point did people start going 'it's actually reasonable to pay this price for this brand'? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/44m6bt/eli5_how_do_brands_eg_audemars_piguet_hermes_etc/ | {
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"David Lynch once said that the best thing about being wealthy was buying a book at a bookstore and never having to look at the price.\n\nThere is a certain level of wealth where the difference between a $20 and $200 shirt is negligible, and they don't have to worry about it.\n\nThere is a certain level of pretention where it is worth $200 to you to make people think you belong to that superior socioeconomic group.\n\nThose two groups are the customer base. ",
"Heritage and craftsmanship.\n\nOne reason these brands are well-regarded is partly because they've hung around so long.\n\nBut that's not the whole story. Well-made things that require a lot of artistry are more valuable. I'm not a watch expert, but I have a few Hermes scarves, and they're beautiful hardy silk designed and originally screenprinted by artists ([here are some videos of the process](_URL_0_)) and the edges rolled by hand, not mass machine-printed on polyester (I have scarves like that too, but they're inexpensive.)\n\nThese items also don't lose much of their value. If you buy an Hermes scarf today, you can wear it for ten years and sell it on eBay for almost the same price, as long as you've kept it in great condition, because the styles change often, some patterns are rarer than others.\n\nThey also hold cachet because some of the people who wear/buy these things are tastemakers.\n\nThere are a lot of \"designer products,\" however, that aren't necessarily worth the price in terms of quality and won't hold their value. In that case, you're paying for the name/marketing. Most designer sunglasses, for example, are made by the same company with different labels stuck on."
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e215cp | enantiomers and how the differ from one another? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e215cp/eli5_enantiomers_and_how_the_differ_from_one/ | {
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"Look at your hands. Your left hand is a mirror copy of your right hand. If you position one on top of another, they do not match exactly - because they arent same, they are mirrored.\n\nThis is what Enantiomers are - they are basically \"mirrored molecules\". They have same atoms, in same positions, connected to each other in similar way - except mirrored.\n\n[Here is example](_URL_0_)"
]
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"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/12/Milchs%C3%A4ure_Enantiomerenpaar.svg/298px-Milchs%C3%A4ure_Enantiomerenpaar.svg.png"
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3jxr51 | the "spin" classification system of particles and atoms | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3jxr51/eli5_the_spin_classification_system_of_particles/ | {
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"\"Spin\" refers to how a particle can have momentum without changing its position. A similar phenomena in the visible world is how a basketball can spin in place. That's not exactly what's happening to the particle, but we use the words \"spin\" and \"angular momentum\" for lack of better words in our vocabulary to explain it.\n\nThe number that comes after the word \"spin\" (like \"Spin-1/2\") indirectly tells you how many possible spins a particle can have. It turns out that there are only certain \"quantized\" values for particle spin, and every possible value is a multiple of half of a certain physical constant. A Spin-1/2 particle has two possible spin values in on a particular axis: +1/2 and -1/2. A Spin-1 particle has three possible spin values: +1, 0, and -1. A Spin-3/2 particle has four, +3/2, +1/2, -1/2, and -3/2, and you can probably deduce the rest."
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24t5wj | how do mods improve a game's graphics? | I understand how mods can add new dialogue and other features, but aren't graphics created by a team of designers at a studio? How can a hobbyist coder make such a dramatic improvement that the studio could not? Thanks in advance for the explanation. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/24t5wj/eli5_how_do_mods_improve_a_games_graphics/ | {
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"Well I know in the case of Skyrim a lot of the graphics were downgraded to make the game more readily available so upgrading wasn't hard because its framework was already capable for this, I think a lot of PC games are like this. Not sure how its done though.",
" > How can a hobbyist coder make such a dramatic improvement that the studio could not? \n\nAlmost all mods have a very limited scope. [Here's](_URL_0_?) an example. All it does it make rock textures more detailed. When someone else makes a mod for trees, another person makes on for water, another for grass, it is as if you have an entire team working on their own parts. It is not the case that one hobbyist remakes the entire game to look better, more like hundreds of them make one small part of the game better. \n\nWhy doesn't the studio just release the game with better graphics? I'm not sure. I think they may be just making one game for the PC and consoles, and so are working within the consoles' limits. Having better graphics also makes the file sizes larger, and increases the computer's required specifications which would mean less people would be able to play it.\n\n"
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j9lbf | basic physics and/or chemistry | I haven't studied physics and chemistry in a very, very long time and suddenly i am in a position where i need to be pretty capable in both subjects. What are some basic bits of knowledge/things to remember that you can tell me that will potentially make my studying easier? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j9lbf/eli5_basic_physics_andor_chemistry/ | {
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"text": [
"What level are you after? And which area(s) of each subject?",
"What level are you after? And which area(s) of each subject?"
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24vdr1 | how do plants mimic each other if they can't see? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/24vdr1/eli5_how_do_plants_mimic_each_other_if_they_cant/ | {
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"They don't actually mimic in the way that a comedian might mimic another voice. They happen to have survived by randomly mutating in a way that has them appear to look like another plant (nettles being a great example - a mutation that makes you look like something that stings is clearly advantageous). This is a great example of the magic of natural selection.",
"Plants don't actively mimic each other. It's a passive process that occurs through natural selection.\n\nFor example, lets say you have a random selection of mimic plants, some of which are better at mimicking than the others. In this case, let's say that the mimic plants are weeds, and they are mimicking a legitimate crop. When you go out to pull the weeds from your garden or whatever, you'll pull out all the ones that are obviously weeds. This means that the plants that do a poor job at mimicking will die, usually before they've had time to spread their seeds. The plants that do a better job will last longer, meaning they have a higher chance of spreading seeds, which results in offspring that are more or less the same at mimicking.\n\nOver time, the worst mimics are killed off, while the best ones live on to produce more seeds, resulting in a population of plants that is better at mimicry. Yet, throughout this entire process, none of the plants were aware of what they were doing. They simply continued with their natural functions, e.g. growing and producing seeds. They had no awareness of why certain members of their species would be uprooted and die."
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2e2lnk | does anyone or any nation own antarctica? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2e2lnk/eli5_does_anyone_or_any_nation_own_antarctica/ | {
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"Many countries have signed agreements that nobody can own Antarctica.",
"Portions of it have been claimed by different countries: the UK, New Zealand, Chile, Norway and Australia. There is also some unclaimed territory as well. 1,610,000 km2 of Antarctic territory is currently unclaimed because it is so remote.",
"A few countries have made [territorial claims](_URL_1_) in Antarctica in the late 1800's / early 1900's, but the later [Antarctic Treaty](_URL_0_) kinda render those claims somewhat moot... the world has set it aside as a scientific preserve.",
"Australia has quite a rich history in terms of original exploration and mapping and fronts a pretty strong case for it's territorial claims.\n\nHowever, majority of the Antarctic falls under the Antarctic Treaty which doesn't necessarily suspend territorial claims, but it does restrict the activities taken out in the Antarctic.\n\nThere are several nation's that form the treaty, and majority of activity in the region involves research and scientific endeavors. ",
"So if you kill someone in Antarctica, would you get away with it because no one owns it?",
"Actually, there is a town called Villa Las Estrellas on the western part of Antarctica that is still considered to be part of Chile becacuse they have claimed it. Suprisingly it has many amenites as a regular town does.",
"There is an international agreement that no country owns the Antarctic. This means that Russia owns it.",
"I defer you to [\"The Antarctic Treaty\"](_URL_0_) ",
"The [Antarctic Treaty System (ATS)](_URL_0_) regulates international activity on Antarctica, limiting it to mostly scientific research and tourism, and banning military activity of any kind. A number of countries do also have territorial claims in the region (typically based on longitude), but they aren't highly contested, nor are they fought over in any form.",
"America owns every country in The World. ",
"There is an Treaty that says that no one owns Antarctica. In the treaty counties can use Antarctica for research as long as it is not for military reasons. Countries can not station troops for military reasons on the Continent. Also in the treaty it states that there can be no fire arms for any reason, which would make it hard to just take land. There is something like 18 different research stations on Antarctica with about 5 being owned by the US. \n\n[Imgur](_URL_0_)\nMe at the South Pole"
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aak3lj | essential oils. | Just that. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aak3lj/eli5_essential_oils/ | {
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"All of them? Lavender has no scientific backing to help you sleep or calm you down. Tea tree has been proven to be a mild disinfectant. Most essential oils have proof or have none. They smell pretty, and that's always nice. ",
"The placebo effect, is when something have an effect, because people think it will have an effect. Homeopathy, oils, etc are basically that. Unfortunately the effects are limited compared to actual medicine. ",
"They're the extracted/refined \"essence\" of plants, condensed down to an oil. Some people think they have all sorts of amazing healing properties but there's not a whole lot of science behind that. Currently, it's somewhat of a hot topic because a few big MLM schemes are marketing them fairly aggressively. ",
"ok\n\nbasically the volatile \"smelly\" chemicals from whatever plant condensed and refined down to be very pure and intense. can be useful for making things smell interesting and making perfumes, and occasionally in making baking extracts to make things taste nice. some say they have medicinal effects, which a few do, but there's also a lot of overblown hype. can sometimes be dangerous especially to pets because they're so concentrated."
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17dcwz | how does one design a cpu? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/17dcwz/eli5_how_does_one_design_a_cpu/ | {
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"I would really love to see a ELI5 of this, since knowing roughly how to explain it i can't really see how it can be simplified to that level.",
"Are you asking how a CPU works, or process of building one?\n\n\nI'll try to answer the first question but I think you have to actually \nask a CPU designer the other question...\n\n\nOK, so imagine that a computer is a small town. The main street is\nthe **BUS** (this is the only street), and on main street there are \na lot of small shops, but instead of making bread and horse shoes \nthey do math.\n\nYou are the mayor, and therefore live in the mayors house. Your in \ncharge of telling the town what to do, you are the **PROGRAM MEMORY**.\n\nBecause you are the mayor and you are focused on running the city \nactual communication between the shops and you is done by the \nsecretary or **CONTROL UNIT**\n\nThe problem is that there can only be one person in the main street \nat a time. The way the secretary solves this is by using a telephone, \nshe tells which shop is allowed to use main street at that moment. \nThe telephone is the **CONTROL LINE**. And there is a separate \none going to every shop.\n\nLets also say that there is a billboard where the mayor can write \nthings onto.\n\nIf we assume the mayor wants to write the amount of money left over \nthat month. First he would tell his secretary to read how much money\nthey collected from taxes that month. The secretary then places that \nnumber on main street so anybody can get to it. She then phones the\nsubtraction shop and tells it that she want it to use this number, the \nsubtraction shop then writes this down on a notepad we'll call a **REGISTRY**. \nThe secretary then takes the first number off of main street and places \nthe second one. She then phones the subtraction shop and tells it to \nuse that number as the second number. The shop writes the number \non another page and does the math. The secretary takes the second\nnumber off of main street and tells the subtraction shop to put the \nanswer on main street by calling it.\n\nAt this point the secretary (before the shop takes the answer off) \ntells the output shop to send the amount on main street out to the \nbillboard.\n\nI am a software person so there is a good chance I missed \nsomething, if so please let me know so I don't continue to lie to people.\n\nEDIT: If you want to learn how to make one, follow a tutorial on mine craft, or download a program like _URL_0_\n\nEDIT v0.2: If you decide to build one using _URL_1_ (feel free to pm me if you get stuck) just learn to read simple schematics, make an ALU, and it'll be easy from there.\n\nEDIT v0.3: Added grammar\n\nEDIT v0.4: Added grammar to edit v0.3",
"If you want a good explanation but don't have much of a background in electronics you should check out the book Code by Charles Petzold.",
"I can't do the whole thing ELI5... I started it off that way, but gave up and just skiped over the last bits. Ask more specific questions where you don't understand and I'll try and break those down more.\n\n\n\nMostly the story of a CPU is the story of building up from little pieces - like making a gigantic township out of individual lego bricks.\n\nTo begin with, people discovered that when you have silicon (like in sand) and you put various things in it (sort of like flavoring) and you put those bits next to each other, cool things happen. Electricity flows in different ways.\n\nOne of the building blocks that they found most useful is call a NAND gate. [Here is the way that they put flavorings in silicon to make a nand gate](_URL_1_). See the colors? Those are the different flavorings.\n\nThat nand gate does one thing. You connect two wires to the input side, and one wire to the output. Mostly the wire going out is on. But If BOTH of the wires going in are on, then the wire going out is off. Weird huh? But it's our little lego block that we can make everything else with.\n\nSo if you connect these up in certain ways, you get the ability to make more complicated things.\n\n\n\n... I can't do justice to this ELI5. I'd need to explain how lights are on/off representing numbers 0/1, and then explain how you make inputs... Anyway, [Here is a circuit built using NAND gates to add two inputs with carry](_URL_0_)\n\nMake 64 of those circuits, wire up the carrys of one to the next, and now you can add 2 64 bit binary numbers.\n\nAdding is one of the more basic operations of a CPU. All the other operations can also be built up the same way out of the humble nand gate, and each nand gate is built up by doping silicon like you see in the first picture.\n\nThen to finish off your cpu you need a clock, a dispatch unit, and a bunch of very careful mappings of all of your inputs and all of your execution units (adder/shift/etc). Everything built up from nand gates.\n\nOr at least it's possible to build up everything that way. In reality there are more optimized ways of doing things once you really do need to make more than a billion of them.\n",
"You settle for an ELI20+, and repost to r/AskEngineers"
]
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14uock | why do computer air-dusters get cold? | Title says it all, why does my air-duster get freezing cold after using it? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/14uock/eli5_why_do_computer_airdusters_get_cold/ | {
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"When gas expands, it cools down. It's sort of because the molecules are a lot less crowded together (you can imagine how hot and stuffy you feel in a crowded subway car, and then you feel a lot cooler once you have some space).\n\nThis is actually the premise behind how your refrigerator and air conditioner work. Your air can is actually acting like a personal AC unit!",
"To add on to watabit:\n\nWhen you spray air from the can, no other air is getting into the can, and the can doesn't shrink or crumple. Result = the air remaining in the can now has more room to move around in, which means the gas is expanding, which means it cools down.\n\nAfter a few seconds, the outside air has warmed up the can. It does this by adding energy to the air inside the can, which makes the molecules move around a lot more, which makes it \"feel crowded\" in the can again, which means it's no longer cold.\n\nContrast this with a leaky balloon. Air is escaping the balloon, but the balloon shrinks, so the air inside is still as \"crowded\" as it was before, so the balloon does NOT get cold.",
"Both answers already given were actually correct, but are missing one major point: The gas in the can is not normal air, but some kind of easily compressable gas ([source](_URL_0_)). It has also such a high pressure, that it is liquid. Every material that changes its state from liquid to gaseous (or from solid to liquid) requires some additional heat.\n\nIf the pressure in the can decreases, the boiling point of the liquid decreases, and some liquid boils away (in the process sucking some heat from the can, which gets cold). The amount of liquid that boils away is the gas that you let out from the can + the amount needed to get to the pressure before. This way there is always a constant pressure in the can until there is no more liquid in the can left.\n\nGas lighters work much the same, but there the amount of gas the you let out is (normally) so small that you don't notice the cooling effect. Some kids fool around and open the valves of gas lighters all the way (don't try, because its dangerous), the result is also a noticeable cooling of the lighter (+ a lot of flammable gas. Did I tell you to not try it?)."
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3u72n3 | where does the money that is given to charity for africa in the last 50 years go if the people there are still in poverty? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3u72n3/eli5_where_does_the_money_that_is_given_to/ | {
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"\n In countries where corruption, bribery and theft are an integral part of daily business. Money, food stuffs, clothing and medicine etc can disappear long before It reaches those in need.",
"A lot of the money is for education, clean water and medicine, which won't make a Starbucks grow. But I'd be willing to bet less than 15% of the initial donation goes to the place it should. The rest gets eaten up by greed and charity costs. "
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9aqfy9 | if you can't get sunburnt through windows/glass because it blocks uv, how do greenhouses work for plants which need uv for photosynthesis? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9aqfy9/eli5_if_you_cant_get_sunburnt_through/ | {
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"I believe windows and glass have to be treated to block UV, it doesn't do that automatically because it is glass. So the glass for a greenhouse simply does not have that same treatment."
]
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3omw1i | how do apartment buildings that use water towers never run out of water? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3omw1i/eli5_how_do_apartment_buildings_that_use_water/ | {
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"The tower is constantly filled with water from the water main. The tower is just there to allow gravity provide constant water pressure regardless of current usage, which is much easier than trying to get pumps to exactly balance supply and demand to maintain a constant pressure."
]
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3a6ite | why do different processor architectures require programs to be rewritten? | A processor is basically converting ones and zeros, i always thought a different architecture was just using a new or different process to convert the ones and zeros, why does a program or OS care how the processor does it? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3a6ite/eli5_why_do_different_processor_architectures/ | {
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"Processors aren't converting ones and zeros, aka bits. They're processing them, hence they're called processors. Different processor architectures process the bits differently, which means programs have to follow the processor's rules for processing things.",
"The processor architecture (more specifically the instruction set architecture) is sort of like the \"language\" it speaks.\n\nCPU instructions are 1s and 0s, but different architectures have different meanings assigned to different patterns of 1s and 0s.\n\nCode for a different architecture won't run because the CPU just won't be able to make sense of it.",
"It may help you to think of it like a language.\n\nYou can write English, German and French with black ink on white paper creating most of the same letters for each language. But if you hand a French speaker a paper with instructions in German written on it they won't necessarily understand what they are supposed to do.\n\nDifferent processors have built in instructions sets. If you complier a program you need to tell the compiler which instructions they can use.\n\nFor a simple program that does very generic things, like a C program that simply writes \"Hallo World\" at the command prompt you would not need to rewrite the program if you switched to a different OS or processor architecture, you would just need to recompile it.\n\nFor other programs that are much more complex and take advantage of instructions or characteristics that might not be there in another architecture you would need to rewrite it.\n\n\n",
"Different processor architectures are actually not that big a deal, and don't necessarily require a rewrite of the software. Here is the process of turning code into \"something that runs\":\n\n* write software (often in a high level language that is quite abstract from the hardware it will run on)\n* compile the software into lower level language that is more bound to the hardware\n* link that compiled software with other libraries that provide \"helpful\" functions for the programmer to rely on\n\nThat linked code is now in a format that will run on a specific CPU. In order to run it on a different CPU, the compile and link stages will need to be re-run, with the compiler knowing how to \"speak\" several different CPU languages.\n\nThe trouble with running on different platforms isn't so much about the language that the CPU speaks, but with the associated \"helpful\" libraries and other hardware interactions. It is in these areas that your generic high level software gets associated with very non-generic pieces that don't just get easily translated onto a new platform.\n\nSome libraries just aren't available on multiple platforms, so you need to replace all the helper function calls with different helper functions. Some high level languages are even specific to certain CPUs and operating systems.\n\nOperating systems (windows, linux, OSX, etc.) have many different ways of doing similar things, and once again, the interactions with these different systems will cause problems with cross platform reuse of your original program.\n\nThere are lots of cross-platform solutions (Java being the most prominent) that should allow \"write once, run anywhere\" software, but there are tradeoffs and costs with writing software that way."
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32vlwo | if you are a beekeeper, and your bees fly away, how do you recapture them? | Saw this on this subreddit _URL_0_
I was curious about it | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/32vlwo/eli5_if_you_are_a_beekeeper_and_your_bees_fly/ | {
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"You basically own their house and the only female they have. Of course they are coming back",
"You don't. Beeing a beekeeper is like renting out a motel. You can only provide the rooms and space to rent out, but if the tourists leave, the tourists leave. You cant force the bees to return if they don't want.",
"It's all about the queen bee. If she's happy in your hive they stay. If she's not she leaves and the bees leave, but if you find her and put her back your good again.",
"So I worked for Awhile as a Beekeper/helper thing, whatever, point being I was the poor guy who had to go out and get stung... now!\n\nto Explain the hive and how it works for a moment first:\n\nthe Hive has really only one point... when it comes down to it, it really all comes down to the queen, when she leaves all kinds of crazy happens... the reason she may want to leave may be, but is not limited to (not enough food, space is terrible or too little, or the hive is just generally not \"good\" enough for her)... now when she leaves the rest of the bees have 2 options... they can stay and try to create a new queen from some remaining brood(unhatched babies) by feeding it a special type of food... I forget exactly what it is... I think it's something called \"royal Jelly\" don't quote me on that, I was just the fool who got stung... anyways! or they can leave with the queen they know and love... some bees stay some bees leave, in the end all they need is a queen, doesn't matter where they get her... granted if there is no brood and no \"jelly\" then of course they leave because that is their only option, tho I've heard of bees \"defecting\" to other hives...\n\nnow to the actual question at hand! :D\n\nwhen a Swarm leaves often times they will just, at least here in Canada, be pretty close nearby just chilling on a branch or a tree like they own the fricken place... now we just grab a box, empty out some frames and one worker holds the box below the giant Fustercluck of bees while the other shakes the entire branch or sweeps the hive into the box... they aren't always aggressive, and if you get the queen in the first sweep or shake they often just comply and sit in the box like the good ladies they are :)\n\n(I am by no means an expert, and I only worked with those angry Australian bastards for so long, but I do hope this helps and maybe answers your question)",
"If your bees escape it's usually because they've outgrown their hive (there can be other reasons, like the birth of a new queen and the subsequent eviction of an old one - who will take a few drones/workers with her - often up to half of the hive). It's likely that they'll swarm somewhere nearby, somewhere structurally supportive, like a tree. In order to recapture the hive, you have to provide a better place for them to live. Beekeeping boxes are usually much nicer for bees than a branch, so often it's enough for a beekeeper to, once they've found the swarm, place a beekeeping box close enough to the swarm (i.e. under a couple of metres) to entice them away, and into the box. This can be done by shaking the swarm, dropping the bees into the box. Once most of the bees are in the box, and especially if you have the rogue queen, the rest of the swarm should follow. From here you can either wait, or accelerate this process by smoking out the bees from their feral hive (which causes them to flee the hive in anticipation of fire - what beekeepers do to rid the hive of bees when collecting honey), or physically moving the rest of them into the box.\n\nIf your swarm is within 3km of where you want it, you have to move it there the day you catch it. Once the bees have settled into the box, it can only be moved less than 100m at a time, giving at least a day in between; any more and the bees may be unable to find their way home in the new setting and may be likely to leave and swarm again, so it's important that this step is done while the bees are still in 'swarm mode'.\n\nIf the bees need to be moved over a greater distance (must be more than 3 kilometres) they have to be sealed up and given time to settle at their new location before being allowed out again, but do not have to be moved the same day.",
"As mentioned in other posts, it's all about the Queen.\n\nbees tend not to fly away of their own choice, however they can split the hive and some bees can leave with a new queen. if a new Queen bee is made, the hive can do something called 'swarming' which is when the new queens takes half the work force, a load of worker bees and leaves, searching for a new place to make a hive. _URL_1_ \n\nAs a bee keeper, you have to be on the look out for new queens being born and destroy them before they become bees. they look like little pods or balls that grow above the honeycomb. You just knock them off with a tool like a screw driver. You'd think they hive would get defensive and attack you but they don't (also, before you get to the hive, you smoke them with a bee smoker which makes them more docile _URL_0_)\n\nOnce the new queen has left, you cannot get them back and you can lose out on a lot of honey.\n\nhope this helped "
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3ixqst | wjy is it that whenever i'm dirnk, loud music or loud anything is easy on the ears, but whenever i'm by mself, my esars ring like crazy? | EDIT: I probably shouldn't Reddit while I'm intoxicated. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ixqst/eli5wjy_is_it_that_whenever_im_dirnk_loud_music/ | {
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"if you've listened to a lot of loud music and the ringing becomes constant you might have developed [Tinnitus](_URL_0_). \n\nfor temporary ringing... it has something to do with damaging your hearing ability little by little\n\n",
"Haha..Were you perchance \"dirnk\" when you asked the question?"
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3sgyst | why did washington, dc develop so that it has residential areas in it rather than just government property? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3sgyst/eli5_why_did_washington_dc_develop_so_that_it_has/ | {
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"Because the people working in the government offices need to live nearby. And because they're all there, they need services (shops, barbers, coffee houses), all of which need to employ staff, who need to live nearby. And they need services, whose businesses need to... etc etc."
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4y20ij | how can so many deep sea creatures be so "squishy" when we have to travel down in a thick metal shell due to the high pressure? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4y20ij/eli5_how_can_so_many_deep_sea_creatures_be_so/ | {
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"Right now, you're under a quite a bit a pressure. You've got miles of air over your head pressing in on you at 1 atmosphere of pressure. At the same time, you and your ancestors have spent virtually all of your time at 1 atmosphere, so you've evolved to press outward at 1 atm. \n\nLikewise, the closed and empty bottle sitting on my desk is pushing out at 1 atm of pressure. If I took the bottle, or you, and sunk you into very deep water, you'd be crushed, because the pressure outside of you would become far greater than the pressure inside. \n\nIf I were to slowly sink that water bottle into the water, while simultaneously pumping in more air to increase the internal pressure, there'd be no problem. As long as I balanced the internal and external pressures, all is good. The bottle doesn't really need to be any stronger than it is.\n\nSo why do we need a metal shell to go that deep. Well, unlike the bottle, the human body doesn't do great under pressure. We can be placed under some pressure, as long as we ramp up or down that pressure slowly so as to avoid medical complications. So we build a metal shell that can withstand a big difference in pressures. The shell, as long as it's intact, can withstand a difference between it's internal and external pressures so that we can survive within it.\n\nSo, back to those deep see critters. Like you, they've evolved to match their environment. Their bodies push out with enough force to match the external pressures at those depth. No strong shell needed because internal pressure equals external pressure. \n\nHowever, there's a catch. If you are taken up out of the atmosphere, you'll eventually pop (not like the movies though). Your internal pressure of 1 atm will be far higher than the external pressure of 0 atm. Likewise, if you take the deep sea creature out of the deep sea, it'll pop when the external pressure is too low compared to the high internal pressure."
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yqd6n | who is ayn rand and why does my roommate hate her? | I recently began reading The Fountainhead. I'm a second year architecture student. I heard the book involved architects, so I decided I might as well read it and see if it's any good. When my roommate found out I was reading a book by Ayn Rand he seemed astonished. He also couldn't believe I had never heard of her before.
Am I missing something here? Please Reddit, explain it like I'm five!
edit: grammar | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/yqd6n/eli5_who_is_ayn_rand_and_why_does_my_roommate/ | {
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"Ayn Rand was a philosopher and novelist.\n\nShe was born in Russia in like '05 or something to a prominent Jewish pharmacist. After the revolution, her family was impoverished.\nSince childhood, she had a problem with hero-worship and proto-Nietscheian thought. \n\nWhen she emigrated to the states, she wrote novels outlining a philosophy she developed called \"Objectivism.\" In a nutshell, it says that 'I hate commies,\" \"The material world exists outside our perceptions,\" \"Government has no more rights than property protection,\" \"God is a figment of superstition and life should be ruled by reason alone,\" and \"Man has no reason to be alive other than to produce things.\" Not acquire, but to produce. Very Russian. Translated, this means that the awesome people (as in, a steel factory owner who tinkers on the floor for a few years until he invents a super-metal with half the weight and ten times the strength of steel; or CEOs, or artistic geniuses, or general magnates, etc.) have every right to rule the universe, need absolutely no one else (presumably they grow their own corn, too, they're just that awesome), and everyone else should stay the fuck out of their way and starve to death in silence and/or worship these heroes by patronizing them. \n\n\nShe concludes that nothing less that complete, lassiez-faire capitalism can achieve these goals.\n\n\nHer stories feature one-dimensional hero characters who she acts as if deserve by right to rule the universe, Mary-Sue female leads with severe masochism problems (her oddly prevalent sex scenes are basically rape scenes where the girls asked for it first), no children whatsoever, thoughtless masses and superstitions who hold the awesome people back, and government agents who act like communist witch doctors, thoughtlessly grubbing everything they touch.\n\n\n\n\nOut of her novels - the only three worth reading - \n\nTHE FOUNTAINHEAD - \n\nHoward Roark is a modern architect who deserves, by being awesome, to rule the architecture world; problem is that people like faux grecian shit. Peter Keating, his popular classmate, schmoozes his way to the top of the society heap, but steals designs from Roark, and finishes a pathetic wreck. Keating's boss' daughter, Dominique Francon, is completely free and haughty and can't love everyone, so of course she is married to three out of four of the main characters over the course of the novel (including a relationship with Roark where she gets wet from lambasting him in the press, and they fuck rapeily as she wrecks his career). Gail Wynand is Hearst/Kane, a newspaper magnate who wants power so he can control everyone (problem is, his paper panders to idiots, so he can't afford to have an opinion). The opinions come from Ellsworth Toohey, critic par excellence and master manipulator, who wants to rule the world by 'enshrining the mediocre,' until the world is 'an octopus with all arms and no brain, and one heart - pumped by me.' A dull grey. Why he wants it, no one knows. Roark struggles against things often, these five keep slamming into each other, and it comes to a head when Roark dynamites a housing project that watered down his design. He wins the lawsuit (?!) and goes on to design the most badass building in New York.\n\n\nAnthem – \n\nA dystopian future society where there is no singular pronoun, and everybody lives for everyone else. A guy digs into a service tunnel, and after steady tinkering, just fucking invents the lightbulb (that’s a very Randian touch). He falls in love with a girl, against the laws that all should be equal to others; then decides to show his bulb to the all-powerful council, and they go all “wither be this witchcraft?! It’s almost as if he’s better than us!” and he runs into the forest and meets the girl. They find an abandoned house, read the books, and name themselves “Prometheus” and “Gaia” and discover the word “I;” pledging to raise an army of supermen. It’s basically “2112” without the guitar.\n\n\nAtlas Shrugged – \n\nIn a bizarre communist USA in the 1950s, the government takes over businesses one after the other, but for some reason all the talented people are disappearing from the surface of the earth, legendarily by the mysterious “John Galt.” Dagny Taggart is head of the best railroad in the states (rail, so Russian), and falls in love with Hank Rearden (H.R. – there it is again!), steel badass and inventor of the superpowered “Rearden Metal.” They decide to fight the tide of cool people disappearing and government agents fucking things up. Her childhood friend, Copper heir Francisco D’anconia, pretends to be a playboy who secretly leaves all his dames virginal (female fantasy) and pretends to be lavish so people don’t care about him. Dagny and Hank discover a random fucker in a factory in Wisconsin built a motor that makes electricity out of air (seriously), the trains keep collapsing, etc. Then Dagny discovers that all the millionaires are hiding in a farmer’s paradise underneath a holographic mountain and a giant dollar sign of gold, just inventing concertos and air motors until everyone else up there starves to death. John Galt breaks onto the radio and delivers a 50 page monologue on objectivism (“I swear by my life and the love of it, that I will never life my life for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine”). The government agents capture Galt, our tragically fallen scientist dies in an explosion, the government demonstrates a sonic bomb on a baby goat (seriously), Dagny’s commie brother James loses his wife to the knowledge that he’s fucking useless, and finally has a heart attack when, literally, he realizes that he worships a commie god of death. The heroes escape, all of New York suffers a blackout, presumably half the country dies of starvation and cold and disease, and the bazillionaires look out from under their holographic mountain, and decide it’s time to repopulate the earth with an army of demigod capitalists. SERIOUSLY. She wrote this book. It’s the seventh longest book in the English language by word count (THE single longest by a woman) and it was about this.\n\n\n\nThe books are sub-Dan Brown potboilers in ‘good taste’ terms, and her writing style is a bizarre mix of literate English with 1920s slang, sloganistic phrases, perfect word order (she typed everything on Amphetamines), odd pacing, and a peculiarly entrancing Russian style of specific adjectives.\n\n\n\n**BECAUSE OF ALL THESE THINGS, **Ayn Rand is primarily read by high school students who haven’t seen Neitsche yet, internet Libertarians, and assholes the world over who want an excuse to be an asshole (“I’m better than everyone else!”). Very few people worth knowing actually give a shit about Ayn Rand. I read her as a humor novelist more than anything else.\n\n**She writes books for libertarian idiots, and piles bullshit Nietschean philosophy into everything she writes.**\n\nThis help?\n\n(Incidentally, every architect in human memory has had two things happen to them - they get a tie or scarf with Frank Lloyd Wright designs on it for their birthday, and a family member asks them if they've read \"The Fountainhead.\" It's quite common.)",
"Rand as an author promotes a point of view which is similar to (But not exactly like) the US version of Libertarianism. Very anti government, very pro free markets, very opposed to social conservatism.",
"Hatred of Rand doesn't necessarily stem from her philosophy. Some people simply dislike her as an author for various reasons. Some people dislike her because they believe that she writes weak characters that undergo no growth. Others believe that her novels go on for about 800 more pages than necessary - in fact, in Atlas Shrugged, a character goes on a rant about Objectivism for around 90 pages, which for some equates to being hit repeatedly in the face with a hammer marked NOVEL THEME. \n\nHowever, you could always ask your roommate why he hates Rand.",
"As someone who actually likes Rand, I recommend reading The Fountainhead yourself first and forming your own opinion, before having your idea of it shaped too much by what others think.\n\nThe ideas that Rand has are highly divisive - some *loathe* her philosophy, while others find it inspiring. Some don't care. It's about 60/20/20%, respectively. Many will simply say her writing sucks. Here is an excerpt that I like so that you can judge for yourself: [Monadnock](_URL_0_).\n\nThe hatred from those who dislike her is often strong enough to influence people who haven't even read her books, so you have people who aren't even familiar with her writings who absolutely despise her. (You'll even notice the undertones of sarcasm toward this author in the comments. For some, it is like a physical reaction that truly cannot be helped.) This tends to lead to popular misconceptions about her philosophy and her personal life. An example of each: A) That you should do anything that satisfies your momentary whim, despite any affect on others, because that is what it means to be \"selfish\"; B) That Roark (character from The Fountainhead) was based on Frank Lloyd Wright, which is false.\n\nFor the people who read and are actually inspired, it is worth it. If it turns out that you would be in the group of people who are inspired by it, IMO you should give yourself the chance to read it first instead of being dissuaded by others' opinions on it.",
"Ayn Rand was a Russian-American philosopher and author who created the philosophy known as Objectivism. Basically, Objectivism focuses on complete self reliance as an ideal. Keep in mind that she escaped from the Soviet Union at a young age and a lot of her ideas can be seen as an extreme reaction to the horrible conditions created by the Communist government. Rand is widely hated by liberals who see her ideas as promoting selfishness. I should add that I haven't read any of her books, I'm just telling you what I know about her as a person ",
"Can someone please tell me how to pronounce her first name? ",
"A while ago I taught high school English, and we had to cover Ayn Rand. I was never a fan of hers, due solely to her style, but seeing what that book did to my kids made me hate her for a while. \n\nA good part of her philosophy argues in favour of selfishness. She believes that advances in the world tend to come from people selfishly pursuing their own goals, rather than trying to help as many people as possible. \n\nNow, this has a debilitating effect on impressionable readers. High school kids read her, and boil her ideas down to that. \"Be selfish.\" They all too often fail to grasp that this means \"be selfish in your pursuit of a dream,\" and not \"be selfish about who gets the last slice of pizza.\" \n\nPeople read Rand too young, and they're going to turn into arseholes for about a year or so. You should definitely read her, just don't swallow her ideas without analysis. ",
"maybe your roommate doesn't believe in personal responsibility. thats usually what does it.",
"If you have the time, the first \"Bioshock\" game is a warped candyland going through a twisted aftermath of a society built around her whole shick.\n\nDon't know how objective it is, but fantastic game (gameplay and storywise). ",
"She's the opposite of Jesus.",
"Like you're 5: Ayn Rand was a lady in the early 1900's who thought that people should just take care of themselves and not care about other people. Most people think it's a mean way to live.",
"You know fairy tales? You know how sometimes we tell stories about old heroes, like Prince Charming? Or beautiful women, like Helen of Troy? Well... Ayn Rand writes books where these super-duper-awesome-people are all walking around with us right now. But instead of trying to save the world or fight crime, like Superman, they are using their special abilities to make money. LOTS of money. And her books are mostly about the fact that the SUPER-DUPER-AWESOME-PEOPLE have every right to spend their time making money and being rich just like any of us normal people. That we shouldn't be mad if Superman decided to go be a wall-street banker, or hire himself out to whichever country could pay him best. Ayn Rand thinks that even if you're SUPER-DUPER-AWESOME you are allowed to be selfish.\n\nShe then argued that we are all SUPER-DUPER-AWESOME, but that some people are using their law-making-AWESOMENESS to restrict people who had business-AWESOMENESS. And so she said that lawmaker-awesomeness should be stopped, so business-awesomeness could flourish.\n\nI'll tell you more when you're six.",
"Chances are your roommate has simply bought into the anti-Rand hatehype because that's what the popular left-wing intellectuals in the college crowd do. They might not have read any of her work, but they're totally 100% sure that she's evil and anyone who likes any of her philosophy or writing is evil. \n\nThe Fountainhead is a fantastic book, and contains much less of her overt political opinion than Atlas Shrugged. I think everyone should read it."
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1kl90k | why does my flatulence sometimes smell similar to what i've recently eaten and other times like hot death? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1kl90k/eli5_why_does_my_flatulence_sometimes_smell/ | {
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"There are several different species of bacteria in your intestines that produce various gases and compounds when they digest things. The contents of your food (fiber, sugar, proteins) affect the consistency and odor of your stool. Your stool smelling \"similar\" to what you ate is probably a coincidence. Also, your ability to digest different foods and your sensitivity to those foods affects your regularity."
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dou4uv | what physiologically causes that "lurch" in your gut - when you get scared you've forgotten something or that you've upset someone etc | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dou4uv/eli5_what_physiologically_causes_that_lurch_in/ | {
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"There is a biochemical signalling path called the 'gut-brain axis'. It connects the gastrointestinal tract with the central nervous system via the vagus nerves. It is why you are able to become nauseous from eating bad food. It is important for the regulation of the immune system, and has a great influence on neurotransmitters. If you do a quick google search on the impact of probiotics on mental health you will come across a great amount of information regarding the incredible influence the 'gut-brain axis' has on a multitude of physiological mechanisms."
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15sh2b | what exactly happened during the french revolution? (referring to les miserables) | I recently saw the movie, and I hardly understand what was going on politically during that time. I googled it, but it's all mumbo-jumbo to me. Please explain! (like I'm five) | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/15sh2b/elif_what_exactly_happened_during_the_french/ | {
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"Just a note - Les Mis is centered around the [June Rebellion](_URL_0_), not the French Revolution.",
"Starting with Louis XIII, France started moving towards absolutism, which is basically total dictatorship (opposite of absolutism is a total democracy). Louis XIV (Louis XIII's son) was even MORE absolutist, and over the course of his reign he got involved in a ton of wars and drove up France's national debt.\n\nFast forward to Louis XVI. The Enlightenment/Scientific Revolution's in full swing and people are looking for more openness, intellectually, rather than just listening to the same explanations they've heard forever. Louis XVI's wife, Marie Antoinette, was foreign and spent extravagant amounts of money (she had a multimillion dollar budget for her wardrobe while the French people were starving), which incurred the anger of the people.\n\nAlso, Louis XVI did nothing to stop the problem. See, the only people being taxed were the Third Estate (First Estate were priests, Second Estate was the nobility, Third Estate was everyone else), and they were taxed ridiculously. Several of Louis XVI's advisors said, \"Hey man, tax the rich people or you're going to be fucked\" and he persistently refused.\n\nNow, this process goes on for a few years until eventually Louis XVI runs out of money. Important: around this same time, France goes through several years of bad harvests. Everyone is hungry, poor, and pissed off.\n\nNow, Louis XVI, like most monarchs, had one main source of money for when he spent it all on hookers and cocaine: that was the nobility. He calls the Estates General, which was this group of representatives from the three Estates. It was an archaic, outdated, traditional kind of thing, and so calling it sent out a signal that he was in deep shit. Louis XVI calls and begs for money.\n\nNow, the Estates General worked on a one-vote-per-Estate basis. The Third Estate (poor people) had the other two outnumbered by people, but the 1st and 2nd Estate always voted together, so the 3rd Estate couldn't get anything done. The 3rd Estate was fed up and said \"fuck this\" so they split off and formed the National Assembly. \n\nThe National Assembly, fueled by years of being dicked over by everyone in France and being starving for food while Louis XVI lived like, well, a king, swore to keep meeting until Louis XVI was bound by a constitution.\n\nThis goes on for a while and several important events happen. For one, a bunch of really angry mothers and wives from Paris marched on the king's palace at Versailles (which was twentyish miles away, relatively close), overpowered the guards and brought him back to Paris. \n\nThe National Assembly changed names and forms (National Constituent Assembly, Legislative Assembly, etc) over the next ten or so years. Louis XVI tries to escape Paris and almost makes it, but he and his family get caught and executed by the ravenous crowd. (Louis XVI, after being taken to Paris, was caught corresponding with rulers of other countries. Joseph II of Austria was related to Marie Antoinette, Louis XVI's wife, and he swore that he would invade France if she was harmed. Louis XVI wanted these foreign powers to invade, put down the revolution, and put him back in power).\n\nNow, the king is dead and France has its very own new government. This works out about as well as a bunch of five year olds duct taping their teacher to her chair and trying to teach class (but in this case, it was a really shitty teacher, so we can't blame them). The government is rife with corruption and in constant debt. On top of that, they start wars with half of Europe and have to build up a huge military to try and fund the war effort (this allows for a man named Napoleon Bonaparte to conquer most of Europe a little later on, but that's for another day).\n\nThe government goes on to become really, really corrupt, when the Jacobins start to get involved. The Jacobins were a radical left-wing party, and they eventually formed the Committee of Public Safety, which was like the Gestapo. They started executing people without trials for \"treason\" and were led by a guy named Robespierre, who openly advocated using terrorism on one's own populace. This regime also banned religion from France (regardless of your thoughts on religion, it was a really, really stupid move) and introduced a new calendar. Along with the religion, they established a ten-day workweek with one day off, which REALLY pissed people off. After Robespierre was executed, a new form of government called the Directory took control. They were a group of five leaders who controlled France with about as much efficiency as any five random US Senators, and wound up with a few revolts on their hands. They had to call in superstar officer Napoleon Bonaparte to put down the revolution. Another revolt happened and they called Napoleon back in, to which he replied \"Fuck you guys\" and he seized control of the Directory, eventually getting himself voted Emperor. Aaaand that's about it.\n\nIn short, Louis XVI was a really hesitant, inefficient ruler, who didn't react decisively to problems in his country. The people got angry, formed their own assembly, eventually marched on him, and seized total political power. They eventually grew really corrupt and collapsed, giving way to Napoleon to take over France.\n\nSource: Took AP Euro. However, I don't claim to be flawless, historically, and after a few weeks of winter break I know I probably fudged a few details, so anyone feel free to correct me, I don't want to mislead our dear friend the OP."
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36uoqo | how come drugs are found in urine much longer than in blood, when urine is filtered out of blood? | I'm basing this on this website I found
_URL_0_ | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/36uoqo/eli5_how_come_drugs_are_found_in_urine_much/ | {
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"Imagine you have a pool ful of warter and you throw a special kind of colouring in there which turned the water red.\n\nSuppose you have a filter which removes the colouring from the pool, and jettersons it out. At first the pool would be bright red so you could just look at it and see that someone threw the colouring in. \n\nHowever as time goes on more and more of the colour gets removed from the pool and you can't tell by looking that the pool ever had dye in it. \n\nHowever if you look at the filter you can see that the water filtered out has lots of red in it still, because it is extracting it from a very dilute source, but in large volumes.\n\nIn the pool if your blood, the drugs are the red colouring and the pump is your kindeys/liver, you can see why urine has a higher concetration of drugs than blood: Because its being deliberatly extracted from the dilute solution (where it can't be tested for) to a concentrated one. "
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1gyo8u | why its ok to name a person mohammed, but not an inanimate object, or animal. | No offence intended by this question at all, I would be genuinely interested to know the reasoning behind this.
Teddy bears, rabbits, etc. named Mohammed can be deemed highly offensive by the Muslim population; whereas Mohammed is a relatively common name for people. Can someone explain to me the reasons behind ok naming a person the same name as the prophet, when nothing else can be? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1gyo8u/eli5_why_its_ok_to_name_a_person_mohammed_but_not/ | {
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"Because humans think that other humans are more or better than things or animals. Since Mohammed is really important to Muslims, they thing you should only name \"important things\" like your son after him. On top of that some things or animals are considered \"unclean\" in some cultures, so using naming a dog after someone would not be cool even if you really like this dog.",
"As an addition to what Archibald said, pretend I'm one of your friends. If I decided to name my kid after you, you'd probably be okay with it, right? What about if I named my dog after you? If that's okay, then what about my pig or my rat? What if I named my toilet after you? It all comes down to what's acceptable in a culture."
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2bhksl | peripheral neuropathy | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2bhksl/eli5peripheral_neuropathy/ | {
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"Peripheral neuropathy is a malfunction of the nerves in the extremities, usually the arms or legs, but sometimes the face. It can cause numbness and tingling, or in some cases a very painful burning sensation or feelings like cold water being poured on the area."
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1jb9zj | how is there enough oil under the ground to power hundreds of millions of cars, planes, boats..etc. daily? | I don't understand how there is THAT MUCH oil under the ground.
Think about it.
There are millions of cars all over the world, Los Angeles, New York, all the major cities in all the countries and all the suburbs... plus planes, trains, and other things that use oil... each are consuming hundreds of millions (billions?) of a gallons PER DAY.
So is the earth just a thin crust FILLED with OCEANS of oil?
I just don't get it. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1jb9zj/eli5_how_is_there_enough_oil_under_the_ground_to/ | {
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"The earth is BIG, compared to our oil consumption:\nWe consume 93,250,000 barrels a day of oil (not just gas) world wide.\nAt 42 gallons per barrels, that's 3,916,500,000 gallons used every day!\n\nBut!, the surface of the earth is 5.1 x 10^8 square kilometers. Oil has been found most everywhere, under land and water so lets assume there is oil under the crust everywhere.\n\nIf you took all the oil the world burns in a day, and spread it across the world, it would be only 1.1x10^-6 inches thick. Tha'ts 1000 times thinner then a human hair.\n\nIf their was only a inch of oil under the crust (which can be up to 50 km thick), it would supply us with oil for 8.75x10^5 days, or 2,400 years. This assumes our oil consumption doesn't increase. ",
"Regardless if there is an end to fossil fuels which as [/u/goldef](_URL_0_) points out will certainly not affect me, you, your neighbor´s children and the friendly Inuit hunting seals between 2027 and 2042 until they died out. However, the kind of fungus that developed quietly about 300 million years ago and adapted to digest and harvest energy from dead wood, this kind of fungus managed to cease the production of oil entirely. Since there won´t be any more rotting wood being pressed by earth´s crust into coal, oil or diamonds we are indeed looking at an nearby end of fossil resources. That is, nearby in a geological time scale. Nevertheless, it would be a good idea to slowly but steady convert to sustainable energy sources.\n\nEdit: fixed link to referred comment",
"I think this unit of measure is helpful:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nIf you take /u/goldef's number of 944 billion barrels of oil used in human history and do the math, that works out to around 40 cubic miles of oil.\n\nThus, a cube a bit less than 3.5 miles each side would contain all the oil ever used. You can probably imagine how that could \"fit\" in the Earth's crust.",
"To explain like you're 5?\n\nThink of all the surface area the gas tanks for oil/gas powered machines take up. Now imagine underneath every machine is miles of oil moving in a vertical direction. That's how you can explain the quantity.\n\nThen think about the fact that oil for cars isn't changed as often as gasoline. Gasoline is derived from oil, but oil has many more uses beyond fueling machines, including acting as a mechanical lubricant.\n\nThere's also plenty of countries that consume little to no oil which are mostly underdeveloped or have made the switch to alternative energy.\n\nAs cars get more fuel efficient, each car needs less and less gasoline, and therefore less and less oil per car. Which works because Oil is finite (there's only a limited supply of oil that has been brewing underground for hundreds of thousands of years). \n\nAlso, when compared to the history of humanity, our dependence on oil is a fairly recent development. In a way, you could say the kinks are still being worked out."
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74jgd2 | how does the "conscious" part of the brain know to ignore normal bodily functions? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/74jgd2/eli5_how_does_the_conscious_part_of_the_brain/ | {
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"This all has to do with how the brain is divided up with regards to function. All of the actions happening automatically in your body are controlled by their perspective parts of the brain, and those have nothing to do with sensations like pain.\n\nFor example, the region of your brain (and corresponding nerves) that make your intestines contract don't deal with pain. When you get a stabbing pain in your bowels, that pain is carried upwards to a different part of the brain by different nerves. If there's nothing to cause you pain, those nerves aren't sending any signals.\n\nLike you guessed, it does vary from organ to organ. The stomach, for example, can send signals up to the brain when it's stretched out, and you feel that. On the other hand, the stomach (and other internal organs) doesn't have fine sensation like your fingers, so you're not constantly aware of every little thing going on down there. In that case it's not that your brain is tuning anything out, there's just no signal of \"feeling\" being sent to the brain. The only time you have feeling is when specific things like \"pain\" happen. The other issues like \"why am I normally unaware of my nose in my vision\" has to do with how your brain simply learns to ignore it, which is totally different.\n\n**TL;DR - Most of your internal organs aren't even capable of sending constant signals of \"feeling\" to the brain like your skin/tongue/etc can.**"
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4c61ui | why does food taste different outside than inside? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4c61ui/eli5_why_does_food_taste_different_outside_than/ | {
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"Not entirely familiar with this feeling, but since smell plays a huge role in the perception of taste (not directly, but taste is very limited and what we're used to when we say \"taste\" as an experience is actually a combination of taste *and* aroma), that might be the answer. Being outside means air movement can interfere with smells, plus multiple other sources of smells can slightly change the perceived taste of foods."
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37y07o | the difference between youtube's buffering and loading an image from anywhere else on internet - and why buffering is so much faster | My WiFi is playing up, and imgur links take ~20 seconds to load, but I can watch a YouTube video fine. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/37y07o/eli5_the_difference_between_youtubes_buffering/ | {
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"This might not be the complete answer but a part of the answer. Try loading a video in Youtube, and then a video from a website which is not primarily a video-hosting site (Like IMDB). You will notice that the IMDB video takes significantly longer to load for the same quality of video. Google has some amazing compression algorithms, and a great network of servers which ensure you are always getting the best speed possible. "
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6lbojc | when we say a person is worth $300 million, how much of that is the person actually entitled to? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6lbojc/eli5_when_we_say_a_person_is_worth_300_million/ | {
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"Generally what that means is the person has wealth and assets valued at $300m. Which could include things like property, real estate, and stock in companies.\n\nSo the person could, if they sold everything they owned at the price it is appraised for, come up with about $300m. ",
"When we talk about someone being \"worth\" a certain amount, we are generally referring to how much cash would be generated if you were to liquidate (sell) all of their assets, turning the things that they own into actual money.\n\nFor instance, if I bought a car brand new in 1970 for $5,000, and that car is now considered a vintage collectible highly sought-after vehicle now in 2017, then we need to consider what it might be worth if I were to put the car up for auction. Maybe $100,000? $120,000? We really can't say for sure, because it's not actually being sold, we are just trying to evaluate what it might sell for in theory. But that number would be what we would use to formulate what my persons \"net worth\" would be. It is the sum total value of everything someone owns that is worth anything (including actual cold hard cash in their bank account), and generally would be made up primarily of stocks, bonds, real estate, cash, property, and other things like that. If you were to take everything you own and sell it RIGHT NOW, how much money would you have?\n\nThat is why net values fluctuate around a lot, and it can be hard to really narrow it down, because it depends on what we think a lot of things might be worth if they were liquidated, and that's entirely conjecture based on our best estimates, and those can change from day to day.\n\nSo, your question is \"how much are they entitled to?\" Well, all of it. It's their stuff. They are entitled to all of the money that would be generated from the sale and liquidation of everything that they own.\n\nHowever, there are practical limitations to liquidating everything all at once that would lower the amount it could be sold for. For instance if a man holds a ton of stock in a company, and that stock is very highly valued, then he has a very high net worth. But it's impossible to sell all of that stock at once without flooding the market and tanking the price and value of the stock, which would make it worth much less. So, the value of the stock is actually higher while he holds onto it in stock form, than it would be in actual liquidated cash form, but we still consider the stock form to be his value for net worth purposes.\n\nAnyway, it's just important to remember that most very wealthy people are not rich because they have a lot of money in the bank. It's because their wealth is tied up in those other pieces of value that could potentially become cash money if they so desired. And they are \"entitled\" to all of it because it is theirs."
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35qkd2 | can someone explain the trade deal that obama is trying to push through? what is it, and why do a lot of democrats not like it? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/35qkd2/eli5_can_someone_explain_the_trade_deal_that/ | {
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"Trans Pacific Partnership is a large corp sponsored bill. With most of its negotiations and contents being kept secret. If that doesn't already make you feel strange.\n\nIts job on top of Pacific Free Trade is international Copy Right and Piracy Laws. It forces each signer to recognize a lot of international over site when it comes to freedom of expression namely on the internet. The U.N. has gone so far as to call it a violation of Human Rights. \n\nThat's why its having issues passing."
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5o4iy9 | why do stores never charge the full dollar amount for goods, like a video game costs $59.99, not just $60? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5o4iy9/eli5why_do_stores_never_charge_the_full_dollar/ | {
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"We read left to right, so we see:\n\n > $59\n\nbefore:\n\n > .99\n\nThe first thought we have is that it's below $60. While we later realise this to only be the case by a single cent, the first impression makes the price-tag appear cheaper that it really is. It's an illusion that makes us more likely to purchase something."
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dj8qe2 | why high fevers make us loopy/silly | I understand that the heat and inflammation negatively affects the brain, but why and how exact does this affect our ability to form coherent thoughts and speech? I always feel high as a kite during a fever. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dj8qe2/eli5_why_high_fevers_make_us_loopysilly/ | {
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"The purpose of a fever is to cook whatever invader is inside of you. Your body is going into the most primitive for of survival so it's not too worried about higher level things such as say doing algebra. \n\nHomeostasis (maintaining an even environment in the body) is very important for overall function. At a certain point of heating somethings can be stopped or sped up depending on the area/function. \n\nThis is a very basic break down"
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25f9vr | why do i only seem to realize how drunk i am when i go to the bathroom? | Whenever I'm drinking heavily, I seem to only notice my level of drunkenness when I go the bathroom. Does this have something to do with being alone, or is it related to a lack of stimuli in the bathroom relative to the party? Thanks! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/25f9vr/eli5_why_do_i_only_seem_to_realize_how_drunk_i_am/ | {
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"Its exactly what you suspect it is. Being alone, and lack of stimuli relative to the party. All of your thought power is on you and you notice that you feel weird.",
"Going to the bathroom is the experience that links me to all past drunk experiences. Every time I look myself deeply in the mirror and gaze into my soul. The experience transcends time.",
"When I'm drunk and look at myself in the mirror I think, \"damn, I look fucking good tonight\"",
"As a dude: One hand on the wall and the other on my dick while swaying is a prime indicator.",
"Could also be the relative frequency of tiles in bathrooms, which provide numerous lines, both horizontal and vertical, with which to judge your own ability to stand straight. It would be less obvious that you're swaying without a clear vertical indicator.\n",
"I think it has something to do with standing up, the change in blood pressure and having to walk. I worked at a bar with a serbian who said in russia the bars have no chairs unless it is a really top notch one cause people would drink till they stood up fell down hurt themselves. Probably sued someone too. Never been to russia but that is my take on it ",
"I thought I was the only one. Every trip to the bathroom whilst drunk usually ends up in a pep talk to myself in the mirror.",
"It's probably, that there are no outside stimuli. When you are at a party and you talk to people, dance and walk around your brain and body just \"flow\" with your surroundings and your senses are distracted. When you go to the bathroom then it's just you alone in a motionless, quit room and everything that's out of proportions suddenly takes over your senses.",
"Doesn't work for me, I just keep getting better looking until I pass out. Beerfest sums it up nicely. ",
"This happens to me as well. \n\nI always figured it was the combination of bright light/white and having to stand in one spot for a bit. \n\nThis is why I piss outside when I'm drunk, so I don't fall over and rip the towel rack out of the wall again...",
"Most likely due to the fact that when you're drinking heavily you're in a group of people, all of whom are getting drunk at about the same rate as you. The fact that you're surrounded by large amounts of drunkards in a noisy environment makes you feel you're just the same as everyone else, there's probably some music or a lot of talking going on so you won't realise your slurred speech or impaired dexterity. But when you go to the toilet you're alone, in a much quieter environment focusing on one task which requires a certain amount of hand-eye coordination you'll begin to notice the changes in your balance, movement etc. \n\nI've noticed the same thing whenever I get drunk and this is the most logical explanation I've been able to come up with.",
"Because you stand up to go there. ",
"Going to the bathroom requires some modicum of focus. So when you're trying to go weewee, you have to concentrate, forcing you to realize you in fact are shit faced. ",
"Lol, (F21) everytime I go to the bathroom drunk, I fall asleep on the toilet XD And my friends are always like \"wtf where'd that bitch go\" lol"
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2r8erz | why does israel collect palestine's taxes? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2r8erz/eli5_why_does_israel_collect_palestines_taxes/ | {
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"Because Palestine doesn't really exist yet. It's a complicated situation. The lands that are 'Palestine' are technically still owned by Israel. It's what is called a de jure state. The territory is nominally controlled by the Palestinians but they do not have true sovereignty yet.",
"palestine is not a country and not a state, it isnt reconized by other world countrys as one, its becouse of old aggreement form 1990's that Israel will collect taxes and send them, thats why they send 50m$+ ",
"Cool, thanks everyone! I appreciate it!",
"I don't think any of the answers here cover the question.\n\nThe Palestinian Authority governs the majority of Palestinians and does collect taxes itself. However, Israel collects some taxes simply because the PA can't. Israel collects custom duties on imports that arrive through Israeli ports. If those imports go to the Palestinian territories, Israel gives that revenue to the PA. Israel also gives the PA most of the payroll tax witheld for Palestinians that work in Israel. Furthermore, Israel gives the PA any VAT taxes Palestinians pay for Israeli goods."
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2sjdgw | if cooking kills bacteria, why does it matter how long we leave meat out, or how often we thaw and refreeze it? | Just as the title says, I see a lot of food safety rules around heating/re-heating food, never re-freezing meat after the first freeze/thaw, etc.
Why does it matter if we cook the food in the end anyway?
(Assuming proper temperatures)
Edit: Wow, quick answers! Simple enough - noted! Perhaps I'll be a bit more careful about raw meat. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2sjdgw/eli5_if_cooking_kills_bacteria_why_does_it_matter/ | {
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"Some bacteria create toxins in the process of breaking down the food they're living in. Enough of these toxins can make you sick, even if almost all the bacteria that made them are long since dead. ",
"As bacteria grow they release toxins. Even if you cook it to proper temperatures, those toxins won't go away. ",
"Before you kill all that bacteria with the heat of cooking it, it is living and breeding and releasing toxins (and sometimes spores) that don't get destroyed by heat. The longer you leave that meat out, the more bacteria, and hence more toxins, are in the food. So you can kill the bacteria, but you'd still be eating everything it made while it was alive.",
"Cooking kills bacteria, but if the bacteria was alive long enough it could have left some pretty nasty stuff behind as waste. Cooking doesn't get rid of this waste and it can cause some serious health problems.\n\nFreezing and thawing multiple times is just bad for the food as far as taste and texture goes, unless the thaw time is sufficient for stuff to grow on it, which brings us back to the first point.\n\nFreezing stuff at a nice and low temperature well into the negatives will keep stuff safe to eat pretty much indefinitely, although the quality does tend to suffer after a few months as it will continue to crack and proteins still break down.",
"Bacteria are just like you and me and houseflies. Food goes in, shit comes out. Some bacteria shit can be really bad for you. \n\nSince someone's asking for examples:\n\n* E Coli: Makes aspartic acid-phenylalanine amino acid (base ingredient of aspartame).\n \n* Staph: Enterotoxins.\n \n* Clostridium botulinum: Botulism toxin.\n\n* Pseudoalteromonas tetraodonis: Tetrodotoxin.\n",
"Short answer: Bacteria poop. The poop stays after the bacteria is dead. Poop is not good to eat",
"Why did blahblah15, At_Least_100_Wizards, and luciferhelidon ask nearly the exact same question?",
"Aside from heat-resistant toxins: If you're cooking whole cuts of fish or beef or pork, there is some overlap between \"Not killing off everything\" and \"Not overcooking it\". Often, the temperatures are only good enough for 99% or 99.9% or 99.999% of bacteria. We distinguish between food that's been cooked, and food that's been cooked hot enough, for long enough (and often under high enough pressure) to do things like put in a can for a few months. Only a few nines isn't good enough for canning, just good enough that you can eat it right after under typical conditions without getting sick.\n\nIf you've mishandled the food beforehand, and as a result it has 100x more bacteria, odds are decent that you're not going to kill off enough of them to safely eat it."
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2g7rn2 | why are 28 pages classified in the congressional 9/11 report? if the terrorists were being supported by another country, shouldn't that information be public? | Also, did Obama say that he would release the 28 pages but changed his mind later, and if so, why?
Shouldn't we know what happened? Why is our government keeping secrets from us? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2g7rn2/eli5_why_are_28_pages_classified_in_the/ | {
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"The government keeps secrets for a lot of reasons. For example, suppose the report contained information only available to someone highly placed in certain governments, A.K.A. a spy. Releasing that info publicly would likely get them killed.",
"Obviously I have no idea what is in those pages, but most likely those pages detail intelligence info that comes from a source that must be kept secret. They could contain statements from a foreign politician that's on US payroll. They could contain transcripts intercepted by listening stations that are secretly operated in foreign nations.\n\nThe US government has many secrets that, for safety or political reasons, should remain secret. Is that right or wrong, I don't know, but it is the reality of the situation.",
"Reports from Congressional members who have viewed state it contains information about the extent of Saudi knowledge of the attacks and the extent of the Bush administrations relationship with the country. It was likely redacted because the information would have destroyed American support for the Saudi government at the time.",
"A common misconception about why material is classified is because the information itself is dangerous. While this is sometimes the case - for example, the industrial process used to make VX gas (a nerve agent and one of the most lethal chemicals known to man) is classified because the information *itself* is dangerous.\n\nThe more common reason something is classified is because there is a desire to protect the *source*. Knowing that some head of state ate at burger king and remarked about some news story is hardly damning information but it could be a vital clue for someone trying to figure out that there is a spy with close access to that head of state."
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3w5pew | how come the f-35 program cost way more to develop than the f-22 despite being generally less technologically advanced? | The F-22 program cost about 66.7 billion dollars while the F-35 program costed about 1.3 trillion dollars. Yet there is an export ban on the F-22 because we can't risk other nations having it but the F-35 is available for export.
EDIT: So it seems I was misinformed about the costs. I didn't realize that the F-35 costs also included the cost of purchasing planes and operational costs. I was under the impression that it was only for development costs but I was wrong. Thanks! | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3w5pew/eli5_how_come_the_f35_program_cost_way_more_to/ | {
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"F-35 is pretty much 3 different planes, that look similar. \n\n* Navy version has different wings and modifications to frame to support carrier landing. \n\n* Marine version has VSTOL. \n\n* Air Force version has better performance. ",
"Partially due to inflation, and also because the F-35 program is really creating three different planes, for the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps, so there's a lot more to figure out.",
"It's because those numbers are comparing apples to rockets. The $66.7 billion is in ~2005 dollars and only includes development and procurement costs for less than 200 planes, while the $1.3 trillion includes inflation out to 2068, buying about 13 times more planes, and most crucially, also includes operating and support costs for those planes (while those were not included for the F-22).\n\nThere are different ways to report the cost of a military fighter program. One part is the cost of research and development for the fighter itself, the *development cost*. Another part is the cost of buying the physical fighter planes, the *procurement cost*. There's also the *military construction cost*, i.e. building the hangars, roads, etc. to support the planes. Then, there is the cost of actually using the fighters, the *operating and support cost*, which includes things like personnel costs, fuel, etc.\n\nThe F-35's costs are projected to be **$54.9 billion** for the development cost, **$331.6 billion** for procurement cost for 2457 planes, and **$4.6 billion** for military construction, for a total of **$391.1 billion** thus far. These are in then-year dollars, i.e. adding up the dollar amount for each of the years in which the costs incurred or is projected to incur. This is very important (and I'll come back to this later).\n\nHowever, the F-35 is projected to have an operating and support cost of **$1016.5 billion**. This is also in then-year dollars, *which means it includes inflation*, assumes production out to 2038, and assumes each plane has a 30-year service life. So some of those dollars are all the way out to the year 2068, inflation included.\n\nIt should be patently clear that most of the reported cost of the F-35 is actually due to including operating and support cost for the **2443** planned operational planes (14 of the planned 2457 are just for testing and development, so their O & S costs are not included). *This cost includes inflation out to the next 50 years*. Additionally, the procurement cost is also (partially) inflated out to the year 2038.\n\nAnother point to note is that most of the cost actually has not been incurred yet. The trillion-dollar cost is the *projected* cost of the program, including its O & S cost. IIRC (but going from memory here), thus far the total cost actually incurred (i.e. actually spent) is roughly $100 billion or so.\n\nIf we convert all these costs to 2012 dollars (which the source below helpfully does), we find that *in 2012 dollars*, the costs are: development $59.2 billion, procurement $257.2 billion, military construction $3.9 billion, O & S $597.7 billion, for a total of $918.8 billion. So, for the projected total of 2457 planes, each will cost an average of $129 million (development + procurement). For the 2443 operational planes, each will cost $246 million over their lifetime (milcon + operating & support).\n\nNow for the F-22. The F-22's costs break down as $32.4 billion for development, $34.2 billion for procurement, and $0.7 billion for military construction. Those are in then-year dollars. If we use 2005 dollars, however (which is what the source uses as its base dollars), it becomes $35.6 billion for development, $33.2 billion for procurement, $0.6 billion for military construction. This is for a total of 188 planes (9 for development, 179 operational).\n\nIf the F-22's costs are inflated to year 2012, to bring it in line with the F-35's numbers, it comes out to: $41.8 billion for development, $39.1 billion for procurement, and $0.7 billion for military construction.\n\nNow on to the F-22's O & S cost. Note that the calculation is for **164** aircraft, instead of the 179 operational ones. This is less than 7% of the planned 2443 operational F-35's. The given figure is $47.0 billion for the F-22 in 2005 dollars, which becomes $55.3 billion in 2012 dollars.\n\nSo, in comparison to the F-35, for the F-22, in 2012 dollars, for the 188 built, the costs comes out to $430 million each (develop + procure), and for the 164 primary ones, it comes out to $342 million each (milcon + operating & support). A table summarizing the figures is below:\n\nProjected Costs in 2012 dollars:\n\nCategory | F-35 (total, $B) | F-35 (number) | F-35 (per plane, $M) | F-22 (total, $B) | F-22 (number) | F-22 (per plane, $M)\n---|---|----|----|----|----|----\nDevelopment | 59.2 | 2457 | 24.1 | 41.8 | 188 | 222.5\nProcurement | 257.2 | 2457 | 104.7 | 39.1 | 188 | 207.9\nMilitary Construction | 3.9 | 2443 | 1.6 | 0.7 | 164 | 4.6\nOperating and Support | 597.8 | 2443 | 244.7 | 55.3 | 164 | 337.1\n\nThree things should be apparent from this chart. The first is that the high total cost for the F-35 program is mostly due to the large number of planned F-35 planes -- about 13 times the number of F-22's. The second is that most of the reported cost is actually due to the projected operating and support cost (again, the commonly-reported trillion-dollar figure *includes inflation* out to 2068, whereas this chart keeps the figures in constant 2012 dollars -- and yet the O & S still dominates). And the third is that on a per-plane basis, the F-35 is actually a lot cheaper than the F-22. \n\nFor the export ban, it's really because the F-22 wasn't designed to be exported; so for example, anybody that got their hands on it could see the original code for the plane's software, while for the F-35, those are encrypted.\n\nTL;DR: It's because you're not looking at a direct comparison of the costs nor considering the number of planned planes for each program.\n\nSources:\n\nF-35 SAR for 2014: _URL_1_ (page 24 for the program costs, page 91 for the operating and support cost)\n\nF-22 Selected Acquisitions Report (SAR) for 2010: _URL_0_ (page 12 for the program costs, page 38 for the operating and support cost)",
"As well as what's been said, it's worth noting that the F-35 is actually more technologically advanced than the F-22; the reason the F-22 is a better fighter is simply because it's bigger, more powerful and focused specifically on fighting other aircraft.\n\nIn order to be good at more than one thing, a lot of development has gone into sensors and computers, which are something that is very important for many different tasks.\n\nWhen it comes to materials, computers, sensors, etc, the F-35 is a decent step ahead of the F-22, having things like infrared sensors, computers that have about 3x as many ways of automatically identifying a target as the F-22, helmets that let the pilot look right through his aircraft, etc."
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7vf6fp | how do altimeters work? (altitude detecting gauges) | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7vf6fp/eli5_how_do_altimeters_work_altitude_detecting/ | {
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"Most of them are essentially pressure gauges. The higher you are above a given level the lower the air pressure. "
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6pf4y1 | why some movies get low rating on imdb and rotten tomatoes but it's still enjoyable and well liked by a lot of people? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6pf4y1/eli5_why_some_movies_get_low_rating_on_imdb_and/ | {
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"Because an enjoyable movie doesn't necessarily have to be a good movie. The directing or acting or whatever could technically be \"bad\" but you still might like the story for example. ",
"The answer is simple: people have different opinions. \n\nThe scores shown on IMDb and Rotten tomatoes are just averages. Many rate the movie higher, many rate it lower. If you actually read some reviews on IMDb, you can see these different opinions clearly. ",
"On Rotten Tomatoes you are the in the percentage that liked the movie. If it is at 30%, you are one of the 3 out of 10 people that liked it. \nFor me I liked the Speed Racer movie. I know it is not a good movie, but I liked it. So I understand the 39% ",
"I took a media critiquing course in college and something pointed out to us by my professor was that professional critics have to see *every* movie that comes out, and that will quickly change their perspective.\n\nSo, when you and your friends are going to out to dinner then want to watch a Transformers movie with a few mindless explosions while the crowd cheers, you're seeing it in a much, much different setting than the critic who sees it during an early-preening, possibly his or her fourth movie that week.",
"The worst rated film on IMDb for a long time (among films with 1500+ reviews) was [*Gunday*](_URL_0_). It still only has a single star there. Yet, critically it got pretty good reviews, mostly in the 3.5-4 out of 5 range, and it made decent box-office. \n\nMany Bangladeshi's felt insulted by some of the framing dialogue of the film, thinking it misrepresented their history. They took to the internet in their droves to downvote the movie in protest where they could, usually without watching the film.\n\nPoint is, internet voting is a weird and wonderful thing, and you can never be quite sure of all of what currents are tugging ratings on crowd-sourced sites like this one way or another. "
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2y9v8n | how do computer screens work and how do they display images | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2y9v8n/eli5how_do_computer_screens_work_and_how_do_they/ | {
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"In LCD monitors an electric current is sent through the crystal,rearranging the 'spin' of the picture to display a certain color. There are 3 layers, a plastic screen, a color censoring sheet and the crystal _URL_0_ see the color a backlight at the bottom of the monitor is passed through the setup so you can see it.\n\nCRT monitors use an electron current through the tube, going row by row, very quickly to create an image"
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9s1jxi | why is it only red light that develops photos? what makes red able to do this as opposed to any other color, or even natural daylight? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9s1jxi/eli5_why_is_it_only_red_light_that_develops/ | {
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"Red light doesn't develop photos. Photos are developed with chemicals. They use red lights in dark rooms because black and white film is insensitive to red light, so you can see what you're doing without exposing the film more.\n\nFor colour film, you in fact open the film and put it in a lightproof tank, in a lightproof bag, after which you can just turn regular lights on. You just see them using the red lights in the movies because pitch black rooms don't make for the most exciting footage.",
"It doesn't. I'm guessing you're thinking of the red lights used in darkrooms? Those are used because the red light (a safelight) is actually a frequency that *doesn't* develop b & w prints. \n\nUnprocessed black and white film needs to be handled in complete darkness to avoid ruining it. Once that's done though you project that image onto photo paper and that paper doesn't respond to red light so at least you can see what you're doing under the safelight. Color film and paper needs to be handled in complete darkness until chemically fixed."
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cwube1 | why does doubling cooking temperature not cut cooking time in half? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cwube1/eli5_why_does_doubling_cooking_temperature_not/ | {
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"It can do, but there are too many variables for it to be a direct relationship like heating all the way through, what the water percentage is, the size of object or even size of oven.",
"That would lead to a burned exterior and a raw or undercooked interior. It takes time for heat to be conducted through what it is you're cooking, and your goal is to reach a certain *internal* temperature without destroying the exterior.",
"Think about it this way. If you needed to bake something at 350 degrees Fahrenheit, and you tried baking it at 700 degrees Fahrenheit, you might think that's twice as hot, right?\n\nBut just convert it to Kelvin instead. 350 F = 450 K, and 700 F = 644 K. From the Kelvin perspective, you didn't \"double the temperature\" from 450 to 644.\n\nThis is because the degree in the F and C scales is an arbitrary measurement that is derived from the fraction of the difference between two reactions (like water freezing and water boiling). It doesn't have anything to do with how hot it is because it doesn't start at an objective \"zero\" like Kelvin does.",
"This statement seems obvious but is key to your question: almost all cooking involves water. If you have a pot of water, and you double the heat of the burner, you don't increase the temperature of that water at all (assuming you've let it come to a boil). The water will come to a boil *quicker*, but in both cases (at sea level) it will be at 212F / 100C. Similarly for food containing water (usually *large amounts* of water), only when you have removed the water can you increase the temperature of what you're cooking much above the boiling point. This is why for foods that you wish to brown, recipes will usually tell you to dry off the surface with paper towels for the like.\n\nNow for certain types of cooking, adding additional heat will speed things up. If you're steaming your food, steam is not limited to the boiling point temperature, and more heat - > more steam - > faster cooking (I think the temperature of the steam will go up, too). Similarly, pressure cookers raise the boiling point and as such will speed up cooking, sometimes tremendously so."
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7goe79 | are organs the same size for everyone or are they bigger for naturally bigger people and vise versa? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7goe79/eli5_are_organs_the_same_size_for_everyone_or_are/ | {
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"Of course, Organs needs to grow proportionately to the size of the person so they may function properly. A good example is the heart. The heart from a small person may not function properly on the body of someone with a bigger build, due to how hard it needs to work in order to circulate blood around the bigger body.",
"While there is some amount of variance, the average dimensions and weight of organs are the same throughout all of humanity according to a rough *height* metric. A 6'5\" adult male would have about 30% larger lung size than a 5'10 adult male, assuming all other factors are \"average\".\n\nFatter people will have heavier organs due to fat deposits, but the overall size of the organs won't change based on their current weight. A 5'10\" fat person will have the same rough size/shape organs as a 5'10\" anorexic, just with extra fat."
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5ljd6j | why are some things transparent when in liquid form but not in solid form? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ljd6j/eli5_why_are_some_things_transparent_when_in/ | {
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"It all depends on the bonds forming (this is actually more of a chemistry question). When a thing changes states (like solid to liquid) the way its molecules bond changes and these bonds might form structures that bend light in a different way."
]
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||
9le37s | what should i do when someone around me has a seizure? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9le37s/eli5_what_should_i_do_when_someone_around_me_has/ | {
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"Help them to the ground and put them in the recovery position. Call 911 regardless. Worst case they'll just check his vitals and leave. Seizures can cause permanent damage the longer they run. EMS will have Clonazepam they can give to help ease the seizure. They'll also check for a medic-alert bracelet or necklace that should have further instructions/contact info. \n\nSource: Parent of a 12 year-old epileptic. ",
"Why wouldn't you call 911? If there is a medical emergency where someone's life is in danger, of course you should call 911.\n\nRoll them on to their side so they don't choke on their own spit. \n\nKeep airway free and open. Use a wooden spoon or something if there's an obstruction. Do NOT put your finger in their mouth. The human jaw can bite your finger off without trying.",
"This happened in a bio lecture in college once. I was scrolling Facebook on my laptop--bored. and I hear a shriek from across the aisle from other students and I glanced over, and I was like \"oh that kid is having a seizure\" and then did a double take and leapt up and did the whole pardon me excuse me thing going through the aisle. Most of the class had cleared out around him and no one was really helping him at all. I attributed my knowledge to learning about it just a week prior in one of my parks and recreation classes.\n\nThe professor was legit freaking out asking what the number was for 911... He was utterly useless., Which boggled my mind. (The EMTs checked him out after they took care of the student.)The best thing to do is put them in the recovery position on their side, and make sure they don't swallow their tongue. Obviously after they finish the episode. Give them space because tend to trash about violently. I got kicked in the shin pretty hard.\n\nThe freshman having the seizure had gashed his head on the folding desk he was sitting in. No one around him attempted to take him out of the desk because I think they were all shocked or something.\n\nOh another thing, It's also important not to grab their hands while the seizure is going on - people experiencing them turn into the Hulk and have superhuman strength.\n\nWhen he came to I asked him his name and the date and where he was - and about 5 min later the EMTs showed up. "
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2ou5yp | how did non-contemporary technology navigators/explorers get to their desired destination with such accuracy? | As an example, how did James Cook (in his first voyage to Australia) navigate from Cape Horn to Tahiti, a tiny island almost 8,000 kilometers away, without either getting extremely lucky or lost? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ou5yp/eli5_how_did_noncontemporary_technology/ | {
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"The use of calculated tools and a very good system of star watching and sun tracking.\n\nNavigating used to be a very serious trade, taking years to learn and being very efficient with sometimes crude and unreliable tools.",
"Latitude can be calculated very simply by measuring the angle of the sun at Noon with a sextant. Longitude is measured using a clock, by subtracting the time difference between local Noon (measured with that same sextant) and Greenwich time (you have to carry a watch set to GMT on the voyage).\n\nCook had both of these technologies, the sextant and a clock. The issue is that 1700s clocks are extremely finicky and easy to break and prone to going off time. And Cook compensated by carrying quite a few clocks along and averaging the difference. Later explorers would get even more anal on the clock front, During Darwin's HMS beagle voyage, the captain took along 34 clocks. "
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[],
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2mw27y | why are the careers of famous people so damaged by rape allegations when there's been no trial? | I've heard that reruns of The Cosby Show are being dropped over the allegations against Cosby, for example. Are the TV stations that afraid of social stigma that they ignore innocent until proven guilty? ELI5 prompted by this: _URL_0_
Disclaimer: I'm not endorsing rape/rapists, and I'm not saying people shouldn't be scrutinised when these kinds of allegations are made, especially in this volume. It just seems like a premature reaction to potentially scupper a career or significantly hit their earnings over what is, legally speaking, hearsay. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2mw27y/eli5_why_are_the_careers_of_famous_people_so/ | {
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"The stigma that comes with an accusation is like having herpies. No one wants anything to do with herpies.",
" > Are the TV stations that afraid of social stigma that they ignore innocent until proven guilty?\n\nYes. Probably rightfully.\n\nThis is probably not a legal reason to not hire someone (depending where in the world.) But working with celebrities amounts to more than simply hiring a new body in your workforce.",
" > Are the TV stations that afraid of social stigma that they ignore innocent until proven guilty?\n\nYes, because the concept of innocent until proven guilty relates to criminal law and not TV entertainment.\n\nThe TV studios know that people suspect Cosby is guilty (13 different people alleging similar crimes...) even though he's rich enough to settle out of court and therefore technically not guilty.",
"I personally feel like a lot of it has to do with the fact that in recent years, a lot has come to light about celebrities \"covering up\" rape allegations by paying people off, or police simply not wanting to mess with a tough situation and dismissing it. The fact that we know that some celebrities who aren't \"proven guilty\" still actually committed the crime makes us feel weird about dismissing hearsay. I'm definitely NOT saying that all allegations are based in fact, but definitely enough sketchy things happen that we have a natural uneasiness about people once their character comes into question. OJ Simpson was acquitted, but he'll never escape the fact that we all think he's a murderer (and a shirt thief, but murderer seems more pertinent). Casey Anthony was deemed not guilty, but you don't see people saying \"good for her\" about having another baby. It's just a case of us not feeling comfortable once we know someone got to the point of pressing charges against them. This may have been terribly explained, and again, I am NOT saying that all allegations of rape or abuse are grounded in fact, but if someone is willing to go through the time and emotional distress of pressing charges against someone, I know that I personally would call that individual's character into question\n\nEDIT: I realize my examples were about murder, but sexual assault is too volatile an issue for me personally to want to go into, I hope my point still stuck",
"There have been accusations since at least 2000 of Cosby behaving inappropriately and his career wasn't damaged. None were proven and he settled out of court on some. His career isn't being damaged by **one** rape allegation it's being damaged by **multiple** rape allegations that seem very credible. At some point it starts becoming believable that he did do some bad things. Even if they aren't technically criminal acts the things he seems to have done are disliked by the public.\n\nBasically though the answer is that when your career is based on people liking you when people stop liking you, whether it's fair or not, you lose your career.",
"Live by your fame, die by your fame.\n\nCosby and other celebrities make millions simply by virtue of being popular. Is it \"fair\" that Paris Hilton can make $10K simply for showing up at a party?\n\nIs it any less fair a celebrity can no longer do that when they become unpopular?\n\nNo one owes it to Cosby to watch is reruns, and if TV stations decide its is bad for ratings, that is just too bad."
]
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3b2cnz | what is the source of the idea that animals and insects can "smell fear?" any credibility to fear having a smell? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3b2cnz/eli5_what_is_the_source_of_the_idea_that_animals/ | {
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"When people are scared, their breathing and heart rate both increase. Your body temperature rises, and you exhale more CO2 than normal.\n\nInsects can detect this, and are attracted to you. Not because of the fear, but because a big hot CO2 making thing flailing around is probably worth investigating. Keep in mind, much of insect communication is through scent and chemicals (pheromones). So, I guess you can say they \"smell\" the fear.\n\nWhen it comes to larger animals, like a bear or lion, again, they aren't \"smelling fear\", but they certainly are perceiving it. These animals largely communicate through body language-rearing up, bearing fangs, rolling on their back, etc. Some things, like \"cowering\" are universal. These animals can certainly perceive your fear and can act on the situation knowing you are scared and therefore not a threat.\n\nBy making yourself not look scared, by making yourself intimidating, large, noisy, and aggressive, the animal knows you are not scared, that you ARE a threat, and that they may get hurt if they attack you. Even if they win, they don't want a fight that looses them an eye or breaks a leg, and are likely to just back off. \n\n(Note: Not guaranteed, especially for animals far bigger than us (like a Grizzly) or anything defending it's home/babies or mating. Your best bet is always to stay away!)",
"More likely than not, the only thing that can be 'smelled' relating to fear is sweat, and some organisms definitely can. (See mosquitoes and my SO)",
"Insects release different pheromones for different functions, and other members of the species react to them, like a trail of ants going for food. Start spraying bug spray, or squishing them, fear pheromone is released, and they will turn and go in the opposite direction. I'd imagine animals work in the same manner.",
"Animal noses have specialized receptors that can detect hormonal changes in sweat, they perceive it as a property of smell. [Here is a relevant TEDtalk.](_URL_0_)",
"I can sometimes smell fear in other animals. A skunk, for instance, has a distinctive smell when it feels threatened."
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2mp7pc | what are spider venoms made from, how does a spider produce it? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2mp7pc/eli5_what_are_spider_venoms_made_from_how_does_a/ | {
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"Spider venom is not all the same, but most are neurotoxins which are polyamines or polypeptides. Spiders produce it from a gland they have."
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||
bvku95 | why do our eyes burn/sting when something gets in them? | What exactly causes that burning feeling? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bvku95/elif_why_do_our_eyes_burnsting_when_something/ | {
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"The eyes are one of, if not the most sensitive part of the body, it's simply them getting irritated. \n\nJust like a corrosive substance will irritate your skin, the eyes are so sensitive that dust, smoke or even an eyelash will cause pain. Because they are so important, we evolved with super sensible eyes to protect them."
]
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106lri | why do oil refineries/wells have these burning tubes? | [This](_URL_0_) is what I'm thinking of, for visual reference. I don't know their proper name. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/106lri/eli5_why_do_oil_refinerieswells_have_these/ | {
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"I used to work at a refinery, and by talking with the operators there are several reasons. First, there are a lot of byproducts that are created that would be harmful such as Benzine-based derivitives. The best way to dispose these are to burn them.\n\n\nSecondly, it's a venting system. If there is a failure in the alkaline or cat-cracker unit (different parts of the refinery that do specific reactions) the system pressure can build. If that happens the system is purged through the towers.\n\n\nrelated, random story:\n\nOne night, not long after 9/11 I was working the 3rd shift guarding our south tank farm (there was a small contained leak being worked on by contractors and I managed the gate- even though everyone had left for the day, but whatever). So I'm sitting in the car, chillin when this heavy fog rolls through. \n\nIt's not bad but it's getting very thick (this is near a port in the gulf) when suddenly I hear a loud bang. I can't see anything so I'm flipping out trying to call on the radio to figure out what was going on. [Here is where I was](_URL_0_). So all the lights around me go out and a few seconds later I hear the ground rumbling. Then everything turns orange. I do what everyone does and sit back in the car, trying not to soil myself and figuring \"This ain't worth $7.25 an hour... I'm going to floor it and gtfo\"\n\nA couple minutes later I was still there though and a break in the fog showed that the flares were venting, the flames were about 100 feet in the air. \n\nWhat happened was that the refinery to my left (Valero?) had lost power causing a power spike and chain reaction power failure to all the surrounding refineries. As per proceedure the gasses were vented via the flares to prevent a nasty explosion."
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30kgys | if most voters disagree with corporate lobbying and company funded candidates, then why do we still vote for them? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/30kgys/eli5if_most_voters_disagree_with_corporate/ | {
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"Some states experimented with severe term limits for politicians in the 1990s. The idea was supposed to be that if you kicked out all the career politicians and forced voters to elect fresh faces who had no ties to lobbyists, then you would get a corruption-free system.\n\nIt didn't work *at all*. It turns out that if you take a bunch of gee-whiz bumpkins and give them offices in the state capital, they have no idea what the correct state regulatory policy on the hygienic slaughter of cattle should be, or how frequently state highways should be repaved and how important the runoff is for the quality of the water table, or what the deadweight loss of various sorts of sales taxes might be... the end result is that when you kick out career politicians, you switch from lobbyist-influenced government to lobbyist-*run* government, because the naive legislators have no idea what they're doing and have to rely on the lobbyists for advice.\n\nThe bottom line is that you shouldn't think of lobbying as pure corruption (although there is some of that, especially with the way politicians make money after they retire from politics) but instead as a research-subsidy from corporations to congress-critters. Ideally, every congressmen should have all the resources he needs to have his own team of researchers come up with an independent answer to any technical question he wants to ask about a law or regulation he needs to take a position on. In practice this doesn't happen, so congressmen rely on research that lobbyists do instead; but the more you rely on their research, the more beholden you are to their policy agenda.\n\n(You could compare it to the way that some underfunded schools get corporate subsidies.)\n\nAnyway, most voters disagree with lots of things about our political system *in general*, but everyone loves their own congressman. People say they don't like pork, for example, but they love the federal road money their rep got to fix the local interstate. And overall, people just have incoherent and under-informed views about the federal government. For example, people want to cut the federal budget *overall*, but they want to expand almost all of the most expensive programs. They seem to think lots of money is spent on programs like foreign aid (1%) and NASA (0.1%), which they don't value.",
"Voters still vote for them because non-corporate funded candidates have no money to get their message out, so voters don't know about them. \n\n"
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1xl2xg | explain how american investing works. buying/selling stocks, bonds, trusts. | Explain how American investing works. Buying/Selling stocks, bonds, trusts. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1xl2xg/explain_how_american_investing_works/ | {
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"Stocks involve giving money to a company in return for a say in how it is run and a share in its future profits. If the company does well, you can resell the stocks to someone else for more than you bought them.\n\nBuying a bond means you are lending money to a government. After a predetermined amount of time, they must repay that loan to you with interest.\n\nA trust is a reserve of funds that one party has left for another party in the care of a third party. The funds cannot be touched until conditions are met, usually when the recipient reaches a certain age.",
"American investing works the same as any other country's investments (assuming interest and uncertain outcomes are OK - investing in Islamic countries is often not OK).\n\nI will preface this by saying that I'm only going to talk about publicly-held shares. There is a LOT of complexity to stocks and bonds, but the public markets are the easiest to explain.\n\nA company has some value, right? All of the stuff it owns, its income, its customer base. All of that is worth something. So a company, once it reaches a certain size, may wish to issue shares of stock. Basically, it says, \"You give us a certain amount of money, and we'll let you say you own a fraction of a percentage of the company.\" This is a way for the company to get a huge influx of cash. The downside is that it is suddenly at the whim of the public, and if the nation says it's no good, then stock prices will crash.\n\nIt should be noted that a company's stock price, and how it fluctuates, will affect how easily a company can do things like get loans to expand.\n\nThis is called the *initial public offering*. The company will set a certain price that it *thinks* the shares are worth, and investors will buy them on an exchange (like the Dow Jones or the Nasdaq).\n\nOnce a share of stock is issued, through a stock exchange, it sits in an open market - a stock exchange is just like a store, for stocks. The only difference is that you can't buy them directly. You must pay a *broker*, who has access to the exchange, to buy the stocks for you. Your broker may be a person, who works for a company, or it may be an electronic broker, like ScottTrade.\n\nShares that have been issued to investors do not belong the company anymore. An investor can sell it, again, through the stock markets, to another person.\n\nA key point here: A stock's price is the value of the *last trade.* It doesn't matter what the investor who owns the share thinks it's worth, what matters is what the next person to buy it thinks it's worth. Selling a share of stock is just like selling a car - both people have to agree on the price.\n\nBonds are things that investors buy with a promise of a set interest rate of return. When you buy a bond issued by a company, that company promises to pay you interest, after a set period (the remaining life of the bond), and to pay you ~~a portion of~~ the value of the *principal of the bond*, which is the initial bond amount (like, say, $10,000). Bonds are issued for a set lifespan.\n\nBonds can be traded just like stocks, on an exchange.\n\nTreasury bonds, also called T-Bills, fluctuate in interest and value. They are issued by the US Government, and go up in price as interest rates decline, and vice-versa. Treasury bills are connected to the actual *value of money*, and therefore to inflation, and to predictions of the nation's overall economic health.\n\nEDIT: Forgot about trusts!\n\nTrusts are a collection of assets, managed by a *trustee*, which pay out a fixed interest rate over a fixed lifespan (either a period of years, or until the beneficiary dies). The payout amount is not fixed, because the trust's assets are re-valued every year, but the percentage rate of payout *is* fixed. Trusts are a great way to avoid things like taxes, because creating a trust means that the assets are no longer owned by an individual (no capital gains taxes!) and are not part of an estate, once it's settled.\n\nI hope that helps!"
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88y0ci | why cables - like laptop charging cable and phone usb cables- stop working without any obvious damage ? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/88y0ci/eli5_why_cables_like_laptop_charging_cable_and/ | {
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"The wire inside the cable might break over time, that's why sometimes your headphones work in only certain positions, and then stop working altogether. It might also be that the electronics inside the adapter got messed up due to prolonged use, since using it makes it heat up. I hope that answer was detailed enough. "
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40ll7l | why do you lose your radio signal(fm) when you've driven a fair distance into a tunnel, but you don't regain it until you're completely out of it? | Title. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/40ll7l/eli5_why_do_you_lose_your_radio_signalfm_when/ | {
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"It depends on the direction the FM signal is coming from. Think of it like a beam of light (actually, radio signals technically *are* light!) where solid structures casts shadows.\n\nIf the light is shining towards the entrance of a tunnel, then the inside of the tunnel is still lit up near the entrance. At the exit, the shadow of the mountain or building still blocks light past the tunnel exit. That is why different places have different signal strengths.\n\nIt depends on where the FM transmitter is and where the blocking objects are.\n\n---\n\n**EDIT:** \nThis is one explanation, but if you find that it doesn't matter which side of the tunnel you enter/exit, then this next explanation may be what's happening...\n\nIf you think of the FM signal as having a particular address (the frequency), then you can only read the signal if you know exactly where it is, and you actually have to know much more accurately than the number you put into the radio. Luckily, your FM radio can find the exact address once you give it the ballpark number and is able to stay locked onto that signal.\n\nThe hard part is finding it in the first place, since once you see it, you can follow it even if the signal becomes faint. However, your FM radio can't find it if it's too faint to begin with. So on both sides of a tunnel, the signal is weaker, but you can still hear it as you go in since you've locked on to it. When you come out, your radio needs to wait for the signal to be bright enough to pinpoint and lock on to it again.\n\nOther answers explain this in more detail: it's called a phase-locked loop.",
"It is mostly due to the design of the FM radio receiver. \n\nModern FM radio receivers have circuitry known as a \"phase locked loop\" or PLL. The purpose of PLL circuitry is to allow your radio to lock onto the radio station's carrier frequency to produce a stable received signal despite intermittent environmental disruptions, temporary weak signals or interference. It also means that your radio receiver will only need to be manually tuned to a frequency close to the carrier and the PLL will do the fine-tuning to lock onto the station.\n\nWhen you drive into a tunnel and the signal gradually becomes weaker, the PLL does a good job of remaining locked onto the carrier, keeping your radio tuned to the carrier frequency despite the signal strength fading. Eventually the signal strength becomes too weak and impossible to detect and the PLL can no longer lock onto the carrier frequency.\n\nHowever as you approach the far side of the tunnel, the PLL circuitry can't lock onto the carrier frequency until the received signal strength rises above a minimum threshold for the PLL to lock back onto the carrier. This usually won't occur until you are almost out of the tunnel.\n\nA more ELI5 explanation might be to compare the weakening radio signal to carefully watching a small, distant object as you travel away from it. If you lock your eyes onto the object, you can still detect it from several miles away. However once you look away and lose track of the object, you will need to move much closer to it again in order to pick it out from the background.\n\nEdit: PLL, not PPL"
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9mghmv | what causes the vibrant clouds when a rocket is launched at night | As seen in this spaceX video. What causes the bright clouds, and why are they multicolored, what do the colors come from?
_URL_0_ | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9mghmv/eli5_what_causes_the_vibrant_clouds_when_a_rocket/ | {
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"You're seeing condensation trails from the rocket exhaust. As the rocket fuel burns, it creates water vapor. That water vapor condenses and freezes in the upper atmosphere. It happened to show up very well in this launch because of the time of the launch. It was past sunset & dark on the ground, but the sunlight was still visible at the launch altitudes so you could see the faint reflections of the setting sun off the ice crystals. The colors were from the same reason sunsets give you crazy colors, the sunlight is filtered through much more atmosphere."
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j2n1f | for those of you who are looking for a simple explanation of complex things: simple wikipedia | explainlikeimfive | http://simple.wikipedia.org | {
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"Unfortunately, only has a very small fraction of the pages real Wikipedia has.",
"didn't know about this, this would be a great thing to post on the LI5 LHC post",
"Well that's just great. All this effort to build a community and you go showing us this. ",
"This is in the sidebar. Also this post doesn't conform to the rules of the subreddit. ",
"Clicking the first link doesn't get you to philosophy. It loops planet and jupiter after a while.",
"Not only did it not have the first thing I searched for \"Super-Pac\" (this was answered very well in likeimfive) It's also hard to search for situational questions, like \"explain what's going on between Israel and Palestine\". This is why likeimfive is such a great subreddit. ",
"_URL_0_ for SSL link",
"You have linked to a version of Wikipedia [written in Simple English](_URL_1_), a language that is a subset of English.\nA better resource might be the English Wikipedia's [introduction to _](_URL_0_ \"for example\") pages.",
"If you are trying to say this subreddit is basically just that Simple Wikipedia thing, its not. This subreddit was made so that anyone with absolutely no prior knowledge on the subject would be able to understand it in terms that even a kid could get their head around. I get the feeling you already have to know a few things or the background of a subject on the Simple Wikipedia.",
"This subreddit is a good place for other people to learn. If I have a question, I'll go to wiki. If everyone just asks their question on wiki, then good for them...and bad for me(?) Like I can read answers to questions of which I have never thought of. So for me, I'm learning random/cool things and am getting a general knowledge of it.",
"wait, theres another website outside reddit? thanks for the link, ill return to reddit now thank you",
"simple wikipedia is awful, to be frank.",
"The idea isn't at all that the explanations are simple, only the words. See: _URL_0_ "
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m2izj | why can't you make a bit-for-bit copy of a disc and use that as the original? | It seems to me that if the original disc is copied bit-for-bit to a new disc, the new one is indistinguishable from the old. Yet, you can't simply copy an XBox/Wii disc and expect it to work without patching your disc drive's firmware. I don't plan on doing this(did a few months ago, realized it was a dick move), but I am still curious as to how the protection works. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/m2izj/eli5_why_cant_you_make_a_bitforbit_copy_of_a_disc/ | {
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"The disks used on gaming consoles have special components of the data tracks near the inside of the disk. These components can be neither read nor replicated by standard drives. Only the drives used in the consoles themselves can access and utilize these proprietary features.",
"Well, copy protection is a cat and dog game, both the pirates and the anti copyright agencies try and outsmart one another.\n\nOne of the simplest ideas was to use custom disks or code on the disc that would upset a standard dvd writer (i.e. you would hardcode fuckups into the cd) .\n\n_URL_0_",
"If you truly make a bit-for-bit copy, it *will* work (assuming there isn't any sort of online DRM). The problem is that most people do not have access to writeable media and drives to make a true bit-for-bit copy.",
"Anyone remember Blindread/Blindwrite?",
"In the specific case of the Xbox/360, it's because Xbox discs are not DVDs--you'll notice they do not have the DVD logo anywhere on them. They are actually Xbox Game Discs. They look like DVDs, act like DVDs and are made exactly the same way as DVDs, but their \"Media Type\"--a special code that indicates what kind of disc it is to the drive--is XGD (Xbox Game Disc) not DVD. This code is stamped on the disc at the factory and cannot be overwritten, period. It's how your computer can tell the difference between a DVD-ROM, DVD+R, DVD-R, etc.\n\nThe fundamental feature of Xbox copy protection is that it will not execute game code unless it is a)signed by Microsoft and b)if it is running from a disc, the disc *must* be an XGD. Retail Xbox 360s will not run game code from any disc that is not an XGD.\n\nPirates get around this by patching the drive firmware to report *every* disc as an XGD, even if it isn't.",
"You are *thiiiis* close to the edge of our understanding of human cloning. ",
"The disks used on gaming consoles have special components of the data tracks near the inside of the disk. These components can be neither read nor replicated by standard drives. Only the drives used in the consoles themselves can access and utilize these proprietary features.",
"Well, copy protection is a cat and dog game, both the pirates and the anti copyright agencies try and outsmart one another.\n\nOne of the simplest ideas was to use custom disks or code on the disc that would upset a standard dvd writer (i.e. you would hardcode fuckups into the cd) .\n\n_URL_0_",
"If you truly make a bit-for-bit copy, it *will* work (assuming there isn't any sort of online DRM). The problem is that most people do not have access to writeable media and drives to make a true bit-for-bit copy.",
"Anyone remember Blindread/Blindwrite?",
"In the specific case of the Xbox/360, it's because Xbox discs are not DVDs--you'll notice they do not have the DVD logo anywhere on them. They are actually Xbox Game Discs. They look like DVDs, act like DVDs and are made exactly the same way as DVDs, but their \"Media Type\"--a special code that indicates what kind of disc it is to the drive--is XGD (Xbox Game Disc) not DVD. This code is stamped on the disc at the factory and cannot be overwritten, period. It's how your computer can tell the difference between a DVD-ROM, DVD+R, DVD-R, etc.\n\nThe fundamental feature of Xbox copy protection is that it will not execute game code unless it is a)signed by Microsoft and b)if it is running from a disc, the disc *must* be an XGD. Retail Xbox 360s will not run game code from any disc that is not an XGD.\n\nPirates get around this by patching the drive firmware to report *every* disc as an XGD, even if it isn't.",
"You are *thiiiis* close to the edge of our understanding of human cloning. "
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fvb8ra | why does putting pressure on a specific point on your neck 'cure' a creak in the neck? | And then when you take the pressure off, it's suddenly as annoying and uncomfortable as ever? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fvb8ra/eli5_why_does_putting_pressure_on_a_specific/ | {
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"It's possible you have a \"pinched nerve\" essentially the muscles in your neck are cramping and by pressing on it you release some of that pressure on the nerve. It's also possible that it's just simple muscle fatigue and pressing on the affected muscle group stretches it out like stretching out your back. As for exactly how stretching helps with fatigued muscles I'm not sure."
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230dn5 | why does polishing a white object to a high sheen not turn it into a mirror? | White reflects all colors, highly polished surfaces are shiny and prevent diffraction, so what gives?
Also why does black actually seem to do a better job of this? And what base-color is actually best for mirrors? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/230dn5/eli5_why_does_polishing_a_white_object_to_a_high/ | {
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"There are two kinds of reflection: specular reflection and diffuse reflection.\n\nSpecular reflection is when a beam of light hits an object, and is reflected back in one *specific* direction. If you shot a laser at a specular reflective surface, it would bounce right back and look pretty much the same as it did going in. Specular surfaces (like mirrors and metal) are shiny.\n\nDiffuse reflection is when the reflection fans out. If you shot a laser at a diffuse surface, it would lose its coherent \"laser-ness\" and look like a regular non-concentrated light. Matte surfaces are diffuse.\n\nYou may have noticed that specular surfaces tend to be very smooth, while diffuse surfaces tend to be rough. That's not coincidental. For an analogy, imagine bouncing a ball off of a smooth surface like a floor: you can guess with pretty much 100% certainty what direction it's going to bounce in. Bounce a ball off an irregular surface like a floor covered with random objects? Yeah, you have no idea where that ball's gonna go.\n\nPolish works by filling in *minor* surface irregularities. The polish itself, however, is frankly not a very good specular reflector. That's why if you overpolish a metal, it'll actually get worse. If you try to polish a rough surface, you're just filling in the big irregularities with a substance that still doesn't specular reflect very well.",
"I'm not sure if this will answer exactly what you're asking, but it may be helpful.\n\nWhen light interacts with an object, there are a few terms that we can use to describe what happens. It can be absorbed (turned into heat energy), it can be transmitted (pass through) or it can be reflected. It's usually a combination.\n\nFor transmission, we would classify it either as diffuse transmission (light though fabric for example) or direct transmission (light though a clear window).\n\nAbsorption is when light is converted into non-visual energy like heat. If all the light is being absorbed, the object would be pure black. If some wavelengths of light are absorbed and some are reflected, we see that the object has a color. The fact that anything has a color, is a result of which wavelengths are being absorbed vs reflected.\n\nThe last property is what we call reflection. Light being reflected off of things is how we see them at all. Two main categories of reflection are diffuse reflection and direct reflection.\n\nDiffuse reflection scatters the reflected light in all directions, while direct reflection reflects the light at the opposite angle at which the light hit it. (angle of reflection is equal to the angle of incidence). \n\nWhen something is white, it will very likely have a high percentage of the property of diffuse reflection. A good example is simple white paper. \n\nIf something is polished, then the polished surface likely has more of the direct reflection properties. \n\nAs for why black objects do a better job of becoming a 'mirrored' surface, it's because there is little or no diffuse reflection to distract from the direct reflection. \n\nOn a white object with the same direct reflection properties as the black one, the diffuse reflection can tend to overpower the direct reflection so that we don't see it. \n\nA mirror is the best example of something that has properties of direct reflection (and little or no diffuse reflection). Silver seems to be the best material/color for a mirror, but the science of why is probably more an an /r/askscience topic."
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23ot0t | if pain is your body's way of telling you to stop doing something, then why does exercise hurt? | I thought that pain was a warning signal from your brain telling you to stop doing something that is detrimental to your health, i.e. instinctively dropping a pan if it's handle is too hot & burns you.
Workouts are painful, physically and mentally, all my body wants to do is stop and rest. So how is exercise painful but also good for you? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/23ot0t/eli5_if_pain_is_your_bodys_way_of_telling_you_to/ | {
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"Med student currently procrastinating from my dissertation on pain here. Pain is a signal warning you of potential damage. In the case of exercise, you are ripping muscle fibres among other things, hence it is painful. In a wider sense your body cannot tell if something will be good long term, only short term, this is why large brains and the ability to plan are such an evolutionary advantage. \n\nEdit: This is a response I posted further down, going to put it here so people will see it and hopefully it will clear up some things. \n\n\"Lactic acid is thought to be a factor in the early stages, however evidence suggest that a variety of factors are at work. These include arachidonic acid derivatives and other inflammatory pain inducing chemicals from the torn muscle fibres, the build up of lactic acid, ionic imbalance, free radical damage etc. Delayed onset muscle pain is very much from the inflammation of muscles in response to damage. However this is ELI5 so I skipped over most of it.\"",
"That's because exercise is actually damaging your muscles, but in a good way. You build muscles by breaking them down. Your body, recognizing that you are lacking in physical strength/dexterity, rebuilds the muscles a little stronger than before. However, the initial action is still destructive to the muscle, so it hurts.",
"As you exercise, muscle breakdown occurs in your body. This breakdown is very small tears appearing in your muscles. The longer you exercise for, the more breakdown occurs and you end up requiring the same amount of energy to be transmitted through less muscle. The pain you feel is the accumulation of all these tears in your muscles. Think of it like your car tyres. When you get nice new tyres, you get more grip and your car can corner at a higher speed. After a year or so, there is less rubber to transmit the car's power to the road so you have to take corners slower. \n\n*Side note: These tears are the reason that people use protein supplements. Protein is used to repair muscles we use on a daily basis and we usually get enough through red meat and chicken. However, people in the gym usually develop more of these tears and will use protein supplements to help them heal and build some extra muscle.\n",
"Aside from the microtears that others are talking about, you very quickly get to an anaerobic state during intense exercise, this is when the body switches to using glycogen stores THROUGH THE ANAEROBIC GLYCOLYSIS PATHWAY in the relative absence of oxygen. One of the immediate byproducts of this is lactic acid, and it is *more* likely that the \"burn\" you feel when undergoing anaerobic exercise is more a product of this than the tears people are talking about. Anaerobic respiration and energy use hurts. \n\nETA- higher O2 demand than available supply also likely causes low level ischemia in tissues, and that hurts as well. I cannot immediately find a peer reviewed source for this, but it makes great sense from a physiological POV. Low O2 often = ischemia= pain.",
"I dunno what all of you guys are doing, but exercise isn't and shouldn't be painful. DOMS the next day hurt, or you might feel exhausted and out of breath, or you might even get side stitches if you're doing cardio, or if you're doing more endurance type of lifting you might feel a muscle burn, but there's shouldn't be any \"OMG stop doing this now!\" pain while doing whatever it is you are doing. \n\nIf you've ever been injured while exercising, there is definitely acute pain you can experience when something is actually going wrong and you should stop it immediately. It is very different from whatever slight discomfort you are feeling otherwise. Being exhausted =/= pain that is supposed to stop you from doing something immediately.",
"I love the pain you feel after working out. It doesn't feel like normal pain.\n",
"it doesn't really hurt. breaking your arm hurts, tearing your ACL hurts.\n\nits uncomfortable, but your body is totally capable of continuing onwards. real pain from injury is debilitating",
"This also goes for childbirth...still remember the excruciating pain 4 years on...why the hell is something so natural so painful!?",
"To make it simple you cause micro trauma to your muscles. The damage isn't enough to actually cause harm but it is enough to cause soreness. Your muscles respond to this trauma by becoming stronger to better withstand the trauma. ",
"Everyone is such an Aristotelian.",
"Because pain is actually weakness leaving the body. ",
"/r/fatlogic quote of the day waiting to happen",
"In addition to what others have said about the physiological mechanisms for which exercise causes pain... In some sense, exercising *is* detrimental to your health.\n\nLet me explain. When we were evolving, energy and food was hard to come by. There was no reason to ever be running or exercising unless you needed to - our hunter-gatherer lifestyle alone got us plenty of exercise. It's energetically unfavorable to do anything beyond the bare minimum amount of exercise. This is why modern day humans are so lazy - because laziness was such an evolutionary advantage.\n\nSo the guy who was lifting up lots of heavy things and running around everywhere just for fun was one of the first to die when food became scarce. Those who were weak, never ran anywhere and were unable to hunt effectively also died. The ones who survived were the ones who ran only when they needed to - to catch food, avoid predators, or whatever else. So we developed an aversion to needless exercise, which is why you feel like you're fighting instinct when you are exercising.",
"It's shouldn't really hurt. It should be a struggle but not a sharp pain\n\n\n\"no struggle no gain\" imo",
"My neurosurgeon: \n\n > Pain represents life. If the area is painful, that means it's still alive. ",
"Working out shouldn't be literally painful. It's difficult and strenuous, but it shouldn't *hurt*.",
"Nice try my fat self. ",
"Checkmate fat shamers. ",
"It's because this maxim about pain is overly simplistic. Our bodies are amazing, but they are not perfect. They have many design flaws, and this is one of them.\n\nPain is a warning of a physical threat to the body, but some kinds of physical stress are good for us, such as exercise. The discomfort is supposed to warn us against *over*exertion, to prevent debilitating injury. Our evolutionary ancestors did not have to exercise, since they got plenty just by surviving every day. They only had to worry about injury, so we never evolved a balanced pain and misery perception appropriate to healthy exercise.\n\nSimilar contradictions are things like our cravings for certain kinds of foods that were vital to our wellbeing eons ago and not easy to obtain. These things are plentiful now, and very easy to overindulge in, to the detriment our health, because we never evolved a natural instinct not to overindulge in them.",
"This has already been answered, but I thought I'd say that the evolutionary reason is that we actually haven't been needing to do exercise for very long. As a species we've been around (and starving, and basically hunter/gatherers till recently) for like 200,000 years. So in the last ~12,000 years more and more of us have been using agriculture which means that we can be less nomadic. But farming sans industrial technology is still hard physical labor and generates more food than hunting/gathering but still not copious amounts. It wasn't until sometime within the last 100 years that exercise became something that was medically necessary to a significant percentage of the population aka something that they weren't already doing as a byproduct of survival. So your body can totally tell what's good for it in the long term (did you know that the smells of people who are genetically distinct from you smell better than the smells of people who are genetically similar?), but we've flipped everything it's evolved to know about food and expending energy completely around in .5% of its entire lifetime (the modern human body, that is), so its responses are actually backwards. It's why you still think that fatty food and meat and sugar taste SO GOOD even though they're \"bad for you.\" ",
"There are many wrong explanations that experts will give you, including:\n\n* Lactic acid build-up. Not a thing.\n* Muscle fibers ripping. Body builders might do this; normal people don't.\n\nThe pure and simple fact is exercise does stress components of your body. It makes you sore due to physical trauma, as much as slapping you inflicts pain: There's no damage (capillary damage, unconnected to any nerves, doesn't count as something you actually feel).\n\nThis stressing puts you at risk for damage. If you injure yourself, it will hurt a whole hell of a lot more, and it will hurt for longer. Extended exercise will put more of your body under stress: muscles, ligaments, tendons, joints, bones, heart, lungs, vascular system, digestive system. The physical stress could make you puke. It could cause a neural aneurism, making you die.\n\nWithout pain, your body will not prevent you from overexertion. You will push and push and push until you break, which is less-optimal than pushing until you fatigue and then growing. You may cause serious injury, leading to an inability to thrive and, thus, and inability to survive and reproduce.\n\nFurther, your body requires fuel. Exercise utilizes more fuel than leisurely relaxing. Reducing the expenditure of energy reduces your need for food, reducing the demands to hunt or gather food, thus preparing you for scarcity. As typical demands do historically include physical labor, a lack of physical labor represents a new turn in human history. Humans thus would best adapt under evolutionary pressure to minimize the consumption of energy, as have most animals.\n\nSo the preemptive prevention of damage by overexertion and the conservation of energy are both reasons for which humans naturally exhibit disinclination to exercise. Pain provides direct disincentive to harm oneself; general laziness itself conserves valuable caloric resources.",
"BECAUSE PAIN IS WEAKNESS LEAVING THE BODY! "
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9bvnb4 | how does baking soda remove scratches from spectacles | So one of the things to removes scratches from spectacles is to use baking soda as a paste and use it to buff your specs to remove it. I'm confused how does that work | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9bvnb4/eli5_how_does_baking_soda_remove_scratches_from/ | {
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"It is a really mild abrasive. It will only remove tiny scratches. That is also why it is a tooth whitener.\n\nBasically if it doesn't fully dissolve, it is slightly harder than glass and grinds it down.\n"
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mfz5s | today's xkcd comic, "where citations come from". | _URL_0_ | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/mfz5s/eli5_todays_xkcd_comic_where_citations_come_from/ | {
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"I hope this doesn't double-comment. I submitted a response and it didn't work (damn IE). Here goes again:\n\nThe punchline is the fact that just because a Wikipedia article has a \"source\" listed does not mean that fact is true. The storyline is as follows:\n\n1. Joe makes up a random \"fact\" and posts it on Wikipedia\n\n2. A news company finds this \"fact\" and, without doing any additional research, reports this \"fact\" in a news article\n\n3. Sally sees that this \"fact\" came from Wikipedia and finds it questionable. She marks it as \"needing a source\"\n\n4. Phil is reading Wikipedia and comes upon the \"fact\" that Joe wrote and sees that it is marked as \"needing a source.\" Phil then does a simple Google search and finds the article written by the news company (point 2). He then marks that article as the source of the fact\n\n5. People now quote this article as fact. They say \"It's on Wikipedia and it has a source.\" Since they don't have the timeline, they don't realize that the article reported the fact before it had a source and then became the source of the fact.",
"It's like time traveling to the past and becoming your own grandfather. Your grandfather had to exist in order for you to come to be. But then you travel back in time and do some pastnastification with granny. Now gramps is out of the picture and everyone thinks you're your own progenitor. \n\nJust the same, grampa is the original, dubious fact on Wikipedia. You're the citation. You needed the original to be here, but once you're here, you're justification for your own existence.\n\n\n...or something like that.",
"It's actually happened before, [this article](_URL_0_) explains how it happened pretty clearly, it should help you out.",
"I hope this doesn't double-comment. I submitted a response and it didn't work (damn IE). Here goes again:\n\nThe punchline is the fact that just because a Wikipedia article has a \"source\" listed does not mean that fact is true. The storyline is as follows:\n\n1. Joe makes up a random \"fact\" and posts it on Wikipedia\n\n2. A news company finds this \"fact\" and, without doing any additional research, reports this \"fact\" in a news article\n\n3. Sally sees that this \"fact\" came from Wikipedia and finds it questionable. She marks it as \"needing a source\"\n\n4. Phil is reading Wikipedia and comes upon the \"fact\" that Joe wrote and sees that it is marked as \"needing a source.\" Phil then does a simple Google search and finds the article written by the news company (point 2). He then marks that article as the source of the fact\n\n5. People now quote this article as fact. They say \"It's on Wikipedia and it has a source.\" Since they don't have the timeline, they don't realize that the article reported the fact before it had a source and then became the source of the fact.",
"It's like time traveling to the past and becoming your own grandfather. Your grandfather had to exist in order for you to come to be. But then you travel back in time and do some pastnastification with granny. Now gramps is out of the picture and everyone thinks you're your own progenitor. \n\nJust the same, grampa is the original, dubious fact on Wikipedia. You're the citation. You needed the original to be here, but once you're here, you're justification for your own existence.\n\n\n...or something like that.",
"It's actually happened before, [this article](_URL_0_) explains how it happened pretty clearly, it should help you out."
]
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8b8ds1 | why do people prefer someone who is a lot like them than someone who is not? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8b8ds1/eli5_why_do_people_prefer_someone_who_is_a_lot/ | {
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"This is both quite a bit of a generalization, and very much subject to individual taste. While there's some truth there, it's absolutely not that simple. And there's also the conventional wisdom (equally flawed) that opposites attract.\n\nA decent article on the subject: _URL_0_\n\n"
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1vzta9 | why a car maneuvers better in reverse than forwards. | As most of us know, it's much easier to parallel park a car in reverse than forwards. I don't understand why-the steering wheels still have the same angle so surely the turning circle is the same? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1vzta9/eli5_why_a_car_maneuvers_better_in_reverse_than/ | {
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"The front wheels of the car are the steerable wheels, they tell the back wheels where to go. It is easier to place the static wheels where they need to go first and then adjust the front accordingly.",
"When you have to parallel park, you have to move the back, fixed wheels sideways. You need to turn the wheels that are fixed to the car, so you have to turn the whole car. If you try to do this while moving forwards, you have to move the body of the car towards the side of the road, but there is a curb there, so you can't. So you can't turn at the sharp angle needed to get your car into the parking spot. So you do it in reverse, where you can stick the front of your car out into the road, allowing you to direct the rear of your car into the parking spot.\n\nSo it is not that the car maneuvers better in reverse. It is just that, for this particular job - parallel parking - reverse is better."
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6tl30j | why do some exercises really have a noticeable effect on my muscles and others just makes my muscles tired? | I'll try to explain:
Imagine doing bicep curls. After a few sets you're like "man that was a good work out, my arm is super worked!"
But then if you do somethin like arm circles (do those even do anything) for an extended period of time, it just makes your arm tired, but no feeling of actually being worked, or soreness the next day. You can't do the arm circles indefinitely, as you eventually can't hold your arms up anymore, just as you can't life the dumbbell after a few sets, but one is actually a strenuous workout that improves muscle composition that your body adapts to, and the other is just exhausting your arm, but no gain.
Clear as mud? great. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6tl30j/eli5_why_do_some_exercises_really_have_a/ | {
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"In the first scenario (curls), you're working your muscle near its maximum ability. This causes small tears in the muscle, and your body rebuilds those tears stronger than they were before as a way to adapt to it (get stronger).\n\nIn the second scenario (circles), you're not working your muscle as hard as you can: you're just working it so *long* that it's exhausted. It wasn't beyond your muscle's ability.\n\nWhat *does* improve in that scenario is your muscle's endurance. If you did arm circles to absolute exhaustion every day, you'd be able to do it for longer and longer. Your arms may not get stronger, though.",
"Yeah u/bazmonkey essentially got the entire basic gist of it.\n\nI am only here to provide a longer (though not as ELI5) explanation for the interested. First, when you do reps of curls, you are \"forcing\" your body to move significant amounts of weight that it probably isn't used to. Your body adapts by expanding your muscle system that was worked out so you can meet the physical demands of the workout the next time around. You feel sore later from a combination of muscle microscopically tearing (the tears are filled in with bigger or more muscle fibers to strengthen mechanical capacity) and the build up of muscular biological waste from the workout (a prominent waste product of muscles is lactic acid, this is what causes cramping in excess and it is removed by getting good levels of oxygen to your muscles). \n\nAs for the circles. Well, remember what I said about lactic acid before? It comes into play because when you do these repetitive motions, the amount of lactic acid being produced is outweighing the rate that this acid is being removed by the bloodstream so you get very quick buildups of this waste product. The longer you keep it going, the harder that \"cramp\" feeling becomes. This is mitigated a little by stretching as the stretching expands important blood ways near your muscles to prepare them for an increased removal of lactic acid. "
]
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[],
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8aeot7 | what makes a password stronger than another? | How is a password that has uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters more secure if every character is always a possibility? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8aeot7/eli5_what_makes_a_password_stronger_than_another/ | {
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"Because some types of attacks will do what's called a 'dictionary attack' and try dictionary words and thing based on them (apple, Apple, APPLE, etc). If you have to brute force a password (meaning try every possible combination) then as you add numbers, case, and specials the number of possible combinations goes through the roof (keep in mind, on average you'd have to try 50% of the possible combinations to get it right).\n\nHaving those all be possible characters in a password increases the amount of possible passwords and hence makes it hard to guess.",
"Case sensitivity, and adding a variety of numbers in an unpredictable matter makes it harder for not only us humans, but also programs that try to find a password because of an unfollowable algorithm. \nAlthough every character is a possibility, uppercases numbers etc.. widens the range of what has to be searched .",
"Depends on what you mean by more secure.\n\nRandom uppercase and lowercase letters will make it more difficult for humans to guess. (\"PassWord\" is different from \"password\") Computers don't care. You can arrange 4 numbers in 24 unique ways. You can arrange 8 numbers in 40320 ways.\n\nWhen cracking a password with a computer the number of variables adds complexity. But for your usual password that does not matter bc usually they are usually broken by leaked databases.\n\nEDIT// They force number and uppercase to force complexity. The majority of people will still use Password123 unfortunately.\n\nEDIT2// _URL_0_",
"This is actually a common fallacy. \"Stronger\" in this case means more entropy, or to put it another way, harder for a computer to guess or brute force. What people aren't telling you enough is that longer is better than shorter.\nSuppose a password had only 8 upper/ lower case letters in it. That would give 52^8 possibilities, or 53,459,728,531,456. Adding in 10 special characters (@#$_ & -+*!) for example, gives you 62^8 or 218,340,105,584,896. Better, but not remarkably so (4x ish the size), considering how many guesses can be made per second.\nIf you had simply added another letter, you would then have 52^9 or 2,779,905,883,635,712 which is literally exponentially better.\n\nFor a fun way to visualize this, I recommend xkcd.\n_URL_0_\n\n**EDIT\nI feel like I should add here that you should make sure to use a DIFFERENT, LONG password for each service that requires one. As people are pointing out, and I failed to mention, the easiest ways to \"hack\" an account are 1) find the same or similar username in a password dump from another breach and check if they re-use their password and 2) just call customer service and tell them you forgot it and no longer have access to your email. If you know who you are trying to \"hack\" you can probably find the answers to most of their \"security questions\" by being their facebook friend, checking their instagram, or just googling them. Hell, half the time its like \"what is your favorite football team\" and if joe blow lives in Philly, you probably have your answer.",
"I go for the single most important quality of a secure password: *LENGTH*. Recent mathematical studies into passwords show that nothing else - not obfuscation, not substitution, *nothing* - is as effective as sheer length.\n\nAs such, I use the maximum length allowed by a site or service, up to 64 characters from the lower UTF-8 character set. This means that up to 80% of characters in any of my passwords are just not found on a standard ANSI US keyboard, and can be any one of up to one million different potential characters per character. That dramatically increases the complexity, when combined with sheer length.\n\nWhat sometimes trips me up is when you have really shitty programmers that do one of three things:\n\n* Save/process passwords in ASCII. Who the fuck still does this? This does nothing but demonstrate severe incompetence in today’s connected (international) world, and they seriously need to relinquish their programmer’s card.\n* Have different password lengths between their website and app, with (usually) the website being longer. Because once I’ve created an account on the site, I find I cannot log onto the app since the app password field truncates a valid password to an invalid password. Also a sign of incompetence, but more of a managerial/project management sort unless the same dev that did the site also did the app (and should therefore have known better).\n* Limit password length to something stupidly low, like sixteen characters *I’m looking at you, Microsoft*. Anything under 12 characters in length is trivially easy to crack, and anything under 16 is becoming rather easy. It’s only when you start hitting the 20-24 character range that the limitations of today’s tech starts making any attempt to crack it impractical.\n\nAnd then you have the really stupidly brain-dead things that are also done by far too many devs:\n\n* Have passwords stored in plain text. If resetting your password involves them sending you your old one, it’s not encrypted and can be stolen!!\n* Store any part of the password in plain text (same problem, just *slightly* less problematic).\n* Roll their own password encryption, instead of using a widely accepted and well-tested off-the-shelf tool.\n* Use a third-party authentication service, such as Facebook or Google, while *not* providing the option of an internal Auth system for the paranoid. Yes, relying *only* on third-party Auth is putting all your password eggs into one basket, and is no different than reusing your password across multiple sites. Plus, with the recent Facebook privacy revelations, I most definitely do *not* want to use *any* third-party Auth for *any* login, thanks. I will make a custom one for every service I use. *And I am looking at PushBullet in particular, ya dinguses. Your Cletus-level attitude on not having your own internal Auth doesn’t look so good right about now, does it? I see you’ve recently removed your Facebook Auth in a frothy panic, but Google Auth has the potential to suck just as badly.*",
"Many folks have provided good answers. I would add that the \"complexity\" requirement is no longer viewed as best practice. The more serious risk is using an easy-to-guess password. \"Easy\" here meaning a password that, based on breach data, other humans have chosen before, and worse one that many humans have chosen.\n\n\nNIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) recently published some [new guidelines](_URL_0_) that basically say:\n\n* don't require complexity (the subject of OP's question)\n* do check proposed passwords against breach lists and other sources of commonly chosen passwords\n* do require long passwords\n* do not set a maximum password length (they suggest allowing at least 64 characters)\n* do not use password hints\n* do not set up security questions for password reset\n\nGiven that the previous argument for complexity was (at least in part) based upon 2003 NIST guidelines, this revision is noteworthy."
]
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[],
[],
[
"https://xkcd.com/936/"
],
[
"https://xkcd.com/936/"
],
[],
[
"https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/sp800-63-3.html"
]
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|
2i06ng | how does someone with insomnia continue living? | I just recently watched David Fincher's Fight Club. It made me ask how an insomniac such as the narrator survive without sleep. Everything I've read seems to say sleep is necessary, and thus this seems to be a paradox. Thanks in advance! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2i06ng/eli5how_does_someone_with_insomnia_continue_living/ | {
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"ckxkvpj"
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"text": [
"From personal experience, You can last atleast 5 days with a 30 minute nap somewhere around day 3-4.\n\nAlso, It's not like Insomniacs never sleep. They just have trouble falling asleep and staying asleep. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
3f8t5t | how does the ufc get away with paying their fighters so little? | How come the main event fighters on Premeir boxing champions (boxing on free network tv) earn 1 million dollars while the main event fighters on some of the biggest ppv's in ufc history are lucky to break 2 million? How do Floyd mayweather and many pacquiao each earn 100+ million for their fight but for lesnar vs Mir (the largest PPv in ufc history based on a Google search lol) neither fighter earned more then 5 mil? How does Floyd mayweather make more $ in one fight then the entire ufc rosters career earnings combined?
How does the UFC get away with paying their athletes poverty wages for pro athlete standards. How come a nba player on the vet minimum will make about the same in a season as a main even UFC fighter will make in a fight. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3f8t5t/eli5_how_does_the_ufc_get_away_with_paying_their/ | {
"a_id": [
"ctme195"
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"score": [
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"text": [
"Supply and Demand, to put it simply.\n\nThe public is apparently willing to pay hundreds of millions to watch Mayweather and Pacquiao, and just the same UFC fighters are apparently willing to fight despite not receiving such massive payouts. If, as a collective whole, UFC fighters were unwilling to fight without getting better pay then either the public would decide to throw more money at them, or it wouldn't and they'd either have to walk away or stay at the pay they currently get.\n\nBasically, they are compensated based on the demand for the service they supply."
]
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[]
] |
|
e25akg | why does stretching a muscle help it heal faster? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e25akg/eli5_why_does_stretching_a_muscle_help_it_heal/ | {
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"There is no good evidence that shows static stretching does anything useful. Dynamic stretching (which is actually just moving around) is evidence based to be useful.",
"Pretty sure this is a false premise.\n\nWhat makes you think stretching a muscle helps it heal faster? Do you mean from tears? From exercise? I don't know of any research that has shown static or dynamic stretches hastening recovery from either.\n\nThe lactic acid thing thing that the top comment suggests is just bullshit. That's stuff taught in exercise physiology 101 classes from the 1990s."
]
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[],
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||
2lqcnn | if all the baby boomers start pulling out their money from rrsp/rifs and "the market" in general, will the stock market suffer? | My Dad the pessimist seems to believe we are doomed, and that having our savings in RRSPs and mutual funds will only result in heart ache. Seeing that not much else will even match inflation, how is one suppose to reach financial independence? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2lqcnn/eli5_if_all_the_baby_boomers_start_pulling_out/ | {
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"text": [
"The question is not if... it is when. \n\nBaby Boomers are not going to die and leave those accounts to the children, they will be spent on vacations, medical expenses, their kids/grandkids college educations!"
]
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[]
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|
1zxm6b | why does a laptop's battery life decrease over time? | For example: You buy a laptop with a marked "5 hour battery life" and at first its battery lasts that long, but after a month or two of use and re-charging, its battery ends up only lasting about 4 hours. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1zxm6b/eli5_why_does_a_laptops_battery_life_decrease/ | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Most (if not all) modern batteries in laptops and electronics are lithium-ion (li-ion) based.\n\nWhen you charge it, an electric current carries lithium ions from a lithium cobalt oxide cathode to a graphite anode.\n\nWhen you turn on the device, the ions then run in the opposite direction, to the cathode.\n\nEach time you charge it, some of those ions, now on the other end at the cathode, won't make the trip back to the opposite end at the anode. This is because the charging causes the internal structure of the cathode to degrade, making it less efficient.\n\nOver time, more and more ions get stuck at the cathode, and battery capacity goes down.\n\nHigher temperatures also speed up the reaction that degrades the cathode. If you've left your phone or whatever on a charger for a while, you'll notice it gets quite warm. This is degrading your battery faster, get it off!"
]
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|
5s6a9c | why do we sometimes feel sorry (or emotional) for inanimate objects? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5s6a9c/eli5_why_do_we_sometimes_feel_sorry_or_emotional/ | {
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"I think it's because we tend to personify things. And that happens when we're kids, thru pretend play. And toy story doesn't help. I remember when I was little thinking my toys were alive when I wasn't around. Damn! If I had only written that out as a story.... I could have been rich!!",
"Right! Lol\n\nI sometimes still feel bad if I throw one of my kids toys away, or donate it, or put it in a toy box. That thought is there lol"
]
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5gtniv | why aren't the scopes of sniper rifles on the side any more? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5gtniv/eli5_why_arent_the_scopes_of_sniper_rifles_on_the/ | {
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"text": [
"This was done because those guns fed from stripper clips, which required loading straight down from the top. Well, you can't put a scope in the way of your bullets or it's not much of a rifle anymore. \n\n\nWhen countries switched to magazine feeds from the bottom of the rifle, you could mount your scope in line with the barrel. This has all sorts of advantages. \n\n\nIt reduces parallax consideration to one axis. Basically your scope and your bullet aren't pointing at the same spot. They're a few inches apart. The closer or further a target, the more this difference changes where you need to aim for the bullet to hit. With the scope centred, you don't have to worry about left/right. Only up/down. \n\n\nScopes in line mean the shooter can position themselves directly behind the rifle in line with the shot. Which helps with posture and recoil. Meaning the shot is more consistent. \n\n\nWith the scope centred, the rifle doesn't want to cant (try to lean to the heavy side). Meaning your rifle is easier to hold level. Again, more consistent and accurate shooting. "
]
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||
4xmk7x | how do birds know not to fly in the path of a kite and its strings? | Recently, I started to fly kites around the delta in California's Bay Area since I live about 7 minutes away from the Martinez Shoreline Park. While I was flying my delta stunt kite today, I saw a flock of Canadian geese flying straight towards the path of my kite. But before I started to take evasive maneuvers, the geese immediately changed direction away from the kite. I can understand the fact that the kite is colorful and the one I have has a long tail, but do birds really possess the vision to see the near invisible strings attached to the kite? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4xmk7x/eli5_how_do_birds_know_not_to_fly_in_the_path_of/ | {
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"text": [
"No, but they have hearing to detect the buzzing of the wind in the lines. They also have excellent collision avoidance hardware in their brains and they use this sort of sound cue to stay in formation for long flights.",
"I doubt there has been a study on how well birds see kite strings, but there is definitely [plenty of publicized reports](_URL_0_) of birds flying into kite strings. I think we can also safely say that some birds do manage to see and avoid kite strings, but I think the more likely answer is that they see the kites and just steer clear of the area entirely.",
"Birds [do sadly get caught in kite strings](_URL_1_) along with [flying into glass windows](_URL_0_), [jet engines](_URL_2_), and even [baseballs](_URL_3_). For all their impressive instincts, they often don't avoid what we think they should.\n\nIn your case, most likely they saw your kite as a foreign object and possible danger, so by flying around, they happened to avoid the strings as well. ",
"Umm.... they don't? If they avoided your kite, it was coincidence, most likely. Or else they were avoiding the kite, not the string."
]
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[],
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"https://www.google.com/search?q=birds+fly+into+strings&oq=bird&aqs=chrome.0.69i59l2j69i57j69i59j69i60j69i59.1459j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#safe=off&q=birds+fly+into+kite+strings"
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"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3Y2q0kLkAk&t=19s",
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbUh7QVMlpw",
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19Oub-EZVDs&t=3s",
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDKS_6qWONo&t=6s"
],
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6nmj8m | what is actually happening when, after a day in the ocean or riding rollercoasters, the body will almost simulate the feelings when you're staying still? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6nmj8m/eli5_what_is_actually_happening_when_after_a_day/ | {
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"There's a few reasons why this happens, and it's actually been a source of contention for centuries now. This is part of where the term \"Sea Legs\" comes from.\n\nWhen you are on a boat, or a roller coaster or other similar behaviours, your brain, vestibulocochlear system (The tubes of fluid in your ears that help maintain balance) and muscles all grow accustomed to that environment.\n\nWhat you're actually experiencing after coming back from such things is actually almost the opposite of what you were feeling; your body is so used to that swaying motion of a boat that the complete steadiness of dry land temporarily \"Confuses\" it.\n\nHave you ever been on a trampoline for a moderate length of time? That's a very similar scenario; after coming off the trampoline your legs feel heavy and your muscles seem weak because you've become used to the \"Springy\" terrain.\n\nIt's a similar situation here; You're used to the movement, and in its absence your brain is preemptively simulating movement that is no longer there, making you feel like you're moving even when you're sitting still."
]
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[]
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||
5wef2m | a lot of celebrities that aren't nominated for anything still get to go to the oscars. how do they decide of the non-nominees who goes and who doesn't? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5wef2m/eli5_a_lot_of_celebrities_that_arent_nominated/ | {
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"Last year's winners (for the big categories) are invited to present their award this year. The Academy invites other A-list people to present or sit in the audience for ratings and prestige, especially if they had a movie this year. \n\nStudios get a certain number of seats that they can give to anyone, obviously executives and actors they're promoting are often selected. The Academy members (over 6k) have a lottery to determine which of them gets tickets. \n\nThen of course all the nominees and presenters get a +1, and they'll often be dating celebrities. "
]
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[]
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||
18degp | why do we include "indigo" in the rainbow? | I have always believed that "indigo" was included in the rainbow simply to make the acronym Roy G. Biv work (which I always dismissed as kind of a lame reason). However, I have been noticing that indigo is grouped in with the other 6 main colors in other places as well (e.g. chakras in Hinduism). What makes indigo so special? Why is "indigo" (blue-purple) included when say "lime" (green-yellow) is not? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/18degp/eli5_why_do_we_include_indigo_in_the_rainbow/ | {
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" > I have always believed that \"indigo\" was included in the rainbow simply to make the acronym Roy G. Biv work\n\nIt's the other way round - the acronym comes from the colour names.\n\nWe have Newton to thank for the names of the colours in the spectrum. He initially distinguished five colours (red, yellow, green, blue, violet) and added orange and indigo later to make the number up to seven for no reason other than that's the number of notes in a scale. Go figure. In other words, it's made up, and the only reason we say there are seven colours in the rainbow is tradition.\n\nSource: [Wikipedia article](_URL_0_)",
"This is your second question in two days asking the same thing:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nWas it not a sufficient answer for you?"
]
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"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow#Number_of_colours_in_spectrum_or_rainbow"
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[
"http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/18c49q/eli5_what_exactly_is_indigo/"
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2zylgy | why do certain songs turn us on? | A few friends and I were discussing how certain songs really get us turned on, especially when with our SOs. Why is this? Is there any purpose for it? Why are certain songs used primarily FOR sex music? (Like the Fifty Shades of Grey soundtrack)
Edited because wording | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2zylgy/eli5_why_do_certain_songs_turn_us_on/ | {
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"text": [
"You do know that being \"turned on\" means that you're horny, right?"
]
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|
cy2ykq | how do movie productions supply "era specific" props? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cy2ykq/eli5_how_do_movie_productions_supply_era_specific/ | {
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"text": [
"Typically they outsource. They don't own all the props, other companies make/collect and loan them to them for the production, or they hire another company for set construction if it needs to be specific. Some bigger companies have in house prop designers too for really specific and important props. It depends on the size of the production and the purpose of the prop whether or not itll be custom made or rented.\n\nEdit: also props typically aren't real. Most likely it'll be a replica made to look period accurate, but isn't an actual piece from the time. Sometimes they can be though. Just depends on the specific production."
]
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[]
] |
||
2x4jq8 | how does right and left handiness work? and why can't i do things as well with my off hand? | What goes into somebody becoming right- or left-handed (or ambidextrous)/ how does it happen? And why can't I control my off hand (left) as well as my right? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2x4jq8/eli5_how_does_right_and_left_handiness_work_and/ | {
"a_id": [
"cowsxqv",
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"text": [
"Increased motor dexterity isn't free, it takes up real estate in the brain. And since you, and in particular your primitive ancestors, seldom needed to have it both hands, you are better off using that brain space just once, and letting the rest be used for other things.\n\nIt is kind of like having an umbrella. One umbrella is kind of a hassle to carry around, but can really come in handy. Two umbrellas is twice the pain in the ass, and rarely offers an benefit beyond what one would.",
"Side topic/question:\nI am *mixed-handed*.\n\nI would say I am predominantly left handed but there are many things I do right handed. For example, I write left. Throw and play guitar right handed. There are also certain things I feel I am unable to do because both ways feels \"goofy\" (such as aiming a gun or riding a skateboard). Both of my parents are right handed and my younger brother is fully left handed. I never trained myself to be both it has just always been this way. Thoughts?"
]
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[],
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3mif30 | why don't human foetuses be small enough to be easily carried and delivered by the mother? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3mif30/eli5_why_dont_human_foetuses_be_small_enough_to/ | {
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"text": [
"They do come out and grow bigger. But that's a trade off. The smaller they are when they come out, the more likely they are to die after they come out, and the longer they will have to be intensely cared for by their family, rather than being able to exist at least semi-independently. I am sure it could have come out differently, but the present balance is also quite plausible.",
"They already do. Babies are born a lot younger than most animals. As you may be aware, a lot of animals babies can walk and sometimes even hunt for themselves. A far cry from the useless lump of human flesh.",
"One thing that factors into it is how viable the offspring would be at the time of birth. If they are too small, the mother is incapacitated anyway because she would have to be caring for the helpless child. However, if they grow sufficiently strong before birth, they are better equipped to survive without the same level of care as a \"premature\" baby.\n\nEvolution has tweaked these two parameters (how incapacitated the mother is during pregnancy vs how big the offspring needs to grow) to a degree that gives both the mother and the child decent chances of surviving and reproducing.",
"It's balancing of risks. Being small enough to be easily born essentially means people would be born earlier than now. But being born earlier also means the baby is vulnerable to external threats for a longer time, and especially in infancy babies are more vulnerable (historically, child mortality has been quite high, demonstrating the vulnerability of human babies). So the current pregnancy time is balance of two opposing risks: the risks of babies being vulnerable for a longer time < - > the risks of dangerous complications during childbirth."
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6lh4s7 | why is the u.s. so outraged that n.k. continues to test missiles? | I assume that the U.S. has frequently tested missiles that are capable of much more devastation than N.K.'s missiles. I understand that N.K. is dangerous and unpredictable, but doesn't N.K. think the same thing about the U.S.? What makes N.K.'s tests more deserving of sanctions and punishment? Is it not hypocritical on some level? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6lh4s7/eli5_why_is_the_us_so_outraged_that_nk_continues/ | {
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"North Korea is run by an almost totally opaque and hyper-paranoid military cult that routinely kidnaps foreign nationals, attacks its neighbors, and threatens mass murder over twitter insults. The other nuclear powers are not nearly on that same level of crazy.\n\nJust because you have a gun does not make it hypocritical to be concerned when the crazy guy down the street is on his front lawn, waving a rifle and screaming at a fire hydrant.",
"Answer me this: Why do the police yell at me when I fire guns into the sky? The police fire guns all the time. What makes my gun firing more deserving of punishment than the police and the firing of their guns? The cops think I'm dangerous, but I think the police are dangerous. Isn't it hypocritical?",
"The best answers have been said but NK isn't JUST testing to make sure they don't have duds for missles. They want to be able to reach countries like the US for not so happy reasons. Sure every capable country wants their icbm's or w.e. to have great distance...just in case but this guy is always seeing red. Also, they're tests are more than just tests they're showing off/sending warnings. They don't play well with others nor do they want to. You can argue all you want about how awful trump is but Kim is next level. For arguments sake let's say you want to be a hunter. You talk about hunting a lot then you go buy a rifle and you practice at a range to get better accuracy. But you also know someone who is batshit crazy and he talks about wanting to kill people. Do You want him buying a gun and stand next to you at the range getting better with his rifle? No. Of course not.",
"You might not be aware that North Korea as specifically entered into agreement where they accepted US aid in exchange for specifically not developing weapons programs. Continued development is a violation of those agreements.",
"At the moment, all nuclear countries have a lot to loose if they enter a nuclear war. The US, Russia and China (as examples) don't want to suffer the consequences of firing a nuclear weapon, the retaliation from the enemy country and possiblle damage to international trade would be too great. In the case of NK there is a big chance that Kim Jong Un doesn't care about the consequences of firing a nuclear weapon. \nEven China is worried that NK will do something without a second thought. "
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9tgurx | what is sharp and flat in music and how do they differ? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9tgurx/eli5_what_is_sharp_and_flat_in_music_and_how_do/ | {
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"Sharp is going up 1 semitone, Flat is going down 1 semitone. \n\nFor example C# would be 1 semitone higher in pitch than C and Cb would be 1 semitone lower than C",
"So from your previous comment I see you asked about a song being in a certain key. I think you are asking 2 separate questions and you don't know it.\n\nA sharped note is a semitone above a given note and a flatted not is a semitone below. These notes are useful in Western music to build a scale, or a group of notes that follow a specific pattern that is familiar and pleasing to our ears.\n\nA song's key, let's say E-flat to go with your previous comment, is different. When you say a song is in the key of E-flat major that means that the song follows the melodic rules of E-flat being \"do\". When I say \"do\" I mean the prime note of a scale, or \"do a deer a female deer\" as it is explained in The Sound of Music. \n\nThat means when you listen to the song it will follow the scale, do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do, and much of the song is going to resolve, or come back to, the note E-flat as a kind of home base. We call that the tonic. Because it is the TONal center.\n\nSo if a song is in G-major that just means home base is the note G. D-major would be D and so on. "
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[],
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||
1v12gr | what is an ip camera, how is it different to a web cam and how is it so easy to hijack? | There was a post on the front page about an IP camera that got hijacked. Somebody please enlighten me. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1v12gr/eli5_what_is_an_ip_camera_how_is_it_different_to/ | {
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"text": [
"It's just a normal camera that uploads images to the web constantly for remote surveilance.\n\nThe reason they're easy to hijack is that they typically come unsecured by default -- and they are really easy to find because they tend to contain a certain word in their title or URL, so you just have to Google for that to find one."
]
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[]
] |
|
6lwo65 | how do criminals use small businesses to launder money!? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6lwo65/eli5_how_do_criminals_use_small_businesses_to/ | {
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"The point of laundering money is to make money gained from illegal (or illegitimate) sources _appear_ to come from legal (or legitimate) sources. By doing so, you can declare that money as \"legal\" income, pay taxes on it, and spend it without worrying about people wondering where it came from (and thus investigating you).\n\nThis is often done by falsifying sales records. If I have a business where I can artificially inflate the number of products I sold, I can take some of my illegal income, deposit it in my bank account and then forge sales receipts saying that that came from legitimate customers. Thus, the income now looks legit. \n\nIn the case of a small football club, you could do this any number of ways. You could say you sold more tickets than you actually did, say that you sold more concessions than you actually did, claim that people paid more for seats than they actually paid, etc. Really, you could to anything that makes it seam that people paid you more in revenue than actually happened.",
"The money laundering consists of 4 parts:\n\n1. Crime by itself. For example robbing a bank\n\n2. Putting your money in commerce. For example sponsoring the failing football team.\n\n3. Cleaning up. Sending money to offshore, transferring them to another country etc. For instance, getting some profit from failing soccer team from advertising.\n\n4. Integration of clean money. Getting clean money.\n\nBasically, you don't get full profit from laundering, so if you put 100$ of dirty money then you'll get like 80$ of clean money. Thus, these businesses can be seemed as unprofitable."
]
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||
1idfol | when i have a common cold, what physiological process makes me feel cold even at room temperature in the summers ? | It is is 72-73 degrees in the room I am in and i am still cold after wearing a thermal inner shirt! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1idfol/eli5_when_i_have_a_common_cold_what_physiological/ | {
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"text": [
"Your sense of cold doesn't really work the number on a thermometer. It's actually a really complex calculation your body does that looks at a lot of things like hoe quickly heat is leaving your body and what temperature your body wants to be. \n\nYour body has a built in temperature that it wants to be. If you get colder than that your body makes you want to find a warmer place or put on clothes. It can also make you shiver so you make more body heat but that takes extra energy. \n\nWhen you are sick your body wants to be a warmer temperature than normal because the virus gets messed up when it's warmer. That's why we have fevers. Your body also doesn't want to spend lots of extra energy shivering to make you warmer because it needs the energy to fight the virus and it's harder to eat when you are sick. \n\nTo make itself warmer your body makes you feel cold so you put on warmer clothes and get under your bed covers. That way your body temperature goes up and helps fight the virus without using lots of extra energy shivering."
]
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[]
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|
3fazlt | how does the magnus effect work? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3fazlt/eli5_how_does_the_magnus_effect_work/ | {
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"text": [
"[Bernoulli's principle](_URL_0_) basically.\n\nIts a basic consequence of fluid dynamics. Like wings on a airplane, a spinning ball exerts a force on the air, which according to Newton, exerts and equal and opposite force back.\n\n",
"It's to do with what's called the boundary layer. Friction with the surface of the object creates a thin layer of air that \"sticks\" to the object - having very little motion relative to the object. Outside of this thin layer, the air flows smoothly around the object.\n\nIf the object isn't particularly streamlined (as is the case with a spherical ball), then behind the object this boundary layer seperates from the object, resulting in a turbulent region of air behind the object. This is a major source of drag on the object.\n\nIf the object is rotating, the boundary layer on one side seperates from the object slightly later than it does on the other side - so the air on one side continues following the curvature of the ball for a little while longer.\n\nThe result is that the airflow is deflected around the ball, and by Newton's third law, this exerts a reaction force on the ball.",
"Youtube video: [Surprising applications of the Magnus effect](_URL_0_). There are lots more."
]
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[
"http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.aviation-for-kids.com/images/Magnus_effect.gif&imgrefurl=http://www.aviation-for-kids.com/the-magnus-force.html&h=353&w=463&tbnid=OCUdNjl9UxdOeM:&tbnh=145&tbnw=189&usg=__Iv3FK6aZLAiA894_BwPl97adrC0=&docid=EXHkWuNdHCYLUM&itg=1&sa=X&ved=0CCgQ9QEwAGoVChMI_rSWq-GFxwIVxwaSCh1dZA4H"
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[],
[
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OSrvzNW9FE"
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||
8r65tf | after several trips to the bathroom with diarrhea and eventual chafing of the wiped area as evidenced by specks of blood on toilet paper, how do these wounds generally not lead to illness by infection? | I'm sure I'm not the only one who has experienced this and is wondering why. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8r65tf/eli5_after_several_trips_to_the_bathroom_with/ | {
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"text": [
"Your bodies immune system is the answer! There are many things involved and probably some people can explain it better than me, but also you probably could experience an infection especially if your immune system was compromised in some way. The lymphatic system helps to filter the blood and is involved in transporting lyphocytes that aid in dealing with infection. Even the way the wounds heal, seals off the point of entry pretty quickly and begins almost as soon as it occurs. ",
"To add to what the other guy said: typically, the chances of infection are based on how deep the wound is. Something like scrapes or chafing are *very* unlikely to cause infections.",
"Fecal bacteria is generally very good for us, but they can cause an infection if it they grow in the wrong part of our body.\n\nWe’ve lived in harmony with certain bacteria so long that we have a hard-coded system in place to recognize when they get into the wrong place. There are molecules on the surface of those bacteria that are different then ours, and white blood cells in our blood are born knowing to attack them. They’re called “pathogen associated molecular patterns” or “PAMPs”.\n\nCertain white blood cells are born with instructions to kill anything that has a PAMP. Those cells don’t go into where the bacteria normally live, but they do travel in the blood.\n\nThis is part of what we call the “innate” immune system. The innate immune system is born with the ability to attack some things without having to be taught to attack them, but they don’t learn from being exposed to new things. The “adaptive” immune system can learn about new things, but it has to be shown the thing first and study it.\n\nWhen I teach immunology, I call them “George and Lenny.” Lenny knows some things are bad, and he kills them right away. If there’s something Lenny doesn’t know about, he takes it to George and asks if it’s a bad thing. George can learn about new things, but it takes time. If George decides the thing is bad, he can tell Lenny to kill it.\n\nLenny knows most of the fecal bacteria, and he knows that they’re not allowed in the body. He doesn’t need George to tell him that. If something slips by Lenny, it’s up to George to decide if it belongs there or not. George is smart, but he’s not perfect. It takes time to learn about new things, and George can be wrong sometimes. But most of the time, George and Lenny are very good at keeping bacteria where they belong."
]
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[],
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|
5q5tiu | what's the benefit of https on regular websites? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5q5tiu/eli5_whats_the_benefit_of_https_on_regular/ | {
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"text": [
"The encryption within HTTPS is intended to provide benefits like confidentiality, integrity and identity. Your information remains confidential from prying eyes because only your browser and the server can decrypt the traffic. Integrity protects the data from being modified without your knowledge. We'll address identity in a bit.\n\nThere’s an important distinction between tweeting to the world or sharing thoughts on Facebook and having your browsing activity going over unencrypted HTTP. You intentionally share tweets, likes, pics and thoughts. The lack of encryption means you’re unintentionally exposing the controls necessary to share such things. It’s the difference between someone viewing your profile and taking control of your keyboard.\n\n"
]
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[]
] |
||
7vewzv | what exactly is happening during a cold when your sinuses become extremely painful for a moment? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7vewzv/eli5_what_exactly_is_happening_during_a_cold_when/ | {
"a_id": [
"dtrv9ds"
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"text": [
"I recently battled a cold and I think I know what you mean. All of a sudden, the inside of your nostrils will hurt for a good 30 seconds. I believe it is because they are dry. Maybe someone with more knowledge in the medical field can help us out?"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
1hex4k | who makes malware, viruses, and trojans? | Who propagates this stuff online? Hackers? McAfee? Both? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1hex4k/eli5_who_makes_malware_viruses_and_trojans/ | {
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"Pretty much anyone with a knowledge of computer programming and code. As to why they make viruses/malware/trojans and their motivations really varies from person to person and could be for a multitude of reasons (everything from politics to \"lulz\").",
"There are alot of malware/spyware programmers who have done AMAs:\n\n_URL_2_\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_",
"It used to be bored kids in their parents basement doing it for teh lulz, but the 'profile' of the malware creator has shifted somewhat from this stereotype to more of an 'organized online crime' approach - ie. people doing it for the money.",
"someone at my university was annoyed with something and he wrote some malicious code meant to destroy the university. Their firewalls and anti-virus software stopped it then they found out who wrote it (the idiot put a message saying who he was in one of the program files) and kicked him out while also reporting him to the police.\n\nThe reasons people make them can vary massively so there is no single answer. Could be a disgruntled employee, customer or client. It could also be some lonely teenager wanting to watch the world burn because he has no friends or a millionaire wanting to hold the world to ransom.",
"To add to all the great answers here, People with technology knowhow in economically depressed areas. If you can tie in a package that's designed to put ads in your free apps with a virus that installs on 100,000 computers you're going to make money until they figure out how to uninstall your malware. Other people write stuff that tries to brute force hack or even just comment on websites to post ads.\n\nIn places with a good economy, the return on investment is hardly worth the time. You can make $40 an hour banging out crappy php code, why leave an illegal paper trail to get a couple thousand over a long period of time.",
"I've always assumed it was bitter Eastern Europeans.",
"two major sources of malware producers in the world today:\n\n1. military and intelligence agencies. alot of countries produce malware as a strategic weapon. some of this is used for industrial sabotage (e.g. Stuxnet), some of it used for intelligence gathering and espionage. \n2. organized crime syndicates. these guys are producing the majority of stuff that you'll find in your e-mail inbox or on shady sites on the internet. mostly this is ransomware or botnet trojans. ",
"assholes, hackers and companies (i presume -creating a demand for their product)"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[
"http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/mmecu/iama_malware_developer_ama/",
"http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/cvnpa/iama_malware_coder_ama/",
"http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/juou2/by_request_i_am_a_spyware_programmer_ama/"
],
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