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1y0l5e | what are the long term effects of lsd use? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1y0l5e/eli5_what_are_the_long_term_effects_of_lsd_use/ | {
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"becoming a wizard",
"Calmness and an overall deeper understanding of life and the beauty of existence.",
"Okay everyone thats saying \"Happiness\" and \"clarity\" are pretty much just drug users that love it and think thats what happening to them in the long run, but arent actually scientists of any sort. Now although I myself am not a scientist or a medical expert, i did write an essay on this, and interviewed a couple of them myself. \n\nTo put it shortly the negative side effects (im assuming thats what you're asking for) can be kinda hard. You can have eye damage (distorted images, haziness/blurriness) and if you have a history of mental illness in your family, particularly anything like schizophrenia, it can trigger it or cause you to develop it. \nThere are a couple of more minor negative effects aside from those that can be brought forth, but nothing too insane or worrisome. Been a long time since the essay so i forgot most minor details. \n\nAs for positives? It is known to boost creativity and help form your brain to think in different ways. ",
"I read a study in my spare time related to the psychological effect associated with high, moderate and low levels of drug use, specifically hallucinogenics . They noticed that the people who occupied the moderate and high levels of drugs use had a slightly lesser chance of developing things like Alzheimer's and other mental illnesses. But to be fair they don't know if it has to do with the drugs themselves (for example that mushrooms use of the blood brain barrier can be \"cleansing for the brain\") or the lifestyle of people who do the drugs. (Aka people who choose to do drugs also posess another variable that is associated with the lifestyle that could be the cause) this isn't conclusive or rock hard support but it exists and definately noted a difference in hallucinogenic users and non users rates of mental illness"
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1qoaem | how to some dogs instantly hate each other at first sight and some love each other, even though they've never met before? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1qoaem/eli5_how_to_some_dogs_instantly_hate_each_other/ | {
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"Just as there are manners with humans, there are manners dogs. Just like humans, some dogs don't understand these manners. \n\nThey're little things people often don't notice. They aren't supposed to look other dogs straight in the eye at first meeting. It's rude, just like staring a stranger down would be. \n\nWhen dogs are in another's territory, they are supposed to submit to a good ass sniffing. This is how dogs recognize each other so it's a way of meeting/greeting. Failure to do so could result in hostility\n\nIt's little things like that. We often times see them as fighting, but sometimes it is just in their manners."
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3mpvsa | what do the dilation drops actually do to your eyes and why does it make your eyes sensitive to light? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3mpvsa/eli5_what_do_the_dilation_drops_actually_do_to/ | {
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"Dilation drops open up your pupils, much like they would naturally do in the dark, to allow more light in. Helps the doctor see better when he's examining your eyes. Going outside while your pupils are dilated hurts because your pupils are already open and they can't retract like they would normally, so the light is POURING into your eyes. Tried to explain that as best as possible."
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4f9wrd | how can car manufacturers seemingly copy features and ideas from each other without getting sued? | 10 years ago, all these fancy new features like blind spot monitoring systems, keyless/push button start, voice controlled climate systems, adaptive cruise control, backup cameras, park assist, etc, were all unheard of. Now, they're all options on virtually every car. One car manufacturer adds some new, previously unheard of feature, and a couple years later, all the other ones have it.
In the mobile phone industry, Apple and Samsung are suing each other over every small similarity between their products. So why aren't automakers all suing the shit out of each other? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4f9wrd/eli5_how_can_car_manufacturers_seemingly_copy/ | {
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"You can only sue for stuff like this if you have a patent. Either the originator of the feature put it directly into public domain, the patent was denied, or they are giving the other companies permission to use the feature. It's also good to know that many many makes of vehicles are all owned by a single company, so they can freely use their own stuff.",
"Also the function can't be directly protected. IE: Car company A starts using bluetooth to make your car remotecontrolled by any device. Car company B see's this and makes their own program to do the same function, but with different code. "
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3pdqy7 | explain radiation, radioactive material, and isotopes to me. literally like i'm 5. | I know all these words but have no idea what they mean other than don't touch the radioactive material.
Edit: And fusion/fission, or does that belong in another post? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3pdqy7/eli5_explain_radiation_radioactive_material_and/ | {
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"Basically, atomic nuclei are made up of protons and neutrons. The number of protons determines the chemistry of the resulting atom (1 proton is hydrogen, 2 is helium, 3 is lithium, etc.). Nuclei can also have neutrons which, for the most part, don't effect their chemistry but can make atoms more/less stable. 2 nuclei with the same number of protons but different numbers of neutrons are referred to as different isotopes of that element.\n\nFor example, Carbon (6 protons) with no neutrons basically cannot exist. Most Carbon on Earth exists as C12 (6 protons, 6 neutrons) but with some trace amounts of isotopes like C13 (6 protons, 7 neutrons) and C14 (6 protons, 8 neutrons).\n\nSome combinations of protons and neutrons are very stable, while other combinations are unstable and cause the nucleus to eventually break apart. These unstable isotopes are what are known as radioactive materials. When they break apart, radioactive materials tend to give off a lot of harmful stuff like high energy light (gamma rays) which can damage your DNA among other things. ",
"An atom has a core that consists of protons and neutrons, the number of protons determines which element it is on the periodic table (the list of all atoms).\n\nThe number of neutrons and protons combined dictate how heavy this atom is. Some combinations of neutrons and protons are stable, whilst others aren't.\n\nThis is where isotopes come in, isotopes are versions of the same atom (so same number of protons) with different numbers of neutrons. If the combination is unstable, it will be radioactive.\n\nRadioactive means that the atom in question will change at some point, this can either be by ejecting two neutrons and two protons from it's core (this is known as alpha-radiation) or by splitting a neutron into a proton and electron (known as beta-radiation) and sometimes when this happens a photon can also be released (gamma radiation).\n\nThese particles (alpha, beta and gamma) are collectively known as radiation in the radioactivity sense.\n\nAs for fission and and fusion:\n\nFission is when the core ejects a number of protons and/or neutrons for whatever reason (either because it's more stable if it does or because something just smacked into it so hard it splits apart), whatever the atom ejected usually becomes its own atom (so alpha radiation is a form of fission because protons and neutrons are ejected, whereas beta and gamma aren't).\n\nFusion is the opposite, when protons and/or neutrons form a common core in order to fuse into a single atom. This usually only happens when the cores are forced really close to each other (so under really high pressure and/or really high heat)."
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dql6cd | why does the colour black go with any other colour? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dql6cd/eli5_why_does_the_colour_black_go_with_any_other/ | {
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"Black is zero. When you mix something with black, you are essentially mixing it with the darkest possible shade of itself, and shades of the same color tend to work together.",
"Black and white are shades and tints, not colors. Gray scale, in color theory, is referred to as NO-N10. N0 = white, N10 = black, N5 = neutral gray (1/2 white, 1/2 black). \n\nTints are pure colors mixed with white \nTones are pure colors mixed with gray\nShades are pure colors mixed with black. \n\nBlack is essentially the lack of color, while white is a combination of all colors. Therefore black, gray and white work with any other color because they are neutral."
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4403at | how is it that many american republicans are strongly against the iran nuclear deal, when it is a shining example of good democracy in european countries? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4403at/eli5_how_is_it_that_many_american_republicans_are/ | {
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"The view it as giving Iran too much ground. Argued we should have limited them more etc.\n\nIt doesn't hurt that well republicans (the far right ones, not the more middle) look for reasons to hate Obama. This was an easy one. They can say hey he didnt do enough, hes giving Iran what they want.",
"They are opposed to it for two main reasons--they do not think that Iran will honor the deal in the long run, and secondly, they want to maintain sanctions because Iran is a dictatorial state and seen as a sponsor of international terror. A lot of the rhetoric suggests a lax policy toward Iran is being irresponsible toward Israel, an American ally.",
"Iran is considered untrustworthy and a regional agitator. They fund and support militant groups in Yemen, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Syria...\n\nThey continue to fiddle around with ballistic missiles in violation of other treaties, and they continue to call for the destruction of several of their neighboring states.\n\nRepublican congressmen see the deal as little more than Chamberlain-esque appeasement. It may delay Iran's ambitions, but it won't change the nation's belligerent activities in the longer term.\n\nI'm not sayin they're right or wrong, but that's their argument."
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yhyzv | what is a proxy, how do i get one and why do i want to? | Is TOR a proxy? If so what does it do and why do I have it? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/yhyzv/eli5_what_is_a_proxy_how_do_i_get_one_and_why_do/ | {
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"Basically it makes so people can't track your IP address and trace downloads or other browsing back to you.",
"a proxy is where you have a computer look at web pages remotely and it then will send that web page to you. It is useful to do this when you would like to conceal the computer you are working on or just want content that is not available where you are (if you are in China you might want one in Africa to avoid censorship. Or anyone may want a proxy in the UK during the Olympics to get all the events live streamed that were not allowed to be viewed outside of the country).\n\n_URL_0_\nTOR appears to have a proxy within a proxy and so on that changes periodically. \"Users of a Tor network run an onion proxy on their machine.\" the onion here referring to layers, you have multiple layers of proxies. \n\nI wouldn't be too concerned with any proxy on your computer, unless you did not install it on there. If that is the case, you may want to ask about people who were using your computer. \n",
"Can authorities not SEE that I am using a proxy? Isn't the act of using a proxy really suspicious, or does your ISP/authorities not know you're using one. ",
"In computer networks, a proxy is a middleman you've assigned to send and receive messages for you.\n\nThink about physical mail. Let's say you're in the US. You could hire a guy in the UK to receive letters from you, open them, put them in new envelopes, and then send them out again. When he receives mail, he packages it up and forwards back to you.\n\nNow, when someone receives a message from you, it looks like it came from him (postmarked from the UK, has his return address). They can send a message to him and it will come back to you. If someone tries to track you down, they find him first. It's always possible that he could tell someone who found him that he's been forwarding mail for you, but it does cause another step in the tracking process.\n\nThings work almost exactly this way with an internet proxy. You might want this if you want to be harder to track (but remember, the proxy knows who you are), or if you want to appear to be in a different geographical location (some websites only work in certain countries). Some corporate networks also use proxies to allow them to easily inspect all internet traffic.\n\nTOR is more complicated. Let's go back to our physical mail example. Now you have a group of people who all forward messages around to each other. Each knows that the other is in the group. Only a few of the people in the group will send or receive mail to anyone outside of the group, we call these people \"exits\". If I want to send a message, I send it to one of the other people in the group and say, \"Hey, someone wants me to send this\". That person forwards it to someone else in the group and says \"Hey, someone wants me to send this\"...this repeats until it gets to the exit. The exit sends it out to the outside world. Thus, the outside world could figure out it came from this one exit, but nobody in the group knows who originally sent it. The above is simplified a bit. There's some extra tracking that goes on so that when a reply comes in (through the exit node), it gets bounced around through the group and ends up at the correct recipient.\n\nNote that in both cases (TOR and a regular proxy) there is at least one person who can read your message. You would need to encrypt your message if you want it to remain unreadable. SSL/TLS (when you see a website starting with \"https://\") does this automatically."
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1pxyjd | what is jihadism? what do jihadists believe? | Can someone explain the common beliefs and practices of jihadism to me? Thank you for any answers. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1pxyjd/eli5_what_is_jihadism_what_do_jihadists_believe/ | {
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"As far as I know, Jihad is a noun that roughly translates to \"struggle\". In Islamic texts, particularly the Shaiahs, it refers to the \"struggle\" against those who do not believe in the Islamic God. There is no such thing as a \"Jihadist\". What you're referring to are simply overzealous religious nutcases (dubbed so by their acts of murder in the name of their beliefs) that consist of less than a percent of the Islamic population. I think many of the \"jihadists\" you see in middle eastern countries simply got sucked into rebel groups with extreme beliefs because their family members needlessly die and they want to fight whatever the enemy is. Some do sincerely believe it is morally okay to kill in some cases such as homosexuality, disobedience to authorities, and in most cases if someone doesn't believe in Islam.",
"\"Jihad\" means struggle. Whether that be the struggle of nofap, depression, etc. Anything that a person is struggling with, becomes their jihad. Some uneducated people in the middle east think this means they can struggle against tyranny of government dictatorship by blowing up innocents rawr! But that's contradictory because in the Quran it states that it is forbidden to kill an innocent man, woman, child, wildlife or even plants when in a war situation.",
"Mostly what people have said here is correct, also note the difference between Great Jihad (your personal fight against your own misguiding desires) and small Jihad (against others). \n\nEither way, this is literally something that you could have googled.\n [Wikipedia](_URL_0_) has a great article which explains this stuff in a way anyone could understand. "
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dhz83x | where do all the fonts get their names from? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dhz83x/eli5_where_do_all_the_fonts_get_their_names_from/ | {
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"It's a little unclear what you mean, especially as you normally don't name fonts, but rather typefaces and within each typeface normally there are many fonts. Whoever created (or ordered) the typeface gets to name it. Some are named after their predecessors, the \"fonts\" which were made long before computers, in the dawn of movable type, and in some cases even long before that. Some are named after their creators, like Gill Sans named after Eric Gill. On top of that often comes descriptive qualifiers, like bold, narrow, condensed, italic, and many others, to describe the style of each individual font in the typeface.\n\nIt's kind of like having a child, you choose what you name it. For instance a font I made years and years ago I based off the letters on the Nintendo Entertainment System gamepad, I called that font Nentindo Consolic.",
"Usually from the font designer/designers. But a lot of time the words in a font mean something. So, for example, Times New Roman was a new style of Roman font that was invented for the Times (they dont actually use it anymore, I don't think). Comic Sans is a comic font that is sans serif (which means without [serif](_URL_0_)). A font family is slight variations of the same font. So, Helvetica Neue is an updated version of Helvetica. And Arial Bold is a bolded version of Arial. Some of the words you might see in fonts, like, Gothic, Sans, Serif, Italics, Slab, Script, Stencil, Calligraphy, Blackletter, Dingbat, Monospace, etc, all tell the user something about how the font looks. Its sort of like naming shoes sneakers, clogs, mary janes, oxfords, or stilettos. If you know shoes (or fonts), then you know something about that shoe (or font) just from the name. \n\nAs for how names are specifically chosen, it's often just a random word that suits the style of the typeface (or that looks good in the typeface). Futura is a futuristic-looking, modern font... Well, it was futuristic looking in 20s or 30s when it was made. Lol. If there's a unique letter or ligature (two or three letters that appear differently when typed together - different from kerning, which is the spacing between letters), then the chosen name will often display this special attribute. This is especially true of fonts that are made by a single artist or designer and sold on a small, individual scale, rather than fonts produced from a major forge (the somewhat humorous name for a company that makes fonts. Font forge). So, for example, the W in [this font](_URL_2_) and the BR in [this font](_URL_1_) and the I, M, and E in [this one](_URL_3_). This just effectively shows off the uniqueness of a font when people are scrolling through. It represents the font in its best light.",
"Typefaces are a product, like a car. Companies that make them sell them,. They name them, like car companies, so that they can better communicate with buyers.",
"Garamond gets its name from Claude Garamond (c 1500s). Likewise Gill Sans gets its name from Eric Gill. The \"Sans\" simply refers to \"sans serif,\" a [font lacking serifs](_URL_0_). Fonts like Papyrus, Jokerman and Comic Sans get their names from the style they're going for. Same with Futura etc.\n\nThere's a good amount of variety... it's often linked with the creator and/or style they were going after.",
"The designer of the font chooses a name. Or their boss. Or the person who paid for the design. They choose the name because they like it, or because they want a name that is related to (or suggestive of) another font, or to honour a previous font designer, or for fun, or any other reason they happen to have.\n\nIn 1984, the font designers for the original Apple Macintosh [named the fonts after cities](_URL_0_), such as Chicago, London, San Francisco, Athens and Geneva.\n\nOccasionally a voice cries out from a burning bush in the desert ordering the designer to use a particular name, but honestly that hardly ever happens these days. *wink*"
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30mdwh | where is drinkable water stored before it hits my taps (big city)? | Never seen a water towers in my city, Phoenix. Its a huge city too, so where is all this "ready to go" water stored? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/30mdwh/eli5_where_is_drinkable_water_stored_before_it/ | {
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"at the water treatment plant. \n\nit's like they make a batch of 1million gallons and put it in a pool somewhere. the plant is continuously running all the time to filter and make potable water."
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bigh8x | why is it that when rain falls, it doesn’t hurt us although it has an enormous potential energy as the water has a mass, and the height is unbelievable? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bigh8x/eli5_why_is_it_that_when_rain_falls_it_doesnt/ | {
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"Water droplets don't have that much mass so they can't carry that much potential energy to begin with.\n\nSince they are a liquid the energy is also dissipated upon impact. Compared to something like hail that is frozen and hard and has enough force to cause a lot of damage.\n\nThere is also terminal velocity, once an object reaches terminal velocity it can't accelerate anymore even if it still has a great distance to fall. So overall altitude isn't as big of a factor.",
"Because due to air resistance terminal velocity of rain is typically about 20 miles per hour. Also it’s a liquid so it splashes. And it has kinetic energy, not so much potential energy.",
"Everything has a maximum velocity it can reach. That whole myth about dropping pennies off the Empire State Building and it going through someone's skull is a load of BS. It would probably hurt and give you a good sting. (MAYBE break the skin a little). But yeah the weight of a rain drop just isn't that much so it's maximum velocity isn't that great. Not to mention that wind probably slows it down as well.",
"Although it's true that water in clouds has a massive amount of potential energy, it doesn't change into kinetic energy very efficiently.\n\nAs the water falls, it breaks into droplets due to air friction. As the droplets \"try\" to gain velocity, air friction prevents them from doing it.\n\nThe kinetic energy is depends on the velocity of the object and its mass, both of which are very small in this case."
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a545b7 | how can sterility caused by a crispr gene drive spread when sterile mosquitoes can't breed? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a545b7/eli5_how_can_sterility_caused_by_a_crispr_gene/ | {
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"One technique involves releasing large volumes of sterile male mosquitoes to reduce populations. Even though they can't breed successfully, they still *try,* and this means the sterile males are competing with their non-sterilized brethren, which means fewer female mosquitoes actually successfully mate and produce eggs. \n\nAnother technique involves releasing a mutation that only impacts female offspring, while leaving male offspring virile. This means that, while the females born of the next generation are unlikely to pass on the gene, the males can still go out and reproduce with unrelated females, and potentially modify *their* lineage to also produce sterile females. Ultimately a population with only sterile females will collapse, even if the males could still theoretically reproduce. "
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43b4wy | how does child lock work in cars? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/43b4wy/eli5_how_does_child_lock_work_in_cars/ | {
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"From experience, on Toyotas, the child lock moves a guide pin out of position, causing the interior door handle to not be able to engage the lock latch. The outer door handle has a separate connection to the lock latch, allowing the two handles to have different functions. Other cars are probably about the same."
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3fnf1h | obama's new climate action plan. | A few questions I have:
1)How does it work?
2)Does it entail cap and trade?
3)Is it a law or is it just a proposal?
| explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3fnf1h/eli5_obamas_new_climate_action_plan/ | {
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"The Clean Power Plan (as it is called) is a series of EPA regulations and budget proposals that look to reduce CO2 emissions by 32% (from 2005 levels) by 2030, increase renewable energy generation by 30% by 2030, and provide a framework to measure these efforts.\n\nThere will be a federal plan, but states are allowed to make their own plans (and submit them by Sept. 2016) as long as they meet the minimum goals stated above. The federal government will provide incentives for performance above the goals, as well as credits for renewable energy construction. The plan also establishes CO2 emissions standards for power plants, which is something new."
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13kop7 | timeline of gaza/israel conflict pre-1967 | I've been reading about the recent events (from this subreddit and large media outlets) in Gaza/Israel, but I don't have much historical knowledge about their general relationship. I've seen timelines that started from 1967 (Six Days War) when the Israelis began to occupy Gaza. Can anyone give me a general timeline of events that happened pre-1967? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/13kop7/eli5_timeline_of_gazaisrael_conflict_pre1967/ | {
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"Ok, super simple version of the timeline\n\n*bits before 500 BCE assume the bible is somewhat accurate in regards to the migrations of people groups*\n\n~2000 BCE: Group of people migrate from Mesopotamia to what would become Israel (Abraham etc.)\n\n~1700 BCE: These people move into Egypt due to a food shortage in Canaan (what Israel is called at this time)\n\n~1200 BCE: These people leave Egypt and migrate back to Canaan and conquer it from the people who live there (the Hittites, the Amonites, the Moabites, etc.)\n\n~1000 BCE: King Saul unifies the \"Tribes of Israel\" and creates the first Kingdom of Israel. This Kingdom fights with the Philistines who came from the sea and settled in South-West Israel (Gaza and surrounding areas)\n\n~586 BCE: Babylonians conquer Israel and destroy Solomon's Temple. Israeli populace exiled to Babylon\n\n~536 BCE: Persians kick Babylonian Ass and let the Israelites move back to Israel\n\n~300 BCE: Alexander conquers it from the Persians, Then it passes to Ptolemy and then to the Selucids (the Maccabe revolt against the Greeks is during Selucid reign)\n\n~165 BCE: Israelite population revolts against the Greeks and establishes a new Kingdom under the Hasmonean dynasty\n\n~60 BCE: Romans conquer Israel.\n\n~4 BCE: Jesus is born in Bethlehem (for some time context)\n\n~70 CE: Israelite population revolts against the Romans, Second Temple is destroyed. Romans rename the Province from Judea to Palestine (after the ancient enemies of Israel the Philistines. Yeah, the Romans were pissed)\n\n570 CE: Mohammad is born\n\n638 CE: the Arab-Muslim empire that has been growing in the surrounding area conquers Israel. At this point it gets passed down through the different empires (Abassid, etc.) This is also where you would have had mass immigration of an Arab populace. In this time period the Jews were given \"dhimmi\" status as \"people of the book\". They were second class citizens but better off than in Christian Europe. During the Muslim and following Turkish rule many of the Jews leave for Europe, but some still stay.\n\nIn this time period: Jews move in and out of Israel to and from Europe.\n\n1516 CE: Ottoman Empire gains control of the area.\n\nMid 1800s: Arab population starts throwing hissy fits about the Jewish immigrants.\n\nLate 1800s: Mass immigration of Jews from Europe. These immigrants buy land from the Turkish governments and begin to settle.\n\n1918: Western powers carve up the ottoman Empire following WW1. Mandatory Palestine is established containing Modern Israel, Jordan, and little bits of Syria and Lebanon\n\n1917: Britain signs the Balfour Declaration, proclaiming: His Majesty's government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country. Jewish immigration is increased under British rule\n\n1921: A MASSIVE section of British Palestine is redefined as Transjordan. This land is ~80% of original Mandatory Palestine\n\n1920s/30s: Arabs throw hissy fits about the Jews and Brits, Jews throw hissy fits about the British and Arab, Britain has no idea what the fuck to do and orders the Peel Commission. Both sides do INCREDIBLY awful things to each other and the British\n\n1936: Peel Commission suggests breaking Mandatory Palestine into 2 states, a Jewish one along most of the Mediterranean Cost, the Galilee area, and Jerusalem. And an Arab state everywhere else (Gaza, the Negev, southern plains, Judea and Samaria. This suggestion is rejected whole-heartedly by the Arab population\n\n1945: WWII ends\n\n1947: UN proposes and adopts a partition of Mandatory Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state with Jerusalem as international. Jewish leaders accept the plan, Arab leaders reject it.\n\nMay 14, 1948: Israel declares its independance from Britain in the land outlined in the 1947 Partition. (basically, they made life so awful for the British that Britain just gave up)\n\nMay 15, 1948: Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq declare War on Israel. This war lasts for about a year and 700,000 Arab residents of Israel leave for a number of reasons and move to Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt (fleeing Israeli army, told to leave by Arab states, kicked out by Israeli army, because Jordan is just so pretty in May, etc.)\n\n1949: End of the war, Jordan Annexes the West Bank, Egypt annexes Gaza. Arabs who stayed in Israel find themselves as full citizens of the new country.\n\n1949-1967: Mass Jewish immigration, specifically from Europe and the Arab states\n\n1964: PLO is established. This is the point where the identity of \"Palestinian\" really starts to appear\n\n1967: 6 day war, Israel captures the Sinai and Gaza from Egypt, West Bank from Jordan, and Golan Heights from Syria. Sinai is returned soon after. \n\n1988: Jordan relinquishes its claim to the West Bank, which it lost to Israel in 1967, to the PLO\n\n\nI think that more or less covers it"
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aoveb3 | why is it important that animal should not become extinct? i don't see how it would have a major impact on the earth overall. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aoveb3/eli5_why_is_it_important_that_animal_should_not/ | {
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"Some animals are indirectly helping us by keeping the environment clean, or are at the start of our food cycle. Take Bees for example, and Coral.",
"Some animals play major roles in an ecosystem. Bees for example were just added to the endangered list and are very important. Something like 80% of our grown food depends on them more than any other thing for pollination... if they disappear then so do our crops unless we start doing it manually by hand or start mass producing robotic bees.\n\nOther animals have roles in their ecosystems as well, such as food or pest control. ",
"Ecosystems are chaotic in nature. That means that they are impossible to predict long term. So that unimportant bug that you just killed the last of might, in 20 years, have prevented the entire collapse of the ecosystem that makes the climate livable for crops we depend on.\n\nOr it might do nothing. We just cant tell.\n",
"ELI5: Honestly, it's probably not. But it depends on your perspective. Are we the caretakers of the planet for the short time we are here? Or, are we animals competing for resources just like all other animals and can use the Earth as we see fit?\n\nSome species matter more than others to how the world functions or even to how humans survive as a species, many others? Not so much (probably).\n\nIf the world belongs to all living life, then we should do what we can to avoid the extinction of the animals we share this world with us regardless of their importance to us. Especially if its population decline is our fault.\n\nIf we're animals just evolved to make babies and hope they survive, then the only species we should save are the ones that help us do that.\n\nFor adults: There's actually an interesting debate here between ecologists. Do species matter or habitats?\n\nLike, people point to bees because of their pollination services, but there are literally hundreds of thousands of other insects that pollinate food and other plants. (Don't mistake that for me saying bees don't matter, *A. melifera* or otherwise.) So, we should save the bees. A reductionist view (arguably) and fairly anthropocentric.\n\nThe other side says, screw that. Animals need habitats because without them they couldn't have evolved and thrived. Choosing to save a single species ignores the role of dozens, if not, thousands or hundreds of thousands of other species. Arguably, a more holistic view.\n\nSure, some species are more important to how an environment continues to function than others. But, as ecologists, we have a pretty haphazard way of figuring that out. Scientists kinda pick and choose the organisms or systems we want to work in, but discovering a keystone species is less common than folks think. Throw in the vagaries of funding and government bullshit and man studying ecosystems for the sake of studying them becomes a PIA.\n\nBut to come full circle. It's a question of ethics and values. Science can't tell us if its moral or right to save or not save one species from extinction. How do we judge the value of one species over another? Is it the value they have to us (bee examples and pretty shitty imo)? Or is it that the planet does not belong to us and, like when borrowing your friends car, you should take care of it and return it in good condition? Of course there are myriad other ways to view this philosophically, I'm just presenting a couple that I feel are easy to grasp. (Like I didn't even go into the ethics of deliberately causing the extinction of a species.)"
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2xik9p | how do routers know where to send outgoing packets if it has never before encountered the destination address? | For example, if the IP belongs to a computer across the world, how does the router know where to send the packet? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2xik9p/eli5_how_do_routers_know_where_to_send_outgoing/ | {
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"It doesn't. Your computer kicks it up the chain.\n\nWe'll take IPv4 since it's easier to visualize.\n\nYour address is 32.12.25.17. The destination address is 85.42.36.78.\n\nSo your computer sends a packet to your local ISP, the ISP says \"uh.. 85.42.36?, that's not me and sends the packet to the regional hub. It says \"uh.. 85.42? That's not me.\" And sends it up to the national hub. It says \"uh... 85? That's not me, that's *over there* and sends it over to the 85. hub. It says \"yeah, 85, that's totally me!\" and then send it down to the regional hub, which says \"yeah, 85.42! I know that guy!\" and sends it down to the local hub. It says \"yeah, 85.42.36? You betcha thats me!\" and send it down to the destination, 85.42.36.78\n\n---------\n\nWell, okay, that's not *really* how it goes, there are route tables which are constantly updated, so it doesn't usually have to get routing information at every hop, it can just send it on the route it needs to go from the tables. But if it doesn't know, that's *mostly* how it happens. It's a close enough visualization.",
"Eventually a packet will get routed to a machine that knows at least part of the destination address, and it will send the packet to the router that it has been told has more information.\n\nOnce the packet gets to a router that knows how to reach at least part of the destination address, the packet can be routed correctly to the destination.\n\nIf the router knows nothing about that particular IP address, it sends the packet to its \"gateway\" - a router that is expected to take responsibility for finding the next link in the chain.\n\nSo hypothetically let's assume that the internet consisted of 5 devices:\n\n1: Your computer\n\n2: Your router\n\n3: The Internet Router\n\n4: My router\n\n5: My computer\n\nYour computer generates a packet with my IP and sends it to your router. Your router doesn't know how to get to that IP so it sends the packet to it's \"gateway\" - the Internet Router. The Internet Router knows about my router, and it knows that my IP is served by my router so it sends the packet to my router. My routers knows about my computer, and sends the packet to me.\n\nIn the real world \"the Internet Router\" could be a lengthy list of routers that each know progressively more specific places to send packets until they're delivered.\n\nIf you look at a typical IPv4 address, it has 4 numbers a.b.c.d That address goes from general to specific left to right. The router responsible for \"1.b.c.d\" knows how to route a packet to at least every address in the \"b\" space for all the \"1\" addresses, and those machines know how to route to the \"c\" addresses in their \"b\" address space, and the \"c\" routers know how to route to the \"d\" addresses in their \"c\" address space. There are some routers on the internet that know a router that manages all the first a's, so worst case, once various routers have \"gatewayed\" to one of those routers, the packet will start its final delivery.",
"Surprisingly, no one has mentioned MAC addresses or the ARP protocol. You may think computers speak directly to one another by the name of the website or even by IP address. In reality, at the electrical level on the wire, there is another address assigned to the ports that are communicating over the wires in your house or over your WiFi. The Media Access Control, or MAC address. \n\nWhen your computer wants to send data to an IP address that is not associated with your PC, your PC will literally get on your house network and ask, \"Who is handling data for IP address _w.x.y.z_? That information exchange is guided by the Address Resolution Protocol, or ARP. If the IP address your PC wants to reach is not on your local network and your router is the default gateway for the network, it will respond basically saying, \"Pass it to me, I will take care of it.\"\n\nThat is where everyone else's conversation in here picks up. Your packets make their way through different hops, with their headers being rewritten all along the way. The source and destination IP addresses will likely stay the same once they leave your house, but the source and destination MAC addresses will change at every rewrite, enabling each device to pass your data on to the next hop in the sequence. \n\nIP addresses guide the systems all along the path as to where the data eventually needs to go, but your data only actually moves using MAC addresses that are discovered using the ARP protocol. "
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1l1zxo | what is a musical scale? | my friend said it was like a major scale has 7 different notes in it or whatever, and then theres like a root note and then 2nd 3rd 4th etc. and i get it, but how do i actually tell someone what a musical scale IS? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1l1zxo/eli5_what_is_a_musical_scale/ | {
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"a musical scale is any collection of notes that forms a pattern.\n\nionian, dorian, phrygian, lydian, mixolydian, aeolian, and locrian are all 7 note scales.\n\nmajor and minor pentatonic scales are 5 note scales\n\noctatonic *(or symmetrical diminished)* are 8 note scales\n\nthe traditional blues scale *(1, b3, 4, #4, 5, b7)* is a 6 note scale.\n\nthere are many others, but these are definitely the most commonly used.",
"basically it's like an alphabet, for musicians. D,E,F,G,A,B,C,D... and it goes in a circle. a scale is when you start on one note, and you play through let's say a D, until you get to the next D. That's simplified. ",
"A musical scale is simply a method of dividng an octave into a sequence of intervals. An octave is from C to C, or A to A, mathematically doubling or halving the frequency of the pitch. (A=220hz is one octave below A=440hz). There are multiple scales, the most common in western music is the major scale which has 7 scale degrees CDEFGAB(C). The number of scale degrees is dependant on the scale, but all scales have identical intervals, therefore they all sound similar unless the listener is tone deaf.\n\nTo make the scales exactly identical the equal temperament system was devised. The equal temperament system divides each octave into cents. There are 1200 cents in an octave, and 100 cents between each note chromatically, so from C to C#, a half step, is 100 cents, C to D, a whole step, is 200 cents, C to G, a major fifth, is 700 cents, the octave C to C is 1200 and etc. \n\nA major scale is divided into the pattern: W, W, H, W, W, W, H (W = Whole Step, H = Half Step)\n\nScales are all relative and dependant on culture, the only thing absolutely universal in pitch is the octave."
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280pcj | how come my feet will hurt after a while in flat shoes, but not when barefoot? | How come I can work all day in flat shoes and my feet will kill me.. but I kick them off (essentially still walking on a flat surface) and actually feel relief? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/280pcj/eli5_how_come_my_feet_will_hurt_after_a_while_in/ | {
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"Pressure from the shoes.",
"The human foot isn't designed to be covered in a shoe. We are meant to walk barefoot. We invented shoes to protect our feet. If you look at the bottom of your foot you will see it is arched. The arch acts as a shock absorber and it also allows the muscles and joints in your feet to move freely. If you wear a shoe it prevents the muscles working in the correct way and will eventually cause pain."
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2norah | how can mother ducks have 6 and more ducklings of the same age follow them if they have to lay an egg for each one of them? | Chickens usually lay an egg every day. I'm assuming that ducks have similar egg laying habits which means they would have to lay a fertilized egg a day for more than a week straight. But even then, the ducks don't look like there is any age difference.
How do ducks do that? Do they crank out several eggs at once? Does egg hatching synchronize with nearby eggs? Do ducklings have synchronized growing? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2norah/eli5_how_can_mother_ducks_have_6_and_more/ | {
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"When a duck breeds, there is more than one embryo available to be fertilized, so all the eggs being laid technically have the same (or nearly the same) gestational age despite not having been laid at the same time and will therefore hatch around the same time.",
"Many birds including ducks don't start to incubate their eggs until all are laid. The eggs can survive for several days in this state and will not begin to develop until incubation begins. Therefore all the eggs hatch at the same time even though they were laid several days apart."
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5x0cf5 | who doesn't 911 services not have a way to contact them through text? | There are surely people who are in distress, but can not call or talk. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5x0cf5/eli5_who_doesnt_911_services_not_have_a_way_to/ | {
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"Some areas *do* have that feature, as a matter of fact.\n\nHowever, text is very difficult to convey important information with, and doesn't allow dispatchers to ask questions to get that important information.",
"It is a feature which is being implemented now. The 911 system was established as a standard back when texting did not exist."
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8o0efm | what would happen to an economy if inflation was always at 0%? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8o0efm/eli5_what_would_happen_to_an_economy_if_inflation/ | {
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"Inflation encourages people to spend money now as they know prices will get higher. People not spending money is one of the biggest threats to a capitalist economy, as it starts a vicious circle that ends with lots of people being unemployed, so a low level of inflation is encouraged to promote expenditure.\n\nAnother use of Inflation is to lower people's wages without them knowing. It sounds sinister but some ordinary people are overpaid for what they do, so eventually they must either accept lower pay or lose the job. People will strongly protest against either option but inflation allows this pay cut to be stealthy as the number you are paid stays the same but everything else increases in price."
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a01lny | how do usb splitter hubs work? how do multiple devices simultaneously transmit signals through a single port without stuttering? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a01lny/eli5_how_do_usb_splitter_hubs_work_how_do/ | {
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"They don't simultaneously transmit. Rather, they transmit one at a time.\n\nHowever, USB transmits so quickly that you'll rarely run across situations where it matters. Most USB peripherals - your mouse/keyboard, for example - use a tiny fraction of the available bandwidth. Even mass storage devices don't generally reach the limits of USB transmission speed.",
"Ah, my friend. Welcome to the glorious world of packet switching serial communications networks.\n\nMultiple devices connected to the same hub do indeed share the same electrical connections (kind of, essentially), so if you don't want garbled communications only one device can transmit at a time. In USB this is done by having the host control all communications.\n\nThe role of host is played by the USB controller in your computer. Everything connected to the host is called a device. The host has a method for automatically discovering all devices, and it knows which address on the network belongs to each device. The host directs a certain device at a certain address to transmit, and only then does the device actually transmit.\n\nThe other part of this is that the host and devices transmit in discrete packets of data. The structure of a packet is exactly defined so that every device knows which part of the packet means what, and most importantly, when the packet ends. So the host can direct one device to transmit, the device transmits a packet (or group of packets), the host waits for the complete packet (or group of packets) to be transmitted, then it directs the next device to transmit. This happens...really fast.\n\nIf we were going to get carried away...this same idea can be scaled up to larger networks, and even over long distances, say through telephone lines. Then you can develop even more complex protocols that don't even need a host, design faster communications methods, create new ways to transfer large amounts of data and deliver them to people's screens...and you have the internet. Every single part of this is massively complex, but also incredibly cool."
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a476ue | why would a solar storm's sustained magnetic field not destroy all data-even tape drives? if a degausser wipes data with powerful sustained magnetic fields, why would a weeklong solar storm not have the same effect on our data? | Could a solar storm big enough and sustained long enough destroy all data storage devices that aren't inside a Faraday cage? Why or why not? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a476ue/eli5_why_would_a_solar_storms_sustained_magnetic/ | {
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"We have a shield! Earth's magnetic field protects us from the worst of it and funnels what's left to the poles. \n\nAnd assuming we have a storm big enough to wipe hard drives, the power grid would have long since been fried due to induction along the power lines. ",
"A really strong solar storm causes changes of > 250 nanoTesla in the magnetic field. The absolutely worst geomagnetic storm is estimated to have peaked at 1760 nanoTeslas. For reference, the Earth's magnetic field is around 50 microTesla or around 25x stronger than the strongest storm\n\nThose degaussers use electromagnets that can put out magnetic field strengths in the 1-10 Tesla range, or 20,000-200,000x stronger than the Earth's magnetic field",
"In addition to the other fine answers, a faraday cage is not a shield against static or low frequency magnetic fields. \n\n_URL_0_"
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5q20qy | how are dictionaries compiled? how do words get picked to be in a dictionary? how do they not 'forget' to put in a word? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5q20qy/eli5_how_are_dictionaries_compiled_how_do_words/ | {
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"Nowadays they take help of computers. With the computer you can basically count all the words occurring in all newspapers and all of last year's released books within a very reasonable timeframe (hours?). Sort the counts and you have a long list of all the most common words, remove all the words you already had in last year's edition and you have a shorter list of words you might consider adding to this year's edition.\n\nI imagine they can do a whole lot more with those statistics, this was just to explain the basics, and I hope you see how no words go forgotten this way! (unless there are computer bugs :D). For example they can also look at how old words change in popularity, if a word increases in popularity, perhaps it has gained another meaning? Or if it loses popularity, perhaps it's an old word that has become replaced by synonym to the extent that it's time to take it out of the dictionary.\n\n\n",
"Check out *The Professor and the Mad Man* by Simon Winchester. Its the story of how the Oxford English Dictionary was created. Looks like its being released as a movie as well."
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11bja2 | stone age | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/11bja2/eli5_stone_age/ | {
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"The Stone Age is the period of time, believed to be around a few million years, between when humans figured out how to use tools made out of stone and when humans figured out how to make tools out of metal instead. Metal tools were a big turning point in history because they are stronger and last longer than stone ones, which made it easier to build more and better buildings, grow more food, and so on.\n\nEDIT: check out _URL_0_"
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r1own | how open source projects/developers make money | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/r1own/eli5_how_open_source_projectsdevelopers_make_money/ | {
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"Many of them have day jobs that pay the bills, and the open source stuff is done in their spare time, for fun and/or learning.",
"The short answer is they don't. The long answer is, many companies work on OSS and make money by providing support and training on said software. MySQL is probably the most well-known example of this. Also, donations.",
"Companies like Canonical and Red Hat give away their software, and just charge for support. Red Hat actually does pretty well.",
"The answer is different for software as opposed to hardware. Open source software projects usually make money on support contracts (being paid to provide technical support to users of the software) or grants (somebody gives them money to create the project) or they may support themselves with volunteers (individuals think it's cool so they spend their own time on developing it). Open source hardware developers and projects normally support themselves by selling the physical object.",
"At Red Hat (where I work), there's a lot of different things. The main part of the business, customers pay us on a thing called the \"subscription model\", which is a fancy brand way to say that they get a QA'd product versus our free offerings (RHEL vs. Fedora, JBoss vs. _URL_0_), they get updates and bug fixes (called errata), and they get support.\n\nThere's a few other things, though: [Global Support Services](_URL_1_) is our contracting division, which has engineers and liasons to deliver custom solutions to our customer. Here, they're not paying us for our software, but our engineering expertise, and we try hard to ensure that any custom software that we develop as part of it is open-source.\n\nWe recently bought Makara Cloud, too, which will be our offering in cloud deployment: [OpenShift](_URL_1_).",
"It's also important to note that you CAN charge for open source software. Open source doesn't necesssarily equate to free."
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3pquui | how are vortexes in water created? image in description | _URL_0_
I ran into that on another sub ([r/dubbedGIFs](_URL_1_))
How are these vortexes created? What causes them? How are they even truly called, in order to google them? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3pquui/eli5_how_are_vortexes_in_water_created_image_in/ | {
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"The vortex in that gif is caused by the interaction of a body of cold water with one of warmer water. The cold water is denser (I think) so it gets pushed down, while the warm water goes up. These opposing currents create that vortex."
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biq4cw | why all of a sudden are insect populations on the decline globally? is it just a climate thing? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/biq4cw/elif_why_all_of_a_sudden_are_insect_populations/ | {
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"Insects have been on the decline for a while now but only recently has this information become more readily available to the public. \n\nThe main factor that is causing insect populations to decline is the use of non-targeted pesticides that are lethal to a wide range of insect species. Farmers use these because they are cheap and using pesticides gives them better crop yields. Which equals more money. \n\nClimate change has also been playing a role as some insects are adapted for very specific climatic conditions. So even small changes in climate due to climate change can have negative impacts on these species.",
"It's been happening for a long time. Silent spring isn't a new book. Just like climate change it's only now something that people care about apparently. But the evidence has been there for decades for anyone willing to look",
"It is not just a climate thing, but also heavy widespread use of insecticides & pesticides thing, plus pollution thing , plus massive deforestation thing,"
]
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5tt7l0 | why do wireless companies treat tethering data differently than mobile data? | if i pay for data, does it really matter how it's being used? if i use my phone to stream netflix, or use it to tether to my computer to stream netflix, isn't the data being used regardless? is tethering more strain on the network than mobile data? if i stream 2gb on my phone or tether 2gb, what is the difference between those? seems some carriers have, for example, caps for regular data usage before they throttle, and a much lower cap for tethering usage before they throttle speed. but, my question is, isn't data usage just data usage? if you lease a car and you have X amount of miles, if you go over, you go over whether you drive with 1 passenger or 5, whether you drive to work or the beach, or day or night. miles are miles. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5tt7l0/eli5_why_do_wireless_companies_treat_tethering/ | {
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"There is no technical reason for this, and a few years back they did *not*. The bottom line is that they can make more money selling you an additional service. ",
"Honestly, it's just a way to charge you an extra fee. I use Project Fi which doesn't charge extra for it, but one thing to keep in mind is that you are likely to use more of your available data if you tether than if you only use your handset. \n\nSo a customer who doesn't tether may only use an average of 30% of their available data every month while a customer who does tether may try to get closer to 100%. *made up numbers*",
"Because they're greedy greedy pig fucks. They can make more money carving up your data into \"voice, video, internet, email, tethering, etc.\" then setting arbitrary limits for each type.\n\nSo say people normally use 100GB of data, but they know people use 80% of it for tethering, instead they cut you to 80GB data, saying only \"high users\" go above 80 & sell you 50GB of tethering package, for an extra $50."
]
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1x2cq7 | what causes a cowlick? | I am curious as to why everyone has one or two (I have three!), and what causes them. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1x2cq7/eli5what_causes_a_cowlick/ | {
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"Believe it or not, it's a consequence of the [hairy ball theorem.](_URL_0_) ",
"It more so depends on your hair follicle. This is what determines which way the hair grows out of the scalp. So essentially cowlicks are tufts of hair where their follicles cause them to grow in such a fashion. \n\nAlso, considering this is an internal thing, we can't change our follicles, so you can't really \"fix\" a cowlick. People will tell you you can train your hair, which is true, but only to a certain extent. Truly the only thing you can do is work with what you got and get some appropriate products and a knowledgeable hair dresser to help you work around it.\n\n\nI can talk more about your scalp if that didn't answer the question the extent to which you were looking. But that's the quick answer.\n\nTL:DR Your Hair follicles determine the growth direction of your hair which sometimes results in cowlicks."
]
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2d8yd6 | why does the water used for tea and many instant meals have to be boiling? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2d8yd6/eli5_why_does_the_water_used_for_tea_and_many/ | {
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"Instant meals are designed for the water to be a specific optimal temperature. Boiling water has the convenient property that it's always at the same temperature, so you don't have to fiddle with a thermometer to figure out when to put the water in.\n\nThe water used for tea *doesn't* have to be boiling, and in fact the vast majority of teas aren't supposed to be made with boiling water. (This is a large part of why green tea isn't popular in the West; people try to steep it in boiling water, and the result is pretty horrible.)",
"It allows for standardization of the process when not everyone has a liquid thermometer, so they actually craft the product for boiling water instead of vice versa, to create a more consistent product.",
"The reason for instant meals was already explained, but I can offer a bit of explanation as to tea.\n\nFirst off, you're not supposed to use boiling water for tea, if you bother doing a google search, you will notice that different teas have different optimal temperature for steeping. This is mostly for flavor though.\n\nSecond, tea is made up of many, many different chemical components. they are responsible for flavor, color, caffeine content etc. these chemicals are soluble in water, and as water temperature increasing so does the solubility of these chemicals in it. Try to dissolve table sugar in ice water, and in near boiling water, you will notice it dissolves much, much faster in the hot water. ",
"in the case of instant food, the heat activates a starch. most obvious in pudding, the chemistry is a bit involved."
]
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9sdj5g | what is the survival instinct? | Why does the survival instinct in humans only emerge after several years, yet for other species it seems to be innate? In other words why do some species have to learn survival skills, while in others it is an innate instinct? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9sdj5g/eli5_what_is_the_survival_instinct/ | {
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"You’re really asking a nature vs nurture question. With humans, we live in relative safety and usually almost never experience anything that requires our survival instincts to kick in, and on top of that, even if they did, our brains are able to overwrite it in the moment.\n\nWith animals, they’re constantly living in a live or die situation, as well as being taught survival by their mothers/parents at the same time.\n\nEdit: \n\nTo add to this, survival skills and survival instinct is not the same thing. \n\nSurvival skills is having the skills necessary to survive in the wild. Example being: knowing what’s edible and what isn’t, knowing how to hunt, knowing how to find water, knowing how to find or build a shelter.\n\nSurvival instinct is a fight or flight response. Example being faced down by a bear, you either run or you fight to stay alive. It also involves other things but that’s the large majority of it."
]
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|
4ep9bv | how do doctors know when a limb has to be amputated? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ep9bv/eli5_how_do_doctors_know_when_a_limb_has_to_be/ | {
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"It's mostly based on the prognosis, or what is likely going to happen to the limb if they don't cut it off. If you have gas gangrene, nothing anyone can do will save it. It's better to cut if off to stop the infection from spreading. If there is a ton of shrapnel from an IED, it's the same situation. The danger won't spread, but it's very very unlikely that the leg will ever be functional again. If someone has diabetes, and the neurons are all dead (so the muscles don't work) or the blood vessels are working so poorly that ulcers and infection are inevitable, they may decide to amputate.\n\nUltimately, it's about seeing if anything can be done to save the limb. Cutting off limbs leads to much worse quality of life, so the only reasons surgeons do it is to prevent death or other poor outcomes. There is a lot of detail (above knee/below knee, when to do it, etc.) The surgery itself is quite detailed. It's not like the whiskey+hacksaws they used during the American Civil War.",
"There's a couple of reasons:\n\n1. Chronic disease, such as vascular issues or diabetes, which result in non-healing wounds. These will just get infected, won't get better, and can lead to a life-threatening whole-body infection, so better to remove the affected part.\n\n2. Trauma, where the damage is so severe that there's an extremely low chance of a good functional recovery without an amputation. There are criteria we use in that case - one such example is the [Mangled Extremity Severity Score](_URL_0_).\n\nEssentially it boils down to this: Is the leg going to heal in a way to give the patient better comfort or function than an amputation? If yes, don't amputate. If no, consider amputation."
]
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||
1fv2g9 | what causes us to pe attracted to a specific race? | I am a white female. Ihave always been almost exclusively attracted to black men. This has been going on ever since I was old enough to be attracted to anyone. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1fv2g9/eli5_what_causes_us_to_pe_attracted_to_a_specific/ | {
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"I've wondered this. I think Freud would bring the parents into it, but even from my own experience this doesn't quite stack up. My 5c would be that it might have *something* to do with our early experiences though- a figure of care and love that stuck in our subconscious (or the opposite- a person treating us like shit causing us to favour another race). I'd be interested to see an answer on this.",
"Not sure why that is but it's more common than you think. A majority of my friends prefer people not of their race. I'm white and am not typically attracted to other white people. (Unless I meet them and like their personality)",
"If I had to hazard a guess I'd assume it comes from some kind of impulse to widen the gene pool."
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d4ri7z | why do women sometimes get urinary tract infections from intercourse? | For a natural activity it seems awfully flawed if for an example trying to conceive, the woman can get a uti? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d4ri7z/eli5_why_do_women_sometimes_get_urinary_tract/ | {
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"Women have a very short urinary tracts. This gives UTIs an easier path to cover.",
"During sex, the urethra often comes into contact with bacteria from the genitals and anus. If a woman urinates after sex, she can help clear this bacteria out of her urethra. If she doesn’t (or even sometimes if she does), that bacteria can result in a UTI.",
"Women tend to get urinary tract infections more frequently than males due to the fact that bacteria can reach the bladder more easily in women. The urethra (the opening to your urinary tract) is shorter in females than in men, so bacteria have a shorter distance to traverse."
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|
5zy9pm | how exactly do skateboarders manage to keep their balance when going up the side of a halfpipe? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5zy9pm/eli5_how_exactly_do_skateboarders_manage_to_keep/ | {
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"The black thing on top of our boards is called griptape which helps us keep our shoes on the board when we go up. It's also a little bit like a swing, when we go down or up the transitions we bend our knees and lean either forward or back to keep our center of gravity on the board. ",
"Imagine you have a ball attached to a string and you are twirling in about in a circle. The string exerts a force completely perpendicular to the motion of the ball changing its direction. This is known as centripetal acceleration. Going to the skate boarder on the half pipe scenario the ball represents the skate boarder and the string can be replace by the half pipe. As the boarder rides up the half pipe he experiences this same centripetal acceleration, his direction of velocity is changing like the balls was. The half pipe provides the acceleration normal to the curve pointing toward the center of curvature. The boarder can feel this change in direction as the force between his feet and the board as increasing. The equation for the force of friction (Force that holds the person on the board) is the force felt by the boarders feet or normal force multiplied by a coefficient of friction. Grip tape on the deck help the raise this coefficient and increase the force of friction holding the boarder on the board."
]
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782ji1 | how do radio waves for cell phone signals penetrate into buildings if light can't travel around corners or visible light can't shine through opaque objects? wouldn't you need a direct line of sight to the tower? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/782ji1/eli5_how_do_radio_waves_for_cell_phone_signals/ | {
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"Light and radio waves are all part of the electromagnetic spectrum. \n\nThey don't all behave or interact with stuff the same. Xrays, infrared and microwaves are also part of that spectrum. They, like radio waves can be reflected like visible light but can penetrate certain materials. "
]
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[]
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||
a6l370 | how do different forms of mass communication work worldwide, when we're all so seperated by oceans? (we don't connect to internet servers across the globe through satellites, right?) | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a6l370/eli5_how_do_different_forms_of_mass_communication/ | {
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"There's huge cables running across the oceans.\n\n[Here's](_URL_0_) all the connections.",
"Most communications take place through fiber optic cables, which are buried under the ground (on land) and laid down on the ocean floor or just under it (at sea).",
"Question has already been answered, I just wanted to add that the first undersea cables were way before the internet. They were developed in the latter half of the 19th Century for telegraph communications. \n\n\nThe transatlantic telegraph cable was laid down across the bed of the Atlantic Ocean over a period of nine years between 1857 and 1866. Maintenance of this cable (which involved hauling bits of it to the surface to repair on deck before being laid back down) provided some early confirmation that life could exist at the bottom of the ocean - as seen when the cables were covered with encrusting organisms. "
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4rdqgy | why do companies need to put the ® or ™ symbols beside their product names every time it is written? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4rdqgy/eli5_why_do_companies_need_to_put_the_or_symbols/ | {
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"The \"TM\" symbol is generally used for unregistered trademarks (including those that are still in the process of being registered) and doesn't do anything significant legally when it comes to violations. \n \nThe ® symbol on the other hand is used for trademarks registered with the federal government, and does have some legal importance. Specifically if you fail to use it then you forfeit the right to sue for damages unless you can prove that the defendant knew your mark was registered. This is a pretty high burden to meet. ",
"They don't need to. The use of trademark symbols does not affect whether it *actually is* a trademark (registered or not). However, these companies hope that by prominently asserting their trademark they can extract more money from people who infringe on the trademark, because they will have no defense of innocent infringement. They should have known that a term identified by a trademark symbol was trademarked, and the plaintiff will not have to prove they did know. A similar principle applies to copyright notices.\n\nThus, it may be prudent for a business to use trademark symbols, though it is not required for protection. It is foolish for anyone but the trademark holder to use these symbols.",
"It's part of \"defense of the mark\", something the law requires you to do to prevent \"gotcha\" trademark suits. [Here is a great, detailed explanation](_URL_0_ ).",
"Let's say you have a lemonade stand and you sell \"Tommy's Lemonade\". You put a lot of work into making your lemonade the best and everyone knows that your lemonade is the best, so they trust it.\n\nUntil one day Brian from down the street starts selling \"Tommy's Lemonade\" too. The problem is, Brian's version of \"Tommy's Lemonade\" stinks and people no longer want to buy \"Tommy's Lemonade\" anymore at all because they can't tell the difference. So you tell your dad, Ron. He says that he's busy, but tells you to sign put your initials, \"TM\", for Tommy Murphy, at the top of your logo. Now people know that the \"Tommy's Lemonade\" with the TM signed at the top is yours and that it's the good one.\n\nBut Brian from down the street is no dummy. So he starts signing his with \"TM\" too. Well now you've had it, so you go to your dad again and now your dad isn't busy. Since everyone knows Ron isn't the guy you mess with (and he knows it too), he signs your Lemonade now instead with a big \"R\". He even puts a circle around it.\n\nNow everyone can buy your lemonade again without having to worry if it's the stinky kind from Brian down the street. And Brian won't be fooling around with that big circled \"R\" because Ron and his mustache are scary.\n\nNow, replace Ron with the government, and that's how \"TM\" and the circled capital \"R\" work.",
" It is to signify to the reader that the name is a trademark, not a generic word for the product. Trademark law is entirely based on the principal of customer confusion. You can have a trademark forever, so long as customers affiliate that mark with you. \n\n If customers instead think that the mark is simply the name of the product, rather than a brand name, the word becomes generic and the trademark becomes unenforceable. This has happened before with things like aspirin, cellophane, trampoline, thermos, etc.\n\n As others have said, the R means the trademark is registered, while the TM means it is not registered. Registering a trademark both applies it nationwide (unregistered trademarks can only be enforced in the regions they are used) and gives a presumption of validity (meaning the defendant has the burden of disproving the term is a valid trademark if registered, and the plaintiff has the burden of proving it has a valid trademark if not registered). "
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1cgff7 | how does the nintendo 3ds display work? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1cgff7/eli5how_does_the_nintendo_3ds_display_work/ | {
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"The trick with 3D is to make each eye see a different picture. \n\nThe Nintendo screen does this by having a series of pointy 'ridges' on the screen with a different picture on each side. Your right eye sees the right side of all the ridges, and your left eye sees the left side of all the ridges, so each eye sees a different image.\n\nThe non-ELI5 explanation: It uses a 'lenticular' display: _URL_0_"
]
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||
fs8son | n95 masks and how they work | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fs8son/eli5_n95_masks_and_how_they_work/ | {
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"It's the same principle as a coffee filter, you have the layers in the mask itself that are very fine as to catch anything in the air that passes through it like dust, harmful bacteria, fine moisture droplets that may harbour virus particles, harmful chemicals from various sprays etc. This prevents said things from entering the respiratory system, hence protecting the wearer. \n\nWhat differs these say from say generic surgical masks is they are generally designed to make a close 'seal' with the face of the wearer and has much better filtration quality as well as providing much better protection to the wearer. A generic looser surgical mask offers little protection to a wearer from outside contaminants and it used usually for the reverse purpose, stopping someone from distributing potentiontial contaminants into a sterile enviroment or to other people.",
"N means it's Not resistant to oil. 95 means it should, properly used, filter 95% of particles 0.3 μm or larger. \n\n[NIOSH air filtration rating](_URL_0_)"
]
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v1pfx | disk frag/defragmentation | What does it mean when a hard drive is "fragmented", what is a fragment? What does it do when a program "defrags" a hard drive? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/v1pfx/eli5_disk_fragdefragmentation/ | {
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"Every time you access a program or file, think of it like an overflowing folder of paper work, while you are moving with it from point A, to point B, you drop a few pages in different places, and when you bring it back from B to A, you forget to pick up those pages that fell out. Defragging your hard drive is like picking up all those dropped papers and putting them back where they should be.\n\n**tl;dr:** Open program > bits get lost in between thus creating fragments > defragmenting returns those bits to their original place.",
"The information on a storage medium, in particular block devices like magnetic disk and SSD drives, store the contents of your data in chunks, the smallest single unit. These block sizes are usually around 4KiB these days. So even if your file is only 7 bytes long, it will still take 4KiB on disk.\n\nSince your data lies in blocks, and the blocks themselves are what are indexed by the file system, the blocks for a given file don't all need to be in the same place; your data doesn't need to be contiguous on the medium... So, if you have a file that is 16KiB (4 blocks), they can be located anywhere across the disk.\n\nWhen the blocks of a file are not contiguous, this is called a fragmented file, and the blocks are the fragments, naturally. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it is a performance cost on magnetic disks, much less so on SSD (the performance cost is currently vanishingly small).\n\nWhy is it a big performance hit on magnetic disk? You have an electromagnet (head) on the end of a stick, attached to an electro magnet actuator (voice coil), that has to bounce all over the magnetic disk (platter, usually made of nickle). Having to PHYSICALLY move all over the platter, looking for data, WAITING for that disk to spin around again (often at 5,400 RPM, for desktop models), takes EONS of time, in computer terms. If you have to read a file from disk, it's nice if everything is contiguous, that is, everything is in a single line across the platter. Just line up the head, and in one pass, you get the whole thing.\n\nSSD have no moving parts, the time hit is in addressing, and currently, it's so fast compared to a disk, and about the fastest you're going to get with todays technology, no one is bitching about it yet.\n\nWhy do files get fragmented? Because file systems often make compromises, they have to, between performance measures. When you're saving a file to disk, and it's suddenly bigger than it was before, it's better to get it on the disk now, and worry about reorganizing later. The file system is going to use some algorithm to find the best fit, and save the file in as few and as contiguous blocks as possible.\n\nThe act of defragmenting or \"defragging\" is simply reorganizing the files so everything is contiguous. Smart defrag programs will organize by criteria; files that don't change much, are read only, marked as archived, are accessed infrequently, or whatever else the filesystem may have to go on, will put those files together and in slower parts of the disk. Files that are frequently accessed and change size often will go to faster parts of the disk, or closer to free space.\n\nDumb algorithms will just make everything contiguous on a first come first served basis.",
"You have a book shelf (your harddrive disk) that has slots for 20 books and you want to store your books on it (your data). Lets say you have 10 books on your bookshelf and you place them in order into slots 1 through 10. You make a chart saying which book is in which slot so you can find your book again. \n\nYour bookshelf looks like this:\nB1 B2 B3 B4 B5 B6 B7 B8 B9 B10 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _\n\nOver the course of time you realize that you don't want some of your books anymore, for example the books 5 & 6, so you throw them away. Since you originally indexed the books by their slot location on your chart, you simply just have to erase books 5 & 6 off of your chart. The alternative is to shift books 7-10 up to those remaining spaces, but this involves too much work and re-indexing your chart.\n\nYour bookshelf looks like this:\nB1 B2 B3 B4 _ _ B7 B8 B9 B10 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _\n\nNow lets say you buy an encyclopedia with 12 volumes. You don't have enough slots to put your whole encyclopedia together in the remaining 10 slots of the bookshelf because your encyclopedia requires 12 spots next to each other. However, you do have the spots left over from where books 5 & 6 were. You put the first two volumes into slots 5 & 6 and then the remaining 10 books in the last 10 spots. Your encyclopedia is now fragmented into two pieces.\n\nYour bookshelf looks like this:\nB1 B2 B3 B4 E E B7 B8 B9 B10 E E E E E E E E E E\n\nThis is a big deal because it slows you down when you are trying to find pieces of your encyclopedia. Instead of checking one place, you now have to check two places on your bookshelf. \n\nDefragmenting your bookshelf would involve putting books into empty spaces so you have room to combine your encyclopedia. You can't simply take all books off the bookshelf and rearrange them. You have to put books into empty slots and move books that need to be next to each other into the correct locations all while keeping track of the indexing. This is why it is good to have more free space when you defragment your harddrive."
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fb6dmq | how is ceramic dinnerware so durable? | I'm talking about your typical glazed plate or bowl or mug. I have plates and bowls that my parents got on their wedding day 35 years ago. After decades of washing and having other dishes rub against them and sharp knifes pressed on the surface, the glossiness has barely even worn off, let alone any other noticeable wear. It's like whatever they use to coat it is indestructible. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fb6dmq/eli5_how_is_ceramic_dinnerware_so_durable/ | {
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"text": [
"It has to do with hardness. Some materials like steel are very strong, but not terribly hard. You can scratch steel with most rocks, which we don't regard as being nearly as \"tough\" as steel. Wear tends to be an accumulation of small scratches. \n\nCeramics can be very hard and thus scratch resistant. Ceramic glazes are actually a form of glass which melts and fuses to the surface of the ceramic. Glass is also very hard and scratch resistant. So you have a wear resistant plate covered with a wear resistant glaze. \n\nSo ceramic dishware will be more wear resistant than metal or plastic dishware. Glass dishware is also fairly wear resistant, but clear glass shows scratches much better than opaque ceramics."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
10dwge | stealing home base. | *Is it purely undertaken to entertain the crowd due to it's sheer outlandishness & unpredictability? Or is there a logic behind it under the right circumstances?* | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/10dwge/eli5_stealing_home_base/ | {
"a_id": [
"c6cmry2",
"c6cnyyi",
"c6cqmm1"
],
"score": [
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"text": [
"It's also done so that the team can get a run in before the batter can possibly strike out, ending the inning with a third out. \nOther bases also have advantages when stolen, because then if the ball is hit to that base, the runner is already there and isn't forced to run into in easy out. ",
"It is usually attempted by very fast runners who feel they have a real chance to score. Often they are exploiting a pitcher who is not paying close attention to them, or has an extremely slow delivery to the plate. If timed right, it can work.",
"It is often part of a double steal, where the runner on 1st tries to steal second, while the runner on 3rd waits for the catcher to commit, then tries to steal home.\n\nA lot of the time the 2nd baseman won't notice or will be disrupted by the runner and will not be able to make a clean throw back home."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
bj390t | how does the earth’s magnetism work if metals lose their properties with intense heat? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bj390t/eli5_how_does_the_earths_magnetism_work_if_metals/ | {
"a_id": [
"em4xz63"
],
"score": [
10
],
"text": [
"Earth's magnetic field is generated by moving currents in the outer core. In that sense, it's more like a gargantuan electromagnet than a permanent magnet.\n\nMoving charge generates a magnetic field, and the liquid outer core moves in circular currents due to the intense temperature difference between the inner core and the mantle. It's really hot down there, the inner core is as hot as the sun's surface."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
cl50i8 | why are there more two headed animals being born than two headed humans? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cl50i8/eli5_why_are_there_more_two_headed_animals_being/ | {
"a_id": [
"evswmr5"
],
"score": [
7
],
"text": [
"Two headed babies is a form of Siamese twins. This can only happen when there is twins. The probability of a twin birth depend on the mothers genes which is different between species. For humans this is quite rare but most animals give birth to twins, triplets or even more babies at once. This is also a feature that can be bread. When there is twins in almost every birth the chances of Siamese twins is much greater which again causes the chance of two headed babies to be quite much higher."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
4z8zbe | why does air cool when it's pressure decreases? (conversely, why does air heat up when it's pressure increases?) | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4z8zbe/eli5why_does_air_cool_when_its_pressure_decreases/ | {
"a_id": [
"d6tupvd"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"Temperature is caused by atoms and molecules whizzing around and hitting off each other. The more collisions, the higher the temperature. If you hold a finite volume of air in a container (say 1 mole, a unit of measurement for atoms and molecules) and change the size of the container, that effects whether the molecules bounce off each other and the sides of the container more or less. If it expands (decrease in pressure) there's more space for the molecules to move around and they bounce off each other less. If it gets smaller (more pressure) they bounce off each other more."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
35aqx6 | ukip had over three million votes, why did they only get 1 mp ? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/35aqx6/eli5_ukip_had_over_three_million_votes_why_did/ | {
"a_id": [
"cr2ljep"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"Let me explain with a really simplified version of the election:\n\n2 Parties run in 100 local elections, each local election gets 201 votes.\n\nBy sheer luck; Party 1 wins EVERY election 101 votes to 100. That means they win every seat.\n\nThe end result is > 51% of total votes but 100% of the total seats.\n\nThe number of votes is not strictly relevant to the number of seats, it's the way the votes are distributed. Proportional voting (the way of overcoming this) was proposed in 2011 in a referendum, but the vote was that the current system is fine the way it is."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
4pu712 | why are airplanes and other aircrafts forward facing tips rounded instead of arrow shaped? | Wouldn't it cut through the air more efficiently if it was sharp? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4pu712/eli5_why_are_airplanes_and_other_aircrafts/ | {
"a_id": [
"d4nvf3i"
],
"score": [
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],
"text": [
" > Wouldn’t it cut through the air more efficiently if it was sharp?\n\nOnly if the air only comes in perfectly straight. Otherwise it creates zones of low pressure which causes drag. A rounded nose allows the pressure wave which extends forward for subsonic aircraft to modify the flow of incoming air to work better with varying angles of approach.\n\nSupersonic aircraft don't have any impact on incoming air until it arrives, so minimizing the charge in air direction is best. This means a pointy tip."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
qb5es | how do criminal bonds work? | I recently got arrested and had to bond out with a bondsman. I just kind of want a rundown of how the system works. Why does a bondsman take on a bond? Is it because a lot of people can't end up paying the difference?
On another note, what happens to the money that you post to bail? Is it used for the jail? County? yada yada? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/qb5es/eli5_how_do_criminal_bonds_work/ | {
"a_id": [
"c3w6ln8"
],
"score": [
5
],
"text": [
"Bail isn't used for anything ideally. It's held by the court, and then given back to you when you show up at the required time. The bondsman just loans you the amount necessary to pay bail, and you agree to have the court pay him back directly.\n\nThis only breaks down if you decide to not show up to court. Then you don't get the bail back; problem is, the government is now angry at you, and you owe the bondsman a lot of money for the loan they don't get back. You'll probably be rearrested fairly quickly, and if you live in some states the bondsman can send a bounty hunter after you."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
3t7io9 | what exactly are co-op apartments and how are they legal? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3t7io9/eli5what_exactly_are_coop_apartments_and_how_are/ | {
"a_id": [
"cx3r68y",
"cx3rbvf"
],
"score": [
6,
2
],
"text": [
"Co-ops (at least New York style) are a type of apartment ownership that have a purpose similar to condominiums, but with some differences. \n\nWith a condo, you own your unit outright but have a shared ownership of the common land, roof, and similar areas.\n\nWith a co-op, all you own is a share of a corporation which has attached to it the right to occupy a specific unit in a building owned by the corporation, subject to the approval of the corporation. The end result is that in a co-op, depending on how the by-laws are written, the board of directors might have more authority than would be possible with a condo. \n\nSince you're asking how they're legal, I'm guessing you're referring to the board's right to approve new co-op members. The answer is that it's the same as any other privately held corporation, which is allowed to put limits on the transfer of shares, as long as they're not impacting a protected class (race, religion, etc.) Just like when I worked for a start-up, before it went public, I couldn't sell my shares to anyone without the permission of the board of directors. ",
"A co-op anything can best be described as something where the customers are the owners. Normally everything is legally owned by a \"not for profit\" corporation. At the end of the year, sales minus expenses will often result in a \"profit\". \n\nAll \"not for profit\" means is that these profits cannot be distributed to the owners of the company. When an NPO is a co-op, they are able to distribute some money, but not to investors. \n\nSo what they do is refund all the customers whatever their portion of that profit is. Commonly this is called a \"patronage dividend\" because the customers were patrons of the establishment. \n\nWith an apartment what this means is that everyone pays rent. The building has expenses, like utilities, a mortgage, the maintenance man. If revenues are more than those expenses, the people paying the rent receive a refund for their portion.\n\nSo if a building has 10 units that rent for $1,000 per month total revenue will be $120,000 per year (10*1000*12). The building pays all of the expenses and they only total $100,000, so there's a profit of $20,000. So they give each apartment renter a refund, each gets a $2,000 refund come the end of the year. \n\nNote, the people running the building might choose to save some of that money rather than refunding it. For example, they might put the $20,000 into a fund for a new roof. \n\nI don't understand what about this arrangement you think would not be legal. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
||
2xwrzt | why do solid-state drives work more efficiently? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2xwrzt/eli5_why_do_solidstate_drives_work_more/ | {
"a_id": [
"cp43b58",
"cp46bb3"
],
"score": [
8,
2
],
"text": [
"Let me begin by explaining how regular hard drives work. Imagine a record player. Replace the physical grooves on the record with a magnetic charge. Now make it really really tiny and spin very very fast. This is in essence a hard drive. You have a spinning disk containing information stored as magnetic charges and you have an arm (like a record needle, but magnetic) to read and write the data.\n\nNow, onto solid-state drives. These are composed of flash memory. These function the exact same as a USB (flash) drive. Flash memory drives consist of an array of transistors to store the data bits and a small computer chip to read and write data to these transistors.\n\nA lot of the energy savings flash drives exhibit is because they don't have any moving parts, which is also why they're called \"solid-state\". Another advantage, because there are no moving parts, and therefor no physical limitations on movement speed, is that solid-state hard drives perform faster.\n\nAs a side note, hard drives aren't always spinning. If they aren't being used while you're on the computer, they will spin down after a certain amount of time, requiring them to be spun back up before reading or writing anything. Solid-state drives are always ready.",
"SSD's work similar to the way ram and other flash memory does which is that it can be randomly accessed unlike a traditional hardrive that has moving parts and has to spend time seeking the data its looking wile the platters spin this process takes way more time."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
||
7wx6z2 | why did people used to believe in witches, and why did things like 'wearing red lipstick' increase your chance of being one? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7wx6z2/eli5_why_did_people_used_to_believe_in_witches/ | {
"a_id": [
"du3umah"
],
"score": [
2
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"text": [
"Witches were women (and, little known fact, in some cases men) who practiced pagan traditions and rituals (the name stemming from the german term 'wicca'). The church saw them as heretics and opposed them and their ways. After a while they began pinning things they didn't like on witchcraft and to subjugate the masses.\n\nIt's a common misconception that people were greatly terrified and paranoid of witches in some mass hysteria. It was mostly one man named Matthew Hopkins (aka The Witchfinder General) and his men who perpetrated the witch hunts later on and he was heavily criticized and despised. It's also assumed that he knew many of the women weren't witches, or possibly didn't even believe in witches to begin with, and that he was just a sadist who enjoyed torturing and killing people."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
5ijf1p | why are tunnels round? | Why are all tunnels, whether underwater or in a mountain, round? What would happen if we made a square tunnel? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ijf1p/eli5_why_are_tunnels_round/ | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"When they're naturally formed, a stream of water or something will be evenly eroding the material around it in the round shape.\n\nArches are also stronger than having straight lines so round tunnels are more stable. I think.",
"Following a simple Google search I found: Tunnels usually have a circular cross section because the stresses around a circular opening are more evenly distributed. ... So the short answer is: they're circular because it's convenient and there is usually no significant reason to make them any other shape.\n\n_URL_0_",
"Tunnels are round because the machines that drill them are, well, drills. They work by spinning and grinding as they spin. I suppose you could drill a tunnel, and then chip out the sides to make it square, but it would be expensive and pointless.\n\n(Round tunnels are also convenient, engineering-wise, because when you line them with concrete, it forms an arch, which is a strong shape to hold back the pressure from the surrounding dirt.)",
"Square tunnels are actually quite common, but the square shape is more prone to collapse: it has points where the load is greater and the tunnel can buckle. A round tunnel avoids that problem, because the loads are more evenly distributed.\n\nSquare tunnels, therefore, are built where they are close to the surface. They're usually built by a process called \"cut and cover\", which involves digging a trench, and then simply putting a cover over it. That technique might be used for, say, [subway tunnels just below the road surface](_URL_1_). Deeper tunnels can't be built that way, so are dug or drilled, and are made round to withstand the stresses better -- because they're deep underground, there's more rock and soil on top of them.\n\nYou notice the difference on the London Underground. There are actually two parts to the London Underground: the older subsurface lines, where they go underground, have square tunnels, so [larger, \"boxier\" trains](_URL_4_) run through them; the deeper lines have [round tunnels and even round stations](_URL_0_), with [smaller, more cramped trains](_URL_2_).\n\nNear where I live, a series of train tunnels is being built. One section is built into a hillside, with the eastbound tunnel deeper than the westbound tunnel. Because the westbound tunnel could be built with the cut-and-cover method but the eastbound tunnel couldn't, [the two tunnels have different cross-sections](_URL_3_).",
"Putting it simply, the more sides a shape has, the more weak points it has.... Tunnels are round because they're least likely to collapse."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[
"https://www.quora.com/Why-do-tunnels-have-a-circular-cross-section"
],
[],
[
"http://www.ramboll.co.uk/~/media/Images/RUK/Projects/JKL/london%20underground%20deep%20tube%20programme/london-underground-270x270.jpg",
"http://www.chicago-l.org/history/[email protected]",
"http://c8.alamy.com/comp/EC2T2H/busy-victoria-tube-line-train-in-london-underground-EC2T2H.jpg",
"http://www.spessartit.de/347-Panoramaplattform-30072016-018.JPG",
"http://www.ktransit.com/transit/Europe/unitedkingdom/london/underground/Photos/lon-hr-eastlondon01.jpg"
],
[]
] |
|
64mxpk | what does the 'cosmic microwave background radiation' picture show and why is it oval-shaped? | I'm referring to this picture: _URL_0_ | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/64mxpk/eli5_what_does_the_cosmic_microwave_background/ | {
"a_id": [
"dg3fq2m",
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"score": [
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"text": [
"The Cosmic Microwave Background is radio waves that come from seemingly empty outer space, from every direction. The Big Bang theory explains it as ancient light that has been 'stretched' by the whole universe expanding.\n\nThe red and blue correspond to slight variations in the strongest frequency of the waves. The frequency is often measured as a temperature instead, because any object will emit radiation and something just a few degrees above the coldest temperature possible, called absolute zero, would emit radio waves like the cosmic microwave background.\n\nThe entire sky surrounding us, including the part below us that we don't see because the Earth is the way, can be mapped as a sphere. This then has to be unrolled to make a flat map to print out or display on a screen. There are various ways to do that unrolling, or 'projection', and the one used for that map makes it an oval.\n\nHere's a map of the Earth made using the same projection: _URL_0_",
"This is the visual representation of the map of remnant radiation left over from the big bang (or shortly thereafter.)\n\nIt is oval because it is a flat representation of what the sensors recorded from Earth looking outwards in all directions.\n\nThe areas of higher temperature correspond to areas in the universe (again, from Earth looking outwards) that have a greater density of mass.\n\nThis map shows that there is a correlation between the state of the very early universe (in terms of matter density) and the current state."
]
} | [] | [
"http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/wmap.jpg"
] | [
[
"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mollweide_projection_SW.jpg"
],
[]
] |
|
f0lu3t | what is the difference between atp and nad? | I know that ATP is a form of energy produced by the mitochondria for use by the cell
I was interested in NAD after reading this article -
_URL_0_ that talked about how when researchers gave mice a boost in NAD, it rejuvanted the mice and allowed the mice to live longer.
I know that NAD is involved in metabolism and the production of energy
What is the difference between NAD and ATP? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f0lu3t/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_atp_and_nad/ | {
"a_id": [
"fgv0es0"
],
"score": [
5
],
"text": [
"ATP is the energy molecule, which you're aware of. I don't know the full role of NAD, but it is part of the production of ATP. NAD becomes NADH when it accepts an electron, as glucose is broken down in multiple steps. Anyway, that accepted electron eventually gets placed in the Electron Transport Chain in the mitochondrial membrane which ultimately culminates with the production of ATP. \n\nHopefully someone will come along with a better answer than mine,"
]
} | [] | [
"https://khn.org/news/a-fountain-of-youth-pill-sure-if-youre-a-mouse/"
] | [
[]
] |
|
bc7ahu | how casinos opening in atlantic city destroyed atlantic city | I’m watching Action on showtime and it’s going through how casinos opening in AC killed the economy and town. Why is this economically? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bc7ahu/eli5_how_casinos_opening_in_atlantic_city/ | {
"a_id": [
"ekoct99",
"ekolxe0"
],
"score": [
5,
2
],
"text": [
"Casinos are a very high profit industry. Some people like them, and other people avoid them. The people who like them spend their money in them, making them profitable, but not helping the other businesses. The people who avoid them don't spend money in AC, helping the other businesses.\n\nThe result is a town that once had a diversified beach vacation economy was converted into one with a single-industry, gambling. This single-industry approach made AC very susceptible to additional competitors like Native American casinos, horse track casinos, or legalized sports books in several states.\n\nThe result is a less profitable casino industry, plus nothing else to employ the people of AC.",
"Atlantic City is a rich, glamorous and delightful beach town ... for one block. Any further from the beach and it is a run down, empty businesses, no jobs and barely hanging on town. \n\nAll the money is in that one block, but only the casino corporations have the money. The worker bees are just hanging on."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
|
4cwl9u | is there a way to induce hysterical strength (life-or-death adrenaline ) willfully? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4cwl9u/eli5_is_there_a_way_to_induce_hysterical_strength/ | {
"a_id": [
"d1lyr8r"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text": [
"Of you can convince yourself you're in grave danger you can activate the flight or fight system. \n\nIt's kinda hard to do but i think i can sometimes do it of i think about something that gets me worked up or scared."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
349wru | why is binary a more efficient system than decimal? | Why is 00100001 easier to process than 21? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/349wru/eli5why_is_binary_a_more_efficient_system_than/ | {
"a_id": [
"cqslti6",
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"score": [
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"text": [
"It's not more efficient. It's simpler for computers.\n\nAt their most basic level, modern computers are a large number (an unimaginably large number) of switches. Just like your light switches at home, these can be thought of as being in two states, either \"on\" or \"off\".\n\nSo because the simplest way to create the electronics for computers is a simple on/off, that is then easily represented in binary as 1 or 0.\n\nIn the past there have been electronic computers built that work on non-binary systems but they turned out to be far more complicated to build and had no significant advantage in speed or processing power.",
"Those are just two different representations of the same value, so I don't know what you mean by \"*efficient*\". However, in digital systems binary is used because building 2-state logic into circuits is easier and more reliable than trying to build n-state logic.",
"The point is that the hardware uses binary storage, a memory cell is either on (1) or off (0), for example by using an electric or magnetic charge. Making a system where the storage has more than two states is more costly and prone to error: suddenly checking whether there is a current is just so much easier than checking the magnitude of that current to determine the states.\n\nSo it is not purely a question on how they operate as /u/dancingwithcats suggests (implying a matter of choice). It is more cost-efficient."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
1dq7iu | the us cellphone carrier market... | I live in the UK and it's pretty simple and cheaper than the US market. I.e. pricing, plans and usage.
I literally don't understand the Verizon, AT & T etc etc.
Any overviews why they have their own varients. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1dq7iu/eli5_the_us_cellphone_carrier_market/ | {
"a_id": [
"c9ss02n"
],
"score": [
2
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"text": [
"copy & paste from one of my other post with some minor changes.\n\nmostly it's due to population density difference and the land mass it has to cover. tbh, not everything is a conspiracy.\n\n > Total land area: (UK) 244,820 sq km. (US) 9,161,966 sq km, about 37 times bigger than UK.\n\n > Population density: (UK) 257.23 people per sq. km in 2010. (US) 33.82 per sq. km in 2010, about 1/7 of UK.\n\nSo when you've to provide service to a country that's 37 times bigger with 1/7 the customers per sq. km, then it'll probably be more expensive without subsidies."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
ku1j2 | how do springs work? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ku1j2/eli5_how_do_springs_work/ | {
"a_id": [
"c2na19b",
"c2na19b"
],
"score": [
3,
3
],
"text": [
"Do you mean water springs or metal springs?",
"Do you mean water springs or metal springs?"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
||
1xeq9h | why i eye squint | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1xeq9h/why_i_eye_squint/ | {
"a_id": [
"cfao84s"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text": [
"When you squint, you are limiting the amount of light entering your eye which allows you to focus on specific objects. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
81q3sm | why are subreddits like r/shoplifting and r/stealing allowed? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/81q3sm/eli5_why_are_subreddits_like_rshoplifting_and/ | {
"a_id": [
"dv4b3el",
"dv4bz1u"
],
"score": [
3,
2
],
"text": [
"Freedom of speech, coupled to both the fact that \"thought crime\" (i.e thinking about stealing) aren't easily punishable and the fact that every thing you say on the internet is satyre and shouldn't be taken literally.",
"The operators of reddit are FAR from responsible when it comes to this kind of stuff, hence /r/jailbait, /r/lolicon and /r/revengeporn were around for years until advertisers threatened to remove their ads from the site if they didn't delete them. Which is something they should have done well before advertisers got involved. Basically, as polished and popular as this site is, it's still a fairly janky HUB for niche topics, and overseen by fairly relaxed people - hence there's only a small handful of site mods. It comes with the bad such as those subreddits existing, but honestly I'd prefer it stay how it is. If they delete every sub deemed controversial, all that would remain would be random gifs and videogame discussions"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
||
4knv7f | why is the european union often accused of being undemocratic? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4knv7f/eli5why_is_the_european_union_often_accused_of/ | {
"a_id": [
"d3gcoif",
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"text": [
"Because many of the decisions are made by EU commissioners who are appointed, with many never having stood for any kind of elected office before. Other decisions are made by votes of MEPs who are elected. However on some votes a country may veto a decision, such as France vetoing the decision of MEPs not to move the parliament every month for 4 days to France.",
"Because legislation (EU-wide law) can only be put forward by the [European Commission](_URL_0_).\n\nThis is a 28-member executive cabinet formed of representatives from each of the EU member states. It is undemocratic in that these representatives are not directly elected by citizens, but rather chosen by the Commission President. \n\nHowever, the Commission President is chosen the European Council (formed of the heads of state) and the President's choices are voted on by the European Parliament (elected MEPs), so it is not entirely divorced from democratic government. The Commission is intended to be an a-political cabinet that acts in the interest of Europe as a whole, so this selection method is a means to implement that.",
"It's a buzz phrase developed by the anti-Eu people mostly. That's not to say that the EU shouldn't be reformed to be more democratic just that people who are against the EU exaggerate. The EU has elected members of parliament that can vote for or against laws introduced to the European Parliament. The European Commision is made up of representatives of all countries and are approved by a vote of elected MEPs. \n\nQuite frankly many of the people who criticise the democracy of the EU probably don't vote in the elections as in the uk for example we get turnouts in the 30 percent range. \n\n\nThe EU is also a bureaucratic nightmare as tonnes of countries have opt outs and opt ins of so many different laws. "
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4kgi0r | why do dogs roll around in things that smell weird? | My dog will walk around the yard sniffing things then randomly stop to roll around. After I cut the grass today he kept rolling in the grass clippings He also rolls around when he's really happy (like when he has a favorite toy.) Why do they do that? Or is my dog extra weird? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4kgi0r/eli5_why_do_dogs_roll_around_in_things_that_smell/ | {
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"Your dog is trying to mask his scent. This makes it easier to sneak up on prey and surprise it so he wouldn't have to chase it down."
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5lgnew | the idea of space as a vacuum. | Cannot. Understand. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5lgnew/eli5the_idea_of_space_as_a_vacuum/ | {
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"It is called that because space has nearly no atmosphere and extremely low pressure. Liquids and gasses always will flow from an area of high pressure to areas with lower pressure while no other forces hold them in place, this is how a vacuum works, by creating a low pressure system that pulls air from higher pressure systems around it until equilibrium is achieved. Space is so large and such low pressure that equilibrium can't be achieved and thus is a constant vacuum.",
"There is no matter there, just empty space. We call that a vacuum, but the word \"void\" conveys the same concept if that works better for you.\n\nI understand it can be hard to imagine space with nothing in it. If it's any consolation, ancient and medieval philosophers also found it perplexing and spent a good deal of ink debating whether the concept of a vacuum even made sense, and if it did whether it could actually exist. That debate ended pretty quick when people started creating vacuums with mercury columns.\n\n(Pedant note: yes, yes, space isn't really empty - there are very sparse particles of dust, gas, photons, etc. But this is the idea of space as a vacuum that we're talking about, and considering it as a perfect vacuum works perfectly well in most cases.)",
"Just turn it around.\n\nHaving *air* around you isn't normal. The pressure inside you compensates the pressure outside you. That layer of air is tiny compared to the ball of rock you're on. As you go up and up, it *rapidly* gets thinner until there is nothing but a few stranded atoms.\n\nTo you, this air is vital. To someone else, that air is poison. To someone, the pressure around you would crush them like a tin can on Venus.\n\nThe air around you **is not normal**."
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5cb5g9 | how is it that something conceptual can make you feel something physical? ie: butterflies at something romantic, or feeling sick at the realisation of a mistake. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5cb5g9/eli5_how_is_it_that_something_conceptual_can_make/ | {
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"The short answer is, the same way thinking to move your arm causes something physical to happen: your arm moving.\n\nYour brain is connected to your body by nerves and also produces hormones. When you're in love or very excited, the brain triggers the production of hormones that, as a side effect, make you feel butterflies in your stomach. ",
"We have psychological responses that trigger hormones to be released when we experience things like embarrassment or attraction, but the physical things we feel, like butterflies in our stomach, are from our body shifting gears (thanks to those hormones) into \"survival mode\". That feeling of butterflies, for instance, is actually your digestive system shutting down. That's one reason why people who experience prolonged periods of anxiety in the form of butterflies/stomach cramps will often end up putting on weight. They eat, sometimes no matter the quantity, and their body doesn't process the food like normal but, instead, does what it can to store the calories as fat.\n\nThe theory is that it's all part of our inherited instincts from our ancestors who lived in the wild. \"Stress\" back then was usually a life or death situation. We get things like goosebumps which makes our hair stand up just like cats get when they feel threatened. We still react similarly in terms of our physical responses because of our psychological makeup, regardless of the actual life or death implications. We don't all feel the same in identical situations, however, because—to put it simply—some people are naturally \"wired\" differently and/or they've been conditioned/trained to react differently."
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fdw4bz | how does this sculpture work? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fdw4bz/eli5_how_does_this_sculpture_work/ | {
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"It works by being a lightweight net that is physically attached to different tethering spots by line that is difficult to see.\n\nIt is made of bits of mylar (the silver balloon stuff) attached to a big net.\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_"
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24d7f2 | linear (in)dependence in linear algebra | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/24d7f2/eli5_linear_independence_in_linear_algebra/ | {
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"Linear independence of a set of vectors essentially means that you cannot create one by adding the others.\n\nAs a simple example, the \"unit vectors,\" or the vectors that correspond to the 3 coordinate directions, are [1,0,0], [0,1,0], and [0,0,1]. These three vectors themselves are linearly independent since I cannot add vectors along the x axis with vectors along the y axis and expect to end up with a vector along the z axis.\n\nthe vector [2,-1,3], however, is not linearly independent from the cartesian \"basis\" vectors (so called because they are the \"basis\" of the cartesian coordinate system). We can say:\n\n2\\*[1,0,0]+(-1)\\*[0,1,0]+3\\*[0,0,1] = [2,-1,3] so clearly these four vectors are not linearly independent. In fact, **no** cartesian vector is linearly independent from the basis vectors! The very existence of the coordinate system is based on the fact that we can \"point\" to anywhere in space with nothing more than the basis vectors."
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7th5r2 | how do apps such as hq trivia earn profit from giving away money everyday? where are they getting this money from? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7th5r2/eli5_how_do_apps_such_as_hq_trivia_earn_profit/ | {
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"Their business plan is probably to raise a large following before they begin putting ads in their broadcasts. Most startups get money from angel investors. Ten thousand a day is not a lot considering most Internet startups get millions.",
"They don't make ANY money... yet. HQ is run by the same people that founded Vine. They're burning through venture capital money right now in an attempt to get as many users as possible. This is similar to the business model used by Venmo, by the way.\n\nOnce they have a ton of users, they'll figure out a way to make money off of them. But they're not spending money that quickly, and they're getting tons of users. Eventually, they'll start running ads, like other internet companies."
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d6f01z | what exactly is happening to our bodies when we’re laying in the sun and feel it’s heat? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d6f01z/eli5_what_exactly_is_happening_to_our_bodies_when/ | {
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"The nerves in our skin that detect warmth are called thermoreceptors (we have separate ones for hot and cold). The infrared radiation from the sun is heat. It makes our skin warm. The thermoreceptors in our skin send signals to our brain that say \"it's warm\" so our brain interprets that sensation as warmth.",
"Radiation (light, heat, x-rays etc.) travel as little packets of energy, called photons.\n\nWhen these packets of energy collide with your body, proteins can detect them. For example, in your eye proteins can detect light packets. They do this with the help of a pigment that changes shape in light.\n\nOther proteins detect heat packets, but how exactly this happens is still being studied.\n\nOnce the protein \"knows\" there's a packet, it sends signals using changes in ion concentrations (like potassium and calcium) to transmit the information to your brain."
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cdn5qm | ; what is the mbti personality test, and does it hold any significant scientific validity? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cdn5qm/eli5_what_is_the_mbti_personality_test_and_does/ | {
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"It holds absolutely 0 scientific validity, yet everyone still refers to it for some reason. It was not developed using any kind of scientific study, it was just how one woman viewed people.",
"MBTI is the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Index. It was inspired by the work of Carl Jung, who hypothesized that one reason some of his friends struggled to get along was because they had opposite personality traits. \n\nIt doesn’t have any scientific validity, because it’s self-reported and not predictive. It can be helpful for understanding interpersonal conflict, but it’s not a tool for serious psychological analysis.",
"MBTI was invented by Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers, both amature authors with no qualifications in any scientific fields, based on personal experience with little research. \nAs a result, when subjected to actual scientific study, it was found that the thing didn't measure what it was supposed to measure, it was unreliable as hell depending on a long list of what the subject was feeling/doing on that particular day, and it didn't even attempt to measure some REALLY important things ( like level of neuroticism). \n**TL:DR its creation was on roughly the same level as one of those online \"What would be your Harry Potter Hogwarts House?\" tests, and it's about as valid/useful.**"
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663woq | why are violent crimes more present in states or cities with tough gun control laws? | I keep hearing this. Is this even true? This has never made sense to me. HOW? and please... pretend I'm five, because I keep trying to google it and I end up becoming more confused and 10 pages deep in a gun regulation debate and thats not what I want... I'm just trying to understand. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/663woq/eli5why_are_violent_crimes_more_present_in_states/ | {
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"You may have cause and effect backward. It makes sense to me that states with more gun crime would have more public support for gun control laws.",
"It's not, really. One example frequently used is Chicago, where people cite strict gun laws and the high number of murders. The issue with that claim is while Chicago's murder count *is* high, it's also the third largest city in the nation. When you adjust for population Chicago's murder rate is actually lower than more than a dozen other major cities.\n\n/u/StupidLemonEater also has a good point. Using Chicago as an example again, long before gun control became such a heated debate Chicago had a long history of gang related violence and organized crime. It's not like they passed strict gun laws and a peaceful city became a violent wasteland. There was violence to begin with and gun laws were an attempt to curb it.",
"There's no simple answer because it's a very contentious subject. Instead, I'll give you the argument from each camp:\n\n* Anti-Gun-Control Camp: The strict laws on gun control only affect law-abiding citizens, as criminals can still easily acquire them through illegal channels. As such, criminals face less opposition from legally armed citizens and can get away with more violent crime. \n* Pro-gun-control Camp: The statistic is misleading in that it confuses cause and effect. Places with lots of violent crime are more likely to enact stricter gun control laws. While these laws certainly help, they aren't enough to completely remove it, hence why there is still more violent crime there. It's the same reason you'd expect a city with a larger police force to have more violent crime: there's more violent crime, so you need more police. ",
"It's due to there being less random people who are able to oppose crime. If you were to rob a bank, which one would you rather rob, the one with firearms banned, or the one where there's a good chance someone has a gun and will take you out."
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5e1jck | with most countries so far in debt, how does china have all this money to loan other countries like the u.s. and u.k. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5e1jck/eli5_with_most_countries_so_far_in_debt_how_does/ | {
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"That's not how sovereign debt works.\n\nSovereign debt exists as bonds. A country offers bonds on the market, and other countries buy them as investments. A bond is basically a contract between the bond issuer (usually a government) and the bond holder (whoever buys it) that says \"The issuer agrees to pay the holder the value of this bond plus X% interest on [DATE].\" US Treasury Bonds are seen as a **very** safe investment because the US **always** pays when and what it says it will pay. This means that the US can offer incredibly low interest rates on its bonds.\n\nA US T-bond is safer than a bank account, safer than gold, hell it's safer than burying your money in the yard. If you have a whole bunch of money and you want to keep it safe for a decade or so, you can't do better than buying US bonds.",
"EDIT: u/belbivdevoe has corrected me about how social security (and the US government) works. Listen to him because I am not an expert.\n\nSo lots of government money is invested. For instance, in the US the social security fund is actually just a big pile of money that gets money in and pays out month to month. They have more than they need at any given time, so they invest that money. That's how the fund can keep up with inflation (somewhat) and how it can grow enough to theoretically keep from running out of money.\n\nExample: The US government gets $1 a month from social security taxes paid in, and it pays out $1.25 in benefits to people drawing social security (sometimes it's even, sometimes it's reversed, and sometimes the difference is a lot bigger, just an example). In total though, it has $100 in the bank. By investing that money you can earn interest (just like a person can invest money and earn interest) and that's how they have enough money to pay $.25 a month more than they take in (because the interest is $.25 or more every month)\n\nThat's how a government can 'own' lots of debt(bonds) from another country but they don't just have like, a big pile of money that they only use to invest. It's all money they are using for something, just not right now. This money is constantly being sold and bought as needed, and China owning US debt (bonds) is the same principle.\n\nNow, this analogy somewhat explains how governments own debt from other countries, and it sort of explains how social security works, but it's all way more complicated so don't take this as gospel, just an example.",
"It doesn't. China holds $1.185 trillion in U.S. \"debt\" (actually treasury bonds). That's a lot of money. We owe $19 trillion in total. That's a lot more. Why does China own all these treasury bonds? Because they are the safest investment in the world. ",
"Because the US has a big trade deficit with China, there's a lot more US dollars flowing into China than out. China's central bank buys the excess USD. If they didn't, the value of the dollar relative to the Yuan would drop due to the excess supply making Chinese exports relatively more expensive to the US, while simultaneously making American products cheaper in China. \n\nThey want to do something with all those extra dollars, but not put them at significant risk, so they buy US treasury securities, which are sold and traded in USD. \n\nIt's not as if China has a big budget surplus every year and is investing the money. China actually has its own debt equivalent to about US$4 trillion, and much more when you consider the corporate debt of state-owned companies. ",
"There are really several factors at work which allow for the situation to exist. \n\n1. China is a major manufacturing hub, meaning their exports generally far outweigh their imports (positive trade balance). \n\n2. The US and EU while have more imports coming in then exports going out to china (trade deficit). \n\n3. When US companies by goods from Chinese companies they use US dollars. This means that there are a lot of US dollars in China which a rent particularly useful to Chinese companies. This is because Chinese companies import goods from Australia and other mineral rich countries and therefore don't use US dollars for these transactions. \n\n4. The lower the value of your currency the easier it is to export (you can be more globally competitive). Corollary to that, a higher currency value makes importing easier but exporting harder. As such the Chinese government wants China's currency to remain low in value. However the demand for their currency and hence ist value has been increasing over time as more people seek to do business with them. \n\n5. In order to solve both these problems the Chinese government prints money (similar to the US Quantitative Easing). Printing money increases the amount (supply) of money hence decreasing its value (inflation) allowing china to export more competitively. \n\n6. The Chinese government then uses all the money they have printed to buy US dollars back from the Chinese companies. This decreases supply of US dollars globally raising the value of US dollars. This means the US can afford to buy more stuff from China. \n\n7. At this point the Chinese government is stuck with billions if not trillions of US dollars. With such large quantities of money, it becomes very difficult to invest in the ways individuals or even companies do. Instead the government looks for a place they can dump their money. Normally this is done by buying US treasury bonds (US debt). While treasury bonds pay out very low interest (far lower than the rate of inflation) meaning china actually loses money, they an considered and incredibly safe investment which is what the Chinese government really cares about. \n\nTLDR: Trade between two countries will naturally tend towards an equilibrium by adjusting the value of the two counties currencies. China actively intervene a in this system to keep the able UFO their currency low and yeh value of the US dollar high allowing them to sell more stuff to the US and Europe. ",
"That's because the money itself is loaned into existence. It's mathematically impossible to pay off the US national debt, there aren't enough dollars in the entire world. I encourage you to look up how the federal reserve creates money on YouTube, it's quite jarring. \n\nWhy is this post controversial? It's factual and answers the guys question in a good \"5 year old\" answer.",
"I see others answering the direct question, but the title here seems to misunderstand both how national debts and \"loans\" work. Yes, most countries have a lot of debt. But they also have massive assets, which is why they take on the debt in the first place. \n\nThe U.S. and U.K. aren't *individuals* who have debt like a person does to somebody outside, and China isn't like a bank loaning them money. Most of the U.S. *government* debt is owned by Americans. \n\nThink of it this way. When you, as an individual, want to increase your earning potential you borrow money to get a better education or training, sometimes taking on massive debt to do so. Why would you do that? Well, because the earning potential out the other side is worth far more than the debt. Your monthly income increase is *greater* than the monthly cost of the student loan, so it's a net value for you to do so. There is simply a delay between the time you take on the debt and the time you see the increased value. Your breakeven will be years after you graduate, but over the long term it is a good investment for you to make.\n\nNow suppose you live in a house where every year another person starts school in the same way. Every year the *household* takes on more debt to fund the education of the next person going to school, but the household *income* continually increases faster than the cost of the debt by the people who have already graduated.\n\nThat household debt and income are analogous to the government debt and Gross Domestic Product (GDP). As long as the GDP grows faster than the cost of the debt, it is a net value to go deeper into debt because it also makes you go \"deeper\" into a net prosperity. Or, mostly simply, if you could borrow money at 1% interest for an investment that pays off 10% interest, you are best to borrow as much money as you can and only ever pay the minimal interest.\n\nThe question then is who does the government borrow money from? Well, that's more complicated, but the part that involves China is perhaps best explained by describing bonds.\n\nLet's go back to the household. Instead of going to a bank, imagine that the manager of the household instead puts out an add on Craigslist telling everybody what it's doing as far as educating the household. It might say, \"We are investing in our household members' education and they are increasing their incomes on average by 10%. To fund next year's cohort, we'd like to offer everybody a piece of that 10%. If you loan us your money, we'll pay you pay everything you've lent us at 1%. That might seem low, but we have so much income now and are so stable for so long that there is almost zero chance that we'll default on paying you back.\"\n\nSomebody reading Craigslist might look at their investment options and see this as a really safe investment. It's low paying, but it's pretty much guaranteed, unlike the stock market which goes up and down a lot.\n\nMany of those people reading Craigslist might actually live in that household, and invest their own money in the household education fund. Some investors won't live in the household. Some of them might even live in China.\n\nThat's essentially what the government does; it creates bonds that essentially anybody can buy. Buying a bond is, essentially, loaning the government money. When we talk about government debt, that largely includes debt to ordinary people who bought government bonds. Most of those people live in the U.S. Many of them aren't individuals but are investment organizations like pensions. Some of those are individuals and organizations in other countries, including China. Some of the other buyers are other governments, including departments of the Chinese government.\n\nThat's why debt isn't inherently bad (if wisely spent on things that grow the economy), and why most of it is owed to Americans and people and organizations throughout the world.\n",
"China doesn't actually own some huge quantity, relatively speaking, of US Treasuries. Last I checked it was something like 4% of the total.\n\nOur biggest creditor is ourselves, basically. Like $5.3T is owned by Social Security, another $5.1T owned by normal American individuals and corporations, and maybe $2.5T owned by the Federal Reserve.\n\nIf China suddenly dumped every UST security on the market it would hurt us, but it would *devastate* them. \n\n",
" > ELI5: With most countries so far in debt, how does China have all this money to loan other countries like the U.S. and U.K.\n\nWell, every time there's a debt, there has to be a corresponding creditor.\n\nHaving many countries with large debts would make it easier to maintain [a sovereign wealth fund for others](_URL_0_)."
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cc6w7e | why do unused tabs drain cpu power | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cc6w7e/eli5_why_do_unused_tabs_drain_cpu_power/ | {
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"They may be unused, but they’re probably running a bunch of JavaScript crap on the page. Things like banner ads rotations or animations. All those burn cpu cycles whether the page is the focus or not.",
"Unused, dosen't necessarily mean unused. A tab you're not using might have music from youtube playing in the background. \n\nAn unused tab would also have a lot of code running in the background automatically for that very same reason, - that people might use websites in the background.\n\nTheoretically a browser could perhaps pause the unused tabs processs so it didn't use any CPU cycles / power. But why would they when it is so convenient not to.",
"On a separate note, you can use Chrome flags (if you're using Chrome of course) to enable only the tab you're working on and put the rest on sleep mode until you go back to them."
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1w4ejk | currently, what are the two sides of the net neutrality debates? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1w4ejk/eli5_currently_what_are_the_two_sides_of_the_net/ | {
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"This is a bit complex and hard to put in ELI5 terms.\n\n(a) many people who consume content online believe that all the content they consume should be treated the same by the ISP, whose role is limited to just *transporting* things that the consumer are asking for from the source to the consumer.\n\n(b) a lot of ISPs use 'shared bandwidth' which means that, for example, everyone in a given apartment building is sharing a single pipeline ... so there's a limit on the amount of content which can be provided in total. this can create situations where nobody is able to get everything they want from the ISP, because too many people are trying to get too many things at the same time.\n\n(c) building bigger pipes is extremely expensive.\n\n(d) some content consumes more 'space' than other content. movies consume a lot; email consumes very little.\n\n(e) many ISPs believe that if they are able to charge content providers for transporting large content, this will (1) somewhat reduce demand for the large content, (2) generate money that can be used to build bigger pipes, and (3) allow them to prioritize content so that the things customers really want get through faster and more reliably, while things that are less important to customers are subject to delays.\n\n(f) some content providers are really in favor of this as they think it will enhance the experience of their customers. other content providers are really opposed to this as they think it will raise their costs and put them out of business.\n\n(g) many customers are concerned about this because they think that ISPs will prioritize content that makes business sense for the ISP. For example, a lot of people get their internet through cable companies, and it's plausible that those companies will choose not to route, or to route only at high cost, netflix and other streaming sites (because they compete with cable). Similarly, it's not hard to imagine a branding deal between time warner cable where suddenly coca-cola's website is inaccessible because time warner has agreed to an exclusive deal with pepsi.\n\n(h) many activists and economists are concerned that if this happens, *new internet content companies* will have a hard time forming and competing because they won't be able to pay the ISPs what is necessary to get their data routed.\n"
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1gsot0 | the volatility of gas prices | In the past two weeks where I live, gas prices have gone up to $4.26/gallon and is now back down to $3.64/gallon. I know that sometimes oil companies capitalize on the collective fear after a terrorist attack or something similar, but in this instance there wasn't any huge news story like that.
What makes the price go up and down like that and what makes it seem so random and unpredictable? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1gsot0/eli5_the_volatility_of_gas_prices/ | {
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"The reason the price of gas is so volatile is that there is no ONE reason that the price fluctuates; oil is a globally traded commodity that is used for pretty much ever facet of life. I'll try and list them, but I'll probably leave something out.\n\nFirst, and probably the most important, is the global nature of the oil trade. Every country in the world needs oil, and only a few countries have the capacity to produce a significant amount of \"sweet\" crude, or the oil that is most easily converted into usable materials. Many of these countries are in unstable parts of the world or are controlled by unstable governments. This means two important things. First is that instability in a country can affect a large percentage of the oil market. A riot in Saudi Arabia or Russia can affect both the capacity and the willingness of nations to export. Secondly, because many nations own their oil reserves, there is less market control over the spread of oil. If a nation decides that it is unhappy about its revenue, or is facing popular pressure, it can change its prices on a whim. (This is also the reason that domestic drilling has such a small effect on the price at the pump. It doesn't increase the global supply enough to have a price change; it just changes where that oil comes from).\n\nSecondly is speculation. The price you pay at the pump isn't the price that the oil company paid to produce the gas (plus profits) but rather what they expect to have to pay in the future. A crisis around the world can make a price in the real cost of crude oil higher, and that uncertainty translates to a need to cover future costs by charging more for the final product.\n\nThird, manufacturing and refining can be affected by natural disasters. Hurricanes have been known to take out offshore oil drills, but can also take out refining capacity. Regardless of how much oil is produced, the relatively low refining capacity means that can be supplied to the market at any given time.\n\nTL;DR Supply and demand affect prices, and speculation means that effect is felt very quickly"
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2bs92m | how do we not get sick from using manure as fertilizer? | Just curious how this is possible. How does this not cause sickness, but every few years theres an outbreak of something like E. coli on spinach? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2bs92m/eli5_how_do_we_not_get_sick_from_using_manure_as/ | {
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"There's two filters on manure before it typically gets into mass-produced food.\n\nOne is the fact that they use \"rotted\" manure which is essentially a rest that causes a further breakdown of the plants and animals that the manure's source ate. Often this rotting process takes place at very high temperatures because the same types of micro-organisms that create compost will feast on it and break it down, releasing lots of heat, and cooking the e. coli. This breaking-down process frees up nutrients for the plants it's spread around.\n\nThe second, though, is more important: the plant. Plants are exceptional filters, taking water from their roots and gasses from the air to build themselves up. So any surviving e.coli in the manured soil don't get *into* the plant at all, and it's e.coli free.\n\nSo why the e.coli spinach outbreaks? It's on the surface of the leaves, not in the plant, and improperly washed spinach will still have it on the leaves. Have a free-range chicken or pig farm next to your spinach patch and there's a good chance some e.coli will find its way onto the leaves.",
"Manure should be composted before use, you don't want to fertilize with raw fecal matter for this very reason. A proper compost will generate heat to kill harmful bacteria. This is particularly important in a home garden or small organic farm, because the produce is less likely to be thoroughly cleaned before consumption. If I get a tomato from my backyard, I'll rinse it off and maybe use a vegetable brush to scrub off the dirt, but that's it. If you are unsure about the source of your produce, clean it well before eating. I typically use vinegar to wash questionable produce, but I do not have any scientific sources to back up the effectiveness of that practice. "
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30yz12 | what determines nationality? why and when did the idea that our nationality is determined by where we are born start and is it internationally recognized? |
If I'm American and my child is born in Japan, Canada, Saudi Arabia my understanding is my child is either or can later chose to be a citizen of that country.
If I'm American and my husband/partner is Nigerian and the baby is born in China but raised in Thailand where is that child considered a resident?
These kinds of situations aren't so rare any more. I'm curious what constitutes nationality, when this definition started to gain acceptance, and is it universally recognized?
| explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/30yz12/eli5what_determines_nationality_why_and_when_did/ | {
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"Local laws will vary, but generally place of birth and nationality of the parents come into play. Many countries allow multiple citizenships, so it's possible to claim based on more than one of those factors. I don't know local laws well enough in your hypothetical, but I'm fairly confident that your child could claim citizenship of the US and China, probably also Nigeria, but probably not Thailand without some kind of naturalization process. I don't know if the US, China and Nigeria would accept them claiming more than one of those, although I'm almost certain the US would. As for residence, that would be Thailand while they're getting raised there. ",
"That depends on each country's Constitution. There are, basically, two kinds of nationality criteria: *jus sanguinis* and *jus solium*. The *jus sanguinis* (right of the blood) criterion is often adopted by countries which experienced exodus in the past (from the \"old world\" to the \"new world\"), basically, european coutries, which means the child inherits the nationality of his father and mother. The *jus solium* (right of the land) criterion is adopted by countries who wanted to make their population grows (like the newfound countries in America) and it means that someone who is born in the territory of the country is a national. Since each country has its own rule, it may conduce to a situation where someone can be stateless (from the german, *heimatlos*) or has two nationalities. Because of that, some international conventions, such as the American Convention for Human Rights, begins to uniformize the rules in order to avoid the stateless situation. It doesn't mean that each country only adopts one criterion: usually, there's most of a criterion, but some influence of the other. That's the original nationality.\nBesides that, each country has its own rule for the derivated nationality. For instance, if you live in Brazil continually for fifteen years you may require Brazilian nationality. There's no universal rule for that.",
"According to the Laws of the US you are automatically a US citizen if one parent is a US citizen at the time of your birth, or if you are born on US soil. As for your Japan/Canada/Saudia Arabia scenario your child has dual citizenship I believe.(I have a friend who was born in Canada to American parents who has dual citizenship). \n\nAs for asking about where you raise your child. They have residency where they live and only where they currently live, that is different from their nationality. Their nationality if you are American is American, if Nigeria also has automatic citizenship based on a parent being a citizen then your child would also be Nigerian, and if China grants citizenship based on being born in the country then your child could also have that. \n\nThere is no universal system, each country determines their own laws. ",
"National citizenship being based on ace of birth started with the united states and other colonial settlements who attained independence because the people becoming independent were not native, and it helped to avoid nationalist problems with different ethnicities.\n\nIt became prevalent Europe after ww2 primarily because majority of the wars there leading to the huge conflict involved nationalism, but also because it worked so well economically for the united states.\n\nSome countries in Africa and Asia are drawn based on colonial borders and thus may have multiple native ethnic groups or tribes living there and national borders may run right through tribal land, so to avoid problems with nationality they take stances based on birthplace as well.\n\nSome countries base citizenship on ethnicity. Japan, north Korea, China, and many others are this way. Sometimes even heritage doesn't matter. For example there are millions of refugees from Bhutan of Nepalese descent, who have been in Bhutan for many generations, but the monarchy is nationalistic and did not recognize them as citizens and forced them out of Bhutan. \n\nSome African governments do similar things, where a tribe is a small minority and has conflict with a majority tribe and so the government there will not recognize them as citizens. \n\nBut citizenship by place of birth is nowhere near universal.",
"The legal basis behind sovereignity and statehood came about in the aftermath of the 30 Year's War and the 1648 peace treaty that ended it. Yes it's universally recognized because citizenship has to be legally determined somehow"
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284f81 | what's wrong with the big pharmaceutical industry? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/284f81/eli5_whats_wrong_with_the_big_pharmaceutical/ | {
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"Many people believe that \"big pharma\" is evil because when you can control the keys to health, there is a lot of room for exploitation. Suppose you were dying and you could only get the cure from me. I could squeeze every dime out of you that I can, or let you die if you can't pay. In reality, this issue is more to do with the way capitalism works than the industry specifically.\n\nAlternatively, many people think that their cures don't actually work but they just convince you that they do and exert financial and political power over you to force you to buy them. This is claimed by the alt medicine crowd primarily as an explanation for why homeopathy, reflexology, and the like (read: magic) aren't widely accepted (it's big pharma keeping us down man!). But on that point, I defer to the great Tim Minchin: \"Do you know what they call *alternative medicine* that's been proved to work? \n.\n.\n.\nMedicine.\"",
"I do notice another aspect of this industry in my travels.\n\nThey love to preach that the drugs they sell in non-western countries might be sub-standard... But they do still sell them here. They just don't want you to come here and buy your medicine at a lower price.",
"I was a clinical scientist in big pharma for years. I ran phase III human trials. It takes on average, testing of 100,000 new compounds to bring one to market. Of those 100,000, only 13 will make it to toxicology testing. 12 will fail. The expense is mind-boggling for all of this. On top of the drug development, the FDA has far more stringent standards than almost any other country.\n\nOn top of this is the desperate need to make money. Big pharma had to compete with Apple, Ford, GE for your investment dollar. Mostly it's not individual buyers, but mutual funds. Big pharma is owned by the retirement plans of the USA.\n\nBecause of the expense of research and the need to compete on the stock market, drugs are overpriced. (Some high tech drugs really DO cost a small fortune to produce) It's not because the companies are any more greedy than any other big business, they are owned by the American populace, but people like to create phantom \"evil owners\" and \"evil employees\" that work there."
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cz4inh | electrical current and grounding | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cz4inh/eli5_electrical_current_and_grounding/ | {
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"Birds have higher resistance than the cable they are sitting on, so electrons take the easier path.\n\nIf the bird had one leg between the cable and the ground, it becomes the easiest path for electrons to move and thus the bird becomes cooked.",
"Electrons move if there is is electric potential difference ie a voltage difference. The bird that sit on the power line on one foot will have the same electric potential as the wire so there will be not current.\n\nA bird that have two feet on the wire will have some current trough the legs but they are in parallell with a wire that is a lot better conductor ie have lower resistance. The result is that a negligible current passes trough the bird. The voltage difference between the feet will be less then regular 1.5V battery have so the current is lower then go trough you when you touch both ends. \n\nYou get a high current trough a object when it is connected to another part with a different electric potential line the ground or another phase on the power line.",
"Sometimes you’ll see birds hover over powerlines before they land, I was told this was to try match the potential voltage.\nI’ve had to clear dead birds that have touched their wings between phases on power lines.\nIf the voltage is high enough there would get a big enough touch potential between both feet, and they would receive a shock or electrocution (death).",
"Birds do not have enough capacitance, the ground has a huge amount of capacitance. Electrical charges are always trying to equalize themselves, just like how hot air mixes with cool air. When a bird touches a bare electrical while, its electrical potential immediately changes to that of the wire. Since the bird contains very little capacitance, this does not result in an electrical shock as the amount of electricity that entered the bird is extremely small (Capacitance of a bird is likely less than 10 picofarads).\n\nIf the bird was carrying a wire that is attached to something else that has a different electrical potential (Such as earth, or another power line), then the current flowing through the bird will be significant and it will be electrocuted. This is not because the bird itself has a high capacitance, but because it is in the path of something that is.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nImagine it like water flow. If you fill up a water bottle, water will cease to flow. The bird is the water bottle. If you drill a hole in that water bottle and attach a hose to it, water will flow through the water bottle and through the hose. This is the same reason why lights do not use electricity when turned off. There is no path to ground, so there is no flow."
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72q9ar | if rockets use controlled explosions to propel forward, why can’t we use a nuclear reaction to launch/fly our rockets? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/72q9ar/eli5_if_rockets_use_controlled_explosions_to/ | {
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"We have a plan to do it, but its not environmentally friendly enough to use on earth, and lifting nuclear bombs into space to use as fuel isnt fuel efficient. If you are more interested though look up Project Orion. ",
"That has been seriously proposed and investigated.\n\n**_URL_0_\n\nIn theory it would be a way to get enormous loads into orbits, in practice it would be a way to make a whole lot of people very angry because you were setting of nukes. irradiating your launch pad the atmosphere and risking distributing your \"rocket fuel\" across the local landscape if something goes wrong.\n\nPolitically and environmentally this simply would not work in practice. The physics are okay though.",
"_URL_0_\n\nI think this is the wikipedia article you're looking for.\n\nThere have been plenty of tests for a variety of nuclear propulsion drives. There are essentially three types.\n\nNuclear Electric - You have a small reactor or nuclear battery and use the electricity generated from it to power some form of propulsion that relies on electricity, like ion thrusters. Unfortunately, nuclear reactors are quite heavy compared to solar panels, and ion thrusters are so slow they're not very practical for manned spaceflight. Nuclear Electric propulsion may have a future someday on a deep space probe that's too far out to rely on solar, but as far as I know nothing uses it today.\n\nNuclear Thermal - Basically, you take a nuclear reactor and pump hydrogen into it. The hydrogen heats up, you let it shoot out the back, propelling your rocket forwards. It's kind of like you just spring a leak in the reactor's cooling system. Nuclear Thermal Rockets have real promise for providing very efficient thrust, and there have been several projects in the past to experiment or develop them, including a couple that are currently ongoing. But they have problems.\n\nDue to weight concerns, shielding for the reactor would have to be kept to a minimum. Most designs provide only for a shield dividing the crew from the reactor, meaning everything around the spacecraft would be bombarded with a lot of radiation. The exhaust is also radioactive. That's less of a problem if you only use it on an upper stage and rely on a normal chemical rocket to get you to space, but that's kind of putting the cart before the horse. They're also a pain to test, since you have to collect the exhaust or give cancer to your neighbors.\n\nYou also have the shared problem with all of these designs- even proven rocket systems fail on a fairly regular basis. If you have enough material for a reactor go up in a high altitude explosion, you're going to be raining material down on a very large area. Even if it's over the ocean, you'll contaminate the food chain. It'd potentially be worse than Chernobyl.\n\nAs an aside, I'd also recommend reading about project pluto. It was a nuclear jet engine on an aircraft, not a nuclear rocket on a spacecraft, but it used a pretty similar principle- it just heated intake air rather than hydrogen fuel. It would have been a nuclear bomber that could fly practically forever, and after dropping its bombs could have spent weeks flying at low altitude to kill more people with sonic booms and radioactive exhaust.\n\nNuclear Pulse - This is the fun one. Basically, nuclear pulse engines are just shooting a nuclear bomb out the back, immediately setting it off, and riding the force of the explosion. They're utterly bonkers. They should be very efficient space propulsion, but they have added political problems. For some reason, launching a huge gun loaded with a magazine of dozens of nuclear bombs into space and having it orbit over everybody's heads doesn't make other countries happy.",
"So there's 3 options here: 1 is the \"nuclear thermal engine\" which is basically exactly what you've said. 2 is even madder, it's called an \"Orion Drive\" and it basically consists of having a huge plate on the back of your rocket and then dropping nuclear bombs behind you which go off, pushing against the plate. And 3, perhaps the maddest of all, a nuclear gun where you're the bullet. \n\nIn all cases there's no insurmountable challenge but there are significant engineering ones, notably around building a spaceship strong enough. NASA got pretty close on the nuclear thermal engine, the rest are more conceptual.\n\nThe two bigger issues are 1) fallout and radiation and its effect on planet earth meaning 3 is ruled out and 1 and 2 are only really viable options if taken as far as orbit conventionally and 2) the fact that at the moment conventional propellants work just fine for everything we might want to do. If we get serious about moving large payloads higher than Low Earth Orbit (say if we want to visit mars) we might revisit the idea, but at the moment conventional propellants are doing all the jobs we need doing just fine.",
"To ELI5: PTBT (Partial Test Ban Treaty) prohibits it because any accident could irradiate the atmosphere and all the living organisms in it. It's a precautionary measure.",
"From a physics standpoint, we can! There are a couple treaties in the way, though. The Partial Test Ban Treaty says that nuclear weapons can only be tested underground. The Outer Space Treaty says that we can't put WMDs in orbit, on the moon, on any other celestial body, or otherwise in outer space. Project Orion or Daedalus type ships would run afoul of one or both of those.",
"Not an answer to your question, but RTGs are the best power source for remote probes and they work on nuclear decay.",
"There have been proposals. One of the projects you might be interested in reading about is, [project pluto](_URL_0_).",
"We could though. Not from a nuclear explosion though, but using fissile material to heat a fuel up so that it's pressure rises and it's flung out of the motor to provide thrust. It would be more fuel efficient than a chemical rocket, but provide less thrust, making it hard to use one as a primary engine to take off, and it still uses fuel, making it have similar limits as chemical rockets. Plus if something goes wrong, and the reaction vessel is breached, such as an explosion, you just released contaminated material all through the atmosphere creating fallout over a wide area. \n\nWe do use nuclear materials as electric generators though which could power ION propulsion to drive a space craft, and we already use them to provide electrical power such as in the Voyager spacecraft. \n\nThe reason we can't explode nuclear material in a controlled way to power a rocket is the critical mass is too large for a controlled explosion. \n\n\nA rocket motor is not exponential, but a nuclear explosion is. I don't think people really grasp the concept of what exponential means. Put simply, the more it happens, the more it will happen. In a rocket motor this isn't true and it's not exponential. The more fuel you feed the combustion chamber, the more thrust it will produce, but there is nothing in the chemical reaction used to create the thrust that would cause the reactions to keep getting bigger and faster exponentially. \n\n\nA nuclear explosion on the other hand is a chain reaction. One atom splits, it's neutron strikes another which splits it, now 2 neutrons are flying, then 4, then 8, then 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, etc etc. In other words each time an atom of U235 falls part, it encourages other atoms of U235 to do the same. This takes place in miliseconds until the fuel is exhausted, or it blows itself apart, releasing all of that energy pretty much instantaneously. There is no way to control the speed of a nuclear explosion enough to use it as thrust. ",
"The problem is not that it can't be done, the problem is that such a propulsion system would generate large amounts of radioactive debris everywhere the spacecraft goes. Such a drawback usually places this mode of propulsion in the category of \"generally a bad idea\" in most instances. "
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4i280n | why do americans drink alcohol through a brown paper bag? | Is it a TV stereotype, or does it happen in real life as well? If anything, the brown paper bag seems to emphasise that the person is drinking alcohol. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4i280n/eli5_why_do_americans_drink_alcohol_through_a/ | {
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"Drinking in public is outlawed almost everywhere. So you use a brown paper bag or hope a cop doesn't recognize that your can/bottle isn't soda.",
"In most of the US, it is illegal to drink alcohol in public.\n\nIt is, however, common, especially among the poor and homeless with drinking problems. The police have better things to do than arrest them, and hassling them doesn't to much to solve the problem. \n\nSo there is under of an unwritten agreement between law enforcement and public drinkers. Keep the bottle in a bag and don't make trouble, and the police will have enough plausible deniability to look the other way. ",
"Yes, it does sometimes happen in real life here. No, they aren't really fooling anyone from thinking it isn't booze in the bag. \n\nIn most of the US there are laws against public intoxication and what is known as \"open container,\" or even having a visibly open container of alcohol out in public. Hence, the brown paper bag shields it from view. \n\nThis of course doesn't necessarily prevent police from issuing citations if you are intoxicated or if the container in the bag is open, though ostensibly it could be anything in the brown bag. ",
"If they don't put the alcohol in a bag, they could get cited for public drunkedness. Unless the alcohol is in plain site, the police will probably look the other way.",
"Case law has established that a drinking from a paper bag cannot be reasonably said by police as enough to search a person (eg, exposing the contents of said property). ",
"_URL_0_\n\nAlthough this is a clip from a TV show, The Wire, it explains the brown paper bag. Although people have already explained it pretty well already I thought I would leave this here so you can hear the explanation. "
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1qc8m0 | are photos of nude underaged girls in mainstream movies considered child pornography? | It seems that, every time this question is asked, the answer from reddit is a resounding "NO!"
The reason I need this explained to me like I'm five is that, despite this supposedly being the case, mods on multiple subreddits delete these photos immediately from any post.
Two examples: Keira Knightly bared her breasts at age 15 in The Hole. Olivia Hussey bared her breasts at age 15 in Romeo and Juliet. I've seen each of these photos in different threads on reddit, and inevitably someone asks if it's CP. Everyone says "No, no of course not," and about an hour later, the photo and every reference to it is deleted by the mods without explanation.
So, someone please explain to me, what gives? Is it CP? If not, why are these photos consistently deleted on reddit?
For reference, the Olivia Hussey photo was on [this](_URL_0_) AskReddit thread, and the photo of Keira Knightly was found in [this](_URL_1_) ELI5 thread asking the EXACT same question I'm asking now. Everyone said "it's not CP," and the mods deleted it nontheless. So, is popular reddit opinion wrong, or are the mods wrong? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1qc8m0/eli5_are_photos_of_nude_underaged_girls_in/ | {
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"The short answer appears to be \"Not if it has artistic value\". \n\nThe Supreme Court has not ruled on this issue in relation to *child* pornography, but for normal (heh) pornography this is the general rule. So yes you can show the breasts of a 15 year old in your Romeo and Juliet movie IF the scene is necessary and artistically relevant to the production. \n\nThat being said, we may be a few years away from having that changed and banned."
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5btmmv | how can i stay anonymous on the internet? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5btmmv/eli5_how_can_i_stay_anonymous_on_the_internet/ | {
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"Do not use services such as Google, Facebook, Tinder, Snapchat, Twitter etc.\n\nMake use of a VPN and use the TOR network for browsing the internet. Making sure that you have adjusted the settings so you aren't leaving breadcrumbs after you've finished. \n\n",
"Others have already mentioned Tor+VPN, but that's just one piece of the puzzle. Go an extra step and use [GPG](_URL_0_). I'd also recommend using a privacy-centric Linux distribution, such as [Tails](_URL_1_) or maybe even Kali. Both are \"quiet\" distros.\n\nWhile not internet specific, it does help to encrypt your data on your drive with something like VeraCrypt. On the off chance that your system is compromized, it adds an extra layer of security for identifying information that may be on your drive.",
"It really depends what you need anonymity for. If you want to buy drugs on Silk Road, you should just quit while you're ahead. If, however, you want to simply ensure your boss doesn't see the crazy shit you post online, just use a fake email address and make sure you don't use it for crazy online stuff *and* serios stuff. Of course, people will still be able to dox you, sometimes in ways you cannot predict, but just a bit of carefulness will ensure you're sufficiently anonymous for most purposes.\n\nIf you want true anonymity, it's actually somewhat difficult, as even using Tor will leave traces of your activity. Watch some defcon talks if you want to learn more about how insecure even VPNs can be. ",
"If you really want to wear your tinfoil hat (and who doesn't these days)\n\n1. Buy a brand new computer with cash. \n\n2. Never use your own network connection to access the internet, always use open Wifi such as the ones at stores, coffee shops, or neighbors. \n\n3. You can also buy prepaid cell phone data with cash and tether your laptop to the cell phone. Always do the refills with cash at a store, such as Walmart. Never pre-pay or link a credit card to this service. \n\n4. Do not have a wireless router at home, only go hardwired. That way you can not accidently log on to your home router. \n\n5. Never punch your personal information into this new computer. You can use google if you want to, but never use facebook for anything or check your personal bank accounts. \n\n6. If you follow these steps you can use whatever web browser you want. If you want a little added security you can use tor. \n\nThat's pretty much it. You won't have the fastest of speeds but if you are looking for total anonymity that's the way to do it. What you are basically doing is getting a burner laptop and getting or using burner internet service. You won't be downloading axxo's latest torrents this way, but you can still send and receive modest amounts of data. \n",
"Depends on how anonymous. Like completely? Tor + vpn + fake accounts + ublock origin + no script + no more using anything popular because they track (Google, Apple, Microsoft, many internet services) + 0 social media presence + randomizing your habits and ensuring you don't have a routine + making sure nothing you post can cross reference to something else you've posted + changing or spoofing your hardware credentials. Meta data is a bitch.",
"_URL_0_\n\nCreate a bootable usb or cd.\n\nOnce you boot your computer from the cd or usb, TAILS will connect to the TOR network and all of your activities will be anon.\n\nAs soon as you remove the usb or cd all data is erased. ",
"Depending on how MUCH you want to be anonymous... you must consider \"linkability\" IE basically any traceable data to you. Anytime your purchase, download, access a network, etc, etc, don't make it linked to you (avoid surveillance cams, don't visit the same places, get rid of habits, etc spy novel stuff). Don't buy a gift card to pay for your VPN subscription with your credit card :)\n\nHaving a set of unlinked (best of my ability) emails (_URL_1_ and _URL_0_ are good choices), computer, VISA gift cards, and VPN subscriptions.\n\nOnce you have a fresh start; IE a computer with no trace of you buying it / owning it... and an unaltered copy of an audited OS, you can start practicing being anonymous.\n\nUnless you audited the systems that actually pass your data, you really have no idea what's happening on the machine that hosts your VPN or the host's intention. So use all VPN systems with caution. Also I think it's a good idea to purchase VPN access with gift cards or bitcoin.\n\nIt might be a good idea to use a network that's not owned by you then connect to a VPN. If you're really paranoid, I'd use OpenVPN with whatever the highest encryption rate is.\n\nUse an audited operating system. Tails OS is a good option or if you know what you're doing configure your own distro of Linux.\n\nI'd use TOR after all of this. Configure TOR Browser correctly as well (noscript, etc) to get rid trackers and what not. Also keep your TOR browser updated and check the news if there are any exploits against the browser itself.\n\nThere's a case where a kid in a school sent a bomb threat via a disposable email service. It was easy to find the kid as they looked at the IP being sent (a TOR IP) and all the school had to do was filter out their network logs to show anyone that was on TOR at the time.\n\nSo...\nPC w/ GNU OS - > Not your owned Network - > Bitcoin/Gift-card paid VPN - > then TOR browser.\n\nIf you're going to use Google, Facebook, etc.... make sure you NEVER mix your \"real\" accounts with ones that are supposed to be anonymous. Mixing meaning the content, behavior, etc, etc... Imagine being an investigator and see how they would link together information.\n\nTry to use end-to-end encryption if possible. GPG is great for this. I'd research air-gap computers and how to decrypt information safely and keep it safe.\n\nDon't ever access your \"anonymous\" accounts with non-anonymized PCs/Networks,etc. Just don't get them mixed up. That's how you get caught. One misstep can undo all of your initial work and even worse, get yourself exposed.\n\nKeep your software updated :) Update them using the same network scheme.\n\nAlways open documents in another computer or VM without internet access. There are times where your internet browser tunnels data through VPN - > TOR, etc... but your AppX IE a Word processor won't. For example, you open hillary.docx and there's an image in the word doc that's linked to a website... the Word Processor won't get the image through VPN - > TOR... now you're exposed.\n\nThis just scratched the surface... I hope this helps!"
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3p1r85 | why is a baby not nine months old when its born? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3p1r85/eli5_why_is_a_baby_not_nine_months_old_when_its/ | {
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"Because there is not a concrete date of conception that can be confirmed. Some infants are born later than 9 months of development, and some are born earlier. So we calculate age from a concrete date and time which is the birth. ",
"Not all babies are born at 9 months. It's just a accepted term because most babies are born around nine months of gestation ",
"Because it's called a \"birth\"day - we define your age as being measured by your date of birth.\n\nWe do that because it's easier to know for sure the day that the baby came out of the mom than the day that the sperm hit the egg. Even with all our technology, there's no real 100% way to know \"Oh yeah, this was fertilized on May 8th.\" So we base our date on what we know, and everything works out about the same."
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5ofq3o | why is it that you never notice a person (mostly kids) aging when you see them regularly, but when you look back at old photos/videos, you only then realize how much they've grown? | I'll give my cousin as an example. He's in his "puberty" years, so a lot of bodily changes happen then. To me, he's always looked the same as he did a few years ago. I only really noticed a small change in his voice, but nothing major. Then I look back on old home videos, and saw how truly young he looked before "puberty hit him". I never noticed the change until then. Could someone explain why this happens? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ofq3o/eli5_why_is_it_that_you_never_notice_a_person/ | {
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"Day to day things are stored in short term memory. The mundane gets replace a lot. Long term memory is stored elsewhere in the brain. Looking at an old photograph will bring those memories to the short term part of the brain where then the shock process occurs. \n\nOther forms of this happen when you get older, move a lot, or just are away for a long while. \nExample, say you live on the east coast of the US and you move to the west coast. You lived on the east for 20 years. While you go about your daily life on the west coast you will see people that look just like people you know from the east coast. If you could put them side by side you would see they usually don't look alike. It is just your brain trying to comprehend the radical changes that took place with the move, and loss of familiarity. \nWhen old people get senile the brain will do the same thing. Trying to place old memories to what it can't comprehend in the short term. Grandma might start calling you by a late relative's name for example.",
"It's called \"just noticeable differences\" in science. It has to do with the ability of our senses to detect minute changes. Example, if I increase the temperature in the room by 0.1 degrees, human senses are not precise enough to notice it. However, if I increase the temperature by 10 degrees, you will notice it. \n\nSo, from day to day, we are all aging. However, the changes are so minute, we do not recognize them. Additionally, short term memories are stronger than long term in terms of personal recognition. Example, when you think of someone, you imagine them as you last saw them, not 20 years ago. So, from each interaction you were not able to detect any noticeable change. \n\nWhen you look back at old pictures, enough time has passed that those minute daily changes have since added up enough to be detected."
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30ii8s | why when i drop something in the car does it not fly back? | I've always thought about this since I was a kid, and there's probably a really easy answer.
If you don't understand the question, basically what I'm asking is that, why if I drop something outside the car it goes flying past (the car drives forward not the object falling back) but if I drop an object in the car it goes straight down. I would think it would fall freely and the car would go forward making the object go back as far as possible, but instead it falls straight down. Maybe this is really dumb question, I've always just wondered. Thanks in advance if you answer :) | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/30ii8s/eli5_why_when_i_drop_something_in_the_car_does_it/ | {
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"Newtonian physics. The item you drop already has the same forward speed (momentum) as you and the rest of the car. And object at motion will always stay in motion unless a force is acted on it. Since there's no force (the wind resistance, you throw it backwards etc.) acting on that thing you drop, the ONLY force that will act on it is gravity.\n\nWhen you throw thing out the window, now the windresistance acting on it will be the force that slows it down.",
"In the car the object is moving the same speed as the car and so inside the car it looks like its going straight down. To someone outside the car the object would look like it is moving forward and falling. When you drop something out of the car, the wind catches it, making it slow down compared to the car, so from the car it looks like it's flying back. But to someone outside the car it still looks like it's flying forward and down, just not as fast forward as when it's not being slowed by the wind.\n\nIf you dropped something and accelerated as it was falling you would see it fly back, or when you break real hard and stuff goes flying forward. It's called inertia. An object in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted on by an external force.",
"Inertia. The object (and the air in the car) is already going as fast as the car, so when you drop it, it just goes straight down (from your perspective, since you are moving with the car too) - When you drop it outside the car, the air outside is sitting still and the air resistance slows the object down so it appears to be falling behind you.",
"Relative to the outside it is falling in a diagonal line from the point of release toward the floor of the car. It does this because when you drop it the momentum of the car is already applied to it and since there is no wind resistance (as there would be if you were to drop it out the window) it will fall in what appears to be a straight line downward. ",
"You, the object, and the air in the car have been accelerated up to speed by the car. When you drop the object, it keeps going forward because nothing is countering its forward momentum. The air it is traveling through is moving forward as fast as it is. \n\nOutside of the car, the air has not been accelerated up to speed by your car. When you drop the object, it collides with the air, and the air slows it down. "
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3n38l1 | if theirs a burglar in you're home and you're forced to hide in closet, why can't you text 911 for help? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3n38l1/eli5_if_theirs_a_burglar_in_youre_home_and_youre/ | {
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"[Because that system isn't fully rolled out yet](_URL_0_)\n\nNew stuff cost money, particularily when it needs to be implemented with existing systems without having issues. Emergency services usually have pretty tight budgets, too.",
"Some places in the world have a system that allows you to text 911. Also, you could always call 911 and either just not talk but stay on the line, or hang up. Usually 911 hangups will result in a call back, and if you don't answer, an officer might be sent to wherever the call is being made from. My information is based on being a Paramedic in Ontario, Canada, so your mileage may vary depending on where you live.",
"911 texting isn't widespread right now.\n\nMy advice, as a police officer:\nCall 911, and whisper into the phone. \n\nGIVE YOUR ADDRESS. Pinging cell phones is not always accurate. We can't kick down every door on the block looking for you."
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9o1y5p | why don’t humans have a thick fur like most other mammals? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9o1y5p/eli5_why_dont_humans_have_a_thick_fur_like_most/ | {
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"Our hunter gatherer ancestors hunted by chasing animals down in marathon runs until the animals died of heat exhaustion / regular exhaustion. In our base survival skills, endurance running is our animal specialty. Virtually no other land predator on earth comes close. In natural selection terms, fur does not optimize this advantage. ",
"Endurance. Not having fur allows us to sweat (one of the few animals that can do this) and lose excess heat in order to chase prey for a long time. Humans are the marathon champions of the animal kingdom, having fur would make our bodies overheat"
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22c6j3 | why does australia use australian dollars and not australian pounds? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22c6j3/eli5_why_does_australia_use_australian_dollars/ | {
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"We did use pounds, until February 14, 1966.",
"Australia originally used Australian pounds (divided into 20 shillings, and 1 shilling into 12 pence).\n\nWhen Australia decided to switch to a decimal currency, it was decided to adopt a new name. Suggested names included: the austral, the oz, the boomer, the roo, the kanga, the emu, the digger, the Quid, the dinkum and the ming [[1]](_URL_0_).\n\nMenzies had suggested the name \"royal\", and some sample designs of banknotes were produced. However the \"royal\" proved unpopular, so instead the name \"dollar\" was chosen.\n\nAustralia could have stuck with the name \"pound\" even after decimalisation if it wanted to, however I think it was probably decided to adopt a new name to avoid confusion, as the method used to decimalise was to make £1 in the old system the equivalent of $2 in the new system.\n\nThis is in contrast to the UK; when they switched to decimal currency in 1971, they made it so £1 in the old system equalled £1 in the new system. The only thing that changed was that £1 was now divided into 100 \"new pence\", which meant it was not really a problem to keep using the name \"pound\".",
"Australia (begun in 1901) as part of the British Empire, adopted the Australian Pound in 1910. The currency was a copy of the British Pound (Sterling) with twenty shillings to the pound and twelve pence to the shilling (240 pence to the pound). When we decimalised in 1966 (100 cents to the dollar, two dollars to the old pound) there was discussion about using a new name. There was a competition and the (conservative) prime minister favoured the \"royal\" but this was unpopular. The government then decided on the dollar over the pound for reasons which aren't clear. The public generally approved of the decision."
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b5qha6 | what is the difference between an atom and a chemical element? | Atoms are the smallest unit of matter that cointains the chemical properties of a chemical element, but what is the difference between the two.
How do we know for example if we have an atom of hydrogen or if we have a chemical element hydrogen?
| explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b5qha6/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_an_atom_and_a/ | {
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"Atoms are what makes up elements. Atoms are the smallest parts of elements that still have all the properties of that element.",
"Atoms and elements are one and the same.\n\nAtoms and molecular elements are not the same.\n\nSome elements come in pairs, they don't normally exist as a single atom, examples hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen. Some other elements come in a single atom presentation when in gaseous form.\n\nMain difference is if you had a cloud of monoatomic hydrogen at room temperature it will recombine to diatomic form so quick that it'll cause an explosion. You'll be vaporized.\n\nIf you stand in a cloud of diatomic hydrogen... You will be asphyxiated but you won't explode.\n\n_URL_0_",
"Each chemical element refers to an atom with a specific number of protons in the nucleus. For some molecules the are multiple isotopes. Each isotope has a different number of neutrons in the nucleus.\n\nFor your example of hydrogen: if we say \"this is a hydrogen atom\" we probably mean it has 1 proton and no neutrons. However there is a rare form of hydrogen that has 1 proton and 1 neutron. This form of hydrogen is referred to as deuterium. Most of the time you could say \"this container has hydrogen gas\" even if a few of the actual atoms are deuterium rather than hydrogen. For other atoms the different isotopes are named by the atomic weight(which is ~number of protons + number of neutrons). Uranium has multiple isotopes with two common ones being U-235 and U-238.\n\nThe reason we use the number of protons to name atoms is that generally isotopes will exhibit similar chemical properties. By referencing the proton count we are saying \"the thing with those chemical properties\".",
"They're essentially the same thing. What makes an element different from other is that it's atoms have a different number of protons, neutrons and or electrons. When you have certain number of these elements, you get different properties, like color, shape, etc."
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lg0sv | store brands | Always been a mystery to me. I want to know about the whole industry. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/lg0sv/eli5_store_brands/ | {
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"Who are the people that try to mimic the original product?\nWhy is it legal for a retail store to profit off of similarity to an established brand?\nAren't there patent issues?\nHow similar are they to the original product?\nWhy are there sometimes several tiers of store brands within a single retail store?",
"This is an example of something called market segmentation. Retailers want to charge as much as possible for things, so ideally they will charge each person as much as that person is willing to pay. Take washing powder. If upper middle class people are prepared to pay £5 for a kilo of powder, the supermarket wants to charge that much. But they also don't want to lose sales from the people who are only willing to pay £1. So, they sell branded washing powder in a nice looking box for £5, and own-brand powder in a plain box for £1. The rich people believe they are getting superior quality, and the poor people believe they are getting a bargain.\n\nIn fact, it is often the case that the same company makes both powders, they may even be identical. If you want to know for sure, compare the ingredients list. Often store brand products contain the same ingredients as the branded products.\n\nSometimes there is an actual difference between the two products, but the profit margin on the expensive one is still usually much higher than the cheap one. There may be an actual difference in quality, but what matters is that there is a perceived difference. Purchasers very often assume that something which is more expensive must be of higher quality - you might even find it tastes better just because you paid more for it.\n\nThis is why for a long time Kellogs had the slogan \"We don't make cereals for anyone else.\"",
"I met a farmer once. He grew and processed tomatoes. He'd get an order from Del Monte for say, canned diced tomatoes, and fill it. His remaining crop was processed and sold as store brands. He said it was the exact same stuff inside the cans.",
"Who are the people that try to mimic the original product?\nWhy is it legal for a retail store to profit off of similarity to an established brand?\nAren't there patent issues?\nHow similar are they to the original product?\nWhy are there sometimes several tiers of store brands within a single retail store?",
"This is an example of something called market segmentation. Retailers want to charge as much as possible for things, so ideally they will charge each person as much as that person is willing to pay. Take washing powder. If upper middle class people are prepared to pay £5 for a kilo of powder, the supermarket wants to charge that much. But they also don't want to lose sales from the people who are only willing to pay £1. So, they sell branded washing powder in a nice looking box for £5, and own-brand powder in a plain box for £1. The rich people believe they are getting superior quality, and the poor people believe they are getting a bargain.\n\nIn fact, it is often the case that the same company makes both powders, they may even be identical. If you want to know for sure, compare the ingredients list. Often store brand products contain the same ingredients as the branded products.\n\nSometimes there is an actual difference between the two products, but the profit margin on the expensive one is still usually much higher than the cheap one. There may be an actual difference in quality, but what matters is that there is a perceived difference. Purchasers very often assume that something which is more expensive must be of higher quality - you might even find it tastes better just because you paid more for it.\n\nThis is why for a long time Kellogs had the slogan \"We don't make cereals for anyone else.\"",
"I met a farmer once. He grew and processed tomatoes. He'd get an order from Del Monte for say, canned diced tomatoes, and fill it. His remaining crop was processed and sold as store brands. He said it was the exact same stuff inside the cans."
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858z33 | why do food regulations require pork and chicken to be fully cooked to kill bacteria in the meat? whereas beef can be consumed half-cooked. how do we know the same harmful bacteria in pork and chicken isn't also in beef? | ELI5: Why do food regulations require pork and chicken to be fully cooked to kill bacteria in the meat? Whereas beef can be consumed half-cooked. How do we know the same harmful bacteria in pork and chicken isn't also in beef? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/858z33/eli5_why_do_food_regulations_require_pork_and/ | {
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"All meats can have e coli on them, but e coli can only live on the surfaces, it can't penetrate into the meat. Cooking on the outside kills e coli. You can also cut away surfaces to get a clean part, hence why people can eat raw beef like steak tartar.\n\nChicken can have salmonella, which can exists anywhere in the chicken. Similarly, pork can have trichinosis, which can be anywhere in the pork, that's why they have to be cooked all the way through. Neither trichinosis nor salmonella can live in beef.\n\nGround beef however, must be cooked all the way through because the external parts all get mixed around. That's why you can get a rare steak but not a rare hamburger."
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5t1qqu | why do some people pay to get their taxes done, while others do it themselves for free? | First of all, this is my first year adulting/having a job, so taxes are very new to me.
This year, my mom went to H & R block, and the little stands in Walmart to get her taxes done. They both charged a ridiculous amount of money, so she left, and said "fuck it I'll do it myself"
She did both of our taxes in about 30 minutes. So why do people pay hundreds to get their taxes done, when it can be done for free by themselves? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5t1qqu/eli5_why_do_some_people_pay_to_get_their_taxes/ | {
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"Lack of knowledge on how to properly complete them. \nFurthermore, if you make for example half a million a year do you really want to be bothered with that? Or would you rather let a tax jockey do it for you who can possibly cut some corners and maximize the amount you get to keep? ",
"Myself, I usually do my own taxes. This year I'll be taking them to a tax place because they will be more complicated that usual as I sold a house and received monies from places other than employment.\n\nI haven't gone to H & R since I was young, I did it then because there was instant return and I didn't have to math.\n\nI rarely get anything back these day, I don't need the money like I did then so I can afford to wait to get (or make) a payment.",
"There are two types of people tax service places may want to attract.\n\nThe first is those who are simply too lazy to do their own taxes, despite the presence free e-filing and the 1040EZ for low/mid income filers. The whole industry revolves around people who are willing to pay someone else to fill out a few sheets of paper. In addition, many tax preparation services are willing to extend a loan of the expected refund for a small percentage/fee, which attracts quite a few people.\n\nThen there are others with extremely complex tax situations who may want a professional accountant to help them out, to make sure everything is accurate and that their tax liability is as low as possible.",
"There are so many ins and outs of the tax code that it is often difficult to know if you qualify for certain savings or which forms you need. For me, when I file in have to use multiple additional forms and it all gets confusing.\n\nIf you have a basic return it is pretty simple to do yourself with pencil and paper, but if not it gets complicated. If you make used a certain level of income there are free tools you can use online. Otherwise you have to pay to use your own tools anyway so for a little more you can go through it with someone who has experience and may ask questions to save you money that you didn't think of yourself.\n\nIt also provides some level of confidence that you filed correctly and the IRS won't be coming after you for money owed and penalties.",
"If you're on the 1040EZ form, this means you have 1 or 2 sources of W2 income (you're an employee of a company), and you don't have enough deductions to get past the standard deduction (the government is willing to let you take a standard amount off your income due to random acts that would normally be deducted, and you don't have to do the work of documenting it).\n\nThis is easy and free, you can do it yourself, or have someone like _URL_0_ do it for free because it's not complicated.\n\nOnce you get to the point where you have deductions above the standard deduction (like being a homeowner), or you're getting income from places other than an employer (like you're an Uber driver on the side), and now it could very well help you out to have your taxes prepared. Tax preparers can find expenses you've documented which can be written off your taxes (like car washes if you're an Uber driver). You may know one or two things that are deductible, but they could find more, or show you how to do better next year. They could also help you avoid pitfalls - like you're claiming mileage deduction on your car and you're also writing off your car's maintenance, and you cannot do both, you pick one or the other. If you didn't know that, the IRS could hit you pretty hard.\n\nIf your mom owns her house, she may want to have a real tax prep take a look at it (hint: they don't sit inside walmarts). They're not as expensive as you'd think (about $150 for a good one) as long as it only takes one meeting (bring EVERYTHING). They can also look at her past returns and re-do them. If she left something off this year that would have saved her $100, then she probably left it off all her previous returns and could easily make the money back.",
"The tax code is complicated, and companies like H & R block actually lobby to keep it that way. Frankly, if you don't have a house and only work for a company (or even two) you can probably do your own taxes really quick.\n\nThe reason people who could easily do their own taxes go to those places is for two reasons. One they don't realize how it easy it is. Two, those places will sometimes do it for free, offer you an advance on your taxes and take a chunk of $ out of the return. So you get your money faster (just less of it) and the company still makes money.\n\nSource: accountant (don't work in tax but had to take a class on it. That class blew.)",
"Often when you stop by those places in the mall to \"help with your taxes\", they are really just running commercial software you can by yourself and do it on your own time."
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4xnvn6 | how do the opsin proteins we have in our eyes convert light into an electrochemical signal? | I just found an article regarding opsin and then I wanted to read about its function on wiki, but the article there is a bit too technical, to say the least, I quote: "Opsin proteins covalently bind to a vitamin A-based retinaldehyde chromophore through a Schiff base linkage to a lysine residue in the seventh transmembrane alpha helix."
So could somebody please explain this to me like I'm five? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4xnvn6/eli5_how_do_the_opsin_proteins_we_have_in_our/ | {
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"I'll attempt to translate this to layman's terms bit by bit, since I think that's what you're asking for. \n\n**Opsin proteins:** As you may know, \"proteins\" are the various tiny machines that, working together, are the fundamental mechanism that makes us alive. The different tasks that are required for life are reflected in the tremendous variety of proteins. \"Opsin\" is the name of a class of proteins that sense light. \n\n**covalently bind to a vitamin A-based retinaldehyde:** Proteins are tiny machines, but for some tasks (such as sensing light) it's difficult to design a protein that can accomplish the task by itself. Biology can get around this by pairing proteins with \"co-factors\". A co-factor is a small molecule that has a certain useful quality that facilitates the task at hand. Often our bodies can't build these co-factors, so we obtain them in our diet. If the co-factor is a metal then it is referred to as a \"mineral\", if it is a molecule then it is referred to as a \"vitamin\" (this is why not eating enough vitamins and minerals can make us sick). \n\nIn this case the co-factor is called retinal/retinaldehyde. Vitamin A is the group of chemicals that can be converted by the body into retinal. Retinal is useful for sensing light because [it can change shape when exposed to light](_URL_2_). That image is a schematic of the molecule, don't worry about the details, just observe that it changes from a crooked shape to a straight shape when exposed to light. \n\nSo our bodies glue (\"covalently bind\") one retinal molecule to each opsin protein. Opsin is designed in such a way that the shape change of retinal triggers opsin to also change shape. In effect, this amplifies a small change in a tiny molecule into a larger change that can trigger other mechanisms that further amplify the change. \n\n**chromophore**: The complete assembly of retinal and opsin is called rhodopsin. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it has a colour. \"Chromophore\" means something that gives colour; \"rhod\" comes from the Greek word for pink. \n\n**through a Schiff base linkage:** Just ignore this, it's basically just specifying the particular type of \"glue\" that is joining retinal to opsin. \n\n**to a lysine residue in the seventh transmembrane alpha helix:** Again, don't worry too much about this, it's describing the particular location on opsin where retinal is attached. \n\n[Here's a diagram of rhodopsin](_URL_0_) the opsin is the rainbow squiggle and retinal is the small red object in the centre. Importantly, rhodopsin is located in the membrane (the external border) of the light sensing cells. When it changes shape it triggers [a rapid sequence of events](_URL_1_) (steps 2 - 5) that amplifies the signal and ultimately changes the amount of ions flowing into the light sensing cell, this change in the flow of ions changes the electrical charge across the membrane which is the \"electrochemical signal\" that your question mentions. ",
"Basically, when a light photon hits the protein molecule, the photon gives it enough energy to undergo a slight change in structure. When it's in this higher energy form, the protein is able to react with other molecules in the cell which themselves cause depolarization in the cell.\n\nAll cells in your body have a slight negative charge inside. Depolarization happens through the opening of sodium channels in the cell membrane. The open channels allows an influx of positive sodium ions into the cell to neutralize the negative charge. This initiates an electrical signal which travels along the nerve to your brain.",
"The general class of receptors that sense light are found all over your body and are also responsible for hormone action, smell, and neurotransmission, among many other things.\n\nWhat's the same about them all is that they sense the presence of substance that binds to and activates them, usually a small molecule or signaling protein. Once bound with one of these substances, the receptors set off a signaling cascade that amplifies the signal so that the cell knows that the substance is there and it can respond. \n\nFor vision, the small molecule is already attached to the receptor, but it is in an inactive shape. Light causes the molecule, retinal, to change shape to an active form and this causes receptor to activate. This sets off a signaling cascade that tells your photoreceptors that light is present. Having it pre-bound to the receptor allows the sensing to happen very fast. ",
"Let me make it simpler. An opsin changes shape when light hits it. The body attaches opsins to a switch called a G-protein.\n\nWhen the G-protein is switched on by the opsin changing shape, it opens up a tiny pore that lets in charged ions (redundant, i know). The cell detects the change in charge and releases a neurotransmitter to the next cell.\n\nYour quote simply describes how the opsin is attached to the g-protein. Not important."
]
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[
"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Rhodopsin_3D.jpeg",
"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/de/Phototransduction.png",
"http://icanhasscience.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Photoisomerization-of-Retinal.jpg"
],
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
2kc2bi | could nitrogen in scuba tanks be replaced with an inert gas like argon to prevent nitrogen narcosis? | If there is no nitrogen in the tank but there is oxygen at normal atmospheric concentration, could that eliminate the decompression limit allowing someone to stay down as long as they have air? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2kc2bi/eli5_could_nitrogen_in_scuba_tanks_be_replaced/ | {
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"text": [
"It can be, and is, replaced with helium for deep dives. People use either trimix (replace some of the N2 with He) or heliox (replace all of the N2 with He) to reduce the effects of nitrogen narcosis. Trimix is cheaper, so people use it when they can. [You can't go arbitrarily deep, though, because helium gives you tremors.](_URL_0_)\n\n\ne: diatomic gas screwup",
"There are mixes like heliox already in use with no nitrogen.",
"They use helium for just that purpose in [Trimix](_URL_0_). I've heard radio communications with guys using it in deep sea submersibles and it's hilarious.",
"Yes, this is done. see [here](_URL_0_)\n\nBut not anyone can just get a mixed gas rig and expect to survive... there is a pretty intense training regiment involved. However, you still have to do decompression stops as oxygen (which is a required component) also becomes toxic under pressure. The only way to do deep dives with no decompression is in a pressurized environment like a submersible or hard diving suits.",
"They use all kinds of gasses. The deepest dives used hydrox, a high pressure combination of pure hydrogen and pure oxygen."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-pressure_nervous_syndrome"
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[],
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trimix_%28breathing_gas%29"
],
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_blending_for_scuba_diving"
],
[]
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|
26dbzd | how do employers in the us employ illegal aliens without any legal ramifications? | Several employers I've been have employed illegal aliens. How do they do so, without any troubles from INS or the IRS? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/26dbzd/eli5_how_do_employers_in_the_us_employ_illegal/ | {
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"As far as I'm aware, you actually can't do that. They're likely paying them under the table, possibly less than minimum wage.\n\nI'm no legal professional, but I have worked for a hotel in California (read: almost entirely Hispanic staff), and the HR department had to turn away new job candidates several times when they found out their papers weren't in order.\n",
"They haven't been caught yet but if or when they do there will be ramifications.",
"As someone who has a general background of the horticulture industry it's really a sensitive dance. Both employee and employee know that each can get in a lot of trouble. There is an understanding between employer and employee that what no one is doing is legal, but (and this is sad because illegal migrant labor is one step above slavery) it is the most mutually beneficial thing for employer and employee. I only say that because the money they make is really better than what they could get at home. The issue here is not illegal labor but general world economic inequality.",
"I worked at a place that hired immigrants with only work visas. Meaning they weren't full citizens so they didn't have to pay them minimum wage. Kind of messed up."
]
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[],
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