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43gacq | why do so many sci-fi aliens have british accents? | It seems like every time I see a tv show or movie where there's a humanoid alien speaking english, they invariably have a British accent. Why has this become the convention as opposed to a random assortment of accents? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/43gacq/eli5why_do_so_many_scifi_aliens_have_british/ | {
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"Because people call it racist if it's anything other than british or american.\n\nSee Also: Nute Gunray and Jar Jar Binks",
"It's just a lazy way to distinguish that they're 'foreign'. They have to set them apart somehow. Make them obviously not from around here. British accents sound more proper to American ears apparently. For some reason a British accent also has come to be associated with intelligence while naive at the same time.",
"Lots of good British character actors in Hollywood, as opposed to leading men/women who wouldn't want to be covered up by the makeup.\n\nThat would be my explanation, although I haven't really noticed the phenomenon you describe. Babylon 5's aliens had all kinds of accents, some of them were British. What other examples are there?",
"What aliens have British accents?",
"Easiest way for hollywood to verbally demonstrate foreignness and still have westerns be able to easily tell what they are saying. most movies with middle eastern characters have slight British accents as well, for example. ",
"Hollywood has long used English accents to imply sophistication or intelligence, in the same way they use Germans to sound sinister. ",
"What type of British accent? I've never seen a Scottish or Irish alien.\n\nBut being serious though, English accents make one sound more \"sophisticated\" and for Americans, \"foreign\". So it makes aliens sound like they have better technology and are more advanced than we are."
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2dn6ws | - why is everything in the universe always moving? | And if something were to truly stop and have no speed would it move thru time? Space-Time would move past it as it stays still, Right? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2dn6ws/eli5_why_is_everything_in_the_universe_always/ | {
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"There is no such thing as \"stopped\" in space because everything is relative."
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47yg77 | how is daemon tools used for business applications? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/47yg77/eli5_how_is_daemon_tools_used_for_business/ | {
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"For mounting iso/disk image on a virtual disk drive when there is no physical disk drive or perhaps there is no disk."
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1mcqdk | why does it take so long for new video game consoles to be produced? | Why does it take new video game consoles so long to be produced? Shouldn't it be as easy as replacing outdated components with better hardware that will allow games to run smoother and better?
I know Microsft made some changes in the Xbox Elite but why is does it take so long for a totally upgraded console to be released when technology is evolving so quickly? It seems like they would make more money since it gives people new things to buy. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1mcqdk/eli5_why_does_it_take_so_long_for_new_video_game/ | {
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"They have assembly lines producing the console and any changes require the assembly line to be changed & also games to be coded to take advantage of the upgraded hardware ",
"Consoles are typically sold at a loss to encourage people to buy them. This increases the install base, and developers want to target the largest audiences possible to maximize sales. Developers have to pay a licensing fee to the console manufacturers to release a game on their platform. So the reason it takes a while between generations is because the manufacturers need to make back their loss on sales and production time and then wait to turn their profits on the games sold."
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80y69l | how does anti-venom work, and why does it require more venom to be produced (or is this a misconception)? | Sneks, how do they work? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/80y69l/eli5_how_does_antivenom_work_and_why_does_it/ | {
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"Anti-venom is made by injecting small amounts of the venom collected from the venomous animal into another animal. The animal's body creates antibodies(things in the blood which attack foreign things in your body that shouldn't be there) to fight off the venom. Then those venom fighting antibodies are extracted from the animals blood and presto. You can now give them to a person who has been bitten and give their body a huge amount of antibodies to help neutralize the venom in their blood before it does more damage. There are some antivenoms that can be used to treat multiple different venoms and also ones that are specific to one kind.\n\nIf you ever saw the princess bride you might remember that a character fed himself tiny amounts of a deadly poison to build up an immunity to it. We are doing the same thing but instead of making ourselves resistant to the venom (there are people who have done this though it's stupidity dangerous) we make another animal resistant and then use their blood to extract the antibodies and give them to people who have been bitten. ",
"Venom is typically injected into horses and then the antibodies produced in the horses blood are extracted and can be used to fight the venom in a bite victim.\n\nDownside of this. Its a blood product. You know all that \"Don't share needles\" talk? Well you pretty much are volunteering to inject some horse blood into yourself and sometimes that is more dangerous than the venom itself. Allergic reactions to anti-venom can be pretty common, and that can be enough to kill you, so its far from a perfect solution. ",
"They use an animal that won't die (horse) to produce antibodies against that venom. The only problem is that it's a big allergen and therefore if you were bitten by a rattle snake they would observe you for symptoms before they would give it to you and then they would be ready in case of anaphylactic shock ",
"All of the above about anti-venom is spot on. I just came in to add that there is also human anti-venom. My mom had to be filled the hell up with horse anti-venom after two copperheads unloaded their venom sacs in her body. They told her to pretty much just stay away from anywhere that copperheads could possibly be because if she was bitten again she would have to be given human anti-venom which is much harder to find. ",
"I met this guy a few times in Punta Gorda. _URL_0_. He has sutvived hundreds of venous snake bites in his career and one time I talked to him when he was still alive, he told me it had been looked into to see of blood donated by him, could be used to make anti venom. He was bitten 172 times in his life and lived to be over 100.",
"A common misconception is that it's called anti-venom. The correct nomenclature is Anti-venin. I'm surprised so many people knew how it was made, but missed that part. ",
"Villain in the Body = venom (AKA antigen)\nHero in the body = antivenom (AKA antibody)\n\nWhenever there's a villain in the body, this hero comes to neutralize it. But when there are too many villains and heroes are proportionately lesser, villains win.\n\nSo, to combat it we bring hero from outside, which we make in someone else's body (usually horse).",
"Any Vegans reading this that would refuse the anti-venom on principal of cruelty to animals?",
"Your immune system is not just for viruses and bacteria. They work on rogue enzymes too in this case venom.\n\nAnti-venom is essentially antibodies for venom.\n\nLike viruses they mark specific proteins that signal your immune system to attack the foreign bodies.\n\nBut due to the chemistry of the venom, you can't rely on your body to produce enough to combat envenomation.\n\nSo we use animal analogs and extract the antibodies from blood. Usually horses are used.\n\nWe kinda need venom for antivenom as it doesnt provide permanent immunity, it doesn't keep well either."
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b6wtdv | how does supermarket sandwiches has 10days expiration date when homemade sandwiches spoils the next day? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b6wtdv/eli5_how_does_supermarket_sandwiches_has_10days/ | {
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"Believe it or not they are usually packed in a low oxygen environment. ",
"The product at the store is a lot closer to fresh than the things you bought last month and have been sitting both out and in your fridge."
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10d37t | why does my ass get sore after sitting for too long? how can i prevent it? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/10d37t/why_does_my_ass_get_sore_after_sitting_for_too/ | {
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"Your butt gets sore from sitting on it too long because your butt is designed to be muscles used for walking and running, not so much a cushion for getting compressed by supporting all your body's weight. Prevention: sit on your butt less.\n\n\n**Edit:** Alternate prevention: sit on a cushion more.\n\n**Edit 2:** [A more advanced explanation](_URL_0_) by [/u/Bedpans](_URL_1_)",
"i came to see if i could reddit without my butt hurting, leaving dissapointed ",
"There are a few things that seem to cause it. \n\nOne of them is the lack of proper support - your weight is not resting evenly across the entire \"sitting surface\", and that means that the parts bearing the weight are under more pressure. You can reduce this by getting a better cushion, which will act as a hammock and give you more surface area to spread the load out. A few years ago I wound up with a memory foam wheelchair pad, and that dramatically increased the time I could sit at my computer before my butt complained.\n\nAnother thing I've noticed is lack of motion. It's a good idea to shift around periodically to give the body a chance to recover. Figure out where your chair's \"recline\" lever is and get familiar with it. You should be able to go much longer if you rock a little.\n\nFinally, reducing the weight resting on your tuckus. Obviously there are some health benefits to getting skinnier, but while you're working on that, think about what you can lean on. If you have armrests that can bear a little of your weight, or if you can tilt your chair back enough to rest a little on your back instead of your backside, you should see a small but significant improvement.\n\nI'm just a guy with a video game habit, though. You might take this to /r/askscience , it's a great question and deserves some educated responses!",
"Your ass is sore because the pressure of your weight forces blood out of the tissues in your cheeks. This causes the cells to become \"hypoxic\" - starved of oxygen. The cells in your butt tissues are forced to switch over to temporarily sustaining energy without oxygen in order to survive through a process called \"anaerobic cellular respiration\". Unfortunately, this kind of cellular respiration produces lactic acid as a by-product, which irritates your tissues, causing you pain! \n\nI think that's about right, anyway. Not quite like you're five! Also, don't use bad words like \"ass\". At least... not when your grandparents are around.\n\nOn top of getting up to walk around, sitting on a textured surface (like egg-shell foam, or those beaded chair cover things that taxi drivers use) might help. ",
" > why does my ass get sore after sitting for too long?\n\nBecause you've been sitting too long.\n\n > how can I prevent it?\n\nDon't sit as long.\n\nAlright, time for my smoke break.",
"Well this subreddit has really turned to shit.",
"Why does only my left cheek get sore? This always happens whenever I'm watching a film at the movie theaters.",
"don't sit for so long. stand up every once in a while.",
"Nurse here. When you stay in one position for too long, your bones actually press against the muscle and skin in your bottom. This pushes the blood away from your skin. If you stay like this too long, you get what's called a **decubitus ulcer**, or bedsore. If someone is too sick to do it themselves, we have to turn them every two hours to prevent this, and because your bottom is so much smaller than the rest of you, but all of your weight is on it, we have patients change position every fifteen minutes.\n\nSo that seems like a lot. But your brain already makes you shift that often, before your skin starts to break down. And how does it do that?\n\nBy making your bottom sore!\n\nSo, short answer: listen to your body. Most pain is a warning, not an illness. Frequent position shifting and breaks from sitting will keep your keister happy!",
"You are too young to be using language like that, mister!",
"I would tell you to ask this guy, butt.... _URL_0_",
"i like to remove the butt plug *before* i take a seat. hope that helps, and good luck!",
"Because you're gay. You can prevent it by not putting so many penises in there.",
"Keep sitting, it'll go away eventually. ",
"This question brought to you by the new WoW expansion :P",
"You get a super comfortable chair. I just did a 13 hour session of WoW."
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32i0io | why do we cut our hair? is it purely for style and looks or is there health benefits to it? | Why did we ever start cutting hair? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/32i0io/eli5_why_do_we_cut_our_hair_is_it_purely_for/ | {
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"The only health benefit that immediately comes to mind is cleanliness. Keeping copious amounts of hair clean is difficult, and you don't want to let it become a repository for bacteria and germs.",
"I just cut my hair into a shoulder length bob. It had been down my back. I slept the first night all the way through without waking myself up yanking my hair from stuck under my arm or back or choking myself. Yay!!",
"Historically: one reason was combat.\n\nLong hair makes a nice (and, for you, painful) handle for me to grab and control you with. Keeping your hair short denies me that easy weapon against you.\n\nA similar reason during the industrial revolution: hair gets caught in gears, etc.; which is likely to at least injure, and possibly kill, he who has long hair.",
"I heard that the ancient Egyptians shaved their heads to control lice.",
"Depends if you like having lice and other bugs crawling around your head. The human body is home to billions of tiny bugs, we couldn't survive without them. However, the ones that live in hair tend to be bigger, more annoying, and carry more diseases."
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2fia8s | why do tan lines become more visible in the shower? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2fia8s/eli5_why_do_tan_lines_become_more_visible_in_the/ | {
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"Because the water on your skin changes the way light reflects off of it. You know how when, say, your hand is wet, it looks shiny? Well, shiny pale skin emphasizes the lightness while shiny darker skin doesn't appear much lighter than normal. Presto -- your neon white ass seems even whiter in comparison."
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469qa5 | if apple engineers can create the tool requested by the fbi to "create a backdoor" into ios, why haven't the best hackers already done it? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/469qa5/eli5_if_apple_engineers_can_create_the_tool/ | {
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"Do you know how RSA encryption works? It relies on people's inability to complete certain processes, even with the help of other computers. That being said, a major factor to cryptography is the human element. A network is only secure as long as the people holding the keys don't share them. \n\nAs to why hackers haven't created a master key for all android or ios devices? It's hard. Really really really really hard. And if someone did do it, that person would be smart enough to understand the literal power they have and they would never tell anyone. That persons ability to hack any phone ever would only be possible as long as he doesn't share what he's doing, other wise product manufacturers would just patch. So you'll never hear about the best hacks in the world, they're only the best as long as no one knows it happened",
"The iPhone won't run any old program you want. It will only load programs signed by Apple, with a secret key known only to Apple. If the FBI forces Apple to make and sign a special version of iOS that is easy to hack, then the FBI could put it on any iPhone they like. That's beyond the authority of the judge in question, and a difficult undertaking. Hackers haven't been able to do it, because there isn't much demand for hacking stolen iPhones. ",
"Even if Apple were to make a whole new iOS that bypasses the limit on the number of passcode attempts, how could they install this software on a locked, encrypted phone? Do iPhones have a vulnerability where a new OS could be pushed to it without the owners consent?",
"_URL_0_\n\n\"So here is my offer to the FBI. I will, free of charge, decrypt the information on the San Bernardino phone, with my team. We will primarily use social engineering, and it will take us three weeks. If you accept my offer, then you will not need to ask Apple to place a back door in its product, which will be the beginning of the end of America\"\n\nI saw the above response from John McAfee. Question is: how is he going to use social engineering when the owner is dead?"
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4l8cvz | why are firearm variants sometimes address with mk? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4l8cvz/eli5_why_are_firearm_variants_sometimes_address/ | {
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"It's short for mark, which is essentially a synonym for \"version\" or \"type.\"\n\nI.e. the Ruger Mk II (pronounced \"mark two\") is the second version of the Ruger pistol.",
"Mk = Mark. As in Version number. Mk II is Mark 2. The Chinese and Japanese say Type instead of Mk.\n\nIt's not just used in Firearms but Many many military applications. \n\nFrom vehicles, equipment, to bombs and torpedos. "
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8sn73z | why is english the universal language when its also one of the most complex aswell? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8sn73z/eli5_why_is_english_the_universal_language_when/ | {
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"It has been spoken in recent times by extremely powerful wide ranging nations. If you wanted to deal with those governments, break into those economies, and get in on some of that clout, it is advantageous to speak the language. ",
"English's complexity also makes it extremely flexible. You don't have to speak English well to be understood by most other English speakers.",
"Your question is really 2 questions (1) Why is English so complex and (2) Why is English so popular? The second question is easier to answer- The British Empire was the most powerful economic and military powers from the 17th century until its decline in the 20th century. The US then became the most powerful economic and military power in the world. Both use English as its main language. The language of money, international commerce, trade, and culture will always influence the world, and English happened to be the language of these two hegemonies.\n\nNow, why is it so complex? In short, its a mixed language, made up of the ancient britons and celts that inhabited the British Islands, which had absorbed migrating germanic Saxons from Central Europe. They were then conquered by the Normans, who were Scandinavian invaders who had settled northern France, who brought with them both Scandinavian and French. Plus, the Islands had once been part of the Roman Empire, and some latin words remaindd in used. Latin was also still used the clergy and educated classes for a while, and continued to influence the development of English, as well as the cultural influence of the neighboring French, and occasional Danish invasions. So English has a huge vocabulary because it has aborbed so many other languages into itself, due to the British Isles having such a colorful history."
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3swnfv | how did europe become "richer" than other continents? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3swnfv/eli5_how_did_europe_become_richer_than_other/ | {
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"This isn't a question to be answered in one small text box. There are many contributing factors. As a World History teacher, I'll just give you a few of the main reasons.\n\n1.) Great Britain was the first to industrialize. Once they moved from the cottage industry to the factory system they gained immense masses of wealth. The Industrial Revolution quickly spread to surrounding European nations and the United States.\n\n2.) Needing more natural resources to feed their factories, the Western European nations went on an imperialistic bombardment, mostly in Africa. This continued to feed them with more natural resources while keeping the Africans down. The United States was doing the same in the Caribbean.\n\n3.) Due to mass competition among European nations they've been at war since the Greek Empire. Europe is a very small space relative to the Americas, Africa, and Asia so people lived closer to other groups of people. Since Europeans have constantly been fighting each other since the Classical period, they're been forced to innovate weapons at a quicker rate to stay alive.\n\nHope this helps."
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4z6bhz | how do they do "stop motion" commercials? | An example of what I'm talking about can be found in this [Humira commercial](_URL_0_) although there are other examples. How do they get the camera motion through the stationary people/objects? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4z6bhz/eli5_how_do_they_do_stop_motion_commercials/ | {
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"I get what you mean, but I'll inform you anyway that stop-motion is different. Stop-motion videos are when you take snapshots like pictures and string them together, like how to make claymation videos. \n\nThis kind of cinematography requires a bunch of cameras in a line, all operating at the same time. \n\nImagine a ball bouncing, with 100 cameras in a ring, all focused on the ball. Every camera will record an entire video of the ball falling. But if you choose which camera to take footage from, and you go around the ring of cameras, you get the same video of a ball bouncing from a continuously-changing perspective, in this case a full 360 degree video.\n\nHere's a video: _URL_0_"
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bkpqwf | why the collor of the reproductive organs are different than the skin? | When observing the body of many animals, the reproductive organs (including nipples) have a different colour and texture than the rest of the skin. How does that happens and why? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bkpqwf/eli5_why_the_collor_of_the_reproductive_organs/ | {
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"Well a lot of that skin is actually mucus membrane which is also why your lips are different colored.",
"There are a variety of reasons.\n\nThings that stretch have a different color because the tissue needs to stretch. \n\nThings that get wet have a different color because they have different cell types.\n\nAnd some things simply have contrasting color because they’re meant to be seen. This color contrast is evolutionarily used in reproductive signaling.\n\nReally, most of the reproductive structures are a combination of some or all of the above."
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33zx50 | when i wear my glasses instead of contacts, everything looks smaller. books look smaller. people look thinner. is it the lenses, or am i seeing correctly when i wear those glasses? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/33zx50/eli5when_i_wear_my_glasses_instead_of_contacts/ | {
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"The further away the lens is the smaller stuff through it looks. Try looking through your glasses as you move them away from your face and you will see that everything gets smaller. And as contacts are the same as your glasses, but closer to your eyes, the effect is much smaller."
]
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3w5miy | what would happen if skyscrapers didn't have lightning rods? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3w5miy/eli5_what_would_happen_if_skyscrapers_didnt_have/ | {
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"Lightning would still strike the building, and find some alternate path of least resistance to earth. Meaning that roof mounted antennas, air conditioners, maybe sewage vents would be the next likely target. This could potentially damage equipment either on the roof, the wiring in the building or even start a fire. \n\nMaybe in some situations, even kill people. Snopes has some examples of that. \n\n_URL_0_",
"Before lightning rods I think the stone used in church spires actually exploded, chunks of stone raining down is never good!"
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a83n7s | why are there so many michellin-star restaurants in japan compared to other countries? | According to this wikipedia article, there's more Michellin star restaurants in Japan than even in a much larger country like the United States. Why is this the case?
_URL_0_
| explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a83n7s/eli5_why_are_there_so_many_michellinstar/ | {
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"Michelin is a French tire company that wrote reviews to encourage people to drive more (thereby buying more tires) and its focus is primarily on Europe. You can only get a Michelin star in places that Michelin bothers reviewing in the first place, and Michelin reviews restaurants in almost none of the United States. I think there's approximately ten cities in the whole country that have been reviewed at all.",
"A lot has to do with the craft that to Japanese restaurants put into their craft, sometimes spending decades perfecting a single dish/preparation. Watch the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi to get a feel for the extreme level of care they put into selecting ingredients, the care with with they work with them, etc.",
"Watch Chef's Table and you'll understand why other countries are more deserving of Michelin stars over American restaurants. "
]
} | [] | [
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Michelin_3-star_restaurants"
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[],
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djic5w | how did aig, an insurance company, go bankrupt when the housing bubble burst? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/djic5w/eli5_how_did_aig_an_insurance_company_go_bankrupt/ | {
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"Most mortgages are backed by an insurance guarantee- aka mortgage insurance. This is not the same insurance you carry for fire theft loss etc. Think of it like gap insurance for a new car that loses value as it drives off the lot. While the bubble was building there were a lot of sub-prime borrowers (people who didn’t meet usual guidelines for loans) and AIG actually chose to take these policies because they thought easy money. A big pool of people, and heck no ones gonna lose here. Then BURST! So a 300000 mortgage goes to foreclosure short sale and is sold for 180000. That loss of $120000 is what the mortgage insurance policy (AIG in this scenario) pays the bank on their claim (ok maybe not that basic...but close). The bigger question is why did we bail out banks when the insurance companies were taking the actual losses.",
"Technically it wasn't mortgage insurance (those companies failed too, but AIG wasn't in that business). \n\nSeveral decades ago some mathematicians figured out something important: that if you take a bunch of very risky things whose risks aren't aligned the risk of loss declines. That's the basic insight of modern finance. But it's crucial to remember that it only works when the risks aren't all depending on the same event. \n\nThe housing bubble was inflated because everyone in finance believed that mortgages in different parts of the country were different enough that a group of risky mortgages were still different enough to keep that lower risk. These mortgages were packaged together into what were basically drone banks, that made it easy to finance lots of them. \n\nAIG effectively took the role of the FDIC for all those drone mortgage banks. It guaranteed that it would bear the losses beyond a certain point, believing that there was no way for a nationwide large decline in home prices. \n\nIt was hard for the company to see how wrong they were in advance, because no one would trust a company without a pristine credit rating, and they were one of the only companies in the world left with such a credit rating (so there was no competition). Which meant they were providing that guarantee for hundreds of billions of dollars worth of virtual banks, who nearly all failed at the same time because they were actually all depending easy lending pushing home prices further and further up. \n\nThe bankruptcy was caused by enormous demands for collateral, as home prices declined nationally and most of the drone banks began to fail, far beyond what AIG could actually meet. \n\nThe bailouts were made to their clients.",
"Mortgages get bundled and sold like bonds. Because historically people would do pretty much anything to keep their house, and because these investments were 1000’s of mortgages, the risk was assumed to be super low of them failing. So premiums were incredibly cheap. And you didn’t even need to own the basket of mortgages to take out the insurance — akin to having car insurance on your friend’s car so when he gets in a crash, you also get paid out.\n\nSo when mortgages did start failing in large numbers, AIG hadn’t collected enough in premiums to pay out claims, even factoring in the reinsurance, because payout were in a scale of 100’s of times expected payout."
]
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30hpl6 | . why has secret service become so controversial when it was held in such high esteem in the past? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/30hpl6/eli5_why_has_secret_service_become_so/ | {
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"It was held in high esteem in the past because we didn't know about some of the disreputable things they were doing.",
"There have been a number of scandals recently that have plagued the Secret Service. They used to be thought of as consummate law enforcement professionals and instead have shown shocking lapses in judgement.\n\n- [Lawmakers investigating allegations that two senior Secret Service agents drove drunk through an active bomb threat investigation at the White House](_URL_1_)\n\n- [Drug Enforcement Administration agents in Colombia who allegedly engaged in \"sex parties\" with prostitutes hired by local drug cartels also arranged for paid sex for at least two Secret Service agents traveling to the country to protect President Obama in 2012.](_URL_3_)\n\n- [Secret Service Agents Booted From Obama’s Europe Trip After Drinking](_URL_0_)\n\n- [Secret Service missed man with gun in elevator with Obama](_URL_2_)\n"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
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"http://time.com/38093/secret-service-drinking-obama-europe/",
"http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/24/politics/secret-service-investigation-clancy/",
"http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/exclusive-secret-service-missed-man-with-gun-in-elevator-with-obama/article/2554185",
"http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/article/2562119"
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5iwsyl | how can the dea schedule cbd as a schedule i drug? can they not be sued over this misrepresentation? there is science out there showing medical benefits. what's going on? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5iwsyl/eli5how_can_the_dea_schedule_cbd_as_a_schedule_i/ | {
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"Congress gave the DEA full control to do as they please long ago. Nothing you personally can do. The president can order the DEA to De-schedule it, however. Best thing you can do is petition your reps to change the laws. ",
"All the class 1 drugs have some medical benefits. It's the supposed strength, danger etc. of using them as *illicit* drugs that regulatory agencies are meant to use to determine classifications like that. ",
"In Chevron v Natural Resource Defense Council the court announced it would give substantial deference to agency regulations. You are unlikely to get far suing the DEA for its regulation. It's something we have to take up with congress.\n\nYou can read the reasoning of the DEA regulation here: _URL_0_\n\nAn alternative would have been for more people to comment before the DEA passed the regulation. As you can see from the link, only five people/entities even commented on the proposed regulation.",
"[Title 21 of the USC codified CSA](_URL_0_), section 812 describes the different schedules. Section 1308 lists each item included.\n\nUnder Schedule 1, subsection c says the following are included:\n\n > Unless specifically excepted or unless listed in another schedule, any material, compound, mixture, or preparation, which contains any quantity of the following hallucinogenic substances, or which contains any of their salts, isomers, and salts of isomers whenever the existence of such salts, isomers, and salts of isomers is possible within the specific chemical designation:\n\n > ...\n\n > (10) Marihuana\n\nCBD is derived from marijuana, so it should be already included in that part. But if not, in section d(1), it states the following is included:\n\n > Unless specifically exempted or unless listed in another schedule, any material, compound, mixture, or preparation which contains any quantity of cannabimimetic agents, or which contains their salts, isomers, and salts of isomers whenever the existence of such salts, isomers, and salts of isomers is possible within the specific chemical designation.\n\nWith \"cannabimimetic agents\" meaning \"any substance that is a cannabinoid receptor type 1 (CB1 receptor) agonist as demonstrated by binding studies and functional assays within any of the following structural classes...\" and then it gets scientific.\n\nCBD is a cannabimimetic agent and therefore has already been included on the schedule 1 list for years.",
"DEA has a conflict of interest. Marijuana is their bread and butter. It is the easiest drug to fight because everyone does it. If they admit that it is harmless, they are effectively admitting that most of what they do is a waste of time and money. This is why you can't leave it up to them. You are asking them to cut their own agency. ",
"The pharmaceutical industry will not allow you to treat your illnesses with a plant they don't have to process for you. They must make a profit from you. "
]
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"https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2016-12-14/pdf/2016-29941.pdf?utm_campaign=subscription%20mailing%20list&utm_source=federalregister.gov&utm_medium=email"
],
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"https://www.deadiversion.usdoj.gov/21cfr/21usc/812.htm"
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||
bsvvil | what actually happens when a molecule activates a receptor vs when an inhibitor molecule just blocks it? | How is it that two different molecules can fit into a slot when one causes something to happen and the other just sits there doing nothing?
Extra question: what mechanism cleans up the inhibitor? Let's say with an SSRI? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bsvvil/eli5_what_actually_happens_when_a_molecule/ | {
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"Think of the molecule as a key and the receptor as a lock. The \"real\" key will always be able to open the lock as intended. However, there are some keys that coincidentally have a similar shape to the \"real\" key, but not similar enough to open the lock. So when you try to open the lock with the similar key, instead of opening the lock, it gets jammed and it gets stuck. The lock is still locked while the key is stuck, which is a metaphor for how the inhibitor just gets stuck in the receptor without causing a biological effect.",
"Regarding your extra question, most drugs are carried in the blood to the liver where they are broken down or modified to form more water soluble products that can be easily removed in the urine. The reason SSRIs can’t be taken with some medication is because they inhibit certain liver enzymes. This causes drugs that are normally modified by the enzyme to remain in the body for longer and at higher concentrations which can cause toxic effects."
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3xcul9 | why do volume sliders in applications never seem to provide a linear increase or decrease in volume? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3xcul9/eli5_why_do_volume_sliders_in_applications_never/ | {
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"text": [
"Actually, the problem is that they usually *do* provide a linear change in volume. But our hearing is not linear, but is instead logarithmic. But it's harder to code a logarithmic slider.",
"Human perception of volume changes is not linear, it's actually logrithmic. For example, the perceived change of about \"twice as loud\" is about 20 times higher than the original (it's around a change of 10 dB). \n\nIf you put a linear slider, meaning if you move it up and down it changes the volume linearly, it doesn't sound linear because we don't perceive it like that. You need a logarithmic slider to get a perceived linear change. Good developers use a logarithmic slider, bad ones don't. ",
"First off, defining \"linear\" in terms of volume is nearly impossible. Perceived volume is a hideously complex subject that is most easily described logarithmically (in decibels) and depends on a huge number of variables like sound directionality, where the listener is, air pressure, temperature, and a whole bunch of other stuff. \n\nAnywho, part of the problem with unpredictable volume changes is most system have at least two volume inputs (application volume and master volume), which are both contributing to what goes out the speakers. As well, most sound systems have no internal feedback; the computer has no idea just how loud the speakers are, so the same sound settings will produce drastically different volumes on different speaker systems. ",
"Sound is created by energy. You would think that doubling the energy would make the sound twice as loud, however that isn't the case.\n\nThis is because the human ear is designed to distinguish sound volume differences at low volumes more than high volumes. At the higher volumes, even when there is more energy blasting into our ear, we don't register it as it being louder.\n\nAn example is having these amounts of sound energy: 1, 10, 100, 1000, 10000, 100000. 1 to 100 have a big difference of 100, but 1000 to 1100 has a difference of 100 as well, but our ear doesn't consider it important. The sensitivity is biased towards the low end."
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2qqkrl | what is keeping the billions in bad student loan debt from crashing the market like the bad housing debt did? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2qqkrl/eli5_what_is_keeping_the_billions_in_bad_student/ | {
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"text": [
"Nothing. IMO it's coming. And soon.\n\nIt's already being blamed for the slow recovery from the recession and I just heard on the radio that housing markets are still slumping because first time homebuyers aren't lining up because of student loan debt... So it's already negatively affecting other sectors.\n\n",
"student loan debt is always collectable in a sense that it is not wiped with bankruptcy."
]
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[],
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||
8hn6t6 | why do some guns have magazines with 2 bullets side by side? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8hn6t6/eli5_why_do_some_guns_have_magazines_with_2/ | {
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"text": [
"It’s called double stacked. Is so you can fit more rounds without having a mag that is a foot long. A 12 in mag would be a tactical nightmare always getting caught on things. ",
"What you're probably referring to is called a [double stack magazine](_URL_0_). The key benefit of them is that it allows for more rounds to be loaded into a magazine without making it unwieldy. Most modern guns, except for the very compact ones, use double stack magazines."
]
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"https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-ab6efeecc97ba74f93e8b5a7f446494c-c"
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5praqp | how come some headphones sound better when slightly pulled out? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5praqp/eli5_how_come_some_headphones_sound_better_when/ | {
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"text": [
"Audiophiles have a term for this: insertion depth. Some headphones, like you've noticed, are very sensitive to insertion depth. The amount of air in between the speaker and your eardrum, combined with the shape of the space formed, will alter the tone. \n\nAn exaggerated form of the same effect is the trombone, whereby changing the shape, length, and volume of the air cavity can actually change the note of the trombone entirely. "
]
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||
4bto89 | the significance of sea levels rising a few feet | I understand and acknowledge that climate change should be a pressing issue, but what I don't understand is how the sea levels rising a few feet (7 feet was the conservative estimate I read) can cause devastating effects to coastal areas. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4bto89/eli5_the_significance_of_sea_levels_rising_a_few/ | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"It's because vast amounts of coastal land are just a few feet above sea level. Raising the water level just a few feet can inundate those areas. Boston, Miami, NYC, DC, San Fran, etc. all have substantial amounts of real estate less than 20ft above sea level.\n\n[Check out these images](_URL_0_). They show what a 25ft water rise would do to some of those cities.",
"That's 7 feet straight up. Go to the beach. It's pretty close to flat. If that was 7 feet higher, it would engulf the whole beach and like 8 blocks of downtown depending on where you are."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/07/15/what-sea-level-rise-looks-america-coast"
],
[]
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|
4aiemq | what's the difference between intolerant and allergy. why can't it be peanut intolerant or lactose allergy? | Why is lactose specifically intolerant? Just wondering... | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4aiemq/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_intolerant_and/ | {
"a_id": [
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3,
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"text": [
"Lactose intolerance is due to not having the enzyme to break down lactose. An allergy is an immune response to something your body thinks is harmful.",
"Allergy is when your immune system is the issue, intolerance is when it's some other body issue like incorrect digestion or wrong chemical pathway. A milk allergy (which is rare) would be your immune system attacking milk like it was an intruder. lactose intolerance is your body being unable to digest milk sugar well and the issues of having a bunch of indigestible sugars hanging out in your guts. "
]
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98tyn5 | why can’t we eat some food raw, instead we cook/boil/steam it until we can eat it in that form? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/98tyn5/eli5_why_cant_we_eat_some_food_raw_instead_we/ | {
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"text": [
"Pretty sure you can eat agonist anything raw if you're savage enough, it's just not recommended due to bacteria etc...also most things taste better cooked...IMO",
"For some foods, we wish to kill any bacteria that may be present on or in it.\n\nFor other foods, the application of heat breaks down chemicals in the food that makes them easier (or possible!) to digest.",
"It’s not that we have to, it’s a choice, now it’s part of tradition and culture... nothing needs to be cooked, we only cook meat to kill bacteria that thrives on dead/rotting flesh. As long as it’s fresh you can eat it raw, beef tartare is a thing, sushi etc etc, it’s cultural + as another commenter mentioned, food often tastes nicer also stretches further cooked with other ingredients. ",
"Its my understanding that you can eat raw food. Cooking it makes more calories and other nutrients bioavailable (that you actually absorb). Requiring less food and reducing the amount of hunting/gathering, creating free time. Having this free time eventually evolved into cultures and societies. This is the extremely shortened version. Cooking also kills bacteria and PARASITES, but has the drawback of us consuming less good bacteria.",
"If you ate the raw meat immediately after the animal was killed then you have a much lower chance of contracting some disease."
]
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4ntpbd | what is stem and why are so many jobs requiring it? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ntpbd/eli5what_is_stem_and_why_are_so_many_jobs/ | {
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"text": [
"STEM means Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. So jobs like programming, engineering, medicine, etc. which are important for bettering human kind and provide well paying careers are all dependent on STEM skills."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
6udr0v | if you body paralyzes you while you sleep, how come some people roll over or randomly swing their leg out without control? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6udr0v/eli5_if_you_body_paralyzes_you_while_you_sleep/ | {
"a_id": [
"dlrwdbs"
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"text": [
"I think you are just misunderstanding what happens when you go to sleep. Your body does not \"paralyze\" you. Your brain is just not sending as many signals to your arms and legs to move but sometimes unconsciously those signals are sent to put you in a more comfortable position. Your brain is still sending and receiving signals all the time, just not nearly as much when you are asleep. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
7ielyz | do your eyes turn off when you sleep or are you still able to see? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7ielyz/eli5_do_your_eyes_turn_off_when_you_sleep_or_are/ | {
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"text": [
"Forgive me because I'm not exactly well-researched in the subject but I was always under the understanding that while you're asleep your brain basically ignores signals coming from your eyes which is how you can get eye surgery done. That said you're a lot more sensitive to light when you're asleep then if you're actually anesthetized or comatose.",
"My understanding of current research is that vision still gets processed at a basic level, but it doesn't register in your consciousness unless it's very important (like life-threatening). You could say your entire vision is subliminal when you're asleep.",
"Quick test method: go into your parent's bedroom when they're in deep sleep. Turn on the light without making a sound. See if they wake up.\nReport back here so that everyone can see if there's a cause/effect situation going on here.\n",
"You have a basic level of vision while sleeping. There are studies where researchers have \"communicated\" with sleeping test subjects while they are dreaming lucidly. \nThe subjects wear goggles with LEDs in the periphery, and sensors in the goggles. The subjects have been informed to pay attention to special light stimuli in their dreams, and to look left, right, left, right when they get the stimulus. So when the goggles detect REM movements, the LEDs flash slowly, and the dreamer interprets this as part of their dream, and then they look left, right, left, right. These eye movements can be detected by the goggles, and thus by the researcher. \n\n",
"No.\n\nIf they did turn off you wouldn't wake up when someone turns on the lights.\n\nThey would need to shake you or talk to you if your eyes didn't work. "
]
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1i3kjw | why do my headphones buzz when i have an electric blanket turned on top of me? | If I touch the headphone jack that's connected to the computer, it'll go away but if my hand isn't touching the computer (screws and other metal parts), there's a constant buzzing in my headphones.
If I turn the electric heater blanket off, the sound goes away though.
So it's something to do with the blanket but why? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1i3kjw/eli5_why_do_my_headphones_buzz_when_i_have_an/ | {
"a_id": [
"cb0tema"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"When an electric current runs through a wire, it produces a magnetic field. In turn, magnetic fields can induce current in nearby wires. If your headphone wire is near the blanket, the blanket could actually be inducing a current in that wire. That would cause a buzzing sound."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
2tp8ab | why are people so angry about wwe right now and why is #cancelwwenetwork trending worldwide on twitter? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2tp8ab/eli5_why_are_people_so_angry_about_wwe_right_now/ | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"SPOILERS FOR THE ROYAL RUMBLE WARNING.\n\nOkay, this won't be short though because it's not really that simple unless you say \"an inexperienced wrestler being pushed by the management won instead of several better suited and highly loved fan favourites.\"\n\nThe WWE puts a lot of stock in having a central figure they consider \"the face of the company.\" In the past it's included household names like Hulk Hogan, Steve Austin, The Rock, and for the past decade has been a guy called John Cena.\n\nCena's getting on a bit now and it's expected they'll have him pass the torch to a new \"face of the company\" in the next couple of years.\n\nFor a couple of years now, the guy they've been grooming is a man called Roman Reigns. He's a big guy, very good looking, great physique, he's visually perfect for what they want and has lived a clean lifestyle etc.\n\nThe problem is, he's not that good. He puts on basically fine performances in the ring, but nothing special and certainly not main event quality. He's also lacking charisma and has frequently botched his lines during promos over the past few months.\n\nMeanwhile, there are guys who are seriously talented who are much beloved by the crowd, but these guys (if you want names look up Daniel Bryan, Dolph Ziggler and Bray Wyatt) just don't have \"the look\" that management wants.\n\nLast year, Daniel Bryan was the hottest thing in the company by a mile, yet a \"surprise return\" by Dave Bautista saw him win the Rumble. Fans went apeshit, knowing that Bautista wouldn't stay around long; he had filmed Guardians of the Galaxy and would inevitably take time off during summer to go promote it, he just came back to the company from a year off and instantly gets handed the top spot in the business (the winner of the Rumble gets a guaranteed title shot at Wrestlemania in the main event).\n\nLuckily, in that instance management listened to the outcry from fans saying \"how dare you just hand the belt over to this part-timer instead of the man we've cheered for and supported for years.\" They changed the main event to have a three-way match which Daniel Bryan won, and fans were happy.\n\nThis year, they've had Roman Reigns win the rumble, making it two years in a row they've ignored what the fans wanted to push their own agenda. The way it ended was a slap in the face too, having all the fan favourites dumped out in embarassing ways that made them never look like serious contenders.\n\nSo now the main event at Wrestlemania is now going to be a guy who's about to leave the business and return to UFC (Brock Lesnar) vs a rookie without the talent or experience to be the champion (who will obviously win the belt, because the other guy's leaving). A lot of people feel it'll be a boring shit sandwich of a match instead of a classic of in-ring athleticism, and resent the WWE saying \"we don't care, this guy's going to be the champion for years to come and we're going to pretend you love it anyway and that he's a huge fan favourite\" leading to this social media rumble to the contrary and a movement to hit them financially.\n\nEdit: I should mention Daniel Bryan also never lost the belt. A month after winning Wrestlemania last year, he had to take time off for surgery and relinquished the belt. He returned a couple of weeks ago, so it seemed absolutely natural he'd win again and get a shot to get the belt back.",
"Basically the company is trying to force a story line that nobody really wants. The CEO of the company is out of touch with the fans, and believe that it is the fans that are wrong.\n\nHow to explain to an actual 5 year old.: You know how the teacher likes Roman? Even though Daniel, Dolph, Ryback, Zach, etc. are better classmates. Well the teacher just gave Roman extra credit, and failed the rest of the class."
]
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68i0wn | if a person who is the age of consent has sex with someone one year under the age of consent, does it count as statutory rape? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/68i0wn/eli5_if_a_person_who_is_the_age_of_consent_has/ | {
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"Depends on the specific laws.\n\nSome places have laws that treat it as a hard limit. If the age of consent is say 18, that means anyone having sex with an under 18 year old is breaking the law. Even if that person is only 19.\n\nSome other places treat it more as a gradated thing. There is generally a lower age limit under which all manners of sex are illegal (say 14), then a period where it is legal to have sex with someone else who is within a few years of your own age (say, between the ages of 14 - 17, you are fine having sex with people that are no more than 4 years older than you) and then there is an upper limit above which you are free to bone anyone above that (in this example 17+). So that would mean in this fictional example that a 13 year old could never have sex legally. A 16 year old could have sex with a 19 year old but not a 63 year old. And a 18 year old can screw a 109 year old man for all the law cares.\n\nYou'd have to check the laws in your particular area to know for certain. "
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3ntoed | why do people in extremely poor countries have children that they will not be able to feed or adequately look after? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ntoed/eli5_why_do_people_in_extremely_poor_countries/ | {
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"There's a number of reasons.\n\nOne of the biggest is simply access to birth control. We take it for granted. They either can't afford it, or it's not available in their area. So they have a lot more babies when they follow the basic instinct and drive to have sex. \n\nA lot of those nations don't have the same level of gender equality that we do. The women have to do what the guys want them to do, sad as it sounds. So at worst there's a lot more rape, leading to more babies. And at best a woman wants to hook up quickly with a stable guy that will help her be safe... and sex which leads to babies is one means of doing that.\n\nAnd of course there's just plain standard of living coupled with educational levels. When all of your friends have babies and you don't understand what it truly means, as a young female you're going to be more open to it. \n\nIn a number of those third-world societies you don't save for retirement. Your kids are what looks after you when you retire. So you have lots of kids.\n\nFinally, nobody EXPECTS their kids to die of starvation or famine. Those things are more common in some areas, but they're not absolutely guaranteed every year, and they move around some. What might be a great crop year when you are looking to a rosy future filled with all sorts of babies, could be a dry dusty bust the following one, and suddenly you have mouths to feed.",
"Everyone has hormones and gets horny, sex is a natural thing, but they don't have the access to birth control we have in the developed world. Before birth control and the industrial revolution, birth rates were high here too. Plus they don't have social security like we do, so need to make sure they have children that can look after them when they're old and/or ill. Also if they have some kind of farm, the kids can work for them. Also, modern medicine is helping to prevent deaths from simple diseases and malnutrition but the birth rate hasn't really slowed down to compensate for that yet.",
"Having a child is a long term thing. Conditions could have been better a few years ago. Now a family is faced with a long term crises.\n\nYour world view is very different. You expect more out of life. You expect Internet and a computer. You see the life style others have. You have choices and opportunity.\n\nThey spend most of the day getting enough food to eat. A better day means more food. A good job means enough food for the family so another family member can be added.\n\nBad times mean the bread winner has to make choices on how to earn a living which are not desireable. They can live far from family working to earn enough for the family. No one give up their children. They will work every day to support them. ",
"The kind of extreme poverty you're talking about is actually pretty rare. Dying of hunger and thirst are usually caused by a period of bad weather, and are in a sense more like localised events than sustained realities of x country. Generally speaking people don't live in places that can't sustain life. \n\n/u/the_original_Retro already made some good points regarding the gender politics in some of the poorer regions, but that's only one part of the issue. The most simple answer is that in most cases having children is a net benefit. If the amount of work a child can do exceeds the value of the food and water he/she consumes then it obviously makes economic sense to have children. In many cases it's required to have children to be able to sustain a family. \n\nThe other big point is to think of children as a sort of pension insurance. If you don't have children nobody will look after you once you are unable to work. Without children you, in a very literal sense, can't retire. ",
"Taken from Wikipedia, Ill try to explain why for each point;\n\n\"According to the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division, the single universal factor affecting fertility rate decline is mortality decline, regardless of race, religion or political context. \n\n- this one is interesting. If there is a high rate of death around you, there is pressure on you to have more babies. I guess this could be an evolutional quirk, (nothing gets people more horny than grief!) \n\n\nExtrapolated from this sole factor of mortality, there are other universal factors affecting fertility rates, regardless of race, religion or political context.This well-proven and exhaustively studied group of factors has affected the population policy of all UN member nations:\n\n\nFemale age at marriage. The younger the female at first marriage, the higher the rate of fertility and vice versa.\n\n- A longer window of opportunity to simply have babies. In richer countries women may choose to wait until their late twenties or thirties to have a child. In poorer nations they may be expected to have children once they reach puberty.\n\n\nFemale literacy and education. The higher the female education, the lower the fertility rate.\n\n- Educated women are often more likely busy at university and working rather then focusing on a family.\n\n\nFemale mortality rates in childbirth and infant/child mortality. The higher the rates of death in childbirth, and crude infant or child deaths, the higher the crude fertility rate.\n\n- With a higher chance of your child (or wife) not surviving infancy, couples may choose to have many children to ensure they have a family to support them.\n\n\nFemale economic participation. The greater the female participation in any form of economic activity or capacity, the lower their fertility.\n\n- Females working again are on average less focused on raising a family than a women who is purely a homemaker.\n\n\nAccess to contraception.\"\n\n- This one is obvious.\n\n\n\n\n\n*edit - formating ",
"Aside from what /u/the_original_Retro mentioned, in many countries children are (sadly) a working force.\n\nImagine that you are growing apples. Working by yourself is tough, but you can still maybe make enough to feed yourself and say, your wife. If you have a kid. Your kid can start helping you out from a very young age and you don't need to pay him and he probably wont question it (at least for a while). Even 4-5 years old.\n\nAnd that's a big boost to the number of apples that you can pick and grow everyday. Imagine now if you have 5 kids.\n\n**TL;DR: Kids can help you with manual labor jobs - > working force.**",
"Asked my 80 yearold grandma why everyone in the her vietnamese village had so many kids. Economic incentives? Farm labor? Culture? Half may die? She flat out said \"we didnt have condoms.\"",
"It has a lot to do with lack of education. Lack of sexual education makes people more vulnerable to unwanted pregnancies/STDs. It really is the \"I didn't know this could happen\" ignorance.\n\nHere's a quick video on why teen pregnancies are high in Guatemala:\n_URL_1_\n\nI originally saw this video in an article titled \"Why are ten year olds having babies in Guatemala?\"\nFull article here: _URL_0_\n\nEDIT: As a personal family anecdote, my grandparents immigrated to the US in the 60s from a poor 3rd world country. My grandfather supposedly did not know how babies were born until his 4th child - my aunt- was born in the bathroom due to a quick delivery. Both of my grandparents went to school until about the 4th grade due to their poverty.",
"What about people who are just poor in general but have plenty of resources for birth control",
"In a lot of those countries not only is birth control difficult or illegal to acquire, abortions are often illegal as well. So that option isn't even available. ",
"To all the people who say ''It's because they like sex'' no, that's not it. I come from a Third world country with exactly this problem and the reason they do it is because to a poor couple, a child isn't ''someone I have to raise for decades'' but instead ''someone who will bring me money eventually''.",
"One little thing to be considered is that humans had children way before anybody was rich, or educated, or able to \"adequately\" care for anybody. Had they not, we wouldn't be here discussing.\n\nMy conclusion is that there's something about propagating your DNA that goes beyond individuals and having many children maximize the probability that some are stronger than the environment (including their fellow humans) and propagate some of the DNA further. Some would die and suffer? sure. This is what happens to all animals and plants on this planet.\n\nAnd while as an individual (or group of individuals) one can take the stance of not having children unless he can \"adequately\" (whatever it means) support them, if we took this approach as a species we would be in trouble. Besides, our ability of \"adequately\" support them relies strongly on their inability. E.g. we wouldn't have the standard of living we enjoy unless a large fraction of the world were in poverty.\n\nAnd last, left to the rich and developed western world, the population of the planet would decline (Europe has been on a negative slope, if you discard immigrants, for years) and a constantly declining population doesn't bring you anywhere good.",
"The fact that many of the children die IS part of the reason for this. If there is a 50% chance your baby won't make it past a couple years but you want a surviving heir (there are many reasons for this), it makes sense to have more than one child. Now, having more than one child may decrease your ability to care for each one individually but on the whole you are still more likely to have a surviving heir out of those several children.\n\nAdditionally, many causes of infant mortality are not related to \"having too many children\" (starvation, etc) but instead are random chances like disease. If your child has a 50% chance of dying of cholera but starvation isn't your main concern, having 3 children makes it much more likely that one of them will survive while not really hurting that first child's chances. ",
"As mentioned before, there's a lot of reasons for that. Having lived in a developing country and studying the issue in university. Here are some of the main reasons:\n\n1. **FAMILY BACKGROUND:** Basically, the aspect of having a lot of children is common from generations back. And it is just usually carried on from one generation to the next. Why? Because there is a lack of...\n\n2. **EDUCATION:** A lot of schools in developing countries (LEDCs), especially public schools, do not offer sex ed classes. *Hell, I never had one too.* Because of the lack of education, young kids who are experimenting don't know what exactly happens when the *peepee* goes in the *veevee*. Moving on, there is no sex ed due to...\n\n3. **RELIGION:** Some religions do not allow birth control, or even cannot talk about sex. A lot of LEDCs are also non-secular, meaning that the state and the church works together, so laws on the scriptures are still followed. \n\n4. **MANUAL LABOUR:** This is one of the most important reasons why parents in LEDCs have more children than they can handle. It simply means, they have more manpower to help them with their farm/to work elsewhere. And most importantly, they take the chances that maybe, *just maybe*, one kid will make it out there and lift the whole family from poverty. \n",
"They do it for the same reason we get tax deductions here in the USA for having children. There was a time when children were part of the work force (farming-agricultural era). The kids you had the better your chances of a successful farm were. Those days went by with the inventions of mechanical plows, man made fertilizers, etc. Also it takes people concerned for future generations to NOT just do what \"comes naturally\". Deny it or not, humans are animals and animals breed. ",
"Half of pregnancies and about a third of births are unplanned *in the US*, a country that has easy access to contraception and where rape, even marital, is a crime. Why would you expect desperately poor people to be any better at it?\n",
"From firsthand experience? A lot of people in poverty have many children so that they could expect at least one of them to survive."
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ei9j0r | how does a human sperm cell carry as much genetic data as an egg 2000 times its size so much as to where the offspring looks and acts like the father more than the mother in some cases? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ei9j0r/eli5_how_does_a_human_sperm_cell_carry_as_much/ | {
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"The actual genetic material is carried in a pretty small part of the cell called a nucleus. The majority of the egg cell’s mass is the cellular machinery required to start the replication and implantation once the egg is fertilized",
"A sperm cell doesn't carry any more genetic information than any other cell you have in your body, and many of them are smaller than your sperm cell.\n\nEggs are ultra-large cells, they're not the standard.\n\nOffsprings do not look more like the father."
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4acxuh | why is biodiesel/biofuel considered "green"? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4acxuh/eli5_why_is_biodieselbiofuel_considered_green/ | {
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"The carbon in a biofuel, say biodiesel, comes (mostly or entirely) from the \"feedstock\", the biological material the fuel was made from (almost always plants). This carbon, in turn, came from the atmosphere in recent history. Whenever the plant in question grew, usually in the last few years, that's when its carbon was \"locked up\". That carbon, in turn, is returned to the atmosphere when the fuel is burned. Conventional petrochemicals, on the other hand, burn and release carbon that was locked up a very, very long time ago, increasing our greenhouse gas levels.",
"Very simplified explanation: Photosynthesis metabolizes CO2 into sugars (technically carbohydrates but bear with me) and O2, using sunlight as energy input. Combustion turns sugars and O2 into CO2, giving heat as energy output. Respiration is pretty much a form of combustion cells can do. Water also plays a role in both process but it doesn't matter here.\n\nIn the primordial Earth, there was more CO2 and less O2 than today. Then, photosynthetic organisms appeared, and they started metabolizing CO2 into O2 (released into the atmosphere) and sugars (stored in their bodies). That by itself doesn't do anything, because they have to burn the sugars to live, reversing the process. Or, other organisms would feed on them, and burn the sugars that was in their bodies.\n\nHowever, due to natural events (landslides, earthquakes, etc), some photosynthetic organisms would end trapped underground. This stops the cycle: They captured CO2 from the atmosphere, but now nobody can burn the sugars to release the CO2 back. So, over time, the CO2 content of the atmosphere would decrease, and the O2 would increase.\n\nWhen we burn these \"fossil sugars\" found underground, we restore the cycle, letting the original CO2 that was trapped ages ago return to the atmosphere. This sounds good, but it's bad. That's why burning fossil fuels releases net CO2 from the point of view of modern-day Earth.\n\nHowever, biofuels aren't found underground. We cultivate them today. So to make a certain amount of biofuel, we grow plants, letting them absorb CO2 to build sugars. Then, we burn the fuel, releasing the CO2 back into the atmosphere. The whole process releases no net CO2.",
"Short answer: \nDone right, biofuels do not add carbon to the atmosphere. The plants suck carbon out of the atmosphere, that carbon goes into the fuel, gets put out the tailpipe, goes back into the atmosphere in the same amount that you started with. ",
"Real answer: they are not \"green\", they would require inefficient use of over 600+ million hectares of (now dwindling) cropland to power all vehicles. High energy input and lower than advertised photosynthetic efficiency (CO2 absorbed vs. released) belies the \"CO2 neutral\" argument. Land, water, fertilizer, would be diverted from much needed food production. The reality is that they are considered \"green\" because very powerful interests have spent much effort convincing us so."
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1tw7n2 | how does little caesars make money by selling pizzas for only $5? | They have large pizza cooking equipment, multiple employees at each store, and still have to pay for advertising and materials to sell their product in. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1tw7n2/eli5_how_does_little_caesars_make_money_by/ | {
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"Sheer volume of sales. If you sell enough pizzas at a small profit, you will make money.",
"I don't think a pizza costs that much to make. Aren't LC pizzas already cooked and thin crust? Cost would be even lower.",
"Sub par ingredients help a lot with their profitability.",
"Pizzas cost about 2 bucks to make... Add a buck for overhead and you have 40% margins. I'm sure a pizza guy will comment. I saw a similar tread a while back that I'm sourcing info from. ",
"the 5 dollar pizza gets you into the store and thinking 'little caesars'.\n\nThey don't necessarily need to make money on the 5 dollars, but if you decide to order garlic sticks, or a drink or you decide you like little Caesars and want to now call them for delivery of a pizza with your favourite toppings they've got you.\n\nThis is a loss leader in MBA speak. \n\n > multiple employees at each store, and still have to pay for advertising and materials to sell their product in.\n\nRight, but they don't just have to sell 5 dollar pizzas. All of those employees and equipment are on and running through the workday, whether they make pizzas or not, the marginal cost, on top of the regular pizza business, to make extra pizzas with reduced toppings is quite low. So they can make most of their money on regular pizza sales, and a little extra from 5 dollar pizzas, garlic sticks drinks etc. and retaining you as a customer when it comes time to order a 20 dollar pizza. "
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5a1nwd | how do dead people vote? | How do dead people vote and how does this loophole exist? Can someone just go to the voting booth and put in a vote for their relative that died in the 60s? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5a1nwd/eli5how_do_dead_people_vote/ | {
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"As far as I know this is usually only an issue if someone died after the voter registers have been updated the last time.\n\nLets look at an extreme example:\nSomeone dies on the night before the election. Of course the people running the election do not know about it yet because their voter register is older than a few hours and had this person survived the night they would of course have been entiteled to vote. Now anyone could vote for the deceased person if they can convince the people at the voting station that they are in fact this dead person. After all the person at the voting station expects the dead person to turn up.\n\nWhile this is an extreme example this could even take place with people who died earlier than the night before. Depending on the place you are voting in the voter registers might be considerably older because for example they have been updated the last time before absentee voting started."
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e8n2pf | why does english borrow so many words from other languages? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e8n2pf/eli5_why_does_english_borrow_so_many_words_from/ | {
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"Can you provide a source for this 80% number? I highly doubt this is correct and I think you are misinterpreting information, but I am not a linguist nor a native English speaker...",
"First, it's not 80%, you just made that up, but it's still a lot. Roughly 29% of English vocabulary comes directly from French, and other 29% comes either directly from either Latin or from Latin through French. That means roughly 58% of our vocabulary is not Germanic, which is the language family English is from, but instead is French or Latin. Why? Because in 1066, William, Duke of Normandy, conquered England. The Normans spoke French, and William largely replaced the local Anglo Saxon nobility with French nobility, and French was the language spoken at court and by the nobles. Over the centuries, as you can imagine, it sort of merged with the English language, creating modern English, which is largely Germanic in it's grammar, but with a lot borrowed from French, particularly vocabulary. To a lesser extent, Latin also entered English through the influence of the church.",
"we're colonial down to our core--regularly beating up other languages and rifling through their pockets for loose terms",
"Borrow may not really be a good term to describe how English ended up with most of its current vocabulary.\n\nAs its core english is a mixture of the languages of the people who have invaded England over the centuries.\n\nThe Anglo-Saxons brought their Germanic language with them, the Romans left some Latin, Viking raiders left a lot of Norse words behind, The French invaded and added a large amount of French to the language and so on.\n\nAt some point the English got sick of being invaded all the time and decided to turn things around and set out to conquer as much of the world as they could and brought some of the local languages with them back home if they found it useful.\n\nThere was also trade where other groups brought interesting new things to english shores and imported the names of those things and ideas alongside them.\n\nRight now english is more likely to hand out parts of its vocabulary to other languages than take new stuff in.",
"It's simple, when the British empire was going around colonizing they ran into hundreds of different cultures and many different languages. They would find neat things and bring them back from the travels. They trips had to be paid for by someone. The crown or by very rich people. You need to show something special to get more money. \n\nSo how do you make something ordinary sound special in English? You give it a strange name. If you are lazy you steal the name it already has. \n\nFor example think about a baguette. What is it? It's a loaf of bread that is made and cooked a particular way. It's originally a French word that had no English equivalent. \n\nSomeone found a baguette and though that it sounded neat and brought it to England to show it off. New word has been made in English.\n\nMultiply that by thousands.",
"English is an old language, and its history goes back thousands of years. Well, most languages do of course.\n\nLanguages are not static as many people believe. The evolve over the decades and centuries, and that also applies to the English language.\n\nI recommend watching some videos from linguistics who can explain these things way better than I can, and start with this 5 minute video:\n\nWhere did English come from?\n\n[_URL_2_](_URL_2_)\n\nI also enjoy this video, which is more about the differences between US and UK English, showing how in linguistic terms a short period of time the two languages has diverged:\n\n [_URL_3_](_URL_3_) \n\nFurther videos of interest:\n\nViking influence on the English language!\n\n[_URL_4_](_URL_4_)\n\nGreek influence on the English language\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\nIs English really a Germanic language?\n\n[_URL_1_](_URL_1_)"
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5s5nkx | why do snakes stick out their tongues so much? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5s5nkx/eli5_why_do_snakes_stick_out_their_tongues_so_much/ | {
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"They are capturing scent particles from the air; once their tongue is back inside, they insert it into a smelling organ on the top of their mouth, the Jacobson's Organ.",
"The inside of your nose is lined with special tissues that can detect the particles that make up smells in the air. When you inhale, the particles from the scent travel through your nose and hit these tissues, letting you smell them.\n\nSnakes breathe through a tube that opens in their mouth in the soft part of the lower jaw, not through their nose like humans do. So instead of having those special tissues up their nostrils, they have a couple of special openings in the roof of their mouth, called a Jacobson's organ. But since they don't breathe up into the top of their mouth, they need to get those particles in there somehow to be able to smell them.\n\nTheir flicking tongue captures these particles from the air and then slides into the holes in the top of their mouth, letting those tissues \"smell\" the particles. They do not have these special sensory tissues on the tongue itself, though. As for why they don't, that's more than I'm capable of ELI5ing, since the explanation of evolution is a bit beyond what I can ELI5.. Enjoy!",
"They pick up scent particles from the air with their tongue and rub it against a scent organ called the Jacobson's Organ in the top of their mouth. The Jacobson's Organ has a left and a right side, and the forks on the tongue correspond to these. This gives snakes \"stereoscopic\" scent which lets them tell how far to the left/right what they are smelling is. "
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3sd6dr | my dog can't catch my cold. what prevents most pathogens from being able to infect multiple species? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3sd6dr/eli5_my_dog_cant_catch_my_cold_what_prevents_most/ | {
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"Viruses and bacteria use specialized proteins to protect themselves and to attack their hosts. The tools your cold uses to invade your cells are not particularly suitable to attacking dog cells, like philips and flat head screwdrivers, or slightly different door keys.",
"Pathogens tend to evolve in parallel with their hosts, so a cold virus adapted by evolution to infect dogs is very unlikely to infect a human. It would be even less likely if it were adapted to infect reptiles or insects.\n\nHOWEVER, some pathogens can and do jump the species barrier. Avian influenza, for example, originates in birds, and if a domestic species like chickens or ducks gets infected, then it's entirely possible for the virus to jump the species barrier. The huge danger there is that because this particular influenza virus didn't co-evolve with humans, it doesn't have the built-in evolutionary \"off switch\" that prevents it from killing its own host. That's where epidemics and pandemics come from.\n\nHIV was also originally a disease in monkeys, which then jumped species to chimpanzees when the chimps ate the monkeys, and then it eventually jumped to humans some time in the 1920's, when hunters in Cameroon ate the chimps. At least, that's the current and most likely theory."
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2tlo6l | what happens in your body when you feel like puking after smoking too many cigarettes? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2tlo6l/eli5_what_happens_in_your_body_when_you_feel_like/ | {
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"You're experiencing the symptoms of nicotine poisoning. Drink some water and lay off the cigs for a while. You'll be fine. "
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210pia | why do we need to 'breathe oxygen' and why is it impossible for other living organisms to 'breathe' other stuff, like hydrogen? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/210pia/eli5_why_do_we_need_to_breathe_oxygen_and_why_is/ | {
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"Oxygen was simply the available gas around. Evolution as a whole is basically just a sequence of good mistakes. Way back when, when the surface of the Earth was basically a sea of single-celled organisms, certain organisms adapted to use oxygen as an energy source. These mitochondria, which are still present in our cells now, were ingested by other cells and usually broken down into the energy that they contained. However, at one point, something went wrong for the cell doing the ingesting, and the mitochondria survived and was now inside the cell. There it did its own thing: making constant copies of itself and so forth, while taking the resources it needed from the mother cell. The advantage to the cell is that the mitochondria turned these resources into energy, which could then be used by the cell itself. Thus, the cells that accidentally failed at ingesting the mitochondria did well. Hence, we have evolved, by sheer consequence to use oxygen.\n\nThere are some animals that use a form of sulphur to survive. Whether or not this contains oxygen I know not, but it seems that they do not need the presence of oxygen to survive. They thrive around geysers on the ocean floor, and it is believed by some that we and many of the plants and animals we know today are derived from these creatures, who swam up from the depths.\nAlthough hydrogen can power our cars, it is pretty useless for our bodies, and due to its very hazardous keeping, it is very unlikely that any lifeforms have developed and/or will develop the use of hydrogen: the element has a tendency to blow up if you look at it funny.\n\nThere are, however, many theories that suggest other life forms on other planets (if, of course, they do exist. We are only speculating here) may have developed in a completely different way. We are based on carbon, but living organisms could be found based on sulphur, for example. As a result, it is highly likely that other life forms, should they exist, gain energy through a different gas, even though on planet Earth this trait hasn't developed. There might very well be mitochondria that turn other gases into energy, but so far as we know at this moment in time, that doesn't exist.\n\nI hope that helps :)",
"Life that doesn't need oxygen is called anaerobic life, and there's plenty of it even right here on Earth. Mostly bacteria. In fact, you have plenty in your stomach. There are even a couple multicellular anaerobic life forms we know about, although they are in very remote and exotic locations (e.g., *underneath* the sea floor), and are still incredibly small compared to typical plants and animals.\n\nHowever, most of the energy on Earth is locked up in organic compounds - compounds containing atomic carbon. The reason for this is that carbon is fairly abundant, but also a very flexible atom that has a lot of possible chemical reactions and compounds it can help form.\n\nOrganic compounds often can't be consumed as completely without oxygen for traditional combustion (burning) chemical reactions. So anaerobic bacteria tend to not get as much energy from the same food supply. That puts them at a big competitive disadvantage - if one species can digest its food fully with oxygen, and another species can only partially digest the same food without, the species that can use oxygen has a big evolutionary advantage.\n\nWe don't know that macroscopic (human-scale) anaerobic life is impossible. We do know we haven't found any of it on Earth."
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g3cpmr | how does a handheld device/laptop switch itself off after you tell it to? | when you go to your menu and select "shut down", i don't get what the device does to shut itself down, it's not like you're pressing the power button to turn it off thereby cutting off the energy source to it, you're giving it a command that it then follows, and it makes itself unable to be used until the next time its switched on, how exactly does this work? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/g3cpmr/eli5_how_does_a_handheld_devicelaptop_switch/ | {
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"I think youve got it the opposite way around. The button isnt cutting off power its calling a command",
"The button triggers a rundown code that shuts down the system.\n\nYour phone has an internal power system even when its off, so pressing the button to turn it on triggers the power cycle and it boots",
"The really basic answer is that in the code that switches it off, it’s really just shutting down some rails of power. There’s still some power running in the system to let it respond to the next command to turn on, but most of the big power consumers are powered off."
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1qzt75 | what do all the words mean when it comes to headphone audio quality? | For example: eq, compression, bass, hz, kbps, etc. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1qzt75/eli5_what_do_all_the_words_mean_when_it_comes_to/ | {
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"Not an expert, but I'll give this a go. \nEQ stands for equalization. More generally in the audio world this refers to the ability to boost or lower the relative volume of sounds at various frequencies (i.e. lower or higher pitched tones) in order to emphasize certain parts of the music you're listening to. For example, if you're listening to hip-hop or heavy bass music, you may want to emphasize the low-end frequencies. In headphones, you won't really have the ability to control this yourself, but some headphones are built to make certain ranges of frequencies stand out. \nCompression in my experience pretty much exclusively happens in mixing of audio (not in headphones), but this basically refers to lowering the volume of unusually loud sounds and increasing the volume of unusually low sounds in a particular song to make everything sound more cohesive; it would for example correct the problem of an extremely loud snare drum sound popping out of the mix at you. \nBass just refers to a low-frequency sound, think about those deep sounds that you can \"feel\" or the low whompy noises in dubstep, etc. \nHz is the symbol for Hertz, which is just a unit of measurement for frequency. The lower the number the lower the sound (like bass mentioned above), the higher the number the higher the sound (like a cymbal or a high-pitched scream)\nKbps stands for Kilobytes Per Second, and this is a measure of quality in an audio file. Basically, digital audio files are not a continuous stream of data, but work by taking \"snapshots\" of the sound and stringing them together in a stream our ears percieve as continuous. The more of these snapshots there are, the more accurately they represent the sound being recorded, and therefore the better the sound will be. \nHope that helps. ",
"Eq is equalisation. Its basically how loud different frequencies are produced by the speakers. So for something like Dubstep/Hip Hop you want more loud lower frequencies to feel the low end bass. For Classical music you may want a flatter eq with a slightly louder higher frequencies for the sting instruments to stand out. \n\nCompression is how information is removed from the audio file to make it smaller. You have different audio compression formats just like you have different image compression formats. So .wav is like a raw audio file where all the information that was recorded is stored in it. It can be compared to RAW DNG (for cannon) in images. .MP3 is the most common audio format. It is compressed to remove much of information from the wav file to make it smaller with some loss in audio quality. It can be compared to a jpeg image which is a compressed version of a RAW image. \n\nBass is just the lower frequencies of sound/music which give you that 'boooom' and 'Bwaaa' sound that you feel more than you hear.\n\nHz is frequency. Humans can hear between 20-20000KHz of frequency of sounds. 20 to ~200kHz is your bass/lows. 200 to ~7000kHz is your mids and 7000 upto ~20,000kHz is your treble/highs. \nYou may also see Hz as the sampling frequency of how the audio was recorded. So like 44.1kHz is like the standard CD quality and it means the audio was recorded at 44,100 times per second. You have higher sample frequency of 92KHz and 192kHz which sample the audio more times to produce a more detailed recording. This is like your HD audio. Though in reality you'll find it hard to tell the difference! You also have bitrate of audio such as 16bit and 24bit. It's again more information on how much of the audio was sampled at each time. 44.1kHz/16 bit is your CD quality it means the bitrate (resolution) of the audio is going to be at 44100x16x2 (2 channels L and R of audio recorded) which gives 1411200 bits of information per second of audio. Or 1,441.2Kbps bitrate of audio (compare that to the highest quality mp3 which is only 320kbps). \n\nKbps is the bitrate of the audio. Think of it as resolution. It is how compressed audio is recorded. How much information is stored per second of audio that is recorded. So it's like a 8bit image compared to a 16bit image if you wanna take a photo comparison. So you have 96kbps mp3 audio means there are 96kilobytes of information for every second of audio which is very low quality which you may hear on internet streams of low quality youtube videos. Then you have 124kbps which is ok quality. 320kbps is the highest quality you get with mp3 audio. \n\nI guess there are lots of different numbers to take in here but to simplify it down:\n\nEq: is how loud the different frequencies are (the lows (bass), mids and high (treble). \n\nCompression is what it sounds, compressing the file to make it smaller and easier to handle but you may lose audio quality as you lose audio information when you compress the file.\n\nBass are the low frequencies.\n\nkHz/bits is how many times per second the audio is sampled/recorded and how much of it is recorded.\n\nKbps is bit rate, how much information the audio file contains and it ultimately determines the quality of the audio file and how big it's gonna be."
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1r4irz | why does a sniper need a spotter, when both of them are using scopes to look at the target? and how does the spotter know the wind speed if there are no moving objects like trees or a flag? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1r4irz/eli5why_does_a_sniper_need_a_spotter_when_both_of/ | {
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"There are two schools in sniping, the German method (team of spotter and sniper) and the Soviet school (single man). The Soviet/Russian idea was that of our standard designated marksman. \nThe two+ team comes down to a couple of basic principles; more eyes are better at picking out a specific target, two brains run the numbers of elevation, drop, wind speed, environment, and most of all, hitting a taget at distance is hard enough on its own. \nThe spotter has a better field of view, leads to the target, runs the issues, gives the info to the trigger man, s/he pulls the trigger and hits the target. Also, when first shot misses, the correction and second shot is a lot quicker with your buddy seeing where you hit and giving you the correction.\nWind speed comes down to a guesstimate built on 100s of hours of practice. \nGranted, this is all related to me as I listened to my family members from opposite sides of the curtain drunkenly argue their respective sides...I hope we can get a person with first hand experience to point out where I went wrong....",
"They're both using devices that give them that information. \n\nA spotter is used because while a sniper is certainly capable of gathering all that information and calculating it, having someone to feed him/her numbers speeds up the calculation of a long shot significantly. \n\nThat's especially important if lives are contingent on the sniper taking down a target quickly. \n\nAs for wind speed, etc., an electronic anemometer has been available for almost 2 decades now. \n\nA spotter gets to position this and other devices and convey the data to the sniper in a single package. And the spotter isn't in the same place, so assuming good communication, you have a much wider \"field of vision\" based on the spotter's reports. \n\nWind speed, direction, presence of glass, movement, possible civilians nearby, etc. are all concerns for a sniper. A spotter alleviates many of those concerns and allows the sniper to focus on accuracy.",
"The spotter does most of the legwork that goes into making the shot, while the shooter is responsible for making sure that they apply all the necessary fundamentals of shooting. Long hours of observing from a concealed potion is mentally fatiguing, and having two people watching a target helps to alleviate this. The spotter is responsible for helping to determine distance, telling the shooter the necessary dope to dial on the scope, making wind calls, and if the shooter misses a shot, they can help make the necessary adjustments to bring the round on target. Spotting scopes also have greater magnification and wider field of view. In the traditional two man sniper team, the spotter also offers security in the case that the team is compromised.\n\nAs far as making a wind call, that is a very difficult skill, and many consider it more of an art. Dust and clothing are all things that can be used to help determine wind.",
"All of the previous posts are correct. There's more as well. A spotter often has binoculars for a wider field of view than common fixed magnification scopes; this aids with finding targets. He also has a spotting scope. One of the more common riflescope fixed magnifications for snipers is 10x. This is adequate for hitting targets out to and even past 1000m, but it is hard to see where you're hitting if you miss (due to the low magnification and the recoil of your rifle moving the scope off target). The spotter has a higher (20x-60x) magnification via the spotting scope, so this makes calling misses easier, as well as finding small targets. \n\nEDIT: Also, the spotter often carries a secondary weapon to add more firepower if the team needs to break contact. Often an M4 with m203 launcher, or a semi-auto .308 rifle if the sniper has a bolt-action .300 win mag like an M24.",
"I always thought it was because after the shot, a sniper wouldn't be able to see his target get hit or what not because of the recoil",
"You also forgot the other thing. Staring downrange for extended periods of times sucks. Fatigue sets in, and you have to rotate shooter/spotter frequently to stay fresh. ",
"The let ronin devices thing is an over simplified, modern answer.\n\nOriginally spotters and snipers were the components of the sniper team.\nWhile snipers are taking the shot. The spotter in pulling security (super important), relaying communications ( Intel the the unit commander, air support, extraction, coordination with friendly units etc...)\n\nAs for the calculations of wind etc.. The spotter would also help or completely handle them (each team is different). You use whatever you can to get the direction and speed (blades of grass, trees, etc...)\nIt's also important to note that winds change direction and strength multiple times on the path to the target. It's the spotters job to look for all these thing and give updated info to the shooter.\n\nBonus info: the only American sniper to ever go without a spotter is the USMC's Carlos Hathcock, in Vietnam. His stalking and shooting ability is some straight legend shit. He is also one of the two father's of the modern sniper program we have now.",
"Additionally, the spotter acts as protection for the sniper. ",
"The spotter is usually the more experienced member of the team and kinda acts like the team leader. The shooter basically just has to adjust the scope and pull the trigger. The spotter uses the instrumentation to determine distance, environmental conditions etc. He also has to work the radio. \n\nMost importantly he's there to help with security. It's really hard to be concentrating on hitting your target and being aware of who is sneaking up behind you.\n\n",
"The spotter can watch what is called \"trace\" it is the actual displacement of the round as it passes through the air. He can track it easier and see the impact without \"splash\" from the round. This way he can make adjustments easier. \n\nThe spotting scope actually has a higher magnification than the optic on the weapon. He can see more clearly and at a greater distance.\n\nFor wind speed you can use a \"kestrel\" but it is not the most accurate piece of equipment. \n\nSource: Sniper ",
"Spotters are also the snipers protection. They can look around at other things while the sniper goes full mantra on a target. They also offer defence, if their position is compromised, the sniper has a measely backup pistol or a lightweight smg. The spotter can carry more mid to close combat options like a shotgun or a tactical rifle. Sniper units are for infiltration. Two man teams that slip in, get the job done and slip out. If you don't have adequate survival and adaptation strategies in enemy lines you are just expensive fodder. ",
"Snipers do not ALWAYS need a spotter. Spotting scopes offer a much wider field of view and have higher magnifications than rifle scopes.\n\nCalculating wind is much more difficult. Yes today they might have Kestrel 4500's to take the guesswork out of making a wind call. However the Kestrels can only give you a reading for the wind in relation to the shooter. The winds 200m down range may be different, and another 500m past that may be different as well.\n\nTypically the spotter is the more experienced sniper of the two. The shooter is just operating the weapon system, while the spotter is actually giving the shooter all of the input he needs to apply to the optics. The spotter can make wind call determinations by looking at grass, dust, clouds, or even the direction gasses expelled by small arms drift after being expended. If there is wind, there will almost always be an indicator of which way it is blowing at a given location."
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1zt3h6 | does napalm self-ignite from contact with the air? | I was told today by a veteran that in training they were told that if napalm gets on them, after smothering it, it must be cut off with the skin immediately, or it would reignite. Is this correct? Did they mix or have some mixtures with phosphorus or something similar, or is (s)he probably getting mixed up on substance (like phosphorus grenades/shrapnel)? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1zt3h6/eli5_does_napalm_selfignite_from_contact_with_the/ | {
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"White phosphorous is used as an ignition agent in most napalm compositions, though older variants used thermite. White phosphorous self ignites in an oxygen environment."
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2lrlra | do alarm clocks really just sometimes not go off, or do we turn them off and forget about it? | This morning I was supposed to meet someone at 7am, so I set my alarm for 6:30. I woke up at 7:30. This is on a Sunday morning after going to sleep past 2am.
I did not make a mistake in setting the alarm (am for pm, etc.), and the alarm works every other morning. Does this mean that the alarm did go off but I just stopped it and immediately forgot, only to become conscious an hour later? Or is it really just a coincidence that the alarm happened to have a malfunction and I woke up uncharacteristically early on a Sunday morning? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2lrlra/eli5_do_alarm_clocks_really_just_sometimes_not_go/ | {
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"It could happen. Sometimes there will be a short loss of power (half a second) where they will reset themselves. You might find your computer to be in a rebooted state if you leave it on 24/7 like me.",
"I turn my alarms off sometimes without remembering, I usually have to change where my phone is every month or so to avoid it happening consistently as I need to actually find it."
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4kmq5l | why do shady companies not work on making their company less shady? | There's always those cheesy "call now and we'll double the offer" with some old last decade font. What's the deal? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4kmq5l/eli5_why_do_shady_companies_not_work_on_making/ | {
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"It is cheap and it works on exactly the kind of people they want as customers. If you will fall for that, they can sell you anything as a follow-up.",
"I can only assume because they're still making plenty of money being shady. It might seem obvious to you and me but there are a lot of people who still fall for those things.",
"being shady is their business model, making it look better won't make it any better and smart people will still not fall for it so no use to spend effort on it.",
"You and I might be smart enough to see them for what they are, but a lot of other people aren't. Why would they change their business practice to be less shady when it's clear there are plenty of idiots for them to rip off?",
"Some companies are in it for the quick buck where the business owner is happy with making money in their lifetime. Also, shady businesses are potentially cheaper to start and run to make a profit.\n\nThink of it this way, if the product I'm selling you is complete shit, I only plan to sell it to you once. Let's say I make $0.10 per sale of this product. There are 7 billion people in the world, if I sold one of that shitty product to every person in the world, I'd make 700 million. So I could be a millionaire if I only sold a fraction of that number. Make it more realistic where you're making more than $0.10 per sale and you can see why being shady can still turn big profits.\n\nI have a friend who used to something that could be considered shady. Went to China with 5k USD and turned that into a LOT more money. When the business crashed, he still had plenty of money to go into less shady business opportunities.\n\nYou'd also be surprised how easy it is for one company to sell you something, fuck you over, make you promise to never buy from them again, and then fuck you over with a different company name."
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411c0s | what do therapy dogs do? | I understand that they help relieve stress, anxiety, etc, but do the dogs actively DO? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/411c0s/eli5_what_do_therapy_dogs_do/ | {
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"First, there's a difference between therapy dogs and service dogs. Services dogs are trained and registered and they provide help with certain disabilities -- things like guiding the blind, alerting the deaf, helping people who are disabled, or sensing when someone has low blood sugar or is going to have an epileptic fit.\n\n\"Therapy\" dogs are somewhat of a made-up category. They generally aren't trained and they can't be registered because there's no organization that does it. The dog doesn't actively do anything except provide companionship for the human. \n\nNow, this *can* be therapeutic for people, especially if they have social anxiety or things like that, because the dog does provide something safe for them. However, these people are basically turning dogs into living security blankets.\n\nThe problem is, because of laws about legitimate service dogs -- they cannot be denied entry and you cannot ask the person what service the dog provides if its wearing an identifying harness -- people with therapy dogs are taking advantage of the system. Some of them do this by slapping a harness that says \"therapy dog\" on their pet, and others just insist that it's a therapy dog.\n\nUnfortunately, people can't challenge them on the issue because of the laws covering service dogs. I've seen people with dogs in shopping carts at grocery stores and in the audience at live and movie theaters and other inappropriate places. The service dog industry is working to make it a lot harder for people to take advantage like this, but that takes time.\n\nTL;DR: Not much, except serve as a living security blanket. Not to be confused with legitimate service dogs."
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m9nq8 | the game skyrim. i've watched half a dozen videos about it, but don't get it. | Don't get me wrong, the graphics seem incredible, but out of the many videos of gameplay I've seen on YouTube, I don't know what to gather from this game. I get that it's an RPG, but that's about it. Is it like WoW (another I don't get)?
Can someone explain the overall point of the game please? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/m9nq8/the_game_skyrim_ive_watched_half_a_dozen_videos/ | {
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"It's an \"open-world\" RPG. Kinda like WoW, but tailored for a single player. Essentially, they've plopped a big sheet of land down; decorated it with trees, mountains, and other nature stuff; built some towns, cities, dungeons, and people or creatures to populate them; wrote stories and quests for the player to do; then told the player to have at thee. It's exploratory fun.",
"Skyrim is the fifth game of the Elder Scrolls series. It is an action RPG set in an open world. When the game begins, you're given a very basic tutorial which gives you the controls and a few items. From there, all choices are yours. You can choose to follow the main quest by completing tasks assigned, or you can choose to go off on your own to explore. The main quest of Skyrim involves the legend of the Dragonborn, who has the ability to steal the souls of dragons and take their powers. You also have the option to join different guilds, brotherhoods, or educate yourself. Choices are all yours. And you can, if you so chose, technically do it all- if you have the time, you can do ALL the things I mentioned, not just play through one way.\n\nWhat really sets the Elder Scrolls series apart from most RPGs is the nature of experience in the game. In most RPG's, you get a set amount of experience points every time you kill a creature. After a certain number of experience points, your character levels up and their stats all increase by some algorithmic ratio. This is not how experience works in Elder Scrolls. In these games, each individual skill or attribute you have will have it's own experience points. You gain experience simply by using that skill. Doesn't matter if you kill anything or not. Simply using your shield will gain you experience for your Blocking skill, which can then level itself up. Using your attack spells will gain you experience in your Destruction Skill, which can level itself up. And so on. After you've leveled 10 skills up, your character gains a level. The positive in this system if that your characters stats and abilities increase based on the things that you use, not just a random algorithm. Constantly using certain skills will make you better in those skills alone.",
"It's an \"open-world\" RPG. Kinda like WoW, but tailored for a single player. Essentially, they've plopped a big sheet of land down; decorated it with trees, mountains, and other nature stuff; built some towns, cities, dungeons, and people or creatures to populate them; wrote stories and quests for the player to do; then told the player to have at thee. It's exploratory fun.",
"Skyrim is the fifth game of the Elder Scrolls series. It is an action RPG set in an open world. When the game begins, you're given a very basic tutorial which gives you the controls and a few items. From there, all choices are yours. You can choose to follow the main quest by completing tasks assigned, or you can choose to go off on your own to explore. The main quest of Skyrim involves the legend of the Dragonborn, who has the ability to steal the souls of dragons and take their powers. You also have the option to join different guilds, brotherhoods, or educate yourself. Choices are all yours. And you can, if you so chose, technically do it all- if you have the time, you can do ALL the things I mentioned, not just play through one way.\n\nWhat really sets the Elder Scrolls series apart from most RPGs is the nature of experience in the game. In most RPG's, you get a set amount of experience points every time you kill a creature. After a certain number of experience points, your character levels up and their stats all increase by some algorithmic ratio. This is not how experience works in Elder Scrolls. In these games, each individual skill or attribute you have will have it's own experience points. You gain experience simply by using that skill. Doesn't matter if you kill anything or not. Simply using your shield will gain you experience for your Blocking skill, which can then level itself up. Using your attack spells will gain you experience in your Destruction Skill, which can level itself up. And so on. After you've leveled 10 skills up, your character gains a level. The positive in this system if that your characters stats and abilities increase based on the things that you use, not just a random algorithm. Constantly using certain skills will make you better in those skills alone."
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6naq9h | will placing the internet under title ii allow it to be censored like radio or will it allow the internet to continue to stay open and free? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6naq9h/eli5_will_placing_the_internet_under_title_ii/ | {
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"Private telephone conversations are covered under Title II, and there's no censorship of telephone calls.\n\nIn practice, censoring the Internet isn't directly possible. You can make a separate net, not the Internet, which you censor. China, for example, does this. There is no Internet in China, only \"China-net\".\n\nIf someone is telling you Tittle II will censor the Internet, they are trying to turn you against regulated net neutrality. These are considered \"bad people\" around here, as Reddit's an advocate for net neutrality (so that you can get to Reddit)."
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57f7yv | if a plane was on a conveyor belt, could it take off? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/57f7yv/eli5_if_a_plane_was_on_a_conveyor_belt_could_it/ | {
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"The question is actually underspecified, which is why it causes such debate trying to answer it. Specifically, \"perfectly matchesa the speed of the plane\" isn't specific enough.\n\nIf a plane is moving forward at 100 kph and then you place it on this treadmill, what would happen?\n\nIf the answer is \"the surface of the treadmill would move backwards at 100 kph\", then the plane would take off just fine. Plane wheels aren't attached to the engines, so this would just cause the wheels to spin at twice the current speed of the plane at all times.\n\nIf, instead, the answer is \"the treadmill would move as fast as necessary to keep the plane from moving forward relative to the ground\", then you'd need an impossibly fast treadmill. The instant the plane started moving forward, the treadmill would need to start moving at incredible speeds to slow it back down, because the plane wheels can spin freely. That'd probably destroy either the treadmill or the plane wheels if they're made of any conventional material, which would indeed keep the plane from taking off."
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1ycpg3 | why do sweaters lose their softness after you put them through the wash? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ycpg3/eli5_why_do_sweaters_lose_their_softness_after/ | {
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"It isn't the wash but rather the heated dryer that kills sweater softness. Check the lint trap in your dryer. All the soft fluff in it used to be in your clothes! The heat if a dryer also burns the tiny soft fibers in sweaters. Air dry your soft sweaters to keep them soft.",
"When you clean and dry clothing the small fibers are burned off in the dryer, occasionally unwoven, and the chemicals in your detergent can also eat away at them. The movement also tightens the fibers and fabric causing knit sweaters to tighten but not shrink thus reducing the softness. "
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1gnex1 | how do cell phones and other electronics randomly break after a few years, or start glitching? | For example, I've had an iphone for about two years now and sometimes it refuses to hang up a call and the red 'button' goes unresponsive. If it was programmed to work originally, how can it just 'forget' what it's supposed to be doing?
Please excuse my tech illiteracy. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1gnex1/eli5_how_do_cell_phones_and_other_electronics/ | {
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"Generally I would say most electronics begin to fail to properly function due to one or several parts not working. This can be through excessive heat, water damage, gradual corrosion of some parts by chemical reactions with oxygen or other reactive substances, through shock or stress such as dropping the device, contamination of parts and short circuiting. In cases such as your iphone it isn't the phone 'forgetting' what it's supposed to be doing, as it may seem, it's simply faulty connnections between interior parts. \n\nFor an example, imagine your phone is a hiking track and every function your phone has is a different pathway. If the path for the off button became flooded or bushes grew over the path then you can't get to it. The path would end and you would not reach that spot on the trail. Your phone may have a similar problem, the part of the phone which ends phone calls may have a faulty connection. Therefore every time you press the button to end the call the phone does everything it normally would, it walks all the way along the trail to the point where the button is and then stops at the overgrown bushes because that is where the trail appears to end. If the parts are not properly connected with all the right materials then the phone can not complete the desired function because it is physically incapable and that translates to no reaction on-screen."
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51zc9s | the feud between the standing rock sioux tribe and the dakota access crude-oil pipeline | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/51zc9s/eli5_the_feud_between_the_standing_rock_sioux/ | {
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"It crosses the Missouri River, which affects the tribe as the river runs through their land. They don't want their fishies to die and their water getting dirty.",
"They are also saying the pipeline would go through burial grounds and sites that are considered sacred to the tribe. ",
"It doesn't go on their reservation, just borders it. They are worried about water contamination and are saying there are sacred sites in the path, but are unable to provide proof of their existence. \n\nAlso the pipeline they are trying to build follows the path of an existing natural gas pipeline",
"A friend of mine is doing some protesting out there if anyone wants his contact info. He's a photographer. His goal is simply to get the word out there as many people have no idea this is going on. Well, obviously his goal is to stop the pipeline. So sad.",
"It comes down to the confirmed fact that as of 2014 more than 18.4 Million Gallon of Oil and oil related chemicals have spilled/leaked/misted in North Dakota alone since their oil boom started. \n\nThe people that are trying to make this Cowboys vs. Indians are ridiculous. This is not about race. \n\nOil pipelines are busting all over the country, the world, today. Entire towns are being evacuated. States of emergency all over, today, Most recently in Montana, also Prince Albert declared state of emergency from their spill, From Ohio to Oklahoma to we have pipelines failing and water both public and private contaminated beyond repair. \n\nEnough is enough. Anyone interested should research with Sierra Club and Indian Country Today. Or with Standing Rock Sioux. Or talk to people living in the affected areas. You can get right wing pro oil opinions on mainstream media. \n\nIt just so happens this latest attempt by the oil oligarchs is near the Standing Rock Sioux Res. When and if the pipeline fails at some point, the river and water will poisoned beyond recovery. Just as it has been across our country and all continents. Water is Life.\n\nThe people, white, black, native, french, South American, all peoples are being moved to speak out for NoDAPL and gather and say enough is enough. It has been peaceful and historic. So many cell phone cameras \n\nFamilies including women and children are being held at gunpoint and searched entering the Sacred Stone and other peaceful camp sites. Cell phone towers shit down. Water was shut off. Nat'l Guard is now there. But with technology the world is watching this time. \n\n",
"Let's form this as a series of questions with yes or no answers (or as close as I can get):\n\nDoes the pipe cross tribal land? No.\n\nIs the pipe bad just by itself? No.\n\nAre the lots of EPA regulations? Yes.\n\nMust they comply? Yes\n\nAre repercussions appropriately severe? Yes.\n\nIs North Dakota lenient as shit and willing to make things easier on big oil? Yes (because fuck you big oil money and we want those jobs and that money in our economy) \n\nDo the protesters have legitimate concerns? Yes (abso-fucking-lutly)\n\nDid protesters break on to private property and into construction zones? Yes\n\nAre people allowed to do that? No\n\nDo I agree with civil disobedience? Yes (when done properly)\n\nWas there security at these sites? Yes\n\nIf a security guard is on duty and someone is not supposed to be there is it their responsibility to ask people to leave, and either detain or remove them if they refuse to cooperate? Yes\n\nDid security start bringing dogs after being over run in attempt to remain safe while doing their jobs? Yes\n\nIs that an acceptable escalation? I'm not really sure but the important part is that everyone remains safe.\n\nWere protesters attacked by the dogs? Yes to a minor extent (they weren't unleashed)\n\nDid this happen in response to protesters being somewhere they weren't supposed to be, refusing to leave and being hostile even to the point of attacking security and the dogs? Yes\n\nIs the current situation being handled correctly by the state? Yes (based on the law)\n\nIs the current situation being handled properly by the protesters? No (based again upon the law)\n\nAre you allowed to put up a big mirror in your back yard that shines the sun directly into your neighbors bay windows and onto their TV fucking up their viewing of Game of Thrones? Probably, some places you might need a building permit (that doesn't mean it's not a dick thing to do)\n\nIf your neighbor breaks into your fenced yard with posted no trespassing signs to smash the mirror and gets bit by your dog is it his own fault? Yes\n\nWould he be justified? Yes\n\nWould his actions be legal? No\n\nWould all your neighbors think you two were fucking stupid? Probably.\n\nAre there better ways to handle the pipe line building/protest shit and/or the neighborhood fude scenario? Yes\n\nShort answer: Everyone's acting on emotion and it's fucking shit up. \n"
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16zsa3 | when "persons" is appropriate | I'm Dutch and have always learned that "persons" is not a word. The plural of "person" is "people". Yet I come across the word "persons" regularly. What's up with that? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/16zsa3/eli5_when_persons_is_appropriate/ | {
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"\"People\" refers to a body of people, collectively. It generally implies that they have something in common or are in some way cohesive.\n\n\"Persons\" means than one person, in the sense of several individuals.\n\n > \"The people of this country want justice!\"\n\n > \"Persons on premises subject to search.\"\n\nIn the first case, you're wanting to refer to a group by their common nationality; in the second case, you're just wanting to say that any person found may be searched, even if more than one, not that you're going to collectively search a group (or even that one person you're searching is associated with another).",
"I teach English in Spain. This is a pretty half-assed explanation, but I tell my students to avoid using *persons* in normal contexts. You'd almost exclusively see *persons* in legal documents, official notices (like the \"Persons on premises subject to search\" example from CaptainObviousMC) and other formal documents (maybe a lease agreement or business partnership contract).\n\nIn conversational English, it's pretty rare.",
"Persons refers to individuals as bodies. People refers to bodies as individuals. \n\nThe connotation is that persons are searched and people are charged with crime. Direct/indirect ",
"_URL_0_\n\n\"persons\" is a legal term. used in legal papers or liability warnings to include women. \n\nuse people in everyday settings. \n\nthat's my understanding. "
]
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"http://canadaonline.about.com/cs/women/a/personscase.htm"
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9u8x6k | why does trap rap music glorify gun violence? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9u8x6k/eli5why_does_trap_rap_music_glorify_gun_violence/ | {
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" > What is the rationale?\n\nIt sells records.\n\nThat's the only objective explanation, which is what ELI5 is for. If you want to complain about popular music, there are subs for that.",
"Read the lyrics of popular rap songs from other cultures (French, Spanish), and you'll see it's very much related to the culture and society. We glorify gun violence in movies and in general, other cultures may glorify being a player, sex, women, etc. \n\nArt always reflects the societal values - throughout history it has."
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3vnxyv | what do college and nfl head coaches do? | With offensive and defensive coordinators and tons of other coaches for each position what is the head coaches main focus/responsibility during a game? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3vnxyv/eli5_what_do_college_and_nfl_head_coaches_do/ | {
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"Head coaches are the overall strategists. They are the main voice on the sideline and many even call plays.\n\nWhilst the defensive co-ordinator and offensive co-ordinator are responsible for their own \"side of the ball\", the HC is responsible for the grand strategy, and personnel desicions.\n\nHe is also the team's official representative to the referees, with the ability to throw challenge flags.",
"An NFL head coach is responsible for the actual operations of the team. Generally they'll start the week watching tape of their upcoming opponent. The ensuing week in practice, they will get their team ready to play on Sunday. \n\nPrior to the game, the coach will have a detailed game-plan of what kind of plays, tactics, and strategies they will implement to defeat their opponent. This includes coming up with schemes, formations, and execution of these plays that the team will have to run.\n\nIn-game, they are responsible for adjustments and counteracting anything their opponents pull on them. The coordinators serve as a second-in-command-type figure. If the coach needs help or isn't sure what to do they can refer to their coordinators for advice. Many times, the coordinators are picked by the head coach themselves. "
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6ozh1v | could a woman take testosterone supplements while pregnant to increase the chances of the child being a boy? | I'm not a woman or pregnant, just curious. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6ozh1v/eli5_could_a_woman_take_testosterone_supplements/ | {
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"No. Sex is not a hormonal issue, it's a genetic one. Your sex is determined based upon whether the sperm cell that fertilized your mother's egg had an X or a Y chromosome. No amount of testosterone will change that. ",
"no, ignoring what would probably be miscarriage inducing effects of hormone treatments, sex of the child has nothing to do with hormones. \n\nIn fact its determined by the males sperm (and no, treating the male wont have an effect either)"
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2g9ki4 | tesla vs. auto dealers | Can someone please explain both sides of the Tesla vs. Auto Dealers conversation. Why does Tesla not want to take the traditional route, like auto makers in the past, and create dealerships? Why are auto dealers so worried about one car company selling directly to the public? Would Tesla really have any impact on a Ford dealership that mostly sells F-150s? I am just really curious to here both side of the argument from some unbiased parties.
Thank you in advance!
Also is there a subreddit similar to /r/Explainbothsides ? if not, there should be. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2g9ki4/eli5tesla_vs_auto_dealers/ | {
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"Its not really about Ford. Ford, Toyota, all the rest... they don't give a fuck what Tesla does. Hell Toyota OWNS 20% or so of Tesla. Their success is perfectly fine and the only thing the other big boys want is a slice of this new market Tesla is opening up.\n\nNow the dealerships, they are a different story. They aren't owned by the car makers... they are independent. A while back the laws were written so that the big auto makers had to do business via these guys. Then it was to protect the consumer by not letting the auto-makers abuse their power... now, its because the dealerships make a lot of money.\n\n20-30 years ago it wasn't possible to sell cars without a dealer. You needed locations, stock of cars, land, sales people. The dealerships provided that. Now though? Today, you can do all that shit from a computer. Tesla just needs a couple of cars around for test drives and then a computer to say \"now order what you want and we'll get it to you\".\n\nThe dealerships *are fucking terrified*. In one move Tesla is calling into question everything they exist for. If Tesla gets its way... how long before Ford or Toyota starts saying \"you know... fuck you guys\". \n\nSo they will fight it. The claim its to protect consumers, but I at least don't buy that. I think it comes down to money... and protecting a system that might be a remnant of a by-gone era."
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39g9mc | how does extended release medicine work? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/39g9mc/eli5_how_does_extended_release_medicine_work/ | {
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"It is usually coated or mixed with something that doesn't get broken down by stomach acids very quickly. So when you swallow it, it starts to break down - but just slower.\n\nEdit: it's for this same reason that two medicines can have the exact same active ingredients but one may work faster than the other. I believe that in pharmacology this is called the delivery mechanism (correct me if I'm wrong). This is also why a lot of people insist that the name brand of a medicine is sometimes more effective than the generic version.",
"There are a variety of mechanisms used.\n\nFor many, it's just a coating that delays digestion or absorption. It might be done in layers, or if it's a capsule, the individual pellets inside the capsule might have different coatings or thicknesses of coatings.\n\nOther medicines use an insoluble casing with a microscopic hole that limits how fast stomach acid can enter and the medication leave the casing. [Concerta](_URL_0_) for example uses a substance that absorbs water through a semi-permeable membrane, expands as a result, and forces the medication out. ",
"An outstanding ER physician recently provided me with a simple explanation using Tylenol Arthritis as an example. One half of the pill is white - the fast acting portion which dissolves readily in the acidic environment of the stomach. The slow release yellow portion passes through to the intestinal tract where it dissolves in the higher pH environment "
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5eh4ji | emdrive. why does this violate newton's third law and how does it work? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5eh4ji/eli5emdrive_why_does_this_violate_newtons_third/ | {
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"Nobody has shown that it works at all. There is a recent paper which managed to make it through peer review in some engineering journal, but that doesn't mean that it works. And it doesn't even guarantee that their experimental methods are sound.\n\nIn the paper, they completely neglect to quantify their systematic errors (they attempt to do so with their statistical errors, but don't do anything with systematics). This could mean the difference between a measurement inconsistent with zero thrust and a measurement consistent with zero thrust. In the latter case, it'd be a null result.\n\nAnyway, if the drive is really \"reactionless\" (meaning it can thrust forwards without throwing anything backwards), it violates conservation of momentum. That's why physicists don't think it works.",
"Respectively:\n \n1) We don't know, but it probably doesn't.\n\n2) We don't know, but it probably doesn't.\n\n\n[Here's a great analysis by Scott Manley](_URL_0_) on the EM drive and why it won't work. The gist of it is that a drive violating Newtons 3rd law can easily be converted into a infinite energy device. It breaks so much parts of physics that it isn't even funny. As such, it's probably just a small unexpected error source.",
"Conventional rockets work on Newton's Third Law, or simplified: you can't push yourself forward without pushing something else back. When you jump in the air, you're pushing the Earth away with the same amount of force that's launching you into the air. But because the Earth is so many millions of times heavier than you, the amount it moves away from you is immeasurably small. A rocket pushes itself forward by pushing exhaust out from behind it. Each individual gas particle is small, but all of them moving together very quickly in the same general direction are enough to push the rocket the other direction.\n\nthe EMDrive supposedly works by generating a resonance of microwaves inside a conical chamber. Supposedly, and without getting into graduate-level physics, the resonance is stronger at one end of the cone because it's concentrated down, and the sum of the forces is a very very small but nonzero value. In effect, that would mean that they are producing force without expending exhaust mass.\n\nIt's important you know that the EMDrive almost certainly doesn't work. The force that was measured was extremely small, and it is far more likely that some other variable was generating a phantom force than that the engine is working as intended.",
"So, if the drive works (big if), it works on this weird principle of bouncing x-rays. When moving around inside the cone, the x-rays will have a series of impacts close together in the narrow end, and few impacts at the fat end that are farther apart. The idea is that this impact disparity creates thrust without any of the x-rays leaving the device.\n\nSo far, everything we have ever encountered in nature follows a simple rule: the total momentum of the universe is constant. To make anything gain momentum, it has to be taken away from something else. When you fire a rocket, your exhaust's momentum equals the ship's momentum. When you accelerate your car, you take some momentum away from the earth (then give it back when you slow down).\n\nIt's only possible in the strictest sense of the term that we have failed in our mathematics adequately for the em-drive to actually work, because it would be really weird that we've been using the wrong equations all this time but they've still always given us the right answers anyway. That's why people are so skeptical. It's also why some people are very excited by these tests, because they are absolutely baffling and may open our eyes to other things we've missed.\n\nBut again, on the balance of probability, it's much more likely that everyone who's done em-drive tests has messed up so far than that we've been consistently wrong about everything to do with physics but still managed to get radios and computers and put a man on the moon. It's definitely worth checking out, because at this stage how exactly it's evading disproof is a discovery waiting to happen on it's own, but you should expect it to be disproved eventually.",
"According to our understanding of physics it shouldn't work. But according to the experiments conducted to date, it does. What gives? \n\nThere are two possibilities:\n\n1) Our understanding of physics is incomplete. \n2) The experiments have been flawed. \n\nBoth are *possible*. But our understanding of physics have been confirmed by other experiments many, many times over the last 400 years. Because we've confirmed physics so much, it seems far more likely that the apparent \"it-works\" result is due to some experimental error that we haven't uncovered yet. Like really really way more likely. These kinds of things happen, like the time we thought we [detected faster-than-light neutrinos, but it turned out to be a loose cable](_URL_0_). \n\nThe best way to be sure is to devise and conduct new experiments & keep reviewing the data.",
"Here is what you need to understand about the EM Drive.\n\nThey hooked up a box designed to make electromagnetic waves, to a pretty significant electrical current, and they detected a very, very, very, very, small thrust. Blowing on the box with your mouth would have produced a thrust thousands of times more powerful than what they measured.\n\nNow in space you really don't need very much thrust to get HUGE results, and so this is very significant, but in terms of testing it to figure out if it works... it isn't like a guy sitting on a rolling chair with a fire extinguisher and laughing his ass off as he zooms around the room.\n\nThe fact of the matter is that this is EXACTLY how science is supposed to work. You run an experiment, you get a result that you don't expect, you make up a theory about why you got that result, and (and this is where we are today) you start working on another test to recreate the result and maybe even verify the theory. If the second test comes back with a zero result (as we still expect it to), we will go \"just an experimental hiccup\", which is totally believable given the tiny, tiny, tiny size of the forces involved. If the second test comes back positive, then you go \"Holly Shit!\"\n\nSo right now the smart money is still firmly on \"This doesn't work\".\n\nLast point: Newton's laws, famously Force = Mass X Acceleration have already changed. F=MA is absolutely correct in 99.9% of applications, but if you open up a university physics text book it will actually be expressed as a much more complex equation which deals with how this changes as you approach the speed of light. At normal speeds all of those extra terms in the formula become zero and you get a nice clean F=MA simplification. Should this EM drive work we likely wouldn't be ditching Newton's Laws, but rather we would be adding a few extra mathematical expressions to them at the end which under ordinary circumstances reduce to zero.\n\nIf you imagine that we had discovered some kind of dusty, ancient, tablet of truth, on which the laws of physics were written \"F=MA\" would be clearly legible but the area of the tablet around it would still be covered in dust and grime, we have cleaned up a lot and we think we should be able to see through the dust at this point, but we are not QUIET down to the surface of the tablet everywhere yet. We might have 70-90% of it clean. Every year we clean it up a bit more though, and we don't expect that last 10% to say \"ha ha fooled you, everything else on here is wrong, all you need to know is XXXXXXX\"\n\n",
"The simplest way to explain it is to put your car on a level surface and try to push it with all of your body on the inside without getting tired.\n\nEDIT: Additional parameters added.",
"the ELI5 on why it violates the law is that you can't, no matter how hard you try, lift yourself off the ground by your hair. \n\nthe \"how does it work\" has two parts: many have explained here, but in short, energy bounces around a container, but somehow manages to have a greater bounce overall in one direction. \n\nThe other part is that it doesn't. Countless very accurate measurements from various fields over the ages, and methodologies that built on top of each other that sustained rigorous criticism, have been made show that it is virtually impossible for something like this to work.\n\nThey should always test stuff surely, cause science, but until they get very macroscopic results, chances are very very very slim to none. "
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24l95h | what would happen if i ate nothing but cat/dog food for a month? | For instance, lets say I was lost at sea for a month with nothing but a 10 lb bag of cat/dog food. Would I be ok? Would I survive? Would I get sick?
What is the difference between cat/dog food and human food? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/24l95h/eli5_what_would_happen_if_i_ate_nothing_but/ | {
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"10lb of kibbles and bits is a bit lean for a month. I could eat that much in a single sitting!\n\nSeriously. You're an omnivore and there's enough carbs and protein to pull you through. Lost at sea for a month and your bigger concern will be water. Oh, and the tiger.\n\nDry cat and dog food are really just greazy-assed meat flavored breakfast cereal.\n\nI'd be face down in a vat of capn crunch within minutes of getting off that boat.",
"I imagine you might get real constipated and maybe maybe early signs of scurvy."
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2062s3 | do airplanes have manual/automatic transmissions? how do they work without them (rpm speed/redlining)? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2062s3/eli5_do_airplanes_have_manualautomatic/ | {
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"Airplanes do not have transmissions in the car sense; the fan/propeller just has one \"gear\". There may be a gearbox to match the core speed to the fan/propeller speed but you can't \"shift\" it. If you push the thrust lever all the way forward the engine will go to maximum thrust for the conditions (basically, redline itself). All modern large engines have full authority computers that will generally not let the engine hurt itself. \n\nA modern jet engine has one control, the thrust lever (analogous to a gas pedal). The normal gauges are:\nN1 or Pressure Ratio: funny units but basically measures how much thrust the engine is making. \nN2/N3: engines have multiple rotors inside. They can have different speeds. \nExhaust Gas Temperature: what it sounds like\nOil pressure and temperature: self explanatory\nVibration: how off balance the engine is\nFuel flow: kg or lbs per hour\n\nThe engine has a very sophisticated computer that measures and records many more parameters but those are not normally shown to the flight crew. "
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78vjqd | how quantitive easing works (lsap)? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/78vjqd/eli5_how_quantitive_easing_works_lsap/ | {
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"Quantitative easing is a way for central banks to increase the money supply and make it easier for banks to lend money. \n\nWhen governments need cash in the short term, they often sell bonds. Bonds are essentially IOUs where the government agrees to pay you back with a little bit of interest in the future if you give them cash up front. \n\nInvestors like to hold bonds because in the case of reliable governments, they're very reliable investments. If a bank is holding billions of dollars of bonds, it shows up as an asset on the balance sheet, but they can't really do anything with it since it's not liquid. \n\nQE is the idea that the central bank will buy bonds on the open market. They essentially turn the illiquid asset (the bond) into a liquid asset (cash), which the banks can then use to lend other people money. \n\nQE also keeps the interest rates low, because it's easier for banks to get liquid cash (they just have to sell bonds). If it's easy and cheap for banks to get cash, competition between banks forces interest rates down. Since the bottom limit of the cost of money is so low, interest lates in turn become lower. "
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1kxq1v | diamonds - cut, clarity, color & carats oh my | What matters the most by cut? Buying online safe? Where from? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1kxq1v/eli5_diamonds_cut_clarity_color_carats_oh_my/ | {
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"What do you mean what matters the most by cut? \n \nI wouldn't buy online even from a reputable dealer myself, but it is safe as long as its a reputable dealer. I want to see exactly what I am getting when it comes to things like this.",
"Pay a lot of attention to cut and clarity, and less to colour. The colour grades from D through J can't be distinguished from completely transparent by the naked eye anyway, but they add very substantially to the price. There are merchants who will try to sell you on the better colour grades, but don't bother. Anything rated better than J is fine, and you won't be able to detect the differences anyway.\n\nAs far as clarity goes, anything at VVS level or better means that any inclusions that the diamond has will not be visible without training and magnification. That means that for the purposes of an engagement ring or the like, it is absolutely perfect. Depending on the stone, you might even find that a VS clarity is good enough for your purposes. **Do not** buy a diamond online. You need to look at it under magnification to make sure you are getting something that doesn't have an annoying inclusion. \n\nCut is very important. The better the cut, the more brilliant it will be to the eye. A flawless stone will look subjectively worse than one with inclusions and noticeably yellow colour if it isn't cut well. This is where you don't want to cut corners (so to speak). Don't go below VG grade, and you might notice a real difference by picking one graded 'excellent'.\n\nsource: I spent months and months researching everything I could about diamonds before buying an engagement ring last year."
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1nkj7m | what would happen if the us ran out of money? | I'm talking complete bankruptcy, so that there's no money to pay the people who print money or pay the people who make the materials on which money is printed, so the presses can't even be funded to print more money. I'm kind of aware of the whole 'if you print more money it leads to inflation' idea, but what exactly happens when the country is simply flat out broke, unable to pay its debts and unable to pay any government wage, including emergency services? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1nkj7m/what_would_happen_if_the_us_ran_out_of_money/ | {
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" > ELI5 isn't a guessing game; if you aren't confident in your explanation, please don't speculate.\n\nyeah unanswerable question",
"essentially, ignoring many facets, it would be a snowball effect. at first minor problems in the US, then growing problems here and minor abroad, then shitstorm here and continuing abroad. ",
"I think you should clarify what you are looking for. It sounds like what you are really asking is, 'What happens if the US collapsed?'. Otherwise, realisticly we could basically always go into more debt, simply with worse and worse terms (interest rates). The rest of the world relies on the US dollar extensively, whether it is the middle east where oil is traded in USD or amount of credit the US is in debt to China with."
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280m6p | where did all these black people stereo types start from? (watermelon,grape whatever etc..) | I AM NOT RACIST JUST CURIOUS :D | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/280m6p/eli5_where_did_all_these_black_people_stereo/ | {
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"They started from racist thought, the process of noticing something one person does and applying it to their entire race.\n\nThe human mind tends to do this. (It an example of categorical thinking.) There's a branch of mathematics called statistics that deals with measuring how valid categorical thought is.\n\nOne of the things you learn quite quickly in statistics is that the human mind does *not* do a very good job of measuring the validity of its own generalizations.\n\nTry to understand the [Simpson Paradox](_URL_0_). Hurts, doesn't it? That's because statistically valid logic isn't intuitive.\n\nAnd that's where stereotypes come from.",
"I have a black friend who refuses to eat watermelon because of this very stereotype. He once told me he doesn't eat it because someone would say \"look at that n***** eating watermelon!\" and he won't be around other black people eating watermelon because people would say \"look at those n*****s eating watermelon!\"\n\nWhat the actual fuck. There aren't white stereotypes like this. Nobody gets on my case because I love pineapple, or riesling wine, or Victor & Rolf perfume. \n\n(But they might make fun of me because I like Coldplay.)"
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300jlh | what is the interaction of a drug with a human & how is it different person to person & species to species? | Pharmacy drugs rather than recreational. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/300jlh/eli5_what_is_the_interaction_of_a_drug_with_a/ | {
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"Imagine a drug as a key. This key can only fit inside a certain lock. That lock is a receptor in your body. Then the drug (key) binds to the receptor (lock) the drug exerts its effects. From person to person there are subtle differences in the receptor that can make the drug work better or worse. When you change species the receptor can change greatly and as a result the key no longer fits in the lock."
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34xbbr | exactly how does a bullet proof vest only last five years? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/34xbbr/eli5_exactly_how_does_a_bullet_proof_vest_only/ | {
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"The Kevlar fibres in such vests are set with a 5 year \"good for\" life. After that the integrity of the vest is variable so setting that limit saves liability for manufacturers. "
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4vmn10 | why, in old movies, do they make light fall across an actor's or an actress' eyes? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4vmn10/eli5_why_in_old_movies_do_they_make_light_fall/ | {
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"I think it's a stylistic choice of lighting, taking inspiration from the cinema noir genre. Noir lighting has strong use of light and shadows, particularly on characters' faces. They use it to draw attention to the character, and may create a sense of moodiness or unease.\n\n[Example of noir](_URL_0_)",
"It's a technique in art called [chiaroscuro ](_URL_0_), in film especially black and white (Alfred Hitchcock made use of this technique often) the lighting was symbolic to the plot somehow, like if shadow was cast on a characters face with their eyes illuminated they may have some sort of hidden sinister plot or bad intentions.\n\nEdit: removed one unnecessary word",
"It's entirely stylistic. Sometimes it's used to show us a certain characters intent or to simply bring focus to them. It has not gone away either. Filmmakers still use this technique. Even the Harry Potter movies used it.",
"It was a stylistic choice used in black and white movies to emphasize the emotion coming from the actor's eyes.",
"Have you noticed the \"soft\"***(3)*** lighting used in Star Trek TOS***(5)*** as well? (Examples [here](_URL_1_), [here](_URL_5_), and [here](_URL_4_)) It's all about intent to evoke certain responses. In this case, \"beautiful\" women were given the soft lighting to emphasize their inherent \"softness\". A shot like this was usually included when a female guest star was first introduced on camera, or was supposed to seem vulnerable.***(4)***\n\nAs for the bar across the eyes, it's a production technique designed to impress a sense of urgency and emotive intimacy on the viewer. Take a look at [this article](_URL_6_). The author writes \"the movement of our eyes reflects our inner thoughts and emotions\" and while that may or may not be true (as with nearly all claims like this, it is likely a partial truth) it was certainly a strong school of thought in the 60's. If indeed much of an actor's emoting can be perceived through the eyes, lighting them as such draws the viewers focus pretty dramatically and emphasizes the action on that part of the face.\n\nAlso, remember that at the time, viewing resolution was *extremely* limited, especially on black and white TVs. Star Trek was specifically produced with this in mind, and it was designed and lit for both color and black/white screens.\n\n**Semi-Relevant Edit:** My absolute favorite ridiculous TOS lighting choice was in \"The Enemy Within\". The way they lit/shot \"Evil\" Kirk was fucking amazing. (Examples: [Here](_URL_3_) (the character's introduction btw - [he spins around on the transporter pad and it zooms in on his face](_URL_0_)) and [here](_URL_2_).)\n\n**Edit 2** I also just noticed for the *first time* (I've probably seen that episode 15 times) that Shatner actually mugs directly into the camera *just* as it fades to black. I'm dying.\n\n**Edit 3** Someone called me out on this not actually being soft lighting. I always just used that term to describe it because the faces look... well... soft. But yes, it's a camera filter. I guess soft lighting is an actual specific term that means something else.\n\n**Edit 4** As a few people have noted, this effect was also used to hide blemishes and wrinkles in the skin.\n\n**Edit 5** For some reason, OP removed their post description, but they specifically referenced having watched an episode of Star Trek TOS which is what prompted them to ask this question. That's why my reply talks about Star Trek so much.",
"In black and white films, the light across the face was an important stylistic feature because it made some noticeable contrast on actors faces and could add drama or impact to the scene. These successful techniques were the ones taught to the next generations of filmmakers, who were now working with color and didn't get as much impact out of the trick, but it was still useful and was what they were all trained to do. \n\nEven today, it is important to make sure actors faces are fully light (most film lights are overhead and make for some weird unnatural shadows otherwise) - but whereas a couple decades ago, this lighting was achieved by holding a bounce board (which is just a large shiny circle that reflects light where you point it), productions today have a much better variety of portable diffused, soft, focused, spread, etc options of light to make the face lighting blend more naturally into the rest of the scene.",
"Film nerd here.\n\nAs it happens, this is a mix of both intent and design, though for this specific example it's hard to say what is what. Go to your bathroom with a flashlight and turn off the light. We will simulate what its like shooting in a soundstage. Shine the flashlight on your face and look at all the shadows it creates in the mirror. Your face is incredibly hard to light. Noses, cheeks, brow lines and foreheads all create numerous shadows that can distract an audience away from a scene's meaning of what a character is trying to portray. In a soundstage, all of the sources of light are controlled, whether you are on a spaceship, out in a desert, or in the back alley of a nightclub, it's all controlled.\n\nDirectors/gaffers/cinematographers used this a lot to make people seem sinister or devious, lighting a face a certain way can create shadows necessary to get that \"evil\" look but in general, it is standard procedure to try to kill as many shadows on the actors faces as possible. \n\nBy the same token they could also make someone look more attractive by painting their face with soft light, which, when mixed with the right kind of makeup, makes a warm velvety skin effect, like check out Gretta Garbo's old films when they do close ups, that's what I mean. So yeah, lighting can certainly be used to help with an actor's character portrayal. Absolutely.\n\nLighting design is a fascinating art and I have nothing but the utmost respect for the folks who pull it off. It's part practicality, part artistry, and part economics (lights are not cheap). ",
"Black and white films, lacking color, used contrast of light and dark to set a scene, often to great [visual effect](_URL_0_).\n\nDirectors were used to using the technique, so it showed up in a lot of early color programming. There were still black and white TV shows in the early 1970s, and a lot of people still owned black and white TVs.\n\nAs color became more ubiquitous, old black and white filming techniques became less common.\n\n",
"This isa very cool lighting technique. Much better answers in the thread, but if you've ever seen Bela Lugosi's Dracula, any time he goes to mesmerize someone and take them under his power this technique is used. A heavy closeup on his eyes with a bright, shining stripe of light across them makes him seem even more supernatural and menacing.",
"Because active eyelashes are lovely, especially in profile. They tell us things. Black & white film (you mentioned old movies) accentuates this effect, both the lashes themselves as well as their casted shadow/s.\n\nDo watch the live TV version of Marty (1953)--it's on YouTube. Rod Steiger in the telephone booth asking for a date and getting turned-down, his eyelashes giving us the entirety of his despair. All from the angle of the photography and lighting, and a few naturally occurring blinks. This is just one easily-accessible example. There are many many others but I don't want to appear anymore a freak than I am lol.\n\nI'm glad you brought this up. As it is said: the eyes have it!\n\n\n\n",
"So much of movie acting is in the eyes that it's important to see them - this is why the camera often looks slightly up at the eyeline as opposed to straight on.",
"That specific streak of light is called **eyelight**. \n\nWhen you watch a movie, you are looking at the actors eyes a lot more than you think, so having a little spot of light [reflecting in the eyes](_URL_0_) makes sure you can read the emotion in the actors eyes, no matter how dark the rest of the scene is. Over time the [technique has been refined]( _URL_2_) and technology has improved so it's not such a hard visible streak across the face, but [even the newest movies](_URL_1_) always have some form of eyelight in the darker scenes. ",
"So I had a film class that covered that. All I remember is that they use a mirror and that one of the main reason for it is to highlight the eyes so the audience can see the emotion better, and seeing the eyes makes a person more relatable and draws the audience into the scene. This is on top of places were it used for plot reasons. \n\n\nOnce you know of this technique you'll see it used all over the place. Mostly it is subtle but not always. \n\nNow when I see it used I always think the actor is just annoyed they have a bright light being reflected into their eyes. ",
"This technique is definitely derived from the chiaroscuro used in art, but has it's origins in film from the genre known as [Film Noir](_URL_0_). These dark films were stylistically different because they used very low lights in many scenes which served some practical purposes, such as lowering the cost of production by using less electricity or hiding poorly made sets. However, the contrast between light and dark is used artistically to demonstrate concepts such as good and evil. A light across the eyes may, in a practical sense, help the viewer to see the expressions of the actors in low lit settings. But, this is also used for an artistic effect, as an aspect of [Mise-en-scène](_URL_1_) to dramatize what's going on in the film. ",
"It's an artistic choice so the motivation is often different depending on the story being told. For example, the old Bela Lugosi Dracula movies used this quite a lot, but only when showing that Dracula was using his mind control powers on someone.\n\nOther films it's a just to make the characters more attractive or make us more involved with them, like you would use a tight close-up (the eyes, after all, are the \"window to the soul.\")",
"It's much less common but it still gets used today. In fact during a recent rewatch of ST:09 I noticed this was used on Captain Pike when he first sits in the captain's chair before the Enterprise leaves spacedock for the first time.",
"I think the first, or at least classic, use of this technique is called the Rembrandt triangle. You see it in a lot of his portraits. Here's a site that tells how do set it up in photography...\n\n_URL_0_",
"Side note: this style of lighting is parodied to great effect in the Addams Family movies. Morticia Addams is very noticeably lit like this at almost all times to make her look like a bewitching vamp.\n\n[Example](_URL_1_). [Example](_URL_0_).",
"Just a tip, it's ok to just use the word \"actors' \", it denotes both genders when used in this way.",
"The old movies (and tv shows) you refer to used to require a large amount of light to register an exposure. The reason for this is primarily that the motion picture film at the time was less sensitive to light, and thus required more brightness to achieve an image with an acceptably low level of grain. In addition to this technical limitation the studios considered it very important to show the actors eyes clearly ( the godfather was one of the first films not to do this and director of photography Gordon Willis was nearly fired as a result ). This presented a challenge to the Director of Photography asked to create a dark looking scene with the stipulation that the audience still see the eyes. The solution commonly adopted was to light the scene to look dark for the wide shot, but on the close up bring in a special eyelight and put a rectangle of light across the eyes so they clearly read without removing the impression of a darkly lit room. Source: I am a Director of Photography. ",
"I like that they did a nod to this in Star Trek 09.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nIt's much more pronounced in the film but this was the best pic I could find.\n\n",
"addams family watch how morticia is lit. _URL_0_",
"What's also interesting, Disney also employed the chiaroscuro style. Here is an example: \n_URL_0_\n\n",
"Hitchcock's Stage Fright uses a much starker example of this effect [frequently](_URL_0_). It emphasises fear, which I think is very much an eye-led emotion, and also focuses the viewer on the act of looking, which was generally an important motif in Hitchcock's work.",
"This is the kind of thread I love best. It's shone a spotlight (ahem) on an aspect of things I hadn't consciously noticed before and given me enough insight to add an extra layer of literacy to my enjoyment of film and TV. Cheers guys :)\n",
"So it's been a while since I studied this stuff, and I'm late to the party but I'll give it my best go at explaining it as I remember.\n\nThe high contrast black and white imagery is called chiaroscuro, much like the style Strong Sad used on his dragon. In the early, early days of film all they had was black and white, and some grays in between. Still, this high contrast lighting wasn't used much early on as most film makers were getting used to what film was. \n \nHigh contrast lighting was really pioneered, and perfected, by the German film makers of the German Expressionist movement in the 1920's. Films like the *Cabinet of Doctor Caligari* and *Metropolis* are some of the finest examples of the area, and really show off some of that chiaroscuro lighting. I mean, look at [this shit](_URL_2_) from the *Caligari* or [this one from Metropolis](_URL_1_). Of course there is the iconic [shadow from Nosferatu](_URL_0_). These German film makers knew their shit when it came to lighting.\n\nThese pioneering films were hugely influential on later American film makers. Hell, Hitchcock even worked on a German film or two. In addition to just plain old influence, a lot of the film makers in Germany at the time were Jewish. As you might expect when the Nazis came into power they did their best to beat feet and made their way to American, where some of them found jobs in Hollywood. Fritz Lang, director of *Metropolis* and *M*, was a director for MGM and made some of the first Noir Films, and many others began working behind the scenes. So that's a real shitty explanation of one of the origins of the whole \"light across the eyes\" thing came from. Hope it helps! ",
"I remember seeing scenes like this, where the light fell always so perfectly over Mortisha's eyes in the Adams family! I always wondered how she kept her head so still so that the light didn't move.",
"I noticed this just the other day watching The Addams Family Values. Morticia is the only character who constantly has a slit of light over her eyes in every scene and I didn't understand why",
"Ever take a picture in a dark? Did it come out too grainy/blurry? Or did you use the flash and everyone in the picture looked like shiny monsters?\n\nThe key to pretty lighting is getting a BIG, SOFT light. A big light will make sure the film isn't grainy. A soft light will get rid of any shadows. That makes people look younger, more perfect. Shadows show wrinkles, pores, and make your features look bigger/less delicate. You shine a big soft light on someone's face at the right angle, a lot of the ugly pocks and wrinkles will be much less noticeable. \n\nIf you want to try this out yourself, take a picture of somebody next time it's overcast. The sun is a big light. The clouds of an overcast sky make it soft. Bonus points if it's mid-morning, when the angle of the sun is at its most flattering.\n\n(Source: Four years of film school, seven years in the production/post production industry.)\n\n",
"If you're interested in old films and lighting, look up information about Marlene Dietrich, an actress obsessed with lightning, and director Josef von Sternberg. _URL_1_\n\nMarlene is credited in particular with \"butterfly lighting\" _URL_0_",
"It's a method called Chiaroscuro, and essentially it was employed to emphasise the eyes, as they are the most expressive part of the actors face. It was widely common in Noirs, where they used shadows from blinds to bring focus to certain parts of a persons face.",
"it suggests sensuality or otherwise sex... they did this in lawrence of arabia, during the scene where lawrence was captured and whipped.. if i remember correctly, they imply impending sexual abuse by changing the lighting across the captor's eyes. very subtle but it's implied"
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2blr19 | could we use nuclear winter to counteract global warming? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2blr19/eli5_could_we_use_nuclear_winter_to_counteract/ | {
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"No. Very simply, global warming is when there is so much stuff in the atmosphere that heat is trapped in. Nuclear winter is when there is even more stuff in the atmosphere and no heat can get in. In a really extreme case, global warming could become as bad as nuclear winter.",
"To provide a differently themed answer: Throwing up a lot of particulate matter into the air to \"dim\" the atmosphere and therefore cause the planet to cool by reducing the amount of solar energy being received by the Earth is a known phenomenon, specifically it happens whenever a volcano erupts.\n\nYes, nuclear bombs are the only technology we currently have that can trigger this sort of effect on demand, but it causes so much other bad stuff, specifically radiation, that it wouldn't really be a practical approach to combating global warming.\n\nNow, suppose for a moment that we had a ... particulate-matter spewing bomb that could replicate the global dimming effects of a volcanic eruption without all of the other bad side-effects of a nuclear explosion - would _that_ be a good way to combat global warming?\n\nStill no. Google \"the year without summer\". While global dimming will in fact cause the planet to cool, the reduced sunlight will cause crop failures, and *worldwide famine is very bad.*"
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919e0e | how is it that the direction you cut steak makes a difference in how tender it is? | I always hear to cut a steak against the grain and it will be more tender. How does that work? Your teeth when you’re chewing are what determines how tender something is and your mouth moves the meat around and cuts in every direction so why does it matter which way you slice the meat? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/919e0e/eli5_how_is_it_that_the_direction_you_cut_steak/ | {
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"Somebody will explain it better. But, because muscles are a large bunch of fibers, cutting against the grain (across the fibers) results in short pieces, easily separated by your chewing. Cutting with the grain (think pulled pork or shredded chicken) yields large sections of long fibers.",
"Muscle cells align themselves into fibres, which align themselves into larger fibres and so on. If you slice it across the grain, you are chopping the fibres and making them shorter, so it takes less energy to deform (ie not so chewy)",
"What's easier to eat, one 12 inch piece of twine or 24 1/2 inch pieces?\n\nWith the 24 pieces, most of the work breaking it down has already been done.\n\nWhen you cut a 1/2 slice across the steak this cuts the muscle so you get 1/2 long fibres.\n\nWhen you cut with the grain you get fibres that are much longer and need to be broken down by chewing more."
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3znuk7 | why can't scientists create new "creatures" by mixing 2 dnas or something? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3znuk7/eli5why_cant_scientists_create_new_creatures_by/ | {
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"You mean a bat? \n\nWe're getting to the point where we can inject DNA from one organism into another. It is still in very early stages and *hugely* controversial. ",
"There's no section of the DNA labeled \"wings\" or anything like that. And we don't know quite enough about how bodies work to make a rat with wings that would actually be able to live.\n\nWe do, however, do this with smaller traits than wings- like making [rice that produces beta carotene](_URL_0_) (the thing that makes carrots orange). This is how GMO foods work.",
"So part of the problem is that DNA is like, thirty layers deeper than we originally thought it was.\n\nFor example, a bunch of scientists took the \"eye\" DNA from a mouse and inserted it (somewhat haphazardly) in the middle of the \"leg\" DNA of a fly. What happened? The fly grew an eye on its leg - a *fly* eye. The DNA strand they inserted wasn't the complete instructions for making a mouse eye, just the command \"make eye here\". The actual instructions for how to build the eye, exactly, are located elsewhere in the DNA. Even then, it's probably like, \"Retina goes here...consult page 385 for retina instructions\" ...page 385, \"Put cones here, rods there...consult pages 507 and 4961, respectively\". The fly got the \"make an eye here\" instruction in the middle of the leg, but it was ultimately the rest of the fly DNA that told it how to build that eye.\n\nSo you can't just say \"rat, put a wing there\" you have to add the \"make a wing\" DNA, find the \"wing bone\" DNA and put it in the correct spot, the \"wing muscle\" DNA and add it in a completely different spot... The easy part, though, is that you could theoretically reference the \"every other kind of muscle and bone\" DNA, and just make sure they end up in the right place.\n\nTheoretically, it's entirely possible. We just don't have the technical ability to come even close to that, just yet. It's *really* complicated.\n\nEDIT: Ah, [finally found the video I was looking for](_URL_0_)."
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2k7txp | why are there so many bugs like mrsa and vre, but nothing is immune to plain old alcohol or bleach? | I mean, we use 10,000 times more of both of these then we use any of the antibiotics, it seems something would have grown to be immune to it by now, right? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2k7txp/eli5_why_are_there_so_many_bugs_like_mrsa_and_vre/ | {
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"Because bleach damages on a chemical and cellular level. It's not an antibiotic, it's a chemical. Anything will get killed by bleach if ingested, or inhaled.",
"Killing things is easy. Killing only one thing without killing others is hard. ",
"Picture a model plane, plastic parts and glue. This is our microbial. An antibiotic or antibody might be, say, a glue solvent, or maybe a knife. These things target a specific nature of the microbial, like dissolving the glue or cutting the plastic. This is great because as an added bonus it's very precise, since we wanted to target this model plane, and not the other one beside it. \r\rNow picture a newer, better model plane. *this* glue is different, so we need a better, stronger solvent. *this* plastic is harder, so we need a sharper, stronger knife. Anecdotally, this is genetic resistance, and why bacteria are getting harder and harder to kill.\r\rBleach and ethyl alcohol? That's a flamethrower. It doesn't matter what the fuck that model plane is made of, that fire has so much energy in it that it violently reacts with any plastic (organic) models you have kicking around. Now, on an atomic level, I don't know what's going on. Electrons are being exchanged, bonds are being broken, new ones are being formed, solids are turn into gases, all kinds of crazy shit is happening. The fact of the matter is, the organism simply can't survive because physics says that hydrogen atom in its cell wall needs to be with the bleach more than it needs to be with the organism, and so it leaves. Do this enough and you can erode a mountain."
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p49g3 | city bonds used for building/investing in roads. | I don't even know how to phrase this question. But how do bonds work? When a city uses a bond to pay off infrastructure or building sewers. Is that like a loan of sorts? I'm confused. Thanks | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/p49g3/city_bonds_used_for_buildinginvesting_in_roads/ | {
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"a bond is a piece of paper that promises the person who purchased it a certain amount of money in the future. If a city wants to build a road, but don't have the money right away, they issue bonds to raise money. \n\ndifferent investors (people who buy the bonds) have different preferences. Some want safe bonds that are almost certain to be paid back, but won't make alot of money on interest. Others want risky bonds that they might not get repaid for, but if they do get paid back make more money than safe bonds.\n\ncities, companies, and countries all issue bonds to raise money.",
"1. City issues $1 million in bonds, perhaps by selling $100 bonds that mature in 5 years.\n2. Investors buy the bonds, city gets $1 million.\n3. City builds road.\n4. Road improves city, facilitating growth and commerce.\n5. Investors redeem bonds for $120 each, the now prosperous city has no problem affording the $1.2 million. \n\nAt least that is how it is supposed to work. Even if the road project is poorly managed or the projected growth doesn't occur, the city still has to find a way to pay out the extra money once the bonds mature. That's how a lot of municipalities get into trouble."
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20mhz5 | gravitational waves | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/20mhz5/eli5_gravitational_waves/ | {
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"Gravitational waves are precisely what they sound like: a gravitational gradient. One of the predictions within Relativity is that gravity is a function of the fabric of space, and that it propagates at the speed of light.\n\nAs a result, when things are moving about, one would expect to find minor fluctuations in gravity. In this specific case, they detect this by determining a polarization bias in old light [the Cosmic Background Radiation, believed to be the residual energy from the Big Bang]: as space expands and shifts, in the same way that light interacts with gravity, the light within that space is also altered, shifted in the direction of the wave.\n\nThe Big Bang is basically the biggest gravitational event we can think of. It was literally everything in the universe moving outwards at the same time, something that will generally never happen again. As a result, it should give off some serious waves.\n\nIn this case, the scientists believe they have detected these primordial waves and they prove the incredibly rapid expansion of the universe in the opening few nanoseconds of time. This would be a substantial piece of evidence to the Big Bang theory and clarify one of the contentious points within it."
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3qn693 | why do screens look more pixelated in pictures than they do with the eyes? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3qn693/eli5_why_do_screens_look_more_pixelated_in/ | {
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"assuming the picture was taken with a digital camera, it is recording the photo digitally (ie in pixels) which lowers the resolution (number of pixels per inch)",
"A few reasons - the screen, made of pixels is being shown on a screen displaying pixels. This isn't likely to sync up and so some distortion is possible. Additionally screens refresh at a certain rate, as does whatever screen you're look at the screen on, again a possible discontinuity. \n\nLastly and probably what has the biggest affect is that a lot of screens color correct, or have their own color settings that don't match what the human eye sees / does. So if you look at your computer screen on your phone, the phone is trying to find the best balance. The human eye sees something like 11 stops of light and so can adjust a lot better. If the one screen or the other doesn't have the same calibration again there can be a conflict. \n\nTry looking at the same image on two totally different monitors (like in real life with your eyes). Even the smallest setting difference is really noticeable when placed side by side."
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5gkqqy | does anyone want to explain the bohr model of hydrogen atom to me? | I do not understand the equations for "Radii for Bohr orbits", "Bohr energy levels in joules", and "Bohr energy levels in eV". It looks like a bunch of random symbols where I don't know where they came from. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5gkqqy/eli5does_anyone_want_to_explain_the_bohr_model_of/ | {
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"so Bohr suggested that atoms arent muffins(like was thought before him) where electrons are inside of protons like raisins in muffins, but rather like planets, with protons being in the middle and electrons spinning around them like planets around sun(later with quantum physics it became more complicated than that). So he also said that if you give an electron some extra energy it might jump to higher orbit. Energy is measured in joules and electron-Volts, same thing just different units(like inches and feet). So Bohr energy levels are energy you need to make electron jump orbit in hydrogen atom(simplest atom), and Bohr radius is distance between proton and electron in hydrogen while electron is at its lowest level. ",
"De Broglie, a physicist from France, ~~had just discovered~~ was about to discover (thanks /u/restricteddata) that particles can be described as waves. The wavelength of a particle is λ=h/p where p is the momentum and h the Plack constant. \n\nBohr proposed that electrons orbit the nucleus. But he furthermore proposed, that the matter wave of the electron around the nucleus had to be a standing wave. That means, the circumference of the orbit had to match the wavelength of the particle multiplied by a whole number like [this](_URL_0_). (Instead of the wavelength not matching up with its initial starting position after one orbit.)\n\nHowever, this meant, that electrons could not orbit at any arbitrary distance from the nucleus. Rather only distances where this criterion was fulfilled are possible. This is the origin of the discrete Bohr radii and Bohr energy levels. \n\nSince the nucleus attracts the electron, it takes energy to lift it into a higher radius. Thus, we can assign energy to each of the possible radii. The SI unit of energy is Joule, so you can describe any given possible orbit by its energy in Joules. \n\neV or electron Volts are just another unit for energy. 1 eV is equal to 1.60218*10^-19 Joules. It is sometimes more useful to use eV instead of Joules, simply because eV are much smaller units. And in particle physics we typically deal with tiny chunks of energy. "
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yf6jq | blood pressure, the basics please? | I've got my elderly mom (78) staying with me and a blood pressure monitor to take morning and eveningreadings. I believe her readings should usually be around 70 something and 130 something but they are all over the place. So, what do the readings mean? I need basic understanding so I know when should I take her to the doctor. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/yf6jq/blood_pressure_the_basics_please/ | {
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"Normal blood pressure for a healthy person is [120/80](_URL_0_). Is your mom on meds for her blood pressure? If it drops much lower than normal she may feel ill. If it gets too high she won't know it unless it's high enough to give her a headache. You should call her doctor (and he will probably want to see her) if the top number hits 200.\n\nYou should probably call anyway. Let her doctor know your mom's blood pressure is erratic and ask for an appointment to discuss options for getting it evened out. For some people it takes quite a bit of trial and error with various combinations of meds to get the blood pressure under control.\n\nYour mom may insist she feels fine and doesn't need to see the doctor, but high blood pressure, or readings that are \"all over the place\" are serious health risks that, left untreated, can cause some pretty terrible health issues. Your mom's erratic blood pressure should be addressed with all haste.\n\nsource: My elderly mom's hypertension (high blood pressure) issues.",
"To give you an idea of what the numbers are measuring:\n\nThere is always a certain amount of pressure in your bloodstream, just like a running water hose has pressure. But because your heart beats, that pressure is always fluctuating a little.\n\nThe first number in a blood pressure is called systolic pressure, that's the pressure in your circulation when your heart is pumping. That will always be the larger number.\n\nThe second number is called the diastolic pressure. That's the pressure in your bloodstream when your heart is relaxed, so it will be the lower number.\n\nYour circulatory system is just like a water system. Your heart is the pump, your blood is the water, and your veins/arteries are the pipes.\n\nIf you can picture trying to water a garden, if the water pressure is really low, the water won't be able to reach the flowers. If the water pressure is on too high, you will damage the flowers, ripping up the soil and can break the plants.\n\nIt's exactly the same for the human body. If your blood pressure is too low, blood won't be able to get to where it is supposed to. Too high and you can cause damage to organs, particularly the kidneys, heart, and brain.",
"To explain the measurement a little better...I'm assuming you're using an automatic blood pressure cuff, but just think of the ones at the doctor when a human actually listens.\n \nThey pump the cuff to about 200 mmHg (unless you have very high blood pressure and then they go up to when they stop hearing the pulse). The cuff stops blood flow through the artery and no pulse will be heard through the stethoscope.\n\nThey then start to slowly release the pressure. When they first hear the pulse again is when the pressure of the blood is strong enough to overcome the pressure of the cuff. This is recorded as the systolic. \n\nWhen they stop hearing the pulse (still not sure why we stop hearing it) is the diastolic pressure. \n\nThere are lots of monitors in the body that should notice when blood pressure is too high or too low. Responses can include constricting/dilating capillaries to increase/decrease pressure, hormones that cause you to pee more or less, altering heart rate, peeing out more or less salt, and probably many others I haven't learned yet.\n\nLow blood pressure means blood isn't getting pumped strongly enough to get to all the extremities as much as they need. Dehydration is a common simple cause, as well as malfuntioning of any of those above regulators. \n\nHigh blood pressure can stress the heart because the heart gets over-stretched. It can be caused/made worse by stress, excess salt, and again, any problems with the regulating systems.",
"Hi! 4th year med student here, came here to see if I could add anything, but there have been some great explanations.\n\nSome basic things I would want you and your mum to be aware of, if you're not already:\n\n1) 120/80 is \"ideal\" blood pressure, but 130/70 is often the target for people who are on medication for blood pressure control (particularly if they are diabetic, or have other medical problems).\n\n2) Lower blood pressure may lead to dizziness, light-headedness, or fainting (particularly when standing up from sitting/lying). It *could* be caused by too much blood pressure medication.\n\n3) Higher blood pressure usually won't cause symptoms. There are situations (i.e. when it gets *very* high) when you should consult a doctor immediately:\n\n * If the top number reads 200+.\n\n * If the person experiences headaches and/or nosebleeds.\n\n * If the person stops passing urine.\n\nOtherwise, there is no need to panic, but you should consult you doctor about bringing your mother's erratic blood pressure under control.\n\nAll the best!"
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16ftou | when your stomach hurts, what physically is hurting inside of you and how is it doing the hurting? | My stomach spent 15 hours in the deepest pits of Mordor yesterday and it got me thinking this question. It obviously hurts, but what is hurting and what is physically causing me to feel this pain?
Edit: Thanks for your responses everyone. That pretty much cleared it up. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/16ftou/eli5_when_your_stomach_hurts_what_physically_is/ | {
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"Follow-up question: what's the physical difference between a \"normal\" stomachache and one that is caused by Crohn's disease? They feel different.",
"Your stomach is just a muscle. Like your arm or leg, when it does a lot of stuff it hurts, the muscle is squeezing too much like a muscle and sends magic electricity to your brain and you feel pain",
"Have you ever taken a long run and got tired and your legs hurt? It's kind of like that. Your stomach may have bad food in it, so it is working hard to try to keep the bad food from making you more sick, and so your tummy is working so hard to make acid to kill the bad food, and it's also moving around a lot and getting bigger and smaller because of gasses building up from all the acid, which is why it makes rumble noises like rawrarawrar. So it's the outside of the stomach that hurts you because of how much it is moving and working.",
"Physically you don't have the same kind of sensors in your stomach that you have on your hand. You can't feel something poking in to your stomach - which is why bleeding in the stomach isn't noticed by an actual pain when the cut is made - instead you feel pressure. (This might sound contradicting but hey, it's a slim difference) \nImagine the difference between someone poking the top of your hand, you can feel that no problem. Now imagine them pulling the skin on the top of your hand, you can feel that too - but it's not the same kind of feeling. This is tension - which is what your stomach can feel. \nAnything that applies this tension (read: pressure) to the stomach-walls or anywhere along the intestines can - if high enough - cause pain. \nAlso inflammations, but they are severely more difficult to explain for me - since I don't quite get them myself yet (reading up about this sort of stuff).",
"stomach pain can be a lot of different things and some of them are scary enough that you should see your doctor if it continues.\n\nSome things that help me are: \n\nstrong (the strongest) probiotics (restore balance of beneficial bacteria when certain things in foods and also overuse of antibiotics can kill them off)\n\naloe vera gel (drink it, you can buy it in bottles, seems to lubricate the GI tract and promote healing of injuries)\n\nresveratrol (high dose - 500 mg. on empty stomach) Complex action to reduce inflammation systemically\n\nacetyl-l-carnitine (helps microcirculation)\n\narginine (microcirculation, for different reason, helps production of nitric oxide which improves circulation)\n\ntaurine (high dose > 2 gms) Helps balance the osmotic aspects of all cells and stimulates bile production\n\nglutamine (generally good for GI function) Helps the intestinal barrier function\n\nn-acetylcysteine (precursor of glutathione - improves glutathione levels, also helps chelate metals, may improve environment for beneficial bacteria as well as help reduce pathogens\n\nThese all work on different things, I would try all of them to see which ones help. (not all at the same time or you wont be able to tell which ones help)",
"On a related note, what is happening when you're hungry and your stomach growls? Does the muscle also cause the \"growl\" somehow or is it something else?",
"And there are different types of pain: somatic, visceral, and neuropathic. Somatic is when you hurt your skin, muscles, or bones. Neuropathic is caused by damage to the nerves. When you have a stomach ache, that's visceral pain. Visceral pain is pain of the internal organs. (I know that's not quite explainlikeimfive, but I thought some people might find that interesting.)\n\nAs for what is physically hurting, it depends what's causing it. When someone says \"my stomach hurts,\" that could mean a lot of things because there are a lot of organs in the abdomen. That's why the nurse and doctor will ask you a ton of questions. Where does it hurt? When did it start, what did you do right before, what did you eat, did you move in a funny way? They'll ask you to characterize the pain (aching, stabbing, burning, pressure). Along with more questions. And they'll look, listen, and feel around your whole abdomen. Then you might be sent for diagnostic imaging tests, because like I said, there are a lot of organs in there. All of these things are put together to give the healthcare team a picture of what's wrong with you.\n\nAnyway, if the pain is caused by constipation or trapped gas, what you're feeling is pain in the intestines. The intestines are swelling with too much stuff inside one section (likely trapped behind a stubborn piece of stool), and working overtime to try to move all that stuff along. So it's like overstretching a balloon, while also overworking a muscle. That's pretty common and might be what you were feeling yesterday. From the sounds of it, the problem has passed. (Not to be alarmist, but a little constipation can turn into a big blockage for some people.)\n\nThere are TONS of other things that can cause abdominal pain. Some people get ulcers, where there's a wound in the wall of their digestive system being irritated by the contents of their digestive system. Some people will experience pain because of a mass in their abdomen, like a tumour, when it gets large enough to start pushing on the organs and structures around it. Some people will get infections like appendicitis or peritonitis, where the pain is caused by the inflammation of an organ or of the sac containing the organs. I could go on forever, but you get the point.\n\nAs always, if you're in a lot of pain, the pain doesn't go away, or you're really worried about it, go see a doctor.\n\nAnd to help avoid constipation, people can drink more water and walk more!\n\nSource: I'm a registered nurse, and I hope I didn't leave out anything important.",
"Follow up question: When a girl gets a cramp when she's on her period, what is that pain specifically caused by?\n\nAlso: When someone gets a cramp while running, what is that caused by?",
"If it is an unbearable pain on the right side just under your rib cage. And it occurs after eating a large greasy meal. usually lasts for 2-3 hours. And by unbearable pain I mean a stabbing pain so bad that nothing makes it go away. It is your gall bladder contracting. Ask me how I know?\n\n\nNever mind I'll just tell you. At least once a month i would have attacks after eating. Didn't even matter what i ate. Then they started happening weekly then daily. Until I could only eat bland chicken and soups. I am not a wuss when it comes to pain. I can handle most pain unmedicated. Not this. It was like a knife in my side and someone kept twisting it . And there is nothing that you can do about it till it stops contracting. ",
"tldr:\n\n-stomach is a bag\n\n-thus a potential space (that gets filled when food and drink are ingested)\n\n-there are folds in the bag (rugae)\n\n-rugal folds rub against one another\n\n-vagus(?) nerve detects that we are hungry\n\n-hunger and grumbling occur from rubbing\n"
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535rzr | how can a company like luxottica own such a large proportion of a market? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/535rzr/eli5_how_can_a_company_like_luxottica_own_such_a/ | {
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"There's nothing inherently wrong or logically illegal about one company controlling a \"monopolistic\" market share. So long as that company still acts like it has competition (fair pricing, supply/demand fluctuation, etc.), they can own as much of the market as they please.\n\nIn this case it's probably because of cost of equipment. Ophthalmologic and optometric medical equipment costs a TON, and the equipment to cut, shape and smooth glass and contact lenses are just as expensive. It took my office almost two years of planning (without a loan) to afford one and they were in an upper-middle class area.",
"They made lucky, smart and well timed moves to undercut and buyout their competition. Government regulation hasn't tackled the effective monopoly because there's a strong anti government intervention movement. It's very hard to create competitors now because all of the luxury designer brands like prada, d & g etc have signed up with Luxottica and are being such ridiculous margins they won't risk it by licencing their names to anyone else. \n\nGlasses are also seen almost entirely as a fashion accessory now, which is why most customers would be unwilling to buy $5 unbranded glasses of similar quality. ",
"You just watched Adam Ruins Everything didn't you OP. Lol. \n\nAs someone who is wildly interested in cologne, and by extension mildly interested in fashion and accessories I found out about Luxotica a few years back. They basically make all of the frames for the fashion houses and designers of fashionable sunglasses and eye ware. This happened because all they make are frames, they are very good at it, can turn a profit, and they buy their competition. \n\nThey are effectively a monopoly like De Beers is with diamonds except that frames are not a natural resource and the only barrier to entry for a company that wants to make frames is start up costs. However the policies they enact that punish eye glass companies and competitors that go against Luxotica are clearly in antitrust violation. But it's not something people are up in arms about because they just don't know any better. It's not the cause du jour, plus they own a large eye care insurance company, which gets into medical insurance stuff where America turns a blind eye to abuse anyway, and they lobby aggressively to operate their business model without government oversite. \n\nTheir home of operations is Europe (Italy I think) and they have different laws there regarding anti competitive legislation. \n\nPeople make buying decisions based on feelings rather than logic and companies take advantage of this with branding. They realized that humans don't so much care about choice as they do the illusion of choice so if they market their product as different brands, then people don't care that they all come from the same company. \n\nThis isn't unique to frames either. I play the drums and I recently found out that almost all of the drums being made all start out as shells from the same company called Keller. They make the shells and sell them to companies like Ludwig or Pearl who then paint them and add their branding, but they all start in the same factories. \n\nIn electronics this has been going on for years with brands like Sony, Pioneer, Optimus, Sanyo, Panasonic, etc all using other manufacturers to make some of their products and then re-branding them. In some cases an identical stereo receiver may be sold by 2 or more different brands like Optimus and Pioneer, just with different branding and badges. \n\nThe problem isn't so much that this is done, as it is that it's done without being open about it. People have a right to know what they are actually buying so they can make informed decisions. "
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5j8v93 | how are slot machines both random (by rng) but still weighted and set to payout percentages? | Slot machines constantly generate authentic random numbers (not pseudo random, according to gaming regulation) which correlate with pre-determined, numbered stops on each reel.
At the same time, each stop is weighted differently, and machines are required to pay out a certain percentage over time
How can it be both totally random, but still follow a set of not-random rules? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5j8v93/eli5how_are_slot_machines_both_random_by_rng_but/ | {
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"A random variable is not necessarily a **uniformly-distributed** random variable. You can sample random numbers from a distribution which favors certain outcomes.",
"You generate a random number between zero and one. If you want a 20% payout then you say if the random number is between .80 and 1 then the play wins, otherwise they lose. This is very simplified because winning and losing cone in many flavors on slot machines. ",
"[Win, Lose]\n\nYou've got a 50/50 chance, yeah?\n\n[Win, Lose, Lose]\n\nOh no, a 1/3 chance to win!\n\n[Win, Lose, Lose, Lose, Lose, Lose, Lose, Lose, Lose, Win, Lose, Lose]\n\n1/6th chance to win!\n\nNow, if we roll on those sets, we get a random number. We pick the slot of that number. Your chances of winning are estimated above. If a machine is expected to pay out a certain amount over a certain time, you have the percentages so the *average* payout based on the chances comes out to that amount.",
"Others have covered this pretty well, so let me throw in a few extra bits of information.\n\n > Slot machines constantly generate authentic random numbers (not pseudo random, according to gaming regulation)\n\nI'm a bit surprised at seeing that pseudorandomness is not allowed by gaming regulation. No software can generate pure randomness without an outside source. I have heard that there are RNG that get a 'seed' from an outside source (like having a microphone and turning the casino sound into digital numbers). But that seed will generate the next few 'spins', then get reset.\n\nBy the way, the old-school mechanical slots weren't even random. They might have had 12 positions on the wheel, and each 'spin' would advance the three wheels by 17, 31, and 37. The prime numbers would guarantee that every possible combination would come up. But it wasn't random, and a slot machine would be 'due' for a jackpot - the prize would come up once every 12^3 = 1,728 spins.\n\n > At the same time, each stop is weighted differently, and machines are required to pay out a certain percentage over time\n\nThe regulations require that *the probability of winning* is the same as that posted or claimed by the machine. And that has to be randomly determined. However, my understanding is that the actual *appearance of the symbols* is not necessarily random. Let me give you an example from Video Poker:\n\n1. You are dealt a hand: 4, 5, 6, 7, and a Queen. You discard the Queen, and 'try for a straight', either a 3 or 8. If you don't hit a 3 or 8, you are certain of losing: you usually need a pair of \"Jacks or Better\" to win.\n\n2. You would think that the machine would 'randomly choose a card', then check if it's a 3 or 8, and whether you are winner. This is not my understanding. \n\n3. My understanding is that the machine determines whether you are winner first. The odds would be 8 winning cards out of 47 remaining cards, or about 17%. Then, if you are a loser (the other 83% of the time), the game may display a 2 or 9, more often than losing cards. \n\n4. By doing this, the casino isn't cheating, it's still a mathematically fair game. However, you are manipulating the player *emotionally*, because a 2 or a 9 is 'closer' to a straight. This keeps the player engaged. ",
"A good explanation is available by examining the \"Telnaes Patent.\"\n_URL_0_\nNot exactly ELI5 but it does explain the relationship between the RNG and the reels themselves. I publish a magazine on the subject, Slot Tech Magazine"
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bk8jvr | how is storage freed in computer hardware at a physical level? | I understand that you can delete software files easily, but what is the physical process of deleting that data? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bk8jvr/eli5_how_is_storage_freed_in_computer_hardware_at/ | {
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"There's an area of data on the drive called the file allocation table which keeps track of which areas are in use. At the basic basic level removing an entry from here is a \"soft delete\" because that allows it to get physically overridden on the drive media when some new data is saved. (Saving data involves looking up spare areas using the file allocation table then physically manipulating that part of the drive to store information.). A hard delete is to go one step further and actually write 0s (or random data) to the area on the drive, obliterating trace of what was there before.",
"When you delete, it just marks those memory cells as rewritable. It’s not truly deleted until something is saved into it.",
"It really isn't. The operating system marks the data as deleted (usually just by making the first character a ?, something invalid to do manually) in a file allocation table. This works like an index that maps files to the blocks on the disk. When we don't want the file anymore, the index reflects that then the operating system knows that space can be used. This is why you never want to write to a disk that has data you're looking to undelete. This is also why undelete tools seem to not know the first letter of the filenames you're trying to undelete."
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4ggr01 | if you have no sense of taste can you feel the heat/spiciness from something like a pepper? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ggr01/eli5if_you_have_no_sense_of_taste_can_you_feel/ | {
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"Yes. Capsaicin (the chemical responsible for the spiciness of peppers), interacts with neurons, not taste receptor (although taste receptors are similar to very specialized neurons) so they would still feel the heat"
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cjapdi | how do tower crane counterweights keep from falling out? | [image](_URL_0_). It looks like it's just held by compression, but that doesn't seem to make much sense | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cjapdi/eli5_how_do_tower_crane_counterweights_keep_from/ | {
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"In the image you have linked you can clearly see the retaining bolts coming out of the sides, this stops them slipping through."
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7mne80 | how do the sights of mortars (the weapon) work? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7mne80/eli5_how_do_the_sights_of_mortars_the_weapon_work/ | {
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" > how do the sights of mortars (the weapon) work?\n\nThey aren't exactly \"sighted\" in the same way as other weapons. They are a method of indirect fire so they are designed to fire at things which cannot be seen, making traditional \"sights\" impractical.\n\nInstead mortars are targeted using calculations as to the mortar's location and the location of the intended target, then setting the direction and angle of the mortar tube according to calculations about the trajectory of a mortar round. What this means is that targeting is done with radioed instructions from a distant observer, along with references to a map and a table of range values."
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4xgt2i | why can mice be inbred? | Why can mice be inbred for 20 generations and stay healthy, while most other animals can't?
edit: answered. ty! apparently they're fucked up too. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4xgt2i/eli5_why_can_mice_be_inbred/ | {
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"Most animals have recessive genes that are damaging if you get two copies of the same one. However, if an animal is already inbred for many generations (like such a mouse) all the recessive genes have already been taken out of the gene pool ahead of time. Essentially, lab mice have been \"bred\" to be \"inbred\".",
"It's not that they can't, it's that most species naturally tend not to due to selective pressure against it. So that's the big issue with your question. No species \"can't\" be inbred.\n\n1) Why do you assume that all inbred mice are healthy? Many strains have well-described health issues. In some cases, this is the desired result.\n\n2) Inbreeding is problem primarily when you have recessive disorders caused by rare alleles. If the family you inbreed has \"lucky\" genetics, there may be no significant problems.\n\n3) Any species can be inbred. The genetic risks of inbreeding are mainly due to a lack of diversity. As a species, it's not good to have little variation. \"Bad genes\" get sorted out through natural selection. Inbreeding doesn't tend to work out in nature a lot of times because there is a selective pressure against the recessive disease alleles that often accumulate. Add in an artificial selective pressure, like breeding mice in a lab (and keeping them alive and forcing them to breed, dammit!), and you can force inbreeding to work so long as the genetic variations you're enriching for don't include anything leading to sterility or death before reproductive age.\n\n4) There are tons of inbred human populations all over the world. They might have increased risk of certain types of diseases, but they're not going to disappear tomorrow and for the most case you wouldn't identify them as exceptionally unhealthy people on initial inspection. There are also other pretty heavily inbred species, like Cheetahs or many breeds of dogs.",
"Being inbred isn't intrinsically detrimental, inbreeding a pool of genes which are healthy will result in healthy mice. The issue with inbreeding wild animals is that you lose genetic diversity and recessive traits which are otherwise masked can become detrimental. Also, many of the mice which are used as animal models are genetic clones and their genes are well accounted for. Some mice are inbred specifically to maintain a trait, even if it might be deleterious.",
"Not a mouse breeder, but something to keep in mind. In-breeding is only bad because they increase the risk of deleterious mutations with regards to fitness. Basically, a lot of mutations need both chromosomes to contain a copy of a mutated gene to have an effect ( this is what we call a recessive trait). If your family has a history of certain mutation, inbreeding increases the likelihood that both your mom and dad has this mutated gene as opposed to only one parent, which in this case could then be \"compensated\" by the presence of a normal gene from an unrelated family member. This is the main basis for the inbreeding problem, though it is obviously more complicated than that.\n\n However, Lab mice are not your average double first cousins getting married. They have been carefully selected over hundreds of generations and those genes that would cause congenital effect were \"bred out\" of the population by the sheer fact that those carrying both copies of a bad gene probably won't even be born, let alone survive to adulthood and breed. \n\nThe major difference of course is, in a normal population we are actually concerned with death of children, health of the population and the suffering of the family. In lab mice, we can have Machiavellian ruthlessness with regards to just persisting through the deleterious effects of these mutations and then have both an inbred line in which most (not all) of the recessive lethal genes inherent to the line have long since bred out (a process known as purifying selection)",
"Inbreeding is not much of a problem as long as there is no presence of genes/alleles that will cause disease if presented twice.\n\nSay you are a carrier of a recessive disease. You carry a healthy allel H and a sick one S, HS. If you breed with an HH, 50% of your kids will have HS. If two HS breed, there is a 25% risk of the offspring getting sick.\n\nThus, if you are a carrier of a disease and you are the ancestor to generations of inbreeding, that disease will come to expression. If you are perfectly genetically healthy, there is no real problem. \n\nWhy do sick allels exist then? Well probably because being a carrier has provided some advantage through the years. Resistance to infections and whatnot.",
"Inbreeding is dangerous because it promotes homogeneity in a population, and is not harmful by itself; how it causes harm is by inadvertently propagating BAD dominant genes to all members.\n\nImagine if you had a bunch of piles of different colored paints; small bits from each are free to mix with one another, producing wonderful colors *for a while*. Eventually after many many generations of mixing, every single paint blob has become brown, ie. the population is homogeneous. So long as being brown doesn't have a downside, the paint population is in no danger, they are simply all the same color.\n\nProblems arise if we wind back time to when the color piles were separate; if one color, say blue, was a carrier for a trait like heart disease, and being brown means that you have some genes from the original population, it means you are vulnerable.\n\nMice that have been inbred, specifically lab mice, are not in danger because they simply don't have negative genes left in their pools. The genes from the blue color in my previous example are simply not present, and cannot harm them. Lab mice have been specifically bred over countless generations and many years to be as genetically bland as possible specifically to avoid issues like this.",
"We don't care about the well-being of the mouse, unless that's our experiment, and then we do. 'Healthy' is a very relative term here.\n\nMice are used as a 'model organism' not because of any assumed simplicity, but because they are a time & cost efficient way of studying mammalian systems.\n\nAny problems involved with inbreeding are overcast by low generational cycling and the low chance of experimental interference.\n\nWhen studying genes, scientists are often only breeding mice with the intent of studying one gene at a time with specific knowledge of the genetic makeup of the parents.\n \nSpeaking from personal experience, they rarely breed the offspring together past the 4th generation, and maintain a large number of the mice. \n\nScientists have a high level of beforehand understanding of each mouses genetic makeup when breeding the mice, and a low rate of inbreeding affecting the gene of interest. Combined, inbreeding usually (read: never) interferes with experiments.\n\nSource: ex-mouse killing technician\n\n",
"Cousin incest is far enough away you don't get too many defects, so that's why mice and other animals do that.",
"Scientist who works with mice. While we typically do inbreed our mice in order to maintain certain gene lines that our useful to our research, we usually 'back cross' them to the a commercially acquired mouse that has the same background from a colony in order to keep things normal. Others in the thread have pointed out that there's a lack of recessives in their gene pool but I would say that the lack of observable consequences from inbreeding tend to come from our inability to observe those differences. Problems with inbreeding in people are intuitively noticeable by others but seeing problems with mice using canonical metrics is unlikely or easily balanced out by using a large cohort of animals. If a mouse line develops a deficit in working memory, for example, you won't notice unless that's specifically what you're testing for. TL/dr, it's easy to maintain the phenotypes you want but hard to notice unwanted consequences that are subtle. ",
"I'm a lab mouse breeder. They can't be that inbred. Recessive genes are still there. Close inbreeding is a problem. I try to mate mice that are a couple degrees unrelated if possible. Brother/sister and parent/offspring matings make for small litters, and it's not very productive. Many closely inbred pups probably die very young or in the womb, so I avoid it. It usually only happens by accident if I leave siblings together too long with parents. ",
"As someone with experience breeding rats, the answer for them (and I assume mice), is because there is significantly greater genetic diversity in rats than humans. To the point where just a single rat colony can have greater differences than the whole human race. Likely because we are moderately inbred, thanks to our long life spans (not as many generations) and a [likely volcanic event that nearly wiped us out] (_URL_0_).",
"Because you can kill the ones that turn out like you don't want. It's the same premise that created all dog breeds.",
"I'm a little late to the party, but I work in basically THE place that does inbred lab mice. It's a misconception to posit that move are somehow more receptive to inbreeding than other organisms. Like any other creature, inbreeding results in lack of genetic diversity and recessive traits that, when combined, cause problematic phenotypes (ie, genetic diseases). The thing is, we can breed a huge number of mice over these generations, and we only actually need 1 complete complement of genes that don't cause major disease. Once we achieve that genetic makeup on a breeding pair of mice, you have your inbred strain.\n\n",
"Questions about inbreeding and incest and why do/don't they cause problems have been asked several times on /r/asksciece, these links might be helpful:\n\n_URL_2_\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_3_\n\n_URL_4_",
"Actually, recessive conditions often exist in these inbred colonies. They are not healthy, and the researchers using them often don't know it.\n\nSource: work in eye disease, colleagues experimenting on inbred line of rats did not realise that all their rats had *some other eye disease* due to the inbreeding. Completely invalidated all their data.",
"They can't. Some species can just go inbred for longer before it catches up with them, like the Gorilla (I think it's the Lowland sub-species but I'm not 100% on it).\n\nApparently their DNA is very similar because there's been a huge bottleneck for a very long time, so long in fact that they've gotten rid of most of the recessive traits.",
"Hey there I'm a mouse geneticist. There is a way to overcome the deleterious effects of inbreeding while still maintaining the strengths of an isogenetic strain. While being generated each inbred strain undergoes their own unique exposure of recessive alleles that severely limits the number of viable offspring. Therefore, each inbred strain should be considered the selective survivors of the inbreeding process. this is useful for looking at the way a single gene mutation affects a system. However, you are limited that the system in which you are studying is already skewed by the inbreeding process. There is a way to overcome this by mating two different inbred strains together and using the offspring of that cross you will have animals who are heterozygous and more reflective of the natural genetic state while still being reproducible. Given the high throughput of crisper technology I think this is where we should be heading in the future."
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yp8ug | how do "convenience fees" work/how are they justified? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/yp8ug/eli5_how_do_convenience_fees_workhow_are_they/ | {
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"A business has to pay the credit card company in order to use their service. Convenience fees are their way of passing the cost on to you."
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f1f9sc | did we invent music or discover it? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f1f9sc/eli5_did_we_invent_music_or_discover_it/ | {
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"This is the same debate between legal positivism and natural law. Or rather, legal realism vs formalism. It's been going on for a while but over the past century the running gag is that:\n\n > we are all legal realists now\n\nAs we have come to accept that we as a society create things, and that they are not discovered in some platonic form (the idea of a thing vs. a thing right in front of you.)\n\n_URL_1_\n_URL_0_",
"Certain aspects of formal music are definitely arbitrary or invented. The system of naming and writing notes in Western music - B-Flat, Treble Clef, etc. - could be handled entirely differently. What 'sounds nice\" in music is also a matter of *relative* pitch, so you could achieve mostly the same effect if all the notes had different absolute pitch but the same intervals. The standard that most music adheres to is \"A440,\" which dictates that A above middle C is 440 hertz.\n\nBeyond that it's more of a philosophical question. We enjoy certain combinations and patterns of noise, so we create them. They exist because humans like them. If there were no humans, there would be no music that resembles the music we create.",
"Humans like order and patterns. The first music was probably prehistoric rhythmic drumming on rocks with sticks. As time went on, humans discovered new sounds and combinations of objects that were aesthetically pleasing. \n\nAncient music was usually monophonic, meaning it had only one note at a time. music was built around different scales that were pleasing to the ear and that were discovered from notes that have a resonant relationship to each other. \n\nAs time went on, music became more complicated. People figured out ways to write down rudimentary forms of musical notation. Music with more than one note at a time (polyphany) became more popular and as people got used to the sound, and created more complex forms of music until we got to a point where Kanye West raps about scooptety poop."
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3s7sfv | what's the situation with the starbucks holiday cups | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3s7sfv/eli5_whats_the_situation_with_the_starbucks/ | {
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"Mostly, it's a slow news day. \n\nYou see, the cups are red and green, and according to the media, that is not Christmassy enough for certain demented people who require graven images for their celebration of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, Lamb of God."
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8w1lzz | if it's bad luck to say "macbeth" in a theater, how do people perform macbeth? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8w1lzz/eli5_if_its_bad_luck_to_say_macbeth_in_a_theater/ | {
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"The play itself is supposedly cursed. Saying the name is certainly better than staging it in that regard. If you are staging it you either say \"The play\" or just um... stop being superstitious. ",
"From the theatrical perspective, the curse of Macbeth is dispellable through a variety of rituals. During rehearsal, they'll often use the term \"Macbee\" instead of \"Macbeth\" so as to avoid the problem until the real show.\n\nOne of the various methods is to have the offending actor leave the playhouse after speaking the name, perform one of the rituals, and then reenter afterward. This supposedly works even for utterances of the word during rehearsals.\n\nThe reason for the \"bad luck\" is the idea that Shakespeare used the words of a curse performed by actual witch covens in this particular play. "
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karha | greek mythology | Hi there, I am currently a student in high school, and my english class has begun a section on Greek Mythology.
The teacher has assumed everyone has learned the basics in middle school, but my middle school never had a dedicated english class, let alone classes on greek mythology. & #3232;\_ & #3232;
Will anyone explain like I'm five the basics of Greek Mythology?
Thank you.
| explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/karha/eli5_greek_mythology/ | {
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"Everything in everyday life had a patron god/godess, from chamberpots to fire, from flowers to individual villages. The Gods in charge of powerful thing like lightning were considered more important then others. And acording to the Greeks, these gods where social, forming aliances and creating mischief, even the occational weaving competition against humans. The actions of the Gods were used to explain strange things in the anciet world like floods and the origins of landmarks. Ask your teacher for the rest.",
"A lot of what we know about it actually comes from the Romans. I can highly recommend finding a copy of Ovid's *The Metamorphoses*. \n\nCheat sheet:\n\nZeus -- 'Father' of the gods (though some of the main ones were his brothers). His Father, Chronos/ Saturn, was scared of his children so he ate them. Zeus escaped, came back, castrated him, and freed his brothers who became...\n\nPoseidon -- Sea god. Shows up in a lot of the poems. \n\nHades -- Underworld. Not 'Hell' so much as just a shadowy place where the dead went. Southern Italy (which was part of the Greek Empire long ago) is covered with volcanoes and fumaroles (smoke holes) so this led to the idea of fires in the underworld.\n\nAll the gods married... Zeus married Hera, and then proceeded to seduce every nymph that walked by. You'll probably hear about Europa, whom he seduced while he was shaped like a bull, and Leda, whom he seduced while shaped like a swan. There is a lot of sex in the Greek and the Roman myths.\n\nSome of Zeus' children are Hephaestus/ Vulcan, the god of volcanoes and forges; Apollo, the sun god; and Artemis/ Diana, the virgin goddess of the moon and the hunt. Athena, the warrior goddess and goddess of wisdom, wasn't even normally conceived... she burst out of Zeus' head after Zeus had a torturous headache. (This writer can sympathize with that.)\n\nThere are a lot of stories about the Greek gods, Demigods (the children of a mortal and a god), and heroes. (Most Greek demigods such as Theseus (fought the minotaur) and Heracles/ Hercules (the twelve labors or tasks) have their roots in actual people, but either they or their descendants linked them to mythology.) \n\nAlso, when I've given two names, the first is the generally accepted Greek name, and the second is the Roman name. In some cases, the god is the same but the name is a translation, so Zeus (Deus in modern Greek) means 'god' or 'father of the gods', and Jupiter means 'all-father.' In other cases, the god or goddess was different but their stories are the same. Diana was an Italian virgin goddess of the hunt, and the Romans adopted many of the Artemis stories to her. \n",
"There are twelve Olympian gods, who are generally considered the most powerful and important. They are nearly all related (yes, even the married ones).\n\n* Zeus is the king of the gods. He throws lightning bolts and will screw anything that moves.\n* Hera is Zeus' youngest sister and his queen. She is the goddess of family and is understandably very jealous. She spends most of her time getting revenge on the girls Zeus screwed.\n* Poseidon is Hera and Zeus' brother and is the ruler of the sea. He's the one with the huge trident.\n* Demeter is another sister and is the goddess of the harvest. Her daughter is Persephone.\n* Athena, goddess of wisdom, is Zeus' daughter, but not Hera's. She was formed in Zeus' head and burst out fully formed. Patron of Athens.\n* Ares is Zeus and Hera's son. He's the god of war and also a complete wimp. Very aggressive but not very courageous. He and Aphrodite have a thing.\n* Aphrodite is the goddess of love. She's married to Hephaestus but fucks Ares on the side. She emerged from the sea rather than actually being born, although there are several stories about how that happened.\n* Hephaestus is the god of smiths and craftsmen. He has a crippled leg and is very ugly but enormously strong and pretty chill. He's Zeus' son but not Hera's, and he's married to Aphrodite.\n* Dionysus is the god of wine and partying. He is Zeus' son and the youngest of the Olympian gods.\n* Apollo and Artemis are twins. Apollo is the god of light and music; Artemis is the goddess of the hunt and of unmarried girls and is famous for despising men (other than her twin) and remaining a virgin. Together they represent the sun and the moon.\n* Hermes is the gods' messenger as well as the god of trickery, medicine, language, and travel. He carries a [caduceus](_URL_0_), wears winged sandals, and kicks ass.\n\nThere's also Hestia, goddess of the hearth and home, who is very humble and quiet and gave up her Olympian seat to Dionysus. And of course Hades, who rules the Underworld. He kidnapped Demeter's daughter Persephone and forced her to be his queen, although she only has to stay with him for six months of every year. Those six months are winter, and the six months when she can rejoin her mother are summer.\n\nZeus, Poseidon, Hades, Hera, Demeter, and Hestia are the children of two Titans (predecessors to the Olympian gods), Cronos and Rhea, who are in turn the children of Gaea (Mother Earth) and Uranos (the Sky).\n\nYou may also need to know that there are nine Muses who inspire all the various forms of art, but you probably won't be expected to know their names. Then there's Eros, Aphrodite's son and the god of love; the Fates, who plan out people's lives and decide when they die; and Pan, the god of nature (he's Hermes' son and has half the body of a goat).\n\nThose are the basic characters, although there are an awful lot of stories that may be discussed in your class. If you know who all those people are, you'll understand what's happening in the stories even if you haven't heard them before. Hope this helps. Best of luck! I hope you'll enjoy your class, Greek mythology is awesome.",
"Your teacher shouldn't make an assumption like that, and I doubt that they would penalize you because you weren't taught greek mythology for an *English* class. \n\nIt's unlikely that the prerequisite knowledge will be in depth *at all*. You probably already know enough just by cultural osmosis. \n\nIf you are really that concerned, go to the library and look for d'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths , which is likely what everyone else read. It's a mostly complete, if sanitized, collection of myths.",
"Everything else here is a list of facts, but if I was truly trying to explain greek mythology to a five year old, I would tell the stories!\n\nSeriously, start with _URL_0_\n\nThat's a good one. But the best way to learn about greek myths is to read some greek myths.",
"Everything in everyday life had a patron god/godess, from chamberpots to fire, from flowers to individual villages. The Gods in charge of powerful thing like lightning were considered more important then others. And acording to the Greeks, these gods where social, forming aliances and creating mischief, even the occational weaving competition against humans. The actions of the Gods were used to explain strange things in the anciet world like floods and the origins of landmarks. Ask your teacher for the rest.",
"A lot of what we know about it actually comes from the Romans. I can highly recommend finding a copy of Ovid's *The Metamorphoses*. \n\nCheat sheet:\n\nZeus -- 'Father' of the gods (though some of the main ones were his brothers). His Father, Chronos/ Saturn, was scared of his children so he ate them. Zeus escaped, came back, castrated him, and freed his brothers who became...\n\nPoseidon -- Sea god. Shows up in a lot of the poems. \n\nHades -- Underworld. Not 'Hell' so much as just a shadowy place where the dead went. Southern Italy (which was part of the Greek Empire long ago) is covered with volcanoes and fumaroles (smoke holes) so this led to the idea of fires in the underworld.\n\nAll the gods married... Zeus married Hera, and then proceeded to seduce every nymph that walked by. You'll probably hear about Europa, whom he seduced while he was shaped like a bull, and Leda, whom he seduced while shaped like a swan. There is a lot of sex in the Greek and the Roman myths.\n\nSome of Zeus' children are Hephaestus/ Vulcan, the god of volcanoes and forges; Apollo, the sun god; and Artemis/ Diana, the virgin goddess of the moon and the hunt. Athena, the warrior goddess and goddess of wisdom, wasn't even normally conceived... she burst out of Zeus' head after Zeus had a torturous headache. (This writer can sympathize with that.)\n\nThere are a lot of stories about the Greek gods, Demigods (the children of a mortal and a god), and heroes. (Most Greek demigods such as Theseus (fought the minotaur) and Heracles/ Hercules (the twelve labors or tasks) have their roots in actual people, but either they or their descendants linked them to mythology.) \n\nAlso, when I've given two names, the first is the generally accepted Greek name, and the second is the Roman name. In some cases, the god is the same but the name is a translation, so Zeus (Deus in modern Greek) means 'god' or 'father of the gods', and Jupiter means 'all-father.' In other cases, the god or goddess was different but their stories are the same. Diana was an Italian virgin goddess of the hunt, and the Romans adopted many of the Artemis stories to her. \n",
"There are twelve Olympian gods, who are generally considered the most powerful and important. They are nearly all related (yes, even the married ones).\n\n* Zeus is the king of the gods. He throws lightning bolts and will screw anything that moves.\n* Hera is Zeus' youngest sister and his queen. She is the goddess of family and is understandably very jealous. She spends most of her time getting revenge on the girls Zeus screwed.\n* Poseidon is Hera and Zeus' brother and is the ruler of the sea. He's the one with the huge trident.\n* Demeter is another sister and is the goddess of the harvest. Her daughter is Persephone.\n* Athena, goddess of wisdom, is Zeus' daughter, but not Hera's. She was formed in Zeus' head and burst out fully formed. Patron of Athens.\n* Ares is Zeus and Hera's son. He's the god of war and also a complete wimp. Very aggressive but not very courageous. He and Aphrodite have a thing.\n* Aphrodite is the goddess of love. She's married to Hephaestus but fucks Ares on the side. She emerged from the sea rather than actually being born, although there are several stories about how that happened.\n* Hephaestus is the god of smiths and craftsmen. He has a crippled leg and is very ugly but enormously strong and pretty chill. He's Zeus' son but not Hera's, and he's married to Aphrodite.\n* Dionysus is the god of wine and partying. He is Zeus' son and the youngest of the Olympian gods.\n* Apollo and Artemis are twins. Apollo is the god of light and music; Artemis is the goddess of the hunt and of unmarried girls and is famous for despising men (other than her twin) and remaining a virgin. Together they represent the sun and the moon.\n* Hermes is the gods' messenger as well as the god of trickery, medicine, language, and travel. He carries a [caduceus](_URL_0_), wears winged sandals, and kicks ass.\n\nThere's also Hestia, goddess of the hearth and home, who is very humble and quiet and gave up her Olympian seat to Dionysus. And of course Hades, who rules the Underworld. He kidnapped Demeter's daughter Persephone and forced her to be his queen, although she only has to stay with him for six months of every year. Those six months are winter, and the six months when she can rejoin her mother are summer.\n\nZeus, Poseidon, Hades, Hera, Demeter, and Hestia are the children of two Titans (predecessors to the Olympian gods), Cronos and Rhea, who are in turn the children of Gaea (Mother Earth) and Uranos (the Sky).\n\nYou may also need to know that there are nine Muses who inspire all the various forms of art, but you probably won't be expected to know their names. Then there's Eros, Aphrodite's son and the god of love; the Fates, who plan out people's lives and decide when they die; and Pan, the god of nature (he's Hermes' son and has half the body of a goat).\n\nThose are the basic characters, although there are an awful lot of stories that may be discussed in your class. If you know who all those people are, you'll understand what's happening in the stories even if you haven't heard them before. Hope this helps. Best of luck! I hope you'll enjoy your class, Greek mythology is awesome.",
"Your teacher shouldn't make an assumption like that, and I doubt that they would penalize you because you weren't taught greek mythology for an *English* class. \n\nIt's unlikely that the prerequisite knowledge will be in depth *at all*. You probably already know enough just by cultural osmosis. \n\nIf you are really that concerned, go to the library and look for d'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths , which is likely what everyone else read. It's a mostly complete, if sanitized, collection of myths.",
"Everything else here is a list of facts, but if I was truly trying to explain greek mythology to a five year old, I would tell the stories!\n\nSeriously, start with _URL_0_\n\nThat's a good one. But the best way to learn about greek myths is to read some greek myths."
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2s0ttk | why are some doors hollow? | A quick Google search came up with door stores selling hollow core doors. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2s0ttk/eli5_why_are_some_doors_hollow/ | {
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"Hollow doors are lighter, cheaper, and aren't meant for security. They are generally used for interior doors where security and insulation aren't required.",
"Because they're cheaper. It saves home builders money to use hollow doors in the interior of a house. ",
"Just echoing everyone else. Lighter, less wear and tear on hinges, they close quieter because they can't really be slammed. All good qualities inside a house. Also comes down to cheaper, sure you could put a $150 solid core door on that hall way closet. But the cheaper hollow core door will do just as much."
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amkdb4 | globalization vs globalism | Seriously, what's the difference? I'm clueless and the news isn't helping me understand at all | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/amkdb4/eli5_globalization_vs_globalism/ | {
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"**Globalization** is a concept in business and economics where businesses, governments, and people operate at a global scale. It's an outgrowth of free market capitalism. \n\nSo think of an American restaurant in the early-20th century. An American farmer grows food, the restaurant hires American workers to make the American food, and they sit on furniture that was manufactured in the US. Everything was done in a single country. Countries like Germany, England, France, Italy, etc. all did the same thing. \n\nToday, an American fast food restaurant can sell Italian food in India. American bulls are sold to Mexican farmers to sire cows which are sold to American beef processors who sell meat in Mexico. Chinese engineers move to America to design smartphones which are manufactured in China and sold in America. Japanese auto companies make cars with more American parts than American car companies.\n\nThe idea is that businesses operate on a global scale. Countries work together to produce goods and services instead. Workers move wherever there is need. Companies open up shops in lots of countries. People eat food from other countries that they've never visited before. American investors buy stock in foreign companies and foreign investors buy stock in American companies. People talk to people on the other side of the planet on the phone and on the internet all the time. It takes only a day to fly to the other side of the planet.\n\nThis leads to a lot more economic efficiency. It's resulted in billions of people leaving poverty. It's turned thousands of business people into billionaires. It's made formerly expensive goods available cheaply all around the world (the King of England once posed for a painting with a pineapple because it was a sign of outrageous wealth. Now anyone can buy a fresh one for cheap).\n\n**Globalism** is a word used by populists to criticize **globalization.** There are a few other niche uses in academia, but this is what most people mean when they use this term. Globalization results in jobs being outsourced to other countries. It results in tastes and fashions from other countries replacing the traditions and cultures in your local country. It results in the people who adapt fastest becoming billionaires and the people who adapt slowly losing their jobs. Globalization makes things better in the long run for everyone, but it results in short term harm to some people. But short term in this sense can mean a few decades, which represents a big chunk of a human's life.\n\nPeople used to marry people because their families knew each other. People used to hire people because they went to the same church. Now, merit is prized over all else. People marry the most attractive people they can find. They hire the hardest and smartest workers who work at the lowest price. This is good for some people and bad for others. It provides opportunities to people who were historically disadvantaged, but it also creates a sense of unease among people who know that their boss might find a better employee and they can get fired at any moment.\n\nGlobalization reduces the risk of war because if you have investments in multiple countries, it hurts you if they start fighting each other. But if there is a war, countries would have a harder time winning than if they were completely self-sufficient.\n\nAs a final point, some people simply dislike other races, religions, cultures, etc. They would much rather interact exclusively with people who share the same worldview as them."
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56vojg | ¿why does the spanish language incorporate two question marks at the beginning and end of their questions when writing? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/56vojg/eli5_why_does_the_spanish_language_incorporate/ | {
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"In Spanish, as in English, the whole sentence is transformed by the fact it's a question--the meaning is different, and you use a different tone. (Consider the difference between \"It belongs to him.\" and \"It belongs to him?\") A question mark at the start of the sentence is an extra clue in Spanish, while in English we're fond of words like \"why\" to signal the start of a question.\n\nPunctuation, especially standardized punctuation, is relatively new as far as European languages go. Hence why different languages often have different ways of doing it.",
"So that you don't need to scan ahead to know if you should inflect your words in an inquisitive manner.\n\nHow bout that local sports team.",
"It's just the way the language is structured. Useful for sentences where only part of it is an actual question. \n\nFor example, if you were to use it in English would be something like:\n\"In the Spanish language, ¿why do you use opening question marks?\"",
"These answers are wrong. They don't explain *why*. They explain the reasoning. \n\nThe fact is the Real Academia Española, the Spanish body responsible for regulating the (official use of the) Spanish language, recommended it in 1754, for the reasoning declared by other commenters. And it was adopted gradually by Spanish writers. Then it permeated to the other languages spoken in Spain, such as Catalan and Galician. \n\nHere is what [the Wikipedia article](_URL_0_) says about it\n\n > The inverted question mark was adopted long after the Real Academia's decision, published in the second edition of La ortografía de la Real Academia (The Orthography of the Royal Academy) in 1754 recommending it as the symbol indicating the beginning of a question in written Spanish—e.g. ¿Cuántos años tienes? (\"How old are you?\"). The Real Academia also ordered the same inverted-symbol system for statements of exclamation, using the symbols \"¡\" and \"!\". This helps to recognize questions and exclamations in long sentences. \"Do you like summer?\" and \"You like summer.\" are translated respectively as \"¿Te gusta el verano?\" and \"Te gusta el verano.\" (There is no difference between the wording of a yes–no question and the corresponding statement in Spanish as there is in English.) These new rules were slowly adopted; there exist nineteenth-century books in which the writer does not use either opening symbol, neither the \"¡\" nor the \"¿\".",
"The RAE introduced it in 1754, probably just because they liked it or looked for a homogeneity, that said, it started to be used only one century later, when Queen Isabel gave RAE a Royal and more important status. RAE is the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language, the ones that say how spanish has to be written and spoken. \nThis only applies to spanish althought seems like gaelician adopted it too meanwhile catalan mantains only an interrogation or exclamation mark at the end.",
"So that when people read out loud, they can see that they are reading a question, even before they get to the end. It's really a good a idea. The better question might be: why does English not do that?",
"In English and other lenguajes the structure for a question is diferent than the affirmative one. In Spanish there is not such difference so its a way to show the reader to use the correct pronunciation and understanding of the context from the begging of the sentence.\n\ne.g:\n\n > You like chocolate\n > \n > **Do** you like chocolate?\n > \n > Te gusta el chocolate\n > \n > ¿Te gusta el chocolate?"
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65qe6s | can the brain function if some nonessential parts get removed?how? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/65qe6s/eli5_can_the_brain_function_if_some_nonessential/ | {
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"Yes indeed, although it can negatively affect people's mind/senses/motor functions if you remove too much or the wrong part. How? The answer is in your question - some parts are nonessential. If I cut part of your earlobe off, you could still hear. Even if I removed the entire hearing apparatus from one ear, you could still hear from the other. Brains are similar: some parts can stand to lose small bits without losing too much function, and sometimes big removals can be compensated by the symmetric part on the other side.",
"Brains function even when important parts fail or get removed. Certain portions are important for memory formation. If they are destroyed memories no longer form. But the person relies on the permanent memories to talk and eat. But in an hour or so they will no longer remember having eaten, or what day it is.\n\nBrains also function without the ability to read, or do math, or write, if there has been a major stroke. Careful performance testing can pinpoint the location of a stroke as well as an MRI.",
"Brains are elastic and their substance can be reallocated to different uses, to a point. Severe damage can be worked around. The internet is an analogue. If the US was removed from the internet due to a catastrophic event, traffic could route around it and the whole would continue in a functional but diminished capacity. ",
"Here is one famous case that is almost always used in introductions on the subject: [Phineas Gage](_URL_0_). He was an American railroad worker who was in an industrial accident where a metal rod was shot completely through his head, but he survived and lived for another 12 years.",
"The brain can function even if essential parts are removed too, but as many mentioned, with a cost. Head trauma is much more common than many people realize; chances are you know someone who has suffered it and you wouldn't even know. THEY may not even know as it's severely under or improperly diagnosed & treated. Doctors cannot fix the brain in many cases, but cognitive and physical therapy is often important for maintaining a healthy life. The movie Concussion (_URL_4_) is one category of this. Even after car accidents, bike crashes, bar fights, dumb drunkenness, etc. you can have damaged a part of your brain and suffer symptoms. \n\nResources to help anyone you may know that's affected \n\n_URL_1_\n_URL_0_\n_URL_3_\n_URL_2_\n\nEdit: as to how, we only have theories. The real answer is no one for sure know, we just know it DOES. "
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"https://www.braintrauma.org",
"http://m.imdb.com/title/tt3322364/"
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