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r26xg | somalia and what's happening there | I know it's a failed state, but how did reach this point? Who is running it? Who is suppose to be running it? What's happening with UN peace keepers there? Is there hope for the future? Is it anarchy? Is there any 'safe zones'?
So many question, when I try to read about it I become more curious.
Thanks! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/r26xg/eli5_somalia_and_whats_happening_there/ | {
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"Today 'Somalia' is basically a geographic expression, the country has had no central government since the 80s. The previous government did a lot of bad things in the north so when that government (Siad Barre) fell they were able to step away and run their own business. So the north is a pretty decent place. They have their own (unrecognized) government and their own (unrecognized) currency. You can even go there as a tourist and you'll be relatively safe.\n\nThe southern part of the country is a different story. When the Barre government collapsed there was no more governmental authority. Warlords and clan chiefs stepped into the void and spent about 15 years fighting one another in an anarchic free for all.\n\nEventually a group of Islamists called the Union of Islamic Courts was created to attempt to end the civil war and restore stability. While they were fighting to take over the south the U.S. gave millions of dollars worth of weapons to the warlords. The UIC won anyways, and for a little while they were doing some good. They were more moderate than the Taliban and while some of their punishments were barbaric they made progressing in restoring a semblance of order. They also got the airports and port running for the first time since things went \nto shit.\n\nOnce the warlords were beaten there was a lot of concern about terrorists going to Somalia. So Ethiopia, whose military is largely a product of American money, went in (presumably with U.S. backing) and attempted to overthrow the UIC and install the U.N. backed provisional government. The provisional government has a lot of problems though, it's mostly made up of warlords and has no presence inside Somalia-- they have to hold their meetings in Kenya.\n\nEthiopia tried occupying Somalia for a little while but since they'd gotten rid of the UIC and didn't have the resources to stay that long they got out. The UIC of 2006 didn't really exist by this time, it had been splintered. The previous leadership tended to be older and more moderate, but after the Ethiopian intervention the Islamists who were left fighting were the youngest, fiercest, and most extreme. They call themselves al-Shabaab (meaning 'youth movement'.) While the UIC cared more about restoring law in Somalia than international terrorism, al-Shabaab is much more sympathetic to terrorists who want to carry out attacks abroad. They've provided a safe haven to some al-Qaeda guys and have carried out a few attacks of their own elsewhere in Africa. Kenya and Uganda have both been bombed by al-Shabaab, in retaliation for support they've given to the provisional government.\n\nSo Somalia is a complex place, with regions that look radically different from one another. The north will probably continue to do well and likely will be recognized as an independent state some day. There's no reason to be positive about the south though; that's only getting worse and worse. Especially since we've now got all kinds of drones flying around the place.\n",
" > How did Somalia reach the point of state failure?\n\nSomalia's eventual collapse has its roots in the Cold War. During the 1970s, the US and China were essentially fighting a low-level proxy war against the USSR in Ethiopia following Haile Selassie's ouster from power by the Derg, a nominally socialist military junta.\n\nHowever, both the US and the USSR provided the Derg with limited support. Initially, the USSR at the time was more interested in retaining its influence over Somalia and Eritrea (which at that time was still part of Ethiopia although in open rebellion against the state) and any weapons that it sent to Ethiopia were sent via Somalia and Eritrea.\n\nThe turning point in Soviet relations with Ethiopia came in 1977 following another coup by [Mengistu Haile Mariam](_URL_0_) who had most of his political opponents in the Derg assassinated and assumed power. Mengistu decided to strengthen Ethiopia's relationships with other socialist countries, particularly the USSR and East Germany.\n\nFollowing Mengistu's coup and his subsequent overtures to the USSR, the Soviets began sending huge amounts of weapons to Ethiopia including helicopters, tanks, and fighter jets.\n\nMeanwhile, the leader of Somalia, [Mohammed Siad Barre](_URL_2_), straddled the line between Soviet support and his ties with conservative Arab governments of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, who were considered allies of the US. Siad Barre recognized that he could not implement large-scale socialist reforms in Somalia and still retain the support of the numerous Somali clans on whose patronage he relied to keep power.\n\nThese factors led Siad Barre to the [Ogaden War](_URL_4_), in a region that straddled the border of Western Somalia and Eastern Ethiopia, which pitted Ethiopian troops against Somalian troops and ethnic Somalis living in Ehtiopia\n\nThis war eventually came to be known as the Horn of Africa crisis. The right wing of the US political elite viewed Carter's reaction to the events in the Horn of Africa as too weak towards the Soviets.\n\nRonald Reagan, who would soon be launching his bid for president, spoke of the Crisis in almost apocalyptic terms saying that \"More immediately, control of the Horn of Africa would give Moscow the ability to destabilize those governments on the Arabian peninsula which have proven themselves to be strongly anti-Communist... in a few years we may be faced with the prospect of a Soviet empire of proteges and dependencies stretching from Addis Ababa to Capetown.\"\n\nTaking a cue from these statements from the West, Siad Barre eventually abandoned Soviet support under the assumption that his government would receive support from the US and Arab states, which never fully materialized. Faced with the prospect of declining revenues, Siad Barre attempted to new levies and taxes in the provinces which reignited clan loyalties over state loyalties in the Somali hinterland. \n\nIn 1988, in a final desperate gambit, Siad Barre attempted to ally himself with the Mengistu regime in Addis, a move which turned the clans on which he relied for popular support against him. The Somalian state began to crumble as inter-clan warfare broke out and by 1990 Somalia had no real government to speak of.\n\n > Who is running Somalia?\n\nToday, Somalia can essentially be divided into three parts: Somalia, Puntland, and Somaliland - see [this map](_URL_1_). Somaliland and Puntland each have their own autonomous governments that are somewhat democratic, as well as their own military forces.\n\nSomalia is a different story. While the central government of Somalia is theoretically governed by a \"transitional federal goverment\", the government has almost no power and is largely administered from Nairobi.\n\n > What's happening with the UN peacekeepers there?\n\nThe peacekeeping force in Somalia ais known as the African Union Mission in Somalia or [ANISOM](_URL_6_) operate with a joint mandate from the UN and African Union. The force about 10,000 strong (soon to increase to 17,000) and is primarily made up of Ugandan soldiers with some Burundian soldiers and is really only present in Mogadishu to fight back forces of [Al-Shabaab](_URL_5_).\n\nAdditionally, recent attacks by Al-Shabaab in Kenya and Ethiopia have prompted those governments to launch attacks into Somalia to try to capture key Shabaab strongholds - again see [map](_URL_1_).\n\n > Is there any hope for the future?\n\nA [recent conference](_URL_3_) on the situation in Somalia outlined a plan for a sort of federated style of government that, while far from promising, is one of the better suggested solutions in recent memory (imo).\n\nOne development that may also help is the declining support for Al-Shabaab following its refusal to allow Western food aid to reach tens of thousands of people who suffered through one of the worst droughts, and subsequent famines, in recent history.\n\n > Safe zones?\n\nSomaliland and Puntland are far safer than Southern Somalia. While Mogadishu is occupied by ANISOM forces, attacks in the city are still frequent.\n\n"
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"http://www.economist.com/node/21548291",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogaden_War",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Shabaab",
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7u6ttl | why almost no smartphone protective case has a cover for the camera glass? | I mean it as a flap ([like dust covers](_URL_0_)), not a transparent layer. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7u6ttl/eli5_why_almost_no_smartphone_protective_case_has/ | {
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"A decent quality smartphone will have a hard protective layer (e.g. gorilla glass) over the lens so it doesn't get scratched. It will resist scratches pretty well. \n\nOn the other hand, smartphone cases are made of cheaper materials, usually some kind of plastic, and are much easier to scratch. So if you had a case over the lens, over time, there would be a bunch of scratches in front of the lens, all your pictures would come out blurry and terrible. \n\nAlso, even if the case is nice and clear with no scratches, it will tend to add distortion, extra glare, and so forth to your photos. \n\nSo bottom line is, they make a cut-out for the camera so your photos aren't potato quality. "
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67h2j0 | does tire tread help when driving on wet surfaces? if so; how? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/67h2j0/eli5_does_tire_tread_help_when_driving_on_wet/ | {
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"Because low tread leaves nowhere for the water to go so the tire kinda skims on top of the water. If there is tread, the water has grooves to go through leaving the tread direct contact with the road. ",
"Tread refers specifically to the channels cut into the surface of a tire. The tread is designed to shed water displaced from under the road contacting surfaces of the tire, though the actual pattern isn't actually terribly important so long as certain key criteria are met, and is highly stylized.\n\nAn over-inflated tire has a significant impact on improving said displacement, as the bulging center can more easily press the water from the center out. I'm not advocating you over-inflate your tires - while it also reduces rolling resistance, increasing fuel economy, it also reduces traction, so you're more likely to lose control of your vehicle, especially at higher speeds, and it wears the center of your tire excessively, greatly reducing durability.\n\nIf you can't displace water fast enough, typically due to speed, lack of tread, or an under inflated tire having too much displacement, you'll hydroplane - the car will literally be floating. That's not driving, that's sailing.\n\nSnow and ice tires are hard rubber with bold edges to dig into the snow and ice, and use *that* as the road surface. They make pretty bad rain tires because if it's warm enough to rain and not snow, you're still driving on hard rubber that doesn't really care all that much about gripping the road surface.\n\nTread is the gaps between the road contacting surfaces of the tire, and the less tire you have in contact with the road, the less friction. Tread actually reduces traction in ideal conditions by virtue of being \"not tire\", which is why performance tires for ideal conditions have little to no tread. Racing tires, aka \"slicks\" (which are anything but, depending on the compound, they can be as sticky as duct tape when *cold*) are illegal for road use because they are dangerous to drive on in the presence of any amount of moisture on the road. They have no means of displacing water but by casting a wake in front of the point of contact. I was in a Dodge Viper that nearly wiped out at 25 mph driving through a neighborhood because it rained, *two days prior*, because of the tires on it at the time.\n\nSo treads are a compromise in the design, and all season tires are the ultimate compromise."
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2lcr4s | why is that when i say "a university student" it sounds right but when i say "an university student" like it should be in english, it sounds completely wrong. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2lcr4s/eli5_why_is_that_when_i_say_a_university_student/ | {
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"Someone posted something similar the other day on here, and it more has to do with pronunciation not lettering.\n\nYou use the singular designator \"a,\" for words that follow don't have a vowel sound. You use \"an\" if it is a vowel sound.",
"You don't say \"An University Student\" in English.\n\n\"An\" is used when the following word starts with a vowel sound. \"University\" does not, it starts with a consonant \"y\" sound, \"You-Ni-Verse-It-Ee\".\n\nYou would use \"an\" when saying a word such as \"umpire\" which starts with a vowel \"u\" sound, \"Uhm-Pyre\"",
"You use \"an\" before vowels that is true, \nbut sometimes you should use an \"a\" too. \nThe sound makes it confusing, \nFor the vowel, you are using, \n\"Youniversity\" starts with \"Y\" and not \"U\""
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3xaz63 | why did adam sandler seemingly stop being funny some years ago? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3xaz63/eli5_why_did_adam_sandler_seemingly_stop_being/ | {
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"I was in high school when Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore were out. That humor made me laugh 20 years ago. He hasn't changed we have. His brand of humor just doesn't stand up to the improv style of so many great comedies of the last 5+ years.",
"I'd say that your sense of humor has changed, Adam Sandler's humor has always been childish/frat guy's humor",
"His earlier movies still make me laugh. Waterboy, Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore, Big Daddy, The Wedding Singer. Maybe he's losing his edge as he gets further away from his stand up and sketch comedy days. ",
"For any comedian, Scuba Steve would be the pinnacle of a career. \nIt's all down hill (or perhaps under water) from there.",
"He's getting too old to play those adrift Man-Child characters. He has to move on to other material."
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5xqrrq | what is with the weird "bubble in your throat" phenomenon? | What causes this to happen?
Why does it change your voice?
Is there any way to control when it happens or any way to control making it go away? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5xqrrq/eli5_what_is_with_the_weird_bubble_in_your_throat/ | {
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"I am pretty sure it's just some mucus messing with your vocal cords, as ,usually, coughing to clear your voice will get rid of it.The voice changes, usually gets a deeper pitch, because the air you are exiling is not just making the vocal cord vibrate, but also all the mucus covering them and all the temporary mucus membranes between them."
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2mty1l | a fever. | * What is a fever?
* How does it change body temperature?
* What are the different severity temperature points? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2mty1l/eli5_a_fever/ | {
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"Hi i am a doctor.\n\nIn response to an invading pathogen (bug) the body starts an inflammatory cascade (attacks the bug). Lots of chemicals are released (cytokines etc) these chemicals cause the brain to reset the normal body temperature to a higher value, say 40 degrees Celsius. This is believed to help the immune system fight the infection but has not been scientifically confirmed. Although the brain raises the set point the body has to actually heat up to this new set point so you may have a temperature of 39 but the brain says that it should be 40 so you feel cold (even though you are not) and start shivering in order to generate more heat. This is a fever and when you shiver its called \"rigoring\"\nWhen you get a fever from heat stroke/exhaustion the brain doesn't raise the set point and as you heat up you actually feel hot this time, this is called hyperthermia (not a fever)"
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345s7x | the sudden outrage towards dr. oz | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/345s7x/eli5_the_sudden_outrage_towards_dr_oz/ | {
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"From my point of view, it largely seems to stem from the fact he is hiding behind the first amendment to promote fringe or even quack medical and health products. Sure the first amendment gives you the right to say any crazy thing you want, but the fact that he is (supposedly) a doctor and is using his authority in that role to peddle bad products is a major issue that will likely get him kicked out of the medical profession at least. ",
"This doesn't explain why it's suddenly become such a big issue, but as for the outrage itself...\n\nHe uses (abuses) his status as a medical doctor (specifically, he seems to be an excellent heart surgeon) in order to make large piles of money by promoting bullshit alternative medicine to people who don't know any better.\n\nThere was a pretty funny montage on Youtube recently of all the times he has said on his show \"I have this magic weight loss pill that will burn the fat right off you without you doing anything...\" or some close variation, and then cuts to his recent congressional hearing, being asked \"is there a magic weight loss pill?\" and him trying to evade the question but finally answering \"no.\"",
"Dr. Oz spreads lies about supposed cures for diseases that seriously have no cure. I have Gastroparesis. One of the members of his team posted a blog about how all that we need to do to cure a paralyzed stomach is take a walk. Is that why I have a gastric pacemaker, a port for IV meds, and three compression fractures due to seizures brought on by malnutrition? A few weeks later, after the GP community went after them, the author posted a mediocre clarification. _URL_0_\nThe guy is a tool. ",
"The outrage is not sudden. Doctors and scientists and others have been. Complaining for years. Hell, he was summoned before congress last year and there was a whole series of criticisms leveled at him at that time. Criticism just keeps building and building. But most recently, a large number of medical faculty at Columbia urged revocation of his tenure, and that action was a huge deal as it's done extremely rarely. Why now? No reason--it's just part of the overall criticisms against him that have been building .",
"If you check out the doctors behind it and the timing then you'll understand: _URL_0_ "
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60lh6z | how come household incomes haven't gone up significantly in decades if more and more women have joined the labor force? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/60lh6z/eli5_how_come_household_incomes_havent_gone_up/ | {
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"In part precisely because more and more women have entered the labor force. Labor supply went up faster than demand, so labor became cheaper. The other issue is that technically compensation has continued to increase. People tend to only look at wage and say that people get paid the same as three decades ago. That's not true though, because healthcare benefits are compensation too, but they've eaten up a larger share of compensation (hence the push to reduce healthcare costs with the ACA)."
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coipvd | who was jeffrey epstein? why is him committing suicide suspicious? what does him committing suicide mean? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/coipvd/eli5_who_was_jeffrey_epstein_why_is_him/ | {
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"Had a child sex slave trafficking ring with multiple elite billionaires involved but hasn’t given much info and was supposed to go to trial soon also was on suicide watch but somehow still committed “suicide” it’s suspicious because there’s a high chance it’s a coverup",
"Epstein was (is?) a very wealthy and connected financier (investment banking, financial consulting, etc...) who has been under intense investigation for his ties to child sex trafficking.\n\nHis apparent suicide is suspicious because he was recently arrested (for a second time) around child trafficking. He had supposedly been under suicide watch after previously attempting it. The fact that he is connected with many high profile names (famous US presidents and politicians, British and Saudi royalty and generally wealthy and well known VIPs, etc...) leads many to believe that there’s more than meets the eye. Without him alive he can’t name drop or implicate the names being accused. Sure it’s possible he committed suicide, but there are many very wealthy, very connected people with an interest in silencing him.\n\nThere are also theories that he’s tied to a deep state spy organization in Israel and that the Israeli government body swapped him and transported him out of prison and the US. \n\nHis suicide “means” that he can’t speak or testify against any of the potential people involved."
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5zqjaj | if your body, very slowly, began to not get the oxygen it needs, which systems would shut down first? (and last) and why? | What bodily functions are top priority for oxygen use and what functions are the lowest tier and so on? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5zqjaj/eli5_if_your_body_very_slowly_began_to_not_get/ | {
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"Im not aware of any published evidence on this so I will give my professional opinion.\n\nFirstly it depends on why are not getting the oxygen it needs. The two main reasons are because of a lack of oxygen in the air (rare) or your lungs not oxygenating blood properly (common). \n\nNot having enough oxygen in your blood (as measured by a blood test from your artery) is termed respiratory failure. There are two types, one is just not enough oxygen with low carbon dioxide caused by hyperventilating to try to get enough oxygen in. The second type is not enough oxygen AND too much carbon dioxide because the lungs are not moving air in and out efficiently enough. \n\nIf you're talking about lack of oxygen then that would typically show the first type of respiratory failure on the arterial blood test. We would still term it respiratory failure even though the lungs were working fine. Without any shadow of a doubt your brain would be the first thing to go. Most of your organs can survive a certain amount of hypoxia but you would go unconscious fairly rapidly. Your liver and kidneys would probably go next - the liver because it is the organ that carries out the most chemical reactions and needs oxygen for this and the kidneys because they require a lot of oxygenated blood flow to keep working. \n\nIf you removed the oxygen very very slowly (over days and weeks) then other mechanisms would kick in such as the blood production mechanisms to ensure there is more haemoglobin to mop up as much as possible of the scarce oxygen that you breathe in. This is why mountaineers have to spend time acclimatising and why people who live at high altitude in for example Chile have very high haemoglobin levels. If you kept removing the oxygen though, you'd eventually pass out. \n\nAfter you'd passed out the liver and kidneys would begin to shut down next and then probably your heart. You wouldn't live long after you'd passed out. The brain is obviously the top priority. After this the body will just keep trying to get as much oxygen as it can until the heart stops.\nTl;dr: The brain. \n\nSource: I am a doctor.\n\nEdit: Grammar"
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1j173e | how are synthetic materials (such as plastic) unnatural / toxic, if they are made from ingredients found on earth? | To clarify: I don't understand how natural ingredients can be used to create non-natural, or synthetic (and thereby environmentally harmful) things. Why, for example is plastic considered "man made" - aren't the ingredients for the chemicals in it at some level just natural ingredients? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1j173e/eli5_how_are_synthetic_materials_such_as_plastic/ | {
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"Naturally occuring chemicals can be used to make chemicals which do not occur in nature. Think of it like baking a cake. The main ingredients in cake (sugar, flour, oil, eggs) are all naturally occuring but you would never a cake in nature. It's similar with plastics. While the chemicals used in plastic manufacturing (most petroleum based) are naturally occuring, you can combine them in specific ways to make something which is not.",
"I personally dont think there is a distinction between 'natural' and 'unnatural' in a universal sense. We are a product of nature, and nature endowed us with the ability to create things, just like bird's nests.\n\nWhere the environmentalists have a point is that when we DO create a new compounds (chemicals that other processes didnt put together until now, like a new atomic leggo set), it often decays slowly and can be harmful to living organisms that have not evolved around such materials. It disrupts their biological functions because we changed some base elements into a compound that works differently than other compounds they are used to.\n\nIf you create a lot of slowly decaying poisonous things and leave them laying around, it will kill a bunch of the living things that were there for millions of years without that stuff.\n\nPlastic, for example, is made (often) of petroleum, which is found deep underground and is (often) the result of many years of decaying organic matter. We pull up the petroleum, which is now some long stringy bits of carbon, and subject it to other chemicals and heat and pressure etc.\n\nNow we can create a plastic bag. Other organisms havent done this before, so we are the first to introduce the plastic bag into the ecosystem. Whenever you introduce a new thing into the ecosystem, it messes with what was already there.\n\nMy personal take on this is that the result can be bad for US, but not universally bad usually. George Carlin has a bit about how nature will just eventually use plastic in a new species, but we'll be fucking long dead cause we screwed up the environment so bad that even we cant live there. I think there is validity to this point.\n\nIf we create a new string of carbon and stuff that causes cancer and leave it in the drinking water, WE die, along with other creatures. WE dont really want to die, so we assume this is universally bad, when in reality, it's only bad for us. \n\nBut bad for us is bad enough, and we should take care to keep this place clean, if for no other reason than I want to not get horrible cancer and die painfully when it could be avoided.\n\nAnother point is that we are not the first species to introduce a powerful chemical agent globally and change all of life. The Earth didnt always have an oxygen rich environment. It took photosynthetic organisms to change the entire atmosphere so that creatures that breath air could evolve and exist. The trees and whatnot changed the planet long before we did. Also, 99% of all species have gone extinct. We are likely subject to the same laws.\n\nIf we change our environment too rapidly and dont pay attention to the cause and effect chains of our decision making, we may end up in that 99% sooner rather than later. This is counter to all our instincts as living creatures, so we should try to avoid doing this to ourselves, even if at some long range universal point of view it's not a new thing to have happen.\n\nI'll bet all that new O2 killed a lot of things off back when photosynthetic organisms were starting to do their thing."
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omj88 | what do you do with your invention idea? | I'm curious about the steps you need to take to create a product. When to seek investors, when to seek counsel, patents, whatever. Thanks! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/omj88/eli5_what_do_you_do_with_your_invention_idea/ | {
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"Write all plans, print it out and mail it to yourself, never opening it. \nIt's a poor man's copyright. \nOther than that, I don't know. Hopefully someone else has more in-depth knowledge. ",
"Really depends on what you've invented/what your idea is.\n\nIf it's a mass-market thing, or something that can be quickly duplicated by competitors and you haven't got the capacity to produce and distribute widely yourself, you might want to consider licensing. Find a company doing something similar or related and pitch it to them in exchange for a license fee.\n\nIf you're going it alone, then a business plan, marketing plan, etc are a must. How much money you need depends on what your startup and operating costs will be. Whether you'll need patents depends on the idea too. \n\nBefore you even start going through the process of developing a plan though, it's worth your time to discuss it with some people first. It might seem like a great idea, but we aren't always the first ones to see major flaws in our plans. Most importantly, try to avoid using family or close friends for this, as they're the least likely to be completely honest if an idea really sucks."
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5aq048 | how do television ratings work? how long do i have to be tuned in to a channel for the rating to count? and what's the correlation between the rating number (i.e. 13.4) and the number of viewers? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5aq048/eli5_how_do_television_ratings_work_how_long_do_i/ | {
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"Ratings are based off what are called Nielsen Ratings. The Nielsen Company employs a system where they select families of a certain demographic in every single area code and \"hires\" out these families to be what are known as The Nielsen Families.\n\nHow do they gather what shows they watch? Nielsen employs a box that connects to a family's DVR or cable box as well as connects to their TV so that they know exactly what shows the family is watching, when they watch it, how they watch it (recorded or live), and how often. All of this information gets transferred into the box and that's then transmitted to their data warehouse down in Texas.\n\nThere, millions upon millions of data is migrated, mined, and reported out to various companies who have bought media, and they receive a report around GRPs or Gross Rating Points. Gross Rating Points tell you the frequency (how often and length) and reach (# of Nielsen families). Each company has a set threshold that they wish to hit so that's how some shows get cancelled vs others. \n\nNot everyone can impact ratings as this would require tons of data plus not everyone wants to have their viewing habits shared with companies. You cannot choose to become a Nielsen Family, you have to live in a certain area and hit a type of demographic (income, race, make up of the family, etc) for you to be selected by The Nielsen Company.\n\nRatings count by seconds so you can be on a channel for a brief moment for it to be counted. For example, if you're channel surfing, the box will record exactly what channels you accessed and for how long even if it was for a second or less. They can also tell if you've accessed the channel guide. They can also tell when you switched the tv over to gaming and play a game.\n\nThere's a high correlation between the two as the ratings take into account number of viewers (reach) and frequency of viewing (how many times viewed and length of time).",
"I've been a Nielsen family participant on 2 different instances. Once about 20 years ago in OK City, and again, 1 year ago in Texas.\n\nThey do allow a small fee to the participants, but all tracking in both instances for me was a manually written log provided by the Nielsen company. I would fill out and mail them the log, and they would send a new blank log back for the next period. \n\nIn both cases, I eventually gave up on the arrangement so my TV watching was very sporadic and I didn't like filling out and keeping up with the log books. \n\nIf they would have provided a box of some kind that tracks viewing, I'd still be doing it. I'm not sure what dictates who gets a box and who has to do the logs by hand.\n\n\n\n\n"
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14r93x | why are smartphones $500-700+ while laptops with the same or better specs are considerably less? | EDIT: I'm seeing a lot of comments about space, but is it the actual cost of the small components or the research that goes into producing them? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/14r93x/eli5_why_are_smartphones_500700_while_laptops/ | {
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"Designing electronics when you have no, or relaxed space constraints is **much** easier and therefore cheaper. Also, the specific parts, while maybe less powerful, are likely more efficient with regards to power (this is highly variable, of course). So even though your particular processor or whatnot is *slower,* it has a more complicated design to ensure better battery life and smaller physical size.\n\nEDIT: A lot of people are nitpicking about the fact that margins are very high in devices like Samsungs phones and the iPhone line. Just because their *raw materials cost* is low, and the profit margin is high on the device, does not mean miniaturization is irrelevant. The reason they can charge those prices, is because miniaturization is **hard** and they've made new, successful, miniature devices. They are recouping their R & D costs. The market will push these prices down (as evidenced by Google's new phones) because the bulk of the R & D is done, and that cost isn't repeated. Companies learn from one another, which is in part some of the issues with patent laws but that's another story.",
"Its all about size. You wouldn't be able to fit a laptop into your pocket. I would imagine making technology smaller requires a smarter way to do so.",
"Proximity sensor, gyroscope, wifi, bluetooth, 3g, 4g, GPS, multitouch super dense screen, multiple cameras, multiple microphones, light sensor, NFC stuff. Theres a ton of stuff in there. I'm surprised its so cheep. ",
"This is not an ELI5 answer, but if you are really interested in smartphone costs listen to the section about it (driving smartphone costs down) on this podcast: _URL_0_. These guys are probably the most thorough tech reviewers and its still fairly easy to understand if you follow the industry at all.",
"A lot of people are saying it's expensive to make things smaller, but nobody is really explaining why. It's not just that you have to do more R & D, you also have to manufacture everything to much tighter tolerances.\n\nEngineers know that when the plans for something say it should be 1mm thick, every single unit won't come out at exactly 1.0000000...mm when it's manufactured. Consequently, they design whatever it is that they're designing such that it will still work properly if all the parts are a bit larger or smaller--they incorporate a **tolerance**. If certain parts of something need to be almost exactly the specified size (perhaps the two halves of a hinge, so it can swing smoothly), they need to be manufactured to a tight tolerance.\n\nThe smaller a device is, the tighter all the tolerances have to be, because there's less room for error. And to manufacture parts with very tight tolerances, you need manufacturing equipment that is *itself* built to very tight tolerances, which in turn had to be manufactured with other tools with tight tolerances. This is, of course, expensive. If you think about it, it's amazing anything can be this accurate at all, considering the whole process started out with sticks and rocks.",
"While the answers about smaller = lower tolerances and such are right, some of it is also plain price gouging. Apple sells iPhones for 3x what it costs to produce them because people will pay that for them.",
"Why are laptops $500-700+ while desktops with the same or better specs are considerably less?",
"The actual reason. \"Because the cost of the phone to the customer is subsidized by the carrier.\" If the carrier is going to discount the phone from $500 to $0 on a 3 year term then there is no reason for the customer to care what the actual price is so no reason for manufacturers to reduce price. If everyone had to buy hardware outright the manufacturers would be forced to be competitive and just like in the pc industry prices would come crashing down. Ever wondered why an ipod touch costs 179.99$ but an iphones full price is $699.99 when it almost the exact same hardware with an antenna? It is because the ipod is sold at low margin and needs to be marketed at a reasonable price and the iphone needs to be marketed at a similar price (with contract). But since carriers are willing to subsidize the price why not charge more and use the full subsidy as full profit. The carrier nor the manufacturer are expecting people to buy phones straight out. They would prefer you on a term.",
"Everyone is saying space, which is certainly a huge factor. The other is simply supply and demand. Laptops have been declining in sales due to competition from tablets and smartphones (not to mention people are getting savvier and learning how to maintain their computer so they can keep it for more than a couple of years - computers are not as disposable now as they were 5 or 10 years ago).\n\nMore people are getting smartphones now. It's also worth pointing out that relatively few people end up paying $500-700 on a smartphone when they just buy them subsidized through their wireless providers. ",
"The computer hardware industry is one that is highly competitive (many players) with very low margins (profit). This is one of the reasons why many of the older manufacturers are moving out of the business (e.g. IBM selling to Lenovo). You will often see the prices come very close to the base component cost especially when they go on sale. \n\nSmart phones are relatively new (Iphone first released in 2007), and esp Apple has been making a killing off of them by having a huge profit margin. [The Iphone 5's bill of materials \\(parts\\) for the 16GB is $207, and for the 32GB is $209. The total manufacturing cost (labor to assemble) gets it to about $230.](_URL_1_) Apple not only makes money from the extra ~$400 and much more for larger GB versions, plus Itunes store/app fees, some subscription fees, and the rest of their business (laptops, software, etc). Yes, they have R & D, advertising and store costs but so do other 'traditional' companies like Dell, Intel, Nvidia, MS, Best Buy etc yet they combined can sell you computers near cost. \n\nThe reason why Apple and others can sell so much is because everyone wants one. They want one because there's little competition for it so far compared to PCs, it's a closed system (you can't just buy a phone and install your own OS easily and the whole closed app market system), and because people everywhere from China to USA think of it as a status symbol. \n\nHowever, people say that this will go down soon esp with the software help from Android. Yes, the Nexus 4 is cheaper at $300 and the Kindle Fire is only $200, but the real prices will come down with more competition. For example, did you know that the best selling smartphone in Kenya is a Huawei (Chinese) running Android that costs [only $80?](_URL_0_)",
"Because people are willing to pay $500-700 for them. ",
"This is a really toughie. Hmmm... I design embedded electronics so my best analogy is this. Building a smart phone is like building mansion in the city. Building a laptop is like building a mansion in the country. The city mansion has less space left/right so i need to build your mansion with many stories (pcb layers) b/c i built so many stories the plumbing and electricity is more complicated (emissions/signal integrity/blind and buried via technology). Also because your city mansion is taller than a country mansion its harder for me to add the jacuzzi, karma machine and tv systems b/c your mansion is in lets say manhattan and it is more expensive to get the special crane to get the jacuzzi to the 5th floor. Where the country mansion can just have a regular one installed outside in the backyard (analogy for package on package memory ics. ...... Um \"yo dawg i installed a chip on top of your chip?\")\n\nAnother thing is your city mansion is in an area where i cannot park big mack trucks to deliver thinks easily. I have to deliver things one at a time b/c the streets are narrow and that means some things like yhe swimming pool need special designers who can figure out how to make all the parts smaller and fit. Also somehow get installed in a more difficult way. That special designer is expensive (ultra fine pitch bga designs for circuits and the higher accuracy machines and finer pitches needed in order to route them)\n\nTl;dr\n\nBuilding a mansion in the city is harder than building one in the open country.\n\n~Sent from my android"
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3f9i76 | how are these girls doing the math in their head so fast? | _URL_0_ | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3f9i76/eli5_how_are_these_girls_doing_the_math_in_their/ | {
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"Do you notice how they're moving their hands around as the guy reads the numbers? That's because they're using a mental abacus. An abacus allows you to do fast calculations that would be very hard to do in your head. All they have to do is picture what the abacus would look like and they can read off the answer even without actually holding on to one."
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18lac1 | why it hurts to look at the sky on a cloudy day | The sun isn't out; why does looking up burn my eyes? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/18lac1/eli5_why_it_hurts_to_look_at_the_sky_on_a_cloudy/ | {
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"* ELI5 version: the sky is still very bright even when you're not looking at the sun, so it can still hurt your eyes.\n\n* Super technical version: [Here is an AskScience question that has a very detailed answer](_URL_0_)."
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ja7yd | li5: poker | I'm going to be playing a game tonight, and I don't want to look like a total newbie... which I am. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ja7yd/li5_poker/ | {
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"In almost every form of poker, you make a five card hand. The hands ranked from best to worst (the notation should make sense if you're familiar with playing cards, Jc is the jack of clubs, Th is the ten of hearts, etc):\n\n* Straight flush (same suit, 5 in a row, like 5h 6h 7h 8h 9h)\n* Four of a kind (like 6c 6s 6d 6h 9c)\n* Full house (three of one rank, two of another, like 8c 8s 8d 5h 5c)\n* Flush (5 of one suit, like 3c 5c 9c Tc Qc)\n* Straight (5 in a row, like 8c 9c Tc Jc Qc)\n* Three of a kind (like 2c 2s 2d Jh Kh)\n* Two pair (like 6s 6c Ts Th Ad)\n* One pair (like 3d 3c 2h 5s 9c)\n* High card (this means none of the above, like 2c 4c 7s Tc Qd is called \"Queen high\")\n\nSome games give you more than 5 cards, some include a combination of cards just for you and what are called \"community cards\" which everyone can use in your hand. But in just about every game, you will be trying to make a 5 card hand.\n\nThe way betting works, is that it generally starts with the person left of the dealer. When the betting gets to you:\n\n* If no one has bet yet this round, you may **check** (do nothing) or **bet** (put money into the pot that others will at least have to match to continue).\n* If someone else has bet before you act, you may **fold** (give up the hand, you don't have to put any more money in), **call** (match the person's bet to stay in), or **raise** (in addition to matching the bet, you bet even more). \n\nSome games have what are called \"fixed limits.\" In every betting round, there is an amount you are allowed to bet. If the fixed limit for a round is $2, the first player may check or bet $2. If he bets $2, the next player may fold, call $2, or raise another $2 for a total of $4. In fixed limit, the bet in each round goes up in increments of the limit.\n\nOther games are called \"no limit.\" This means you may bet any or all of your chips at any time. Two exceptions: there is generally a minimum, and if someone has bet $x and you want to raise, you have to raise at least by another $x for a total of $2x.\n\nTwo important pieces of advice:\n\n* Tell the people you're playing with that you are a newbie. It's a heck of a lot easier to get the hang of things by having things explained to you as it goes. \n* Figure out how much money you are ok with losing before arriving. Under no circumstances should you let yourself lose more than that.",
"Yes. I specifically searched for this ELI5. This is quite helpful, thank you!",
"In almost every form of poker, you make a five card hand. The hands ranked from best to worst (the notation should make sense if you're familiar with playing cards, Jc is the jack of clubs, Th is the ten of hearts, etc):\n\n* Straight flush (same suit, 5 in a row, like 5h 6h 7h 8h 9h)\n* Four of a kind (like 6c 6s 6d 6h 9c)\n* Full house (three of one rank, two of another, like 8c 8s 8d 5h 5c)\n* Flush (5 of one suit, like 3c 5c 9c Tc Qc)\n* Straight (5 in a row, like 8c 9c Tc Jc Qc)\n* Three of a kind (like 2c 2s 2d Jh Kh)\n* Two pair (like 6s 6c Ts Th Ad)\n* One pair (like 3d 3c 2h 5s 9c)\n* High card (this means none of the above, like 2c 4c 7s Tc Qd is called \"Queen high\")\n\nSome games give you more than 5 cards, some include a combination of cards just for you and what are called \"community cards\" which everyone can use in your hand. But in just about every game, you will be trying to make a 5 card hand.\n\nThe way betting works, is that it generally starts with the person left of the dealer. When the betting gets to you:\n\n* If no one has bet yet this round, you may **check** (do nothing) or **bet** (put money into the pot that others will at least have to match to continue).\n* If someone else has bet before you act, you may **fold** (give up the hand, you don't have to put any more money in), **call** (match the person's bet to stay in), or **raise** (in addition to matching the bet, you bet even more). \n\nSome games have what are called \"fixed limits.\" In every betting round, there is an amount you are allowed to bet. If the fixed limit for a round is $2, the first player may check or bet $2. If he bets $2, the next player may fold, call $2, or raise another $2 for a total of $4. In fixed limit, the bet in each round goes up in increments of the limit.\n\nOther games are called \"no limit.\" This means you may bet any or all of your chips at any time. Two exceptions: there is generally a minimum, and if someone has bet $x and you want to raise, you have to raise at least by another $x for a total of $2x.\n\nTwo important pieces of advice:\n\n* Tell the people you're playing with that you are a newbie. It's a heck of a lot easier to get the hang of things by having things explained to you as it goes. \n* Figure out how much money you are ok with losing before arriving. Under no circumstances should you let yourself lose more than that.",
"Yes. I specifically searched for this ELI5. This is quite helpful, thank you!"
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9arf3q | how did humans discover music? or is there music among animals as well? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9arf3q/eli5_how_did_humans_discover_music_or_is_there/ | {
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"\"Or is there music among animals as well?\"\n\nYou - you've never heard of a bird? "
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quhwo | the concept of "hanging on" or "fighting" when you're dying from a disease like cancer | I always here about people "hanging on" when they're dealing with a deadly illness, but don't understand it fully. How can someone's will to live help prolong their death? What exactly happens (from a medical standpoint, if there is one) and why does it happen? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/quhwo/eli5_the_concept_of_hanging_on_or_fighting_when/ | {
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"It's less from a medical standpoint and more a matter of will. Someone hanging on or fighting means they still want to live. Once someone decides they don't want to live anymore, or they give in to death, a survival part of the brain shuts down and the illness takes over. When someone \"hangs on\" or \"fights to survive\" they are still battling their illness mentally. While not everything can be overcome this way, if someone decides they just give up and want to die, it's hard to turn it around. You can't force someone to live who just gives up.",
"Being sick can be hard work. \n\nTaking meds that make you naseous, getting painful and invasive procedures, not smoking or drinking or eating junk food, eating when you don't have an appetite, staying on top of your doctor, actively seeking out new treatments. Doing these things can be the difference between life and death, and some who is \"fighting\" is doing all of these.\n\nAlso, getting depressed can have physical side effects that make fighting a disease harder."
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r38al | what's wrong with the word 'negro'? how is 'black' politically more correct than 'negro'? | From wikipedia: The word “Negro” is used in the English-speaking world to refer to a person of black ancestry or appearance, whether of African descent or not.
I am from India, where 'Negro' is still a well accepted term for blacks, so I am curious what happened elsewhere? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/r38al/eli5_whats_wrong_with_the_word_negro_how_is_black/ | {
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"Apparently words that have a neutral definition can become slurs if they are constantly used to describe someone we don't like. Negro, just as a word outside of any context, is completly neutral; it's the Spanish word for black. However, because it was previously used to name people that we oppresed, the word is now bad. Just like Chinaman or Jap. Chinaman is bad but Englishman is good, and Jap is bad but Brit is good. These words are bad because at some point in time, they were used negatively. If there was a big war, and the word \"person\" was used to describe the enemy in propaganda, you would not be allowed to call anyone a \"person\" afterwards.",
"In American society, while the word negro wasn't used in as racially charged slurs as the other, it was the word the oppressor/the Man/the Other traditionally used to name blacks in America through slavery and segregation and beyond. (That's a whole other ELI5.) \"Black\" (not necessarily capitalized) doesn't have those same connotations and is also the term people choose to call themselves. \n\nAlso, \"negro\" is almost a 'dated' word in America's use of the English lexicon; it has archaic tones in relation to current American society and terminology and has fallen out of general use and favor in our language. ",
"deep_sea2 is right, and it is generally frowned upon to refer to a \"person of color\" as a Negro, at least in the United States. I say generally because you might notice it is still a [racial category](_URL_0_) on the 2010 US Census. There are a significant number of people in the US who prefer to racially identify themselves as Negroes.",
"The only thing I can think of honestly is because whenever I was called \"negro\" by a white person it was used as a slur. When I was young and ashamed of the color of my skin being called \"black\" empowered me. See documentaries and looking at old photos of my mom with the huge afro when someone called me \"black\" I mentally related it to strong, and still do. ",
"So, I have a question here. Did the offensive word \"nigger\" come from the harmless word \"negro\"? ",
"It's all about context, intention, and knowledge overall. You can't expect someone who doesn't know a word's history to understand the historical reasons behind the word. I had a white friend who purposely would say negro instead of the \"n-word\" because he knew I didn't like it, but he would emphasize negro just the same (to get on my nerves). The issue is is it ever used positively? That's why the United Negro College fund, there's no problem with it. But racists saying they don't want negro's (I highly doubt they would say negro) is just negative all around. ",
"I think its a question of who used it, when, and what the emotional attachment was to the word.\n\nBasically any word used by non-African Americans while American society was still fairly racist to describe African Americans ended up adopting the connotation that went along with the social asymmetry of the time. Its not until we used clinical technical terms like \"African American\" that we achieved any level of neutrality.\n\nThe simple fact is that African Americans still have hurdles that they go through that others do not. It sounds like a stereotype, but they are far more likely to be stopped by a police officer for no reason. So long as that sort of inequity exists, the words negro, colored, etc, will always retain their negative connotation.\n\nThere are signs that things are getting better though: When New Orleans was flooded and mostly African Americans were forcibly displaced, some people started referring to them as \"refugees\". This is just a technical description of their status due to the events, and should have been a neutral description. Jesse Jackson then decided to make a stink and insist that they not be called that because it was demeaning and made it seem as though they were foreigners from the third world, and thus not from the first world America. However, most people rejected this, as there was no connotation of any kind intended one way or another.\n",
"Negro is widely used in Latin America, and French and Spanish speaking countries all over the world. \n\n\nIn the US, \"Negro\" had noble connotations in black and white America during the early 1900s. Activists and thinkers of the Civil Rights Movement during the 1940s-'60s distanced themselves from the word because it had connotations with Marcus Garvey's Pan-African Movement in the 1920s that had helped empower and unify blacks yet stirred up a lot of racial hatred. Promoting the \"____-American\" label helped with integration. According to their train of thought, an America made up of distinct, separate races like \"white,\" \"negro,\" \"yellow,\" or \"red,\" as it had been under segregation would not be inclined to live with each other. A nation of \"African-Americans,\" \"Native-Americans,\" \"European-Americans,\" etc, however, would probably see each other as different shades of the same tribe, and may vote for integration. They did.\n\n\nNot to mention what's already been said about using \"negro\" negatively. It's like if Harijan became a bad word because people still used it to describe people of that caste as untouchable and second-class, as opposed to \"child of God\" as Gandhi meant. ",
"\"Negro\" is similar to \"Oriental\" in that, while not primarily meant as a pejorative, was used as a means of creating a hierarchical separation -- these words were used in a context that tried to scientifically distinguish people of different ethnicities and was often used as a means of patriarchal domination. \n\nELI12: Dog-whistle words for ethnic discrimination.\n\nELI5: It doesn't seem like it would be a bad word at pure face value, but it is. ",
"\"Is there something I can call you that's less offensive than Mexican?\" - Michael Scott",
"Negro is the politically correct term in Salvador, Brazil, where about 80 percent of the population is black. It is considered insulting to use 'black' to describe an individual, with the rational that the term should be reserved for the description of inanimate objects. People are proud to be called Negros there. I spent 6 weeks there, just thought it would be an interesting aside to the conversation. ",
"You might also want to look at the concept of the \"Euphemism Treadmill\".\n\n_URL_0_\n\nTerms that are perfectly acceptable gradually become associated with negative qualities, and then eventually become looked at as insults.\n\nFor example, in the US, The original term used was \"Negro\" (As in the United Negro College Fund)\n\nThen, when that began taking on negative connotations, someone started using the word \"Colored\". (For example, the National Assocation for the Advancement of Colored People. (NAACP))\n\nEventually that hit the treadmill and was replaced by Black... Then African American.... Now I think the politically correct term is \"Person of Color\"\n\n",
"Meanwhile, the NAACP isn't budging :)",
"I think there's some confusion here. \"Negro\" is not so much politically incorrect now as it is antiquated. As far as I know, \"Negro\" was never an offensive term; it was, in fact, the preferred term for a long time until for whatever reason it just fell out of favor -- just like \"colored\" or, for that matter, \"square.\"\n\nThe cultural lingo just changed. That's all. People in this thread seem to assume that it's offensive now just because it's not used anymore.",
"Is this really an ELI5 topic?\n\nEDIT: I mean doesn't it belong in [/r/answers](/r/answers) ? ",
"What about Porch Monkey? We should take it back.",
"Because white people wouldn't like to be called Caucasoids. ",
"Connotations.\n\nThe same way the Hitler mustache isn't ever worn by anyone anymore.",
"When people call me 'negro' or 'black' I don't get offended, I just think they are crazy because I'm white.",
"In the 1960's, negro was a perfectly acceptable term for blacks. Martin Luther King used the word negro often to refer to black people, though 'nigger' certainly would have been very offensive back then.\n\nHowever, many black people felt a sense of unease with being black. When you're disrespected everyday for the color of your skin, there are almost no positive icons in popular American culture, you could see how many black people could develop a stigma with being black. It's not that black people wanted to be white (most didn't). But many black people in America just didn't want to be black and the heavy baggage that came with it. \n\nMalcolm X was the catalyst for embracing blackness and ridding black America of this self-hatred. [You can see Malcolm X here in 1962 speaking on this topic.](_URL_0_). Malcolm exhorted black people in America to be proud of who they were despite a stifling culture of disrespect an disenfranchisement. He emphasized the importance of self-esteem and self-reliance within the community. He worked to improve black America from within, while Martin Luther worked to improve black America from without.\n\nA part of Malcolm's work was the subconscious meaning of words. Although you hear Malcolm X using the word 'negro' in the previous video, he eventually distanced himself from it in favor of 'black'. He saw 'negro' as being associated with slavery and segregation so by making this explicit break with the word 'negro' and embracing 'black', this was a subtle but important path to self determination.\n\nMalcolm X's work (along with others) eventually evolved into what was the black power movement. The spirit behind this black power movement was really captured elegantly in James Brown 1968 hit ['I'm black and I'm proud'](_URL_1_). This song got black people on a mass level to proudly embrace 'blackness'. No longer was being black was no longer a derogatory term. Black became beautiful, black became strong. \n\nThe end result of all this, is that 'black' became a word of pride while 'negro' was seen as a classification imposed on black people by outsiders. So 'black' slowly but surely became widely accepted as 'negro' fell to the wayside.",
"Different cultures have different meanings. In South America, Negro is considered a polite term. Like saying \"Friend\". [Example here](_URL_0_)",
"phrases have to be changed very often, otherwise they become stigmatising.\n\nDisabled has become Special Needs which has become Additional Needs\n\nSpecial Education has become Individualized Education which has in turn become Adapted Edducation which has become Additional Support. (that was within three years)\n\n\n\n",
"[Kaffir](_URL_0_) is our version of nigger in South Africa. Be careful when and where you use this word.\n\nWhile I was high school it started getting used as a way to refer to a person as useless or if they did something so dumb that \"only a kaffir would do\" for some reason. Let's just say people started getting a bit to familiar with the word.\n\nI feel racist typing this.\n\nedit: This word can't be used as in, \"my nigger.\" It is purely a racist term.",
"A website thats 97% white people explaining why black people find something offensive. I always enjoy watching tht. \n\nCalling someone by their race is offensive for obvious reasons. Just because it is still an accepted term does not make it less offensive. \n\nUnless obviously its how you say \"black\" in your native tongue but then again why are you describing people by their race in the first place.",
"I think that it isn't accepted as a term because it sounds too much like the word \"nigger\". ",
"The word \"black\" to describe someone's race has only just become socially acceptable as the word negro is just in times with modern US vocabulary and African American is simply just not accurate most of the times. \n\nHowever the word Negro is still the official terminology for the race, and it is still widely used on most, if not all, government or record keeping forms. \n\nEven the 2010 census has the word Negro on it. ",
"I have always wondered the same thing, OP. In my country, \"Negro\" is the \"politically correct\" term to address a black person and \"Black\" is the pejorative term. Living and learning....."
]
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"http://www.prb.org/Articles/2009/questionnaire.aspx"
],
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[],
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"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRSgUTWffMQ&feature=related",
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23eosgpDib0"
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[
"http://i.imgur.com/0raTr.jpg"
],
[],
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaffir_%28racial_term%29"
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|
3q3nk8 | what are 'short-links' such as _url_1_, _url_2_, and _url_0_ used for? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3q3nk8/eli5_what_are_shortlinks_such_as_googl_reddit_and/ | {
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"The goal is to make URL's smaller, which is beneficial if e.g. you have a comment section or tweet you want to send and there's a character limit. It may also just look better than a medium to long size url.\n\nAn exception is that some of those URL shorteners are also used maliciously by criminals to hide the original URL which may have looked less safe. \n\nSo, keep an eye out when clicking those url's."
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6geqsm | i have terrible vision, but sometimes if i blink hard enough, my vision goes crystal clear til i blink again. why? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6geqsm/eli5_i_have_terrible_vision_but_sometimes_if_i/ | {
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"As someone who's spent 4 years studying, researching and working clinically with eyeballs, here's my guess: \n\nYou're likely forcing your focusing system to focus through as much blur as it possibly can, assuming that while you \"blink enough\" you're concentrating your gaze, at a single object or direction. Both your cornea and your crystalline lens will change shape in order for you to be able to focus; younger people, especially kids, have a much greater dynamic range for focusing then do older folks, so if you're young, that's probably most of it. If you know you have terrible vision, meaning a high prescription in one and or both eyes, you definitely should not do this. In that case, you'll probably get headaches if you do it enough. Just use glasses. ",
"Could be that blinking hard, your eyelids are pressing on your cornea enough to flatten them, essentially making your nearsightedness less. The effect lasts until you blink again, and your cornea resumes its usual shape and the clarity in your vision disappears.",
"It is because you spread layer of sticky tears on your cornea. It just happens to be concave at the right spot ( assuming you are myopic ). \n\nUsually this layer is convex and just worsen the vision. I sometimes have flush my eyes to restore precise vision. I do not understand why the liquid is sometimes stickier causing these problems.",
"These answers are all over the board and everyone sounds 100% sure of themselves. You may want to find your way over to r/askscience and hopefully an ophthalmologist can chime in."
]
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bkgu44 | to anybody who has used nesquik milkshake powder, why is it that the chocolate powder never mixes in with the milk fully, yet the banana powder does? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bkgu44/eli5_to_anybody_who_has_used_nesquik_milkshake/ | {
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"The primary ingredients in the banana powder are cane sugar and maltodextrin (which is a white powder made from flour starch and used as a food additive). Both are very soluble in water (or milk), so it dissolves easily.\n\n\nThe chocolate powder, the primary ingredients are cane sugar (dissolves easily) and cocoa powder. Cocoa powder is about 22% fat, which is insoluble (doesn't dissolve well in water or milk). So the bits that don't dissolve are the cocoa powder, due largely to the fat.\n\n\nIt will dissolve better using hot water, and vigorous stirring, but may not do it perfectly even then."
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atu5zz | why does a scientific calculator show "0" as a result if i add 1 to a really high number and then substract said high number although it should show "1"? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/atu5zz/eli5_why_does_a_scientific_calculator_show_0_as_a/ | {
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"Your calculator doesn't store all of the digits for 2^50, so the 1 at the very end gets removed from the memory. How many digits a calculator actually holds depends from calculator to calculator. ",
"For 32 bit floating point numbers in IEEE754 format there's something called precision error and rounding error and a whole bunch if other problems.\n\nA 32 bit integer number can store all numbers up to roughly 4 billion.\n\nBut a 32 bit float can store up to roughly 3x10^38 which is much higher than 4 billion.\n\nHow is that possible?\n\nIt's because after roughly 16 million, reals don't store every integer anymore. There start to be gaps in what integer can be stored accurately and the gaps keep getting larger.\n\nSo let's say if you're adding 1 to 17000000 the result is still 17000000 but if you add 2 then the result is 17000002.\n\nHowever at 20000000 you need to add 3 to get something larger because now neither 20000001 nor 20000002 can be represented.\n\nIf the magnitude difference between the two numbers you add is larger than roughly 10^7 you will have problems.\n\nIf variable X is s real and you perform X=X+1 over and over, X will increment roughly until 10^7 and then it will stop adding because the result of 1+10^7=10^7.\n",
"The floating point and rounding situation other people mention is true, but I think there is also an order of operation that is important here.\n\nLet's say your input is a + b - c, the calculator processes a + b first (which equals 2^50 due to said storage depth, the 1 is dropped) then it subtracts c (which equals zero since 2^50 - 2^50).\n\nWhat happens if you input 2^50 - 2^50 + 1?\n"
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b99cju | how does regenerative brakes work ? | I need to work on a school project about wasted energy recovery and i came across regenerative brakes. could't get hold of the mechanism because i found a lot of different designs. I understand the basic concept of it being instead of wasting energy in brakes into friction and heat it'll be converted back to electricity,but how ? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b99cju/eli5_how_does_regenerative_brakes_work/ | {
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"Electrical induction.\n\nYou have probably made an electromagnet out of a coil of wire around a nail and a battery in school. Electricity flowing through a conductor will form a magnetic field around the conductor, and the reverse is true as well. A magnetic field moving around a conductor will cause an electrical current within it.\n\nAn electrical motor and an electrical generator are basically the same device, the difference being the input and the output. A generator takes the physical turning of magnets past wires to make electricity and a motor takes electricity moving through wires to make a magnetic field to turn the magnets.\n\nRegenerative braking is using the momentum of a moving car to turn the magnets and create electricity. This slows the car down, and the most effective use of that captured electricity is to turn around and use it to accelerate the car again through the reverse process."
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2ojwue | why do some tv shows have a sign language interpreter on the screen? why can't they just use subtitles? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ojwue/eli5_why_do_some_tv_shows_have_a_sign_language/ | {
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"As far as the interpreter goes, though, some deaf people may prefer it because they're accessing information in their own language (one that is readily accessible)... English is usually the second language learned for deaf people, so that may be a secondary choice.",
"Might it be because it is live television?",
"When broadcasting live it's much faster to translate to sign language than to write subtitles "
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66k21l | "the core of the planet earth is made of iron and nickel": how scientists can determine that if no one has been in the core of the earth? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/66k21l/eli5the_core_of_the_planet_earth_is_made_of_iron/ | {
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"We have a pretty good idea about what's on the inside of the Earth, based on the geologist's equivalent of a CAT scan or an MRI -- earthquake data. When an earthquake happens, it sends waves bouncing around the inside of the planet. These waves change direction and speed based on the kinds of materials they pass through. Geologists can detect the movement of these waves by taking measurements at different locations all across the planet, and in so doing, build a picture of how the inside of the planet is constructed.\n\nThat's how we know that the interior of the Earth is separated into four layers, that the innermost is made of something solid, and that at least one of them is an actual liquid. From here, scientists can use other information to get an idea of what elements the interior is actually composed of.\n\nBased on the estimated density of the solid inner core, we can guess that it's probably made of iron. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that iron appears to be exceedingly plentiful in the solar system. Given how plentiful it is, and given that we know it's a very dense element, and given what we know about how a dense metal like iron would behave in a still-molten Earth when it was forming, it makes sense that Iron is probably what our core is made of. \n\nWe can guess a few more things about how the inner and outer cores behave, based on the fact that the Earth has a magnetic field. We know that the inner core must be rotating, and that the outer core must be convecting, because without those two things, the Earth would not have a magnetic field. So the existence of some external factors can tell us a lot about the internal factors of our planet.",
"The truth is no one really know as direct measurements can be made. That said, the theoretical composition of the core of the earth has been estimated based on a few things:\n\n1. The earths magnetic filed could only be formed with a large iron mass at its core\n2. Iron and nickel are relatively dense and would tend have migrated towards the center of the earth when it was still a giant ball of liquid. \n3. An interesting theory exists that at the center of the core is a large mass of uranium which acts as a natural fission reactor. "
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3401xs | the event horizon of a black hole | People keep saying that the gravitational pull of a black hole is so strong that even light can not escape. This basically means that the escape velocity past the event horizon must be greater than c. fair enough. However, this does not mean, as far as i understand, that nothing can get out of the event horizon or from within it because if some object that were inside were to be able to use some sort of fuel to accelerate it with a force greater than that of gravity and for long enough, i see no reason that it can not escape.
If this is the case, why do people take that the event horizon acts as a threshol indicating that nothing from within it can escape at all? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3401xs/eli5the_event_horizon_of_a_black_hole/ | {
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"Because any direction past the event horizon points inward. Space itself is warped so massively beyond the horizon that nothing can get out not only because the escape velocity is greater than the speed of light, but there is literally no direction that is \"out\"."
]
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368adm | what does it mean when a wound gets "infected?" | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/368adm/eli5_what_does_it_mean_when_a_wound_gets_infected/ | {
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"It means that bacteria or fungus has set in the wound and has begun to grow off of the tissue in that area."
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4dtad2 | do painkillers (advil, tylenol, etc) reduce pain in the specific area that is hurting or do they affect the whole body but you only notice it woking on the area that is in pain? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4dtad2/eli5do_painkillers_advil_tylenol_etc_reduce_pain/ | {
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"The pain killers you listed reduce inflammation in different ways so they would help calm down a throbbing injury where inflammatory response is strongest -- they act at the site of the pain. However, the effective anti-inflammation molecules are in your blood so its not like they can't affect more than one region. If you took Tylenol for a sore back and later stubbed your toe you wouldn't have to take more Tylenol for the new injury.\n\nPain killers like Vicodin act in the central nervous system and lower your emotional response to pain. These don't affect the inflamed area at all -- they just make your perception of pain less unpleasant."
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54hbne | difference of chinese dialects and written languages | From what I know there is 2 written (simplified and traditional) and 2 spoken (Cantonese and Mandarin) dialects of the Chinese language.
Are there any similarities between the written and spoken?
Does this mean you are fluent in essentially two different languages?
What is the main written and spoken dialect in Guangzhou?
Any info on the general concept of the Chinese language would be great. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/54hbne/eli5_difference_of_chinese_dialects_and_written/ | {
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"The written language obviously shares a considerable history with the spoken language. But unlike this language I'm typing in here, with these letters, the Chinese written language does not fundamentally express the way words sound when spoken. It has symbols for different words, over the history as they made symbols for new things by making compounds of existing symbols they would often create a compound using one symbol for the sound and one for the meaning, or some variation on that. But its not a rule, its just a a history of how those symbols came to be. They don't fundamentally say how they're spoken at all. \n\nThis means that there is a gap between the written language and the spoken language in a way that doesn't really exist if you have a language that's designed to express how words sound. There are other countries that aren't china that have taken the chinese alphabet and they can write out sentences that you can understand if you know the chinese written language even if you don't know the spoken language of the area. However the design of making sentences in the Chinese written language is naturally very interrelated with how things are structured, the grammar, of the chinese spoken language. \n\nThey're not strictly the same language, they're not wholly independent. Speaking chinese and reading/writing chinese is probably more akin to knowing how to program in two languages, than being fluent in two entirely separate languages. The underlying logic is there, even if everything has different names, you need a new vocabulary. ",
"**Spoken**\n\nThere are (I hate this word) actually many, many more dialects of Chinese than just Mandarin and Cantonese, although it's true that those are the two largest and most influential. Mandarin in particular enjoys a strong legal status as the official language of the People's Republic of China, including as the language of instruction in schools. \n\nIf you go anywhere in China, then it is likely that the local people where you live will have their own language, whether it is the language of the province, that area within the province, or even just a particular village. Some of these dialects are basically just Mandarin with an accent; others are completely mutually unintelligible with Mandarin.\n\nNevertheless, because of the strong legal status of Mandarin, with the notable exception of the elderly, the very poor, and those living in very far-flung regions (particularly areas of Tibet and Xinjiang, China's far northwestern province) virtually everyone can at a bare minimum understand Mandarin and (in my experience) definitely over 90% can speak it. If you're talking about young, educated people in an urban center then it's > 99%, although (not totally dissimilar to Britain) there's a certain preoccupation with accents and a rich and often self-deprecating humor that surrounds less-than-standard pronunciation. In general (including in Guangzhou) people will respond to you in whatever language you use to speak to them.\n\nComparing Mandarin and Cantonese specifically, the two are not really mutually intelligible. There is a limited amount of vocabulary that you might be able to guess at from one or the other and/or go \"oh!\" if it were explained to you, but overall the tones, vocab, and even to a certain extent grammar are different.\n\nPeople in Guangdong are nevertheless quite proud of Cantonese, which also enjoys a degree of cachet as a commonly-used language in relatively wealthy and culturally influential Hong Kong and among overseas Chinese, many of whom have family origins in southeast China. Because of this there's also definitely a corresponding degree of language politics that takes place in China and particularly Hong Kong about the official statuses of the two languages that can occasionally become heated.\n\n**Written**\n\nToday in Chinese there are \"simplified\" characters and \"traditional\" characters. Simplified characters are used throughout the PRC, \"traditional\" characters mostly in Taiwan. The idea of simplifying the writing system goes back a long way, and the work to create the current set of simplified characters was (somewhat ironically) begun by the Chinese Nationalist Party who (after going through a lot of changes) eventually moved to Taiwan and stuck with traditional characters.\n\nYou can think of the two writing systems as basically being different fonts (albeit sometimes *very* different) in the sense that there's a one-to-one correspondence between the two sets. It's easy with software to transcribe the one into the other.\n\nEither set of characters can be used to write almost all dialects of Chinese, although you will find the odd word in dialect for which there simply is no character, and this or that dialect might commonly use a character that is rare in other dialects.\n\nThere's a lot more to Chinese than that and the history of the language is pretty interesting, but that's a broad overview of the questions you were asking.\n"
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e7wqhb | why isn't the night sky just one big light? | Okay so I understand the title sounds like I'm on drugs but hear me out?
The universe is infinite, so theoretically in every possible direction we look at some point there should be a star somewhere out there, right? So by that same logic, why are there so *few* stars in the sky? I get that during the day the sun outshines them and that light pollution makes it harder to see the stars at night, but even in the middle of the desert there is still an awful lot of black in the sky. Shouldn't most if not all of it be filled with starry lights?
Does this make sense? Maybe I am high. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e7wqhb/eli5_why_isnt_the_night_sky_just_one_big_light/ | {
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"it's called olbers paradox and actually there is a lot of light. we just can't see it because it's out of out visible spectrum. this is because as galaxies move away the light changes and so we may not be able to see it anymore",
"Visible light is on a small portion of light we can observe but there are many types of light That we can’t observe",
"Two things:\n\n1) Regardless of how big the universe is, light still takes time to get places. The universe is 13.77 billion years old, so light has only had 13.77 billion years to get here. Because the universe is expanding, we can see stuff from much farther away than that, but there's still a limit on how far away stars can be and still have had time for the light to get to us.\n\n2) As the universe expands, it stretches light passing through it, causing the light to be redshifted, which means it lowers in wavelength. Visible light from the very edges of the visible universe can get redshifted out of the visible spectrum and into infrared or radio waves. That's why the Cosmic Microwave Background is, well, microwaves. It used to include a *lot* of visible light, but it's so old and it's been shifted so much that it's all microwaves, now.",
"But the observable universe isn't infinite. Because the universe is expanding everywhere at once, there is a distance where objects are moving away from us faster than the speed of light (important to note they aren't moving faster than light, but the expansion of the universe is causing the distance between is to grow faster than the speed of light) bc of this light from those objects will never reach us.\n\nSo when you stare out at the blackness between the stars, you're actually looking at the edge of the known universe and I think thats fucking cool",
"Another thing people haven’t said is your assumption is wrong \n\n > t he universe is infinite, so theoretically in every possible direction we look at some point there should be a star somewhere out there, right?\n\nThis isn’t true, just because it’s infinite doesn’t imply this. It could be infinite but there still be a space somewhere. Just because it goes on forever doesn’t mean the stars are evenly distributed.\n\nI think it’s simpler to think about it in terms of numbers. Pi is infinitely long, 3.1415... forever, but what if we took out every single 7? It would still be infinitely long, still be a unique number but just have no sevens.\n\nNow with that in mind what if we divided the sky into ten sections 0-9 and look at all the stars in the sky in order or how close they are to us. every time a star shows up we add it’s section to the end of a number. Say the first star in in 1 , then the next is in section 5 then 4 381289345etc. As in the example above a seven doesn’t have to show up which would mean 10% of the sky has no stars even though there are an infinite number is stars",
"1) Light diffuses rather significantly with distance. The sky is indeed awash with stars, but most of them are too far away to be even remotely visible.\n\n2) Because of universal expansion, light from far away sources gets redshifted to frequencies below that of human vision limits.\n\n3) Expanding on the above; the night sky, bluntly, **is** one big light. But most of that light is at relatively low frequencies below what the human eye can see, even before redshifting is taken into account.",
"If you draw a line on a balloon with a sharpie, then inflate the balloon, the line you drew will get stretched. What was one solid black stroke at the beginning is now a large faded line.\n\nNow imagine the balloon is the universe and the line is light from a far away object. Eventually it gets stretched so much that we can’t see it anymore.",
"Lots of nice comments, and several explain the physics in a way I've forgotten since I studied it, so kudos.\n\nBut I'd like to add that the night sky is really actually quite bright. If you can get somewhere without massive light pollution, there really isn't any direction which doesn't have light.\n\nIf you find a \"dark patch\" and look at it through a telescope you'll generally see stuff... And if there's a dark patch in that then you get a bigger telescope etc.\n\nEdit: cause apparently I can't English today",
"My favourite [minute physics video](_URL_0_) explains this exact thing really well!",
"Turn your radio on but not to a channel. Hear that static? That’s the one big light. \n\nSame for an analog tv that hasn’t been tuned.\n\nWe call it CMB. Cosmic microwave background.",
"1. We don't actually know the universe is infinite.\n2. The black patches might be the stars being too far away for enough light to make it to us to be visible to the naked eye\n3. There's a theory that this proves the universe is expanding because if it weren't the sky would be filled with stars.",
"It's called Olbers' Paradox--\"why is the sky dark at night?\" \n\n[_URL_1_](_URL_0_)\n\nThe idea's been around a long time."
]
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"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers%27\\_paradox"
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2f9ic2 | how has the economy managed to compensate for a majority of women entering the workforce in the past several decades, along with a rise in unmarried households - essentially doubling the demand for high paying jobs in a short period of time? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2f9ic2/eli5_how_has_the_economy_managed_to_compensate/ | {
"a_id": [
"ck74wvi"
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"text": [
"The economy hasn't doubled high-paying jobs. An interesting book on the subject is called \"The Two-Income Trap\" by Elizabeth Warren. \n\nThe simple answer is that women entering the workforce made quality housing more expensive and made it so unmarried mothers have almost no chance to move up in social classes - most unmarried mothers have low-paying jobs. In general terms, the highest paying jobs are held by men and women who are married, have college degrees, and they combine incomes. To move up in life you really need both incomes.\n\nOur economy in the past fifty years has seen an explosion of low-paying service jobs like retail and customer service and an explosion in creative jobs like computer programming. There is very little in the middle."
]
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[]
] |
||
3kvj1s | what does the president of france do as co-prince of andorra? | It seems that (s)he would have much more important matters concerning France then the tiny nation to the south of them. Does the President of France actually do anything as Co-Prince? Does he sign laws? Does he dictate policy? What does he do? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3kvj1s/eli5_what_does_the_president_of_france_do_as/ | {
"a_id": [
"cv0wb3l"
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"text": [
"The coprinses have, like most heads of state of modern monarchies, more of a ceremonial function than a political one. The don't even have the right to veto governmental decisions. They are also have representatives in place so the President of France will normally not directly concern Andorran affairs that often.\n\nThe real power lies with the parliament and their head of government, Antoni Martí. So not much difference there compared to other democracies. "
]
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[]
] |
|
24oey1 | how do criminal defendants end up with charges like "four counts of murder" when only two people are killed? | [This man](_URL_0_) in Minnesota was recently convicted of four counts of murder for killing two teens. What's the justification for multiple murder charges per death? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/24oey1/eli5_how_do_criminal_defendants_end_up_with/ | {
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"Sometimes it is hard to prove that an accused murderer had all the requirements of a crime. With 1st degree murder, the prosecution needs to prove everything in 2nd degree murder, PLUS the act/s were premeditated. \n\nIf the jury agreed that he was reacting, and not making specific plans, that would eliminate 1 st degree. If the jury found at any point the defendant was in fear, using self-defense of life, or local versions of 'stand your ground, and 'castle doctrine', they could nullify any of the murder charges. \n\nEach States laws are a little different, some would call them 'included offenses'. In this case, if you prove murder 1, you have to also prove murder 2- even though the same act . Technically, that act could also be murder 3, manslaughter, and aggravated assault. \nBut our system only punishes the highest crime of the inclusive 'stack' - for each separate action. \n\nThe jury instructions are [here](_URL_0_). Thee jury was asked to determine if the facts met all 4possible crimes, jury says yes. \nUnless there is something I missed that makes these 2crimes x2victims, the sentencing will only show a conviction and penalty for the most heinous criminal act. \n\nIf these other charges were not given to the jury now, they could not choose to convict, and the defendant might be protected under double jeopardy. Many times a criminal will be charged with lesser versions of the same crime, just to avoid letting them walk on a paperwork issue . \n\n"
]
} | [] | [
"http://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2014/04/29/closing-arguments-tuesday-in-little-falls-murder-trial"
] | [
[
"http://www.mncourts.gov/Documents/0/Public/Court_Information_Office/Smith_Jury_Trial_Instructions.pdf"
]
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|
4970ho | why is it that "time flies when you're having fun"? | Why is it that we experience time going faster while other times it feels so slow? What are some psychologist / neuroscientist explanations of our perception of time?
I would also appreciate paper recommendations so I can read more about it.
Thank you!
| explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4970ho/eli5_why_is_it_that_time_flies_when_youre_having/ | {
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"I think because you focus much harder on the task at hand you stop thinking about the time so much.",
"The psychology term you are looking for is [flow](_URL_0_\n \nWhen you are engaged in something and our attendion is focused on it. Our perception of the passage of time is altered. "
]
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[],
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"https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)"
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ci65v2 | what are the grey areas that we can see in the moon from down here? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ci65v2/eli5_what_are_the_grey_areas_that_we_can_see_in/ | {
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"They're called mares. It means \"sea,\" but these are actually more like patches of the surface that had melted and re-hardened in the distant past.",
"They're called maria. They're large, flat basaltic lava planes from from when the moon was geologically active and had volcanoes."
]
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[],
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||
5uezov | since blue whales have aortas large enough to swim in, do they have fewer issues with blood clots? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5uezov/eli5_since_blue_whales_have_aortas_large_enough/ | {
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"Or do they just have man-sized blood clots?",
"considering they have an extremely active lifestyle (swimming constantly all the time) and a relatively low cholesterol diet (mostly plankton and krill iirc) they are presumably at very low risk for blood clots in the first place. ",
"Also, humans don't tend to develop blood clots in our aortas. The aorta is susceptible to other things, like aneurysms, dissections and ruptures, while blood clots are typically found in much smaller arteries, for example the cerebral arteries or the cornary arteries.\n\nSource: me, I'm not a doctor.",
"They do have large vessels, but they also have small vessels. Not every artery in a blue whale is the size of their aorta, and those are the vessels that would be vulnerable to clots. \n\nThey would likely have decreased clot risk because they are less likely to have hemostasis (where your blood flow is poor or pools). "
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154xvd | why does fabric (temporally) change colour when it gets wet? | My backpack got wet this afternoon by some rain and the wet spots become a lot darker. I couldn't really tell why, though. Anyone who can explain this? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/154xvd/eli5_why_does_fabric_temporally_change_colour/ | {
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"First of all, you have to look at how colour works. When light hits something, most of the light is absorbed by whatever is there, in your case, the backpack. What you see is only the light that isn't absorbed, it's reflected back at you. So, when you add water (rain) the reflection back is different because the water has changed how the reflection works. When you see something white, you see everything reflected back, when you see something black, thats because no light is reflected back. ",
"Ever look at the wet spot on fabric from the other side? The wet spot reflects less light to you because it is transmitting some of the light through it to the other side. Just like oil making paper translucent or even transparent.",
"[Check out these threads](_URL_0_)."
]
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"http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/search?q=wet+darker&restrict_sr=on&sort=relevance&t=all"
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407qel | what will happen if a republican president is elected in 2016 and signs the obamacare repeal bill? | Could the Affordable Care Act actually be repealed? What would happen? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/407qel/eli5_what_will_happen_if_a_republican_president/ | {
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"Yes, it could be repealed, and what would happen depends on what exactly is in the bill repealing it.\n\nWhile the Affordable Care Act is one discrete public law, it is codified by inserting provisions into various titles and sections of the U.S. Code (statutes) that deal with health care and insurance. So whatever act repeals it needs either to show what part of the current code needs to be repealed or it can repeal all of the provisions of the ACA at once and leave [someone else](_URL_0_) to do the dirty work of tracking it all down and updating the Code.\n\nThen I suppose _URL_1_ goes down, no one gets insurance subsidies anymore, you can get jacked out of qualifying for insurance based on health condition, and premiums could be underwritten again. You might have to pay for preventive care, you might have a lifetime maximum benefit again, and there's no guarantee that the plans you do qualify for will offer decent coverage. A lot of poor people would get kicked off Medicaid.\n\nIt would be like 2008 again."
]
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"https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_the_Law_Revision_Counsel",
"healthcare.gov"
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|
3e6jks | why there is no radio function in iphones (not sure about androids) radio was avaliable in almost all old phones | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3e6jks/eli5why_there_is_no_radio_function_in_iphones_not/ | {
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"text": [
"Because you need to add yet another chip which can receive the right wavelength, which adds complexity, costs, and takes away space for things you'd rather put in."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
9mtitf | why are australia's vast empty planes simply not covered in solar panels to help with their power productions crisis? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9mtitf/eli5_why_are_australias_vast_empty_planes_simply/ | {
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"The same reason they're not spinning up new gas plants - Money and maintenance. It's not like you just stick solar panels out in the middle of a dusty wasteland and that's that. They need to be continuously cleaned to deliver anything close to their rated output.",
"A couple of reasons:\n\n* it's expensive as fuck\n* you lose a lot of the power having to transfer it across lines to where it is useful. \n* despite it being fairly inhospitable to people, there's still a great deal of wildlife there that would be impacted by such a huge construction project. \n\nI mean yeah put a solar plant or two as close as you can to civilization, but don't cover the land with them. ",
"*plains\n\nPartly because those huge deserts are nowhere near where people need the power to be. You can generate lots of power in the middle of nowhere, but you'll lose most of it in the process of transporting it to the cities.\n\nSpain has been fairly successful at utilising it's desert-like areas for solar power, but it is much more densely populated so the efficiencies work out better. (Plus they don't have a mining boom to prop up the otherwise dying coal industry, but that's another matter)"
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7j0dnk | why is it recommended to cook with cold water instead of hot water? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7j0dnk/eli5why_is_it_recommended_to_cook_with_cold_water/ | {
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"There are 2 reasons, that I know of, \n\n1. Hot water can leach minerals and metals out of pipes/ lining of the hot water heater affecting taste/ heavy metals are no fun.\n\n2. If a hot water heater does not properly cycle to high temps (160 I think) it can become a reservoir for legionnaires disease",
"The notion is that the cold water is fresher. (This means it has more chlorine in it) It also has not picked up anything while traveling through the hot water tank.",
"Yo ho ho! Yer not alone in askin', and kind strangers have explained:\n\n1. [ELI5: Why is it better to start with cold water and boil it when making pasta or coffee, rather than starting with hot water? ](_URL_3_) ^(_30 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: When I boil water, why am i supposed to use cold water? ](_URL_2_) ^(_29 comments_)\n1. [When cooking, why do we not boil hot water from the faucet? Won't it be faster and doesn't the heat kill any bacteria anyway? ](_URL_1_) ^(_4 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: Why do packages often say bring cold water to a boil? ](_URL_0_) ^(_11 comments_)\n"
]
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[],
[],
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"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/39nfrs/eli5_why_do_packages_often_say_bring_cold_water/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/4bg2du/when_cooking_why_do_we_not_boil_hot_water_from/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ha2pj/eli5_when_i_boil_water_why_am_i_supposed_to_use/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ugshq/eli5_why_is_it_better_to_start_with_cold_water/"
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||
44x4gb | how is it possible that we encounter plateaus when losing weight even if we continue to operate at a caloric deficit? | I know plateaus don't last forever I'm just wondering how this happens. What causes a temporary "stall" | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/44x4gb/eli5_how_is_it_possible_that_we_encounter/ | {
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"There are a lot of possible explanations. One big thing to keep in mind is water weight.\n\nWhat are the physical things that make up your weight? Bones... Fat... Muscles... Organ tissues........ and Water! You're actually mostly water, by the way. And the amount of water sitting inside of you can vary DRAMATICALLY.\n\nYou ever really, really have to pee? A full bladder can potentially fill multiple bottles of water when emptied. There's a significant weight difference right there, especially since urine is a little bit heavier than plain water.\n\nBut when you pee, you're not peeing out all of the water inside of you. Your body actually really wants to keep a certain amount of water most of the time.\n\nWe depend on a water-to-salt balance. If you eat A LOT OF SALT one day, your body decides it needs A LOT MORE WATER to compensate. So the water that you drink, or eat in the form of fruit, etc., will just STAY there inside of you.\n\nIf you eat HARDLY ANY salt, and especially if you drink A LOT more water than usual, your body says hey! We can dump all this OLD water in place of the NEW water! And you'll pee a lot.\n\nYes, that's right. The more water you drink, the less water you retain. Putting MORE of something into your body can actually make you LIGHTER (temporarily). Weird.\n\nThe difference between a \"LOTS OF SALT\" day and a \"NO SALT, lots of water\" day can be HUGE. Many pounds.\n\nBut the most important thing to remember is that this is all TEMPORARY. You're NOT gaining and losing fat. It's an ILLUSION.\n\nFor example, you can't do the \"no salt, lots of water\" trick multiple days in a row and expect to lose 5 pounds every day. It doesn't work. Your body only stores so much water. It's best not to think of this as contributing to your \"real weight\" at all.\n\nIt's more like, say, on Tuesday morning Bob steps on the scale, and it reads 205 lbs. Bob has no idea how close this number is to his real weight. His real weight is a total mystery. Bob figures 205 must be pretty close, so that's the number he writes down. (There are actually only 200 pounds of average-day-Bob, but his water stores allow plus-or-minus 5 pounds based on water retention, but Bob doesn't really need to know this.)\n\nBasically, this is the reason it's really kind of silly to record your weight every day. Every week is a little better. But even then, don't take every number for gospel. Come back a month or two later and take a look at the trend line. You'll probably see plateaus, maybe even ups and downs, even if you've been super consistent in caloric intake and exercise. If you eat a lot of salt the day before a weigh-in, you'll \"balloon up\" - who cares? You're still getting skinnier, and your pants are falling down. You've still lost \"real weight\". The scale is just guesstimating.\n\nOne really common thing is to lose weight REALLY, REALLY QUICKLY at the start of a diet. You're eating less than usual, so you're probably eating less salt than usual, so you lose a lot of that \"fake\" water weight RIGHT AWAY and feel super good about yourself. In the first month, maybe the scale says you've lost 10 pounds!... Hooray!... but actually no. You've probably lost like 5 pounds. A week later, the scale hasn't moved. A week after that, the scale still hasn't moved. You think you're plateauing....... You're probably not. You're probably still losing like 1 pound a week. Your water levels are just fluctuating and hiding your progress.\n\n**tl;dr - your scale is lying to you, water weight can fluctuate up and down like crazy, don't trust day-to-day numbers, just look at the trend line over a period of multiple months**",
"A good explanation might be that you did not adjust your calorie defict after losing weight the first time. For example, let's say when you started, your TDEE was 2,000 calories, if you ate anything less, you are losing weight depending on the amount you have a deficit by. Remember that you need to burn about 3,500 calories in order to lose 1 pound of fat. So, at a 2,000 TDEE, you would need to eat at 1,500 calories a day, in order to lose 1 pound a week. BUT, this is where your question comes in. Since you lost weight, you have to adjust your TDEE in order to reflect your current situation. So now instead of your TDEE being 2,000, it is now 1,700. So, if you are still eating 1,500 calories, you only have a 200 calories deficit a day, or 1,000 calories a week. So, now instead of losing 1lb a week, it will take you about 3 and a half weeks to lose the same amount. It is essentially a numbers game. "
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2c1k27 | why would human poop be white? | When I joined the Navy, eating a drastically different diet gave my bowel movements a variety of strange colors, most notably green. That, I learned, was due to increased iron content. On occasion, though, I've had poops that were pure white. What causes this? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2c1k27/eli5_why_would_human_poop_be_white/ | {
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"White stool is not normal and should be evaluated promptly by a doctor. White stool is caused by a lack of bile, which may indicate a serious underlying problem.\n\nBile is a digestive fluid produced by the liver and stored in the gallbladder. Stool gets its normal brownish color from bile, which is excreted from the liver into the small intestine during the digestive process. If the liver doesn't produce bile or if bile is obstructed from leaving the liver, stool will be light colored or white.\n\nLiver diseases, such as hepatitis and cirrhosis, can cause white stool. In some cases, the problem lies not in the liver but in the tube (duct) that delivers the bile to the intestines. This tube can be squeezed shut or blocked — for example, by a tumor or a gallstone — which prevents the bile from entering the intestines. Some babies are born with constricted bile ducts.\n\nmayo clinic"
]
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] |
|
fik4y3 | what is actually in contraband (cheap) cigarettes and why are they so cheap and illegal? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fik4y3/eli5_what_is_actually_in_contraband_cheap/ | {
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"Because some states like New York tax cigarettes heavily. Contraband cigarettes are purchased out of state to avoid the taxes and sold at a discounted rate."
]
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||
nusvn | why everyone seems to hate /r/politics. | I mean, often times in other subreddits when /r/politics comes up it's talked about with distaste. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/nusvn/eli5_why_everyone_seems_to_hate_rpolitics/ | {
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"Reddit as a website skews young, especially on the default subreddits. Reddit also skews liberal (which I am too).\n\nAs a result, you get a bunch of 15-18 year olds yelling about politics they have only recently started to be interested in and learn about and which they barely understand. They lack an awareness of context/historical precedents. Further, [/r/politics](/r/politics) has turned into a witchhunt for any sign of conservativism while it derides conservatives' endless debasing of liberals. The whole of the subreddit doesn't seem to grasp the irony that they're as distorted and left wing as Fox news is distorted and right wing.",
"It just turned into a bit of a circlejerk, so i gave up",
"stay out of all subreddits whose primary topics are sex, religion or politics. They are doomed because of the nature of the internet.",
"Any attempt at expressing an opinion that differs from that of the Hive is ruthlessly punished by moderation and any opinion that plays to the hive is upvoted without regard to its factual merit.",
"First of all, as MySuperLove explained, the subreddit is particularly suited toward young liberals. On any given day, if you look at the articles on the front page of r/politics, you'll see that just about every article supports the same side of an issue or candidate in an election. I haven't been keeping up to date with it since I unsubscribed, but I can't recall seeing a link showing how a Republican presidential candidate, other than Ron Paul, did something good.\n\nAnother aspect is the constant accusations of America being a police state or something along those lines. While I'm not one of those Americans who is so patriotic that I wear red, white, and blue every day, have a flag waving on my front lawn, or possess an incubator for baby bald eagles, I still have some respect for the way my country functions. Simply put, particularly during the Occupy Wall Street protests, many articles and comments were upvoted that referred to the US as a police state, where freedom of speech was non-existant and police could arrest whomever they wanted. Needless to say, not everyone agrees with that view, and I find such views a bit insulting. It's hard to take a group of people seriously when Occupy protests lasted a few weeks and continue to be discussed on a relatively well-known site like Reddit, and they still insist that the government has surpressed all free speech against the status quo. ",
"Obviously Reddit skews liberal so /r/politics is going to skew that way as well which can’t be helped. But a conservative or anyone that has a thought different than that of the hivemind is immediately attacked and derided. Even worse there are many instances of moderators removing posts they don’t agree with, which is pretty much a slap in the face of the entire core of Reddit as a place for people to discuss ideas and opinions. /r/Politics is simply a joke at this point in time and will be until Reddit removes the offending moderators and works to instill some basic Kindergarten rules of “play nice with others” and “don’t call people Nazis just because you don’t like what someone says”.",
"Because politics and politicians in general just suck.",
"I find the problem being that it is the type of politics which is pretty nonacademic, reactionary and sensationalist. So they tend to discuss things in a very aggressive way which never leaves a good result of any debate, they tend to base their opinion more on gut feeling and fail to look at the details and causes rather than just being outraged at x forcing this on y. It's all american politics and very partisan, liberals and conservatives who stick very much to their party lines. \nAn example was \"That's it, Congress has made Pizza a vegetable\". Although eating it counted as a fruit portion, there was a lack of analysis of why it was being seen as a fruit portion (the tomato pureé and the lobbying power, as well as an ideological battle against the big state), instead it was quite a big shouting match about something that wasn't so well defined.",
"I should add that that r/politics constantly leaks to other subreddits, and that is annoying for some people.\n\n ",
"Reddit as a website skews young, especially on the default subreddits. Reddit also skews liberal (which I am too).\n\nAs a result, you get a bunch of 15-18 year olds yelling about politics they have only recently started to be interested in and learn about and which they barely understand. They lack an awareness of context/historical precedents. Further, [/r/politics](/r/politics) has turned into a witchhunt for any sign of conservativism while it derides conservatives' endless debasing of liberals. The whole of the subreddit doesn't seem to grasp the irony that they're as distorted and left wing as Fox news is distorted and right wing.",
"It just turned into a bit of a circlejerk, so i gave up",
"stay out of all subreddits whose primary topics are sex, religion or politics. They are doomed because of the nature of the internet.",
"Any attempt at expressing an opinion that differs from that of the Hive is ruthlessly punished by moderation and any opinion that plays to the hive is upvoted without regard to its factual merit.",
"First of all, as MySuperLove explained, the subreddit is particularly suited toward young liberals. On any given day, if you look at the articles on the front page of r/politics, you'll see that just about every article supports the same side of an issue or candidate in an election. I haven't been keeping up to date with it since I unsubscribed, but I can't recall seeing a link showing how a Republican presidential candidate, other than Ron Paul, did something good.\n\nAnother aspect is the constant accusations of America being a police state or something along those lines. While I'm not one of those Americans who is so patriotic that I wear red, white, and blue every day, have a flag waving on my front lawn, or possess an incubator for baby bald eagles, I still have some respect for the way my country functions. Simply put, particularly during the Occupy Wall Street protests, many articles and comments were upvoted that referred to the US as a police state, where freedom of speech was non-existant and police could arrest whomever they wanted. Needless to say, not everyone agrees with that view, and I find such views a bit insulting. It's hard to take a group of people seriously when Occupy protests lasted a few weeks and continue to be discussed on a relatively well-known site like Reddit, and they still insist that the government has surpressed all free speech against the status quo. ",
"Obviously Reddit skews liberal so /r/politics is going to skew that way as well which can’t be helped. But a conservative or anyone that has a thought different than that of the hivemind is immediately attacked and derided. Even worse there are many instances of moderators removing posts they don’t agree with, which is pretty much a slap in the face of the entire core of Reddit as a place for people to discuss ideas and opinions. /r/Politics is simply a joke at this point in time and will be until Reddit removes the offending moderators and works to instill some basic Kindergarten rules of “play nice with others” and “don’t call people Nazis just because you don’t like what someone says”.",
"Because politics and politicians in general just suck.",
"I find the problem being that it is the type of politics which is pretty nonacademic, reactionary and sensationalist. So they tend to discuss things in a very aggressive way which never leaves a good result of any debate, they tend to base their opinion more on gut feeling and fail to look at the details and causes rather than just being outraged at x forcing this on y. It's all american politics and very partisan, liberals and conservatives who stick very much to their party lines. \nAn example was \"That's it, Congress has made Pizza a vegetable\". Although eating it counted as a fruit portion, there was a lack of analysis of why it was being seen as a fruit portion (the tomato pureé and the lobbying power, as well as an ideological battle against the big state), instead it was quite a big shouting match about something that wasn't so well defined.",
"I should add that that r/politics constantly leaks to other subreddits, and that is annoying for some people.\n\n "
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5eimdc | during the cold war, how did the united states (and by extent, the soviet union) know that a nuclear missile was fired at thier respective country early enough so that they could deploy countermeasures? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5eimdc/eli5during_the_cold_war_how_did_the_united_states/ | {
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"Both countries deployed radar stations and other surveillance set ups around each other, looking for the distinctive sounds or signatures of a missile launch. This wasn't a perfect system, we nearly had some false alarms that ended humanity.",
"Radar systems. Also the \"counter measures\" we're launching your own. There wasn't a viable set up to completely intercept a massive incoming nuclear attack. ",
"ICBMs weren't really a threat b until around 1960. For the first part of the Cold War, bombers were the real threat and much easier to detect in advance.",
"A combination of huge long range radar stations and satellite early warning systems.\n\nYou can't really hide a rocket launch from a satellite. Large rockets like ICBMs have a *massive* thermal signature that is easy to spot. That is why the US and USSR (and now Russia) notify each other of peaceful rocket launches in advance.",
"The USA had the [Ballistic Missile Early Warning System] (_URL_0_), a series of powerful RADAR stations at Anderson (Alaska), Thule (Greenland), and \nFylingdales (Yorkshire), and others. ",
"There were no countermeasures. Neither the USSR nor the US had any method whatsoever to shoot down or even deflect an incoming nuclear missile. And still don't even today.\n\nThe only response to an incoming nuclear missile is to launch a nuclear missile of your own back. This is known, in complete seriousness, as the MAD doctrine, \"Mutual Assured Destruction.\"\n\nAnd MAD is how it's still working, right now."
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2nos65 | how can we identify different instruments playing at the same time if it is the same air that is vibrating? | I mean that if 2 instruments are palying at the same time, they are all sending vibrations to the air... doesn't this make a unique sound or unique vibration? If so.. how can we identify the different instruments playing? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2nos65/eli5how_can_we_identify_different_instruments/ | {
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"The amazing human brain takes all the sound waves in as a raw input just as you say, but the truly spectacular thing is that it can decode this information for us into separate sounds all playing at once. I don't think neuro scientists have discovered exactly how the brain does such a feat but it must use previous knowledge of sounds to do so. \nFor example if you do not listen to electronic music then it would be quite difficult for you to pick up on two different sounds of synth playing over he top of one another, where as someone who does would find it quite easy to distinguish the two sounds. ",
"Vi Hart explains it better than I ever could. Basically, it's what your ear was made to do. _URL_0_",
"I've always wondered the same thing. When you overlay two or more colors, you see the new blend they create, you don't see the individual colors. But when multiple sounds are happening at the same time, they pretty much remain distinct and don't blend.\n\n(Yes, I know that all I did was re-phrase your question.)",
"Simple version:\nYour cochlea is the part of your ear that actually turns vibrations into neutral impulses and enables you to hear. Everything else (I.e. your ear) is just there to get sound to the cochlea. \n\nThe cochlea is constructed so that different parts respond to different frequencies, so when you hear a complex sound (with many different frequencies), your cochlea detects each individual part of the sound separately! Your brain is pretty good at taking multiple different aspects of a stimulus and recognizing that they are part of the same stimulus... for example, when you see an orange your brain perceives the shape and color of the orange separately, but can easily 'put them together.' Your brain can do the same thing with sounds: it can 'put together' the different sounds in different frequency ranges made by a particular instrument.\n\nSource: master's degree in neuroscience.",
"To some extent, we can't identify the two different instruments playing. There are two major attributes of the sound sources that make it possible:\n\n1) Stereo placement\n\n2) frequency spectrum\n\n3) \"filling in the gaps\" over time i.e. \"interpolation\"\n\nGiven two instruments where 1) and 2) are similar or the same, your ear really will \"hear\" only the loudest one.\nBut then, over time, your ear and brain \"figures out\" that there are two instruments because of differences in what they are playing, and fills in the gaps so that you appreciate both instruments.\n\n\nThis is largely how mp3 compression works, in that it removes information that your brain doesn't need to follow the music.\n",
"All the sound waves fill the air at the same time and become in super position with one another. (Essentially summed together) The resultant signal carries the all the information of all the sound waves together. Reaching the ear it can then be split back into its original constituent frequencies and interpreted by the brain. This can be done mathematically with a Fourier transform. I assume the brain has a specialized circuit for doing this.\n\nThe point of my statement is that this is nothing mystical, the mathematics underlying it are used every day.",
"Sound is more than just the basic note. The tone of an instrument has various characteristics. \n\nAttack: the initial intensity of the sound, often louder than the succeeding sound. A plucked guitar string has a strong attack. A bowed violin string has a soft attack.\n\nDecay: how quickly the sound fades after the initial attack. A plucked string instrument will have a fast decay (in the absence of electronic processing). A bowed violin string has a slower decay. A banjo has a fast decay, as does a drum.\n\nSustain and release: the later parts that describe the sound.\n\nIn addition, instruments have overtones. When you play a note on an instrument it also produces higher tones, often multiples of the primary tone. So, a note played at 100 hz also has tones played at 200, 300, 400, 500, 600, etc. The loudness of each overtone contributes substantially to the sound of the instrument",
"[This](_URL_0_) man is blind and autistic but has an amazing ability to hear and play piano. In the clip a guy plays upwards of 10 simultaneous notes and Derek plays them all back after a few seconds.",
"There's something called timbre. Wikipedia defines it simply as\n\n > In simple terms, timbre is what makes a particular musical sound different from another, even when they have the same pitch and loudness. For instance, it is the difference between a guitar and a piano playing the same note at the same loudness. \n\nNow, it's my understanding (and I could be wrong on the physics of it) that what's actually happening is this.\n\nEach \"note\" you hear is a specific frequency, right? But the thing is, that frequency also includes all sub-frequencies (called harmonics) of the same frequency. So something vibrating at a frequency of 120hz is *also* vibrating at 60hz. Makes sense, right? (it's also vibrating at 30hz, etc.) Something that's vibrating at a certain frequency is also vibrating at half that frequency.\n\nSo here's the thing, different instruments include different levels, or amounts, of those sub frequencies. I'm not super clear on the physics part here, but basically a specific instrument can include more or less prominently those sub-frequencies. When you make a digital tone, it's \"pure\"-- it's only the specific frequency with no additional prominence on any of the sub frequencies. But analog sounds, real instruments, include them. That's called timbre, and it what makes different instruments producing the same sound sound \"different.\" It's also how we can synthesize real instruments-- we can estimate which of the harmonics/subfrequencies are more or less prominent.\n\nThat's the basic idea. Things like how the frequency resonants in the body of the instrument, or how the sound is made (strummed, struck, plucked, blown through brass) can affect which frequencies or harmonics/sub-frequencies are more prominent.\n\nedit: Okay I think I explained more why different instruments sound different when playing the same note, but if you're asking why different instruments sound different in general, it's the same idea. One instruments has different overall timbre than another one, with many contributing factors.",
"They're playing in different frequency ranges. If they're playing similar frequencies it's hard to distinguish them (and it usually sounds like ass.) \n \nThis is from a music production standpoint, not sure if it's the precise scientific answer.",
"I'm getting to this a little late but I think I've got something that'll answer your question a little more specifically. It's something I've always wondered about myself: how can a single membrane (either the eardrum or a speaker cone) reproduce the sound of an entire orchestra? How does a single speaker cone sound like both a cello and a violin (and a flute and a trumpet and everything else) at the same time?\n\nThe thing that allows that to happen is called the Fourier Theorem. The Fourier Theorem states that any wave function, no matter how complex, can be represented as the sum of a series of sine waves. Conversely, any number of sine waves, no matter how much they differ in amplitude and frequency, can be expressed as a single complex wave function. \n\nThere are some great visual examples of how exactly that works on the [Fourier Series](_URL_0_) Wikipedia page. But the general idea (and this is a bit of an oversimplification for purposes of illustrating the concept) is that complex audio information can be \"encoded\" in a single waveform that can be reproduced by a single vibrating membrane. \n\nWhat happens next has been largely covered by the other commenters. The inner ear and brain \"decode\" the single waveform into its component parts (again, oversimplification for purposes of illustration), and those parts are analyzed as a whole to determine what we're hearing. That's where timbre and frequency spectrum come into play. If you've heard a trumpet before, your brain has created a pattern recognition schema based on its timbre, the harmonics characteristic to that instrument. The brain recognizes, decodes, and interprets patterns of harmonics within the total spectrum of what we're hearing. The fact that the ear and brain can decode and interpret that many simultaneous patterns in an audio spectrum is nothing short of miraculous, but that's how it's done.\n\nThis is something that can be done visually as well, assuming you have a good spectrum analyzer (the thingy that creates a moving, visual wave based on audio data). If you play the beginning of Mahler's 5th through a spectrum analyzer, you're going to see that first trumpet melody show up as a series of spikes, representing the trumpet's fundamental frequency and all of the harmonics above it. When the trumpet plays later on over the rest of the symphony, those spikes will pop up again among the dozens of other spikes from all the other instruments, and the brain is able to recognize that particular pattern of harmonics among everything else that's going on."
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2x3vbn | what is the reasoning behind above-ground power lines? germany buries them, mostly, but the usa keeps them exposed to the elements. | They're unsightly, and result in power outages during storms if above the ground. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2x3vbn/eli5_what_is_the_reasoning_behind_aboveground/ | {
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"A few factors:\n\n1. It's cheaper initially, even if it has significant costs due to more damage.\n2. When a part of a 10 mile power line breaks, the power company has no idea where it happened. They drive down the road to find out where the failure happened. If the wires are underground that doesn't work, lots of wasted digging to resolve that issue.\n3. American is huge, and so there are a lot of areas where there are just huge stretches of power lines without connecting to anything, that makes #2 worse as well.",
"Germany only buries the low-voltage power lines between transformers and the homes. The power lines between the transformers, switching stations and power plant are above-ground lines most of the time.",
"I have underground lines in my neighborhood. As I fount out several years ago when we lost power, repairing underground lines is the homeowner's responsibility. If they were overhead lines, the power company would do it.\n\nSo I had to spend $3,000 to have my lines dug up and replaced."
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eukkeu | how do free mobile games make money when all the ads in the game are from other free mobile games? | Is it just a closed loop of game companies paying eachother or are they getting money from somewhere else? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/eukkeu/eli5_how_do_free_mobile_games_make_money_when_all/ | {
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"In game purchases are the primary income stream for that kind of game. Advertising is a thing too - last quarter [Zynga reported 18% of revenue in advertising](_URL_1_) - but it's not what the business is built on. \n\nIt's worth remembering that a large portion of the income in this kind of in game purchase comes from a small portion of the player base, which is often [directly targeted with addictive mechanisms](_URL_0_).",
"Free mobile games make money primarily in three different ways: \n\n(1) offering in-app purchases usually used by their ‘whales’ (i.e - 20% of their customers who spend a significant amount of money on the game and keep it alive for the rest of the non paying users).\n\nEdit: Just wanted to clarify that the 20% isn’t supposed to be an exact figure, it’s a reference to the [Pareto principle](_URL_0_) also known as the law of the vital few. I’m aware that the actual amount of users who pay can be significantly fewer.\n\n(2) Is by running ads, usually bought as a advertising package (meaning you don’t have to you choose a specific game to advertise on you can just specify which customers you aim to target and how much your company is willing to spend on it and it is accordingly shown to such users. Alternatively, if your game if quite similar to another one in the App Store, you can specifically target that app as you might find a lot of users with the same interest all conveniently in one place) and shown to you based on your past user data and preferences from the App Store. They always make sure to give you the option to remove ads with a small fee - which appeals to our human need to remove a ‘pain point’ (an inbuilt aspect in many free to play mobile games that slows down the player or tries to push them towards making paid purchases - these include things like in-game wait timers). \n\n(3) That other major way they make money is buy selling your user data to other third parties (businesses) as user data is an extremely powerful tool for companies to have because it allows them to understand you and how to market and target you as a customer.",
"They get paid to host a bunch of third party SDKs on the backend and hidden away from users. There's an interesting article from the POV of a small-time app dev [here](_URL_0_)",
"What about games that only monetize with Ads ?",
"May I stop your scrolling to tell you about an amazing game? It's called Raid Shadow L...",
"They get money in various ways. Running ads of other games earns them ad revenue paid by the other game companies. The more popular a game gets the more likely people are to subscribe to them, get membership or premium features, which gets em even more income. And then there's other in-app purchases like currency to buy in-game items, to speed up in-game progress, unlock access to new areas or items or quests or characters, etc.",
"Some of these ads are so dumb....showing gameplay that has nothing to do with the advertised game. They should have rules and regulations for the dumb shit they’re allowed to show....I’m talking about you Homescapes",
"Just an fyi if anyone sees this. Disabling wifi and data before opening a game should disable adds especially if its one of those simple addictive games that have adds every level",
"Mobile game maker here, I'll try to explain to some extend (sorry for my english).\n\nFirst thing after you create your free mobile game is to find people downloading your game. Most common thing to do is to \"buy\" players, you pay money for the ads to appear on any other game or platform, and it will cost you money for each download you get, we will call this Cost per Install (CPI)\n\nBut each time an Ad appear in our game, we also got money from the Ad Network (Admob, Ironsource,...). The money, of course are from anyone who paid to get users. So basically it's a loop with Ad Network tries to improve their AI to be more effective (reach the right people), and game makers try to encourage player to watch more Ad (or IAP) so our revenue from each user higher than CPI\n\nWe game makers also use players data but not for sale, just to track and improve our game based on the data we have so our game will have better retention rate",
"Don't forget that _you're_ seeing game ads because you're being targeted. Not everyone sees all game ads",
"Even if this were the only way they could make money (it isn’t), the vast majority of game “companies” lose money buying ads for their games. They’re actively pumping money into the ecosystem while the top maybe 1% actually make money.",
"Oh I have some background here. Finally an area I can share some expertise on. \n\nGenerally speaking, every digital company is connected at this point in the advertising world. \n\nWhen you go to your local grocery store and buy some coke and use your “shoppers club” card, that is then sold to one of the thousands of companies interconnected to what is known as DMPs. These DMPs then hold a lot of this data to be resold in some sort of targeting tool. \n\nThe idea of “click through” for paid ads is old, and largely not used due to inaccuracy. They use impression methods for payouts on ads. Looking at one of these partnering networks to see if the ad was effective, then getting paid out on said ads. Effective as in you purchased the good they sold. Using one of the thousands of available IDs they use to tie you, to the marketing campaign. \n\nThe digital advertising world is a vast network of companies buying and selling data in the same method. One example of these networks is the \n\n_URL_0_\n\nSo as indicated earlier on ads, thats how some of the revenue is being generated.",
"I worked in the mobile free to play industry. The current answers I see don't reflect what I experienced.\n\nAds are nearly worthless. Usually 1 to 2 cents per view. So if we have a user base of 5000 active users a day and they each watch 5 ads it's $250. Which is not terrible but that number is basically the maximum many dev studios would see.\n\nAnd more importantly ads give resources without training purchasing behavior which is discouraged. You will often see limits on the number of ads you can volunteer to watch for instance. This is because it's not valuable to allow you to farm currency that way. It's a supplemental income, not the main focus.\n\nWhaling would be a great term for how free to play games actually make their money.\n\n99% of a studios income will be from a very small percentage of the userbase. These people are the whales, they spend literally thousands to tens of thousands of dollars on free to play games. They do this because free to play games focus on including every single mechanic they can to encourage addictive behavior. With many strategies pulled right out of casino textbooks.\n\nIt's very important to gate time. You can't have people burning through content. So time sinks need to be made. All resources are monitored to make sure that their are good gold/gem sinks. So that players are properly on the verge of just having enough to push them to buy more.\n\nAlso it is very important to encourage purchasing as early as possible to normalize the behavior. You'll be given premium currency as part of the FTUE (first time user experience) and this will maximize the likely hood that you will be tempted to purchase more premium currency.\n\nLots of people will spend a few dollars here or there. But all of the players that spend a reasonable amount combined likely do not add up to what the biggest whale is spending.\n\nSo when trying to understand these markets, remember they are whaling industries trying to land the big one. This is why so much of what they do seems so unappealing. They don't care about you shrimp, because the whales 'love' it. (Or at least they will drop their money endlessly and that's the important bit.)",
"Wow hey a topic I'm an expert at!\n\nWell, the basic idea is that when you show an ad for your game in another game, you're paying in CPM, or 'Cost Per Mile' which means 1000 views. \n\nOne ad can get millions of views per day or even hour if the budget is high enough.\n\nThe goal then, is to get the users to come to your game and filter through your business model--whether that be in game purchases, in game ads, subscriptions, rewarded ads, or offer walls.\n\nIf you run an action game called Ninja Attack and I have an RPG game called Ninja Hero Gaiden, chances are players of your game might want to play my game too. So I would contact an advertising company like Google, Facebook, Unity, or Ironsource to get advertising. \n\nThe key is the Business Model. Do I make my money from advertising or from in game purchases?\n\nIf it's from advertising, the goal is simple, make you play long enough to see more ads than I paid for. \n\nMore likely thought, it's to get you to come and play the game and spend money. \n\nOne user out of 100 coming and spending $1 will net me 10x what I spend. Worth it.",
"South Park season 18 episode 6 is about Freemium gaming.\n[Click here for the episode](_URL_0_)",
"For mobile games:\nGame companies spend most of their money on advertising and wages.\n\nThey get most of their money from in app purchases and from investors.\n\nNew mobile games spend a ton of money on advertising and get all their money from investment (can’t get IAP before releasing). So if there are 10 new mobile games all running ads for each other, you are seeing investment money being used to buy ads for games in other games.",
"In-game monetization, at least in some cases, you'll be surprised the amount of money some people can spend in this. One friend spent over $500 to pull an specific character in FE Heroes.\n\nI've played Clash Royale, I'm not proud of doing it but I have no regrets neither because I've spent around $300 total during these 3.5 years playing it. However about 2 years ago when they released Graveyard (Or some other cards), there were reports of people cashing $20k or more for maxing out that card in Day 1, and I meant not only 1 or 2 people, but hundreds or more. This last week they released a \"special pack\" with some stuff, the stuff is kinda expensive IMO, because everything could be obtainable in the store for much cheaper or easier methods, but the lure is an exclusive \"emote/emoji\", and I've seen dozens of people using it while playing against me, so basically they paid $50 for an emoji.",
"They advertise and then the advertisers advertise, when they run out of advertisements they have to buy more. Eventually they buy and circulate some Paddy's Dollars. The money keeps moving in a circle, thus creating a self-sustaining economy.",
"In actual ELI5:\n\nBecause ads cost money, any mobile game that can afford to make an ad must not actually be completely free. If it were really free, they could afford the ad. So they must make money some how, and usually it's by making the app free to try and then some parts of the game actually cost money later.\n\nIf you want a game, look for ones that cost money, ask me if I'll buy it for you, and if I approve, I'll get it for you. That way you get the entire game at once and also won't see ads for other games in your new favorite game!",
" > Is it just a closed loop of game companies paying eachother \n\nHow would this even be possible?\n\nMicro transactions is how freemium games make the most money.\n\nWhales get addicted to games and drop thousands of dollars per year on them. That's their main source of income. Its why you have obnoxious games where you pay 100 bucks for a mediocre skin on a bad mobile game.",
"And while it's not always true, there is a portion of this old adage that applies:\n\n\"If you're not paying, YOU are the product\"\n\nAs mentioned elsewhere, these games are often largely making money off of whales - a small percent of the userbase who make large purchases at the cash shop for overwhelming advantages in-game.\n\nTo keep the Whales playing, they need a never-ending supply of sheep for them to roll over. What good is buying an invincible army if you can't gank noobs? These people don't want to fight another whale's giant army, they want to embarass a free-to-play noob and crush them completely.\n\nSo you, the free-to-play player, goes through the tutorial, maybe gets one or two matches against other free-to-play people - then boom - they throw you at a whale or two in a matchup you literally cannot win.\n\nSo take these free-to-play mobile games with a grain of salt. The more pay-to-win they are, the less you need to invest emotionally into actually winning.",
"You greatly underestimate the amount of people literally addicted to pouring money into these games. They single-handedly keep those mobile game schemes running.",
"Good question. All roads eventually lead back to in app purchases. You may well get an ad for a game with no IAP (just more ads) but if you follow the chain it would eventually lead to IAP (or other real revenue apps/products like an item on Amazon, a credit card, online poker, etc).",
"To understand this, first you have to understand that these ads are managed by \"Ad Networks\". Google, Facebook, Apple, all have their own ad networks. These ad networks decide what ad to show where. And there are advertisers who just want people to know about their app/game. So, any games that show such ads have integrated one or more such networks.\n\nLet's say you're playing Subway surfer, and you see an ad for temple run, and if you install temple run using that ad, temple run guys pay some amount to the ad network because the network helped with a new install for their game. And in turn, subway surfer gets a share of the said amount.\n\nYou can actually integrate such networks in your own apps and start showing ads. If any of your app users found anything interesting for themselves in any ads your app shows, well, good for you.\n\nNow the question arises, what if no one ever clicks on any ads ever shown by your app? Well, whenever any ad is shown in an app, it's called an \"impression\". The ad networks also pay on the basis of per 1000 impressions. \nThis amount is very negligible and also depends on the region the impression was made. Also the rate of per 1000 impressions vary (like stock market). \n\nAnother way how games make money is In-app purchases. You pay real money to buy stuff in the game. It's just that simple. \n\nEven though, ad revenue seems promising at first, it's actually not. To generate a decent amount of revenue through ads would require millions of downloads and god knows how many impressions.",
"Even if the game that you are playing does not have microtransactions the games in the ads will most likely have some pay to win scheme.",
"Micro transactions. Extra loot boxes extra packs of cards extra weapons extra money for the in-game transactions. All of which make them a shit ton of money.",
"They barely make any money from ads - most income is from in-game purchases available. \n\nSpotify has a similar problem. You may notice on Free Spotify most the ads are just for premium spotify. They've always had trouble making the free version profitable due to low ad income, but premium is what makes spotify its money. Free mobile games with premium options / in game purchases work the same way.",
"Can anyone explain to me how the ad for gardenscapes, is completely different from the actual game?? I finally gave in and downloaded it because I thought man I love a good brain teaser, these look like fun puzzles and it’s all some repair game with a candy crush game??? Someone help me I’m baffled here"
]
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"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7S-DGTBZU14",
"https://investor.zynga.com/financial-information/quarterly-results"
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"https://betterexplained.com/articles/understanding-the-pareto-principle-the-8020-rule/"
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"https://southpark.cc.com/full-episodes/s18e06-freemium-isnt-free#source=6154fc40-b7a3-4387-94cc-fc42fc47376e:c6cbd5e3-7eae-4cc3-94b7-119c8d412f99&position=6&sort=!airdate"
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ks1r6 | how do man-made canals work? like the suez, erie, panama canal? | How are they built? their purpose? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ks1r6/eli5_how_do_manmade_canals_work_like_the_suez/ | {
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"Their purpose is to move boats between places that don't directly connect. This saves a lot of money on shipping things, because then you don't have to steer your boat all the way around Africa or South America if you're shipping stuff from Greece to India or from New York to San Francisco. They are built, as you'd expect, by digging out the dirt between the two bodies of water.\n\nMost canals have locks, which are doors that close and allow the water level to change by pumping, kind of like an airlock but for water. This accounts for the water level differences between bodies of water. The Panama and Erie canals both have locks because of the need for changes in elevation during the crossing. In contrast, the Suez canal has no locks because there is no perceptible change in the elevation of the Red and Mediterranean seas.",
"Their purpose is to move boats between places that don't directly connect. This saves a lot of money on shipping things, because then you don't have to steer your boat all the way around Africa or South America if you're shipping stuff from Greece to India or from New York to San Francisco. They are built, as you'd expect, by digging out the dirt between the two bodies of water.\n\nMost canals have locks, which are doors that close and allow the water level to change by pumping, kind of like an airlock but for water. This accounts for the water level differences between bodies of water. The Panama and Erie canals both have locks because of the need for changes in elevation during the crossing. In contrast, the Suez canal has no locks because there is no perceptible change in the elevation of the Red and Mediterranean seas."
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3tjvgf | why are electoral votes all or nothing(for the most part)? why are they not divvied out representative to popular vote? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3tjvgf/eli5_why_are_electoral_votes_all_or_nothingfor/ | {
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"text": [
"Because each state chooses to use all of its electoral votes to elect the person the majority of the electorate in that state voted for. Each state chooses to not divvy up its electoral vote."
]
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[]
] |
||
4gv5a4 | why do we get random bouts of euphoria? | Why do people get random bouts of happiness through out the day even though we may be having a terrible day? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4gv5a4/eli5_why_do_we_get_random_bouts_of_euphoria/ | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Well, there are a couple of reasons. Number one, when we lower our expectations for something, we are usually pleasantly surprised with the outcome. An example of this is a rainy day. On rainy days, we wake up and go, \"Looks like today is gonna be crappy.\" In thinking like this, we have already lowered our expectations for the day. Then, when you have a good interaction with someone, or something goes your way, it seems even better as you realize, \"Hey! Today ISN'T crappy!\" \n\nThe second, and more troubling answer, is something along the lines of a mental disorder like cyclothymia or bi-polar disorder, which is characterized by marked changed in mood, both lows (depression), and highs (euphoria). \n\nThe way you've posed the question, I'm more inclined to think that the answer is the prior. You've lowered your expectations so that smaller things make you happier. Hope this helps! \n\n",
"Hmm, I've never experienced that. I've known people who had sharp mood swings one way or another, but they usually had issues like hypoglycemia, bipolar disorder, etc.\n\n I've for sure personally moved from down to up, but never very quickly, and never for no apparent reason."
]
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3jit73 | why does ssds have a specific number of reads/writes. | As the title goes.
Thanks for any kind answer. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3jit73/eli5why_does_ssds_have_a_specific_number_of/ | {
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"The way my boss describes it is like this:\n\nWhen you write to a cell, you're basically shooting it with a shotgun (electrons). This makes it return a different signal when you apply power (to read it). \n\nWhen you erase that cell, you take a giant magnet to rip the bullets out. Unfortunately some of the target comes out with the bullets. \n\nEdit: I work in Intel's Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group",
"When you flip a bit on an SSD, you are essentially forcing electrical current across an insulator. \n\nEventually, the insulator wears out.",
"SSDs use \"flash\" memory, which uses a specialized transistor to store data. The data is written by forcing a charge (electrons) onto a \"floating gate\". It is called floating because it is entirely surrounded by insulators. When something in a circuit isn't connected, it is called \"floating\". \n \nThe electrons are forced onto the floating gate by putting an electric field on either side of it. The process of writing the cell this way, and the process of erasing it by removing those charges causes a bit of damage to the thin insulator around the gate. Eventually, it starts to wear out and charges can leak off the gate. Once it loses too much charge, it can no longer be reliably read. \n \nEven when some of the bits in a flash memory start to wear out, it may still be usable for quite some time. There are a variety of error correction schemes used to overcome having a few bad bits. All of the bits don't wear out at the same rate, so quite a few bits can go bad and the chip can still be usable. \n \nEven when too many bits in a word go bad, the SSD can just tag that location as unusable and start using spares instead. And when too many words in a block or a page or bad, there can be spares for them, too. Once all of these things are exhausted, the chip is no longer considered reliable. \n \nFlash memory makers do a lot of work to characterize the \"read/write endurance\" of their chips, and the SSD maker will do more on top of that. So they have a pretty good idea of how many reads/writes can be done. But that still has a fair amount of variability, since it is dependent upon many factors, such as the nature of the data that was written, the manufacturing quality of each chip, etc. "
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3mka2j | why should i bother getting married? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3mka2j/eli5_why_should_i_bother_getting_married/ | {
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"Do you live in some religious autocracy where that carries the death penalty? If not probably nothing stops you.",
"From a secular point of view, a marriage is a contract between (usually two) people. They agree to pool their resources. The general idea is that both partners gain something from this, for instance financial security, a stable home situation and - not unimportant - a partner in procreation.\n\nThe government (that is, the other people who live in your country) generally find this pooling of resources an excellent idea and try to promote it by giving married couples all sorts of financial and other benefits that unmarried people (couples, single or otherwise engaged) do not receive.\n\nSo, to answer your question: nothing will stop you, and if you choose to not marry, you will miss out on (mainly financial) benefits that you would otherwise be eligible for. \n\nThe down side of marriage is that you enter a legally binding contract, and should you at any point in the future wish to disband it and no longer be held to the responsibilities that stem from it, you cannot simply quit operations and leave but have to go through a legal procedure (a *divorce*) which can set you back financially and emotionally."
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80nfb1 | how do mesh networks maintain speed? | If I use range extenders the speed of the extender is cut in half to extend, unless I connect wired. How does a mesh network do the same thing without losing speed? or does it? I have an apple airport extreme and if I extend with airport express the speed is in half. what am I missing? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/80nfb1/eli5_how_do_mesh_networks_maintain_speed/ | {
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"dux56tx"
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"Any wireless mesh network will lose speed each hop because of the overhead. Even wired networks you will lose some speed each hop but it is not near as noticeable because there is much less overhead in wired communication. Basically each wireless node takes the data off the wire, encapsulates it in the wireless packet, sends it to the next node which has to process the packet and send it back out for the next node to pick up. So if your PC is 5 nodes away then the wireless packet has to be processed 5 times coming in, and then another 5 times going back out. If there is a lot of traffic then it will be even slower because the radios will have to wait until the air is clear to send each packet. I hope this makes sense. "
]
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[]
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|
1s2i36 | why do i see product placement at big events in the form of only the name of a brand? | At the rare moments I watch soccer on TV, I always asked myself the the point of certain adds at the side of the field. I see for example 'Sony', but I don't understand how this motivates me to buy Sony products. Just seems like wasted money to place that add there. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1s2i36/eli5_why_do_i_see_product_placement_at_big_events/ | {
"a_id": [
"cdt99ce"
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"text": [
"When you go to buy, say, a TV, you might see a Sony and a Magnavox. If you see Sony's name over and over again, you'll be more familiar with the brand name and think it more reputable."
]
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j2pag | can someone explain to me what a tax bracket is? | I hear the term all the time in money speak but idk what the hell it is, help me out reddit? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j2pag/can_someone_explain_to_me_what_a_tax_bracket_is/ | {
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"When declaring your income while doing your taxes, a \"Tax Bracket\" helps the government know which % of tax you owe based off of said income.",
"The government taxes your income based on a percentage of how much you make. If you make more money, the government takes a larger percentage of your pay. How does it know how much to take? It groups people into 'tax brackets' based on how much you earn. For example, if you make, say, between 10,000 and 30,000, government takes 20%. If you make 30001-50000, government takes 25% etc. etc.\n\nI hope this answers your question, and sorry if i'm completely off. I\"m not IRS agent.",
"As you have higher income, you pay more and more \"marginal income\" in taxes. Your bracket is the highest marginal rate.\n\nSo one person might bay 0% on the first 10k and 10% on the , for a total of $1000 in taxes out of 20k in income. \n\nSomeone making 30k is in a higher bracket, so they might pay 20% of the next 10k they make, which means they'll pay $3000 in taxes on a 30k income. does that help?",
"A tax bracket says the percentage of your income that is taken as income tax when you're earning a given amount.\n\nSo, for example, it might be (taken from the Australian tax scheme):\n\n* 0 - $6,000: Nil\n* $6,001 - $37,000: 15c for each $1 over $6,000\n* $37,001 - $80,000: $4,650 plus 30c for each $1 over $37,000\n* $80,001 - $180,000: $17,550 plus 37c for each $1 over $80,000\n* $180,001 and over: $54,550 plus 45c for each $1 over $180,000\n\nOne thing to note here is that each bracket gets applied in turn. If you look at the $80,001 - $180,000 bracket, you'll notice that it says \"$17,550 plus 37c for each $1 over $80,000\". This is because $17,550 is what you would have owed from the previous tax brackets if you earned $80,000. Generally speaking, you are said to be 'in' your highest tax bracket, as that informs how much of every extra dollar you earn will be taken in tax.\n\nAs an example to see how much tax you'd pay in this, assume that you earn $70,000.\nFrom the previous brackets, you'd pay $4650. Then from the current bracket, you'd pay (70,000 - 37,000) * 0.3 = $9900. So your total income tax on $70,000 would be $4650+$9900=$14,550.",
"There are four categories of tax brackets in the United States: Single, Married filing jointly, Married filing separately (same bracket as single for each spouse), and head of household. Married filing jointly provides the best tax bracket, and each category will have different dollar amounts for the tax brackets.\n\nI'll provide the single tax bracket:\n\n* 10% - $0-8,500\n* 15% - 8,501- 34,500\n* 25% - 34,501 - 83,600\n* 28% - 83,601 - 174,400\n* 33% - 174,401 - 379,150\n* 35% - $379,150+\n\nFor example. If you make $50,000 per year, the first $8,500 is taxed at 10%; all income between $8,501 - 34,500 is taxed at 15%; all income between $34,501 - $50,000 will then be taxed at 25%. \n\nSo if you calculate that, your tax bill (ignoring credits and deductions) will be $8,625.\n\nEdit: four categories, not three",
"So let's say your taxable income was $100,000. The first $8,735 of that income will be taxed at a rate of 10%. Your income from $8,376 to $34,000 will be taxed at a rate of 15%. This goes on until you reach the highest tax bracket that your income reaches. The system is set up this way so that someone just barely slipping into a higher tax rate doesn't suddenly pay much higher taxes."
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f28oya | how does billing work for toll roads? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f28oya/eli5_how_does_billing_work_for_toll_roads/ | {
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"Will be helpful to list the specific system you are talking about \n\nIn many cases in the US, tolls may be assessed on certain entry/exit points and certain points along the road.",
"In Massachusetts we have gantry open road tolling now, every gantry charges you a set rate per axle on the vehicle. If you don’t have a transponder “ez-pass” they snap a photo of your plate and send you a bill in the mail I believe with an added surcharge for not having the ex-pass. The bill will have the break down of every gantry you went under and what time etc."
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||
2m3jxq | why does it hardly rain in southern california, despite being adjacent to the pacific ocean? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2m3jxq/eli5_why_does_it_hardly_rain_in_southern/ | {
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"text": [
"Proximity to an ocean is only one of the factors when determining rainfall. There's lost of deserts in the world that are ocean adjacent. \n\nThe overall weather patterns play a much more significant role. So air currents, ocean temperature, as well as land features like mountains. There's more important factors than how close you are to the ocean. "
]
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||
7mx6gy | how does an iud work? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7mx6gy/eli5_how_does_an_iud_work/ | {
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"There's two basic versions of a an iud; one uses hormones while the other does not. \n\nThe non-hormonal one simply makes the uterus a non hospitable environment for the zygote, even if the egg gets fertilized. The hormonal one also acts as a physical deterrent, with the added bonus of super slow release hormones making the body think it's already pregnant. Or was just pregnant. Either way, the balance is off compared to a person's \"fertile period.\"\n\nPregnancy takes a lot of pretty precise events to occur. If any of those are wrong, even if the sperm meets the egg the body will reject it. ",
"Yer not alone in askin', and kind strangers have explained:\n\n1. [ELI5: How does a IUD work? ](_URL_3_) ^(_18 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: How do hormonal IUDs release a reliable, steady stream of hormones for years? And do they taper off or just stop releasing hormones? ](_URL_0_) ^(_3 comments_)\n1. [How does a copper IUD work? (ParaGard or equivalent) ](_URL_2_) ^(_3 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: how do non-hormonal IUD's work? ](_URL_1_) ^(_2 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: How can IUDs prevent periods? Where does the uterine lining go? ](_URL_5_) ^(_3 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: What are IUDs? ](_URL_4_) ^(_4 comments_)\n",
"Well, lots of answers from previous threads to answer this, but I'll take a hit at it since I'm bored at work. \n\nThe IUD, intrauterine device, is a small, T or anchor like piece of plastic/metal/copper that is inserted into the uterus through the cervix. When not enlarging for the purpose of fetus holding, the uterus is actually pretty small, about the size of a fist. When you put an object in it, it makes the uterus a pretty shitty place to be.\n\nPregnancy itself, despite how much we talk about surprise pregnancies, and how much we as a society take it for granted, is a difficult process, and requires a lot of proper steps to take place in order to be successful. Throwing a big anchor, literally, in the way, makes the uterus a hostile environment, and far less likely to indicate to the body that pregnancy is the right move at this point in time. \n\nThe IUD, prior to insertion, has a long pair of strings attached to the ends of it that are cut down after insertion. Once the IUD is ready to be removed, the gyno reaches in with foreceps, and tugs on the strings. This causes the prongs on the IUD to collapse and then it can be pulled straight out! \n\nIf hormones are involved in the IUD, as others have mentioned, it essentially works in the same vein as any other same-type hormonal birth control, most commonly by making the uterus extra-mucuousy so it doesn't allow for the implantation of eggs on the lining.\n\nSource: Was a army medic and regularly assisted and performed Well Woman's Exams and Birth Control procedures for Mirena, ParaGard, and Nexplanon"
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"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/571lr6/eli5_how_do_hormonal_iuds_release_a_reliable/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6r03p7/eli5_how_do_nonhormonal_iuds_work/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1myznk/how_does_a_copper_iud_work_paragard_or_equivalent/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6iq9xo/eli5_how_does_a_iud_work/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/sdqik/eli5_what_are_iuds/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ta9t4/eli5_how_can_iuds_prevent_periods_where_does_the/"
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||
1om37o | if what we see and hear has happened in the past does that mean that time outside our sphere of awareness is moving faster? | I read [this article](_URL_0_) about how what we see right now actually happened about 80 milliseconds ago because that is about how long it takes the brain to process the information. So does that mean that time outside of our sphere of awareness is actually moving faster or that we are moving slower? Or do I just completely misunderstand the science behind what the article says? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1om37o/eli5_if_what_we_see_and_hear_has_happened_in_the/ | {
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"It's all \"going at the same speed\", so to speak. The brain just takes a fraction of a second to 'boot up', and so it is starting out on the back foot.\n\nA bit like... if you have two identical marathon runners in a race, but one of them is given an 80ms handicap. You wouldn't say that time is now \"running slower\" for that person. They are running at exactly the same speed as the person in front of them. They're just suffering the effects of a momentary delay to start with.",
"It means that you're on an 80 millisecond delay. The rate at which time goes by is the same, you just don't notice it until 80 milliseconds after it happens.\n\nFor an analogy, they often use something called a 7-second delay on live TV and radio so that they can bleep swears and stuff. The host says something, and then it gets broadcasted seven seconds later.\n\nThe host is still talking in real time, though. A second to him is a second to you. You just don't hear it until seven seconds after he talks."
]
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"http://www.salk.edu/news/pressrelease_details.php?press_id=31"
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1gcx4e | why does adobe publish so much software for free? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1gcx4e/eli5why_does_adobe_publish_so_much_software_for/ | {
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"text": [
"They dont. Most of Adobe's software is at least a couple hundred bucks. What software (other than reader) are you referring to?",
"By publishing so much free software, they can get their name known to pretty much every computer user in the world.\n\nThat way, when someone needs some software which is not free, Adobe's offering is a natural choice, because you've already heard of them.",
"The viewer software is free because you want anyone to be able to view the content. It is the content creation software that is so expensive. Yeah, there are millions of people using Adobe Acrobat Reader, Shockwave viewer and Flash Viewer, but to create Shockwave and Flash content you generally have to use the Adobe tools. PDF files though can be created with other free software, but the full version of Adobe Acrobat is for pay.",
"Tangentially related, but Adobe takes a somewhat lax stance on piracy of their software and has even released older versions of their software for free as specific marketing strategy: They don't care if individual college students pirate their copies of Adobe Photoshop, because the big bucks come from charging whole companies hundreds of dollars a pop for legit Photoshop licenses. \n\nLetting the small fish use their software \"for free\" just reinforces their standing as an industry standard."
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2a23lq | if the europe-central map projection used in most places is inaccurate, why isn't a more accurate created and used instead? | Also, what is the most accurate map (according to the scientific community)? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2a23lq/eli5_if_the_europecentral_map_projection_used_in/ | {
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"Are you talking about the distortion of certain maps, physically? Or are you talking about the fact that it's centered on Europe, and people think it should be centered elsewhere?\n\nIn general, though, there is no \"accurate\" flat map of the earth. The earth is round, and a map is flat. That will cause every map to be inaccurate in some way. We just get to choose WHICH inaccuracy we want, when we use different maps.",
"All 2D (flat) maps are inaccurate because you can't accurately represent a sphere in 2D. Therefore a 2D map will always be a compromise where you choose a type that is accurate enough for your specific use.\n\n_URL_0_"
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4bv9m4 | what is the tech bubble burst that everyone keeps talking about will happen soon? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4bv9m4/eli5_what_is_the_tech_bubble_burst_that_everyone/ | {
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"Tech is part of our daily lives now and it's unlikely that will change any time soon so the demand for tech is comfortably high. But what is happening is the nature of that tech is always changing.\n\nConsumers are opting for tablets and smart phones over computers and laptops so the industry has to evolve to meet the new demand, and handle the decreased demand for products which used to be the bread winners. \n\nIronically in spite of all the money being spent on mobile devices, there was already a pretty big tech bubble that burst a few years back in telecomm with some pretty big names like Nortel and Alcatel. Even Nokia and Avaya. \n\nRight now there is a lot of money being thrown at the internet of things and having many tiny, inexpensive, computers operating together rather than big machines being central to the home. If consumers decided they don't really need smart toasters and refrigerators, then that could be a bust and there will be some shaking up of the job market some more. \n\n"
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w1513 | why do we pronounce the "w" in words like "swore," but not in "sword?" | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/w1513/eli5_why_do_we_pronounce_the_w_in_words_like/ | {
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"Not sure about those two words specifically, but common English words come from many different langauges, often using the same letters. If the words of origin are vastly different (like not just different words but from different langauges) it is not surprising the pronunciations would be different.",
"Because English is a stupid language.\n\n_URL_0_",
"I'm no expert, but linguistics is always something that has been a major interest for me. First of all, English is a weird language. It has tons of strange rules that complicate the language significantly. I think that in this case, it depends on the etymology of the words, or what language the words came from. Some languages pronounce letters in different ways, and when the words pass into English, they tend to somewhat retain the same pronunciations as they had in their previous language. For example, the word \"swear\" has kept its pronunciation [as it transferred from Proto-Germanic to Old English to English](_URL_2_). \"Sword\" is a bit more difficult. Looking at the [etymology](_URL_0_) it appears that it retained it's hard \"sw\" sound even in Old English, but in recent times has lost that hard \"w\" sound. I cant explain that. Take the word \"wreck\" however. Looking at the [etymology](_URL_1_) one can see that it gained the silent \"w\" when it passed from the Swedish \"vrak\" (pronounced we-rek (although its really one syllable, but I'm emphasizing that the \"v\" is pronounced like a \"w\")) to Anglo Norman \"wrec\". During that time period, the sound that the \"w\" made probably became less pronounced as it is a difficult sound to produce being next to the \"r\". over time, the sound was completely phased out of the word and is now pronounced as we know it: \"rek\". \n\n\n**TLDR: It depends on which language the words come from.**\n\nHopefully this helped, If you have any further questions, Ill do the best I can to try to answer them.\n",
"I can't say what's true for any specific case, but for a lot of words the reason English spelling is so whacky is because the spellings were made concrete before the pronunciations were. The printing press was invented before the radio and as such widely available books for all parts of England caused certain spellings to become standard, even though people all over the country still pronounced the words very differently to each other. Eventually how you pronouce each word also became standard, but that had little to do with the way the spelling became standard.\n\n**TL;DR:** How you spell words and how you say words in English became standard independently.",
"We used to. \n\nThe K in Knight, for example. Kuh-nicht. Similar to German Knecht.",
"British English speakers do pronounce the \"w\". "
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eg0mdx | how can you get pregnant when not taking the pill every day at the same time/missing a day or when leaving the hormonal ring out for more than 3 hours? doesn't hormonal bc have a longer-term effect on women's bodies? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/eg0mdx/eli5_how_can_you_get_pregnant_when_not_taking_the/ | {
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"As I understand it (and I'm not an expert or anything close), hormonal birth control stops you from ovulating, and the part that it stops doesn't take very long. If it gets messed up, that little part will happen, then when whole process starts and you can be fertile.",
"No form of birth control is 100% effective, even when used correctly. Biologic processes have high variability and quality control isn't as precise as you might expect from mechanical or electronic systems.\n\nThe NuvaRing has the advantage of releasing hormones in the right place, as opposed to the systemic technique of a pill you swallow. With this advantage, lower doses can be used to reduce side effects.\n\nAll these hormones have clean-up mechanisms in the body that break them down, that's how the system works."
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167oe5 | why is it we find walking outside in 90 degree heat unbearable, yet sitting in a 90 degree sauna is so relaxing? | much obliged. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/167oe5/eli5_why_is_it_we_find_walking_outside_in_90/ | {
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"Part of it probably has to do with the sun. The temperature isn't really the unbearable part, the burning from the sun is. In a sauna it is dark and moist. Even so I still hate them. ",
"I find saunas insanely stressful! \n\nIt's the ability to step out of them in to the cool that relaxes me. "
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135g5i | the expulsions of the germans in european countries during and after ww2. | What was the ultimate goal of having these germans deported from their countries? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/135g5i/eli5_the_expulsions_of_the_germans_in_european/ | {
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"By the time of the World Wars, German speaking populations existed in many places throughout Europe, including Central Europe and along the Baltic Sea. These maps both show Prussia and other German states [before WWI](_URL_4_) and [before WWII](_URL_0_). Note how the territory is larger than modern Germany, and includes much of modern day Poland.\n\nAs WWII drew to a close, many German speaking residents of Eastern Europe/the Baltic migrated west with the retreating front line, fearing dire ramifications from the Soviets. Eventually by the war's end a lot of German speakers (regardless of ethnicity) and German citizens (regardless of language) ended up in Allied-Occupied Germany or Austria.\n\nAccording to the Potsdam Agreement by Allied leaders on the state of post-war Europe/boundary changes/etc, this population migration continued up until 1950 or so. About 12 million Germans are estimated to have been moved. Up to 500,000 may have died during this migration.\n\nIf you look at a map of Europe, you can see notable changes, especially in Russian territory. [Koenigsberg](_URL_3_) for example, the former capital of East Prussia was heavily war-torn and repopulated with Russians. Today, it's called [Kaliningrad](_URL_2_) it's about 0.7% German by ethnicity.\n\nEDIT: For more reading I'd recommend this _URL_1_\n"
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2bprp3 | how do the "double irish" and "double irish w/ dutch sandwich" tax avoidance techniques work? | [Disclaimer]: This isn't exactly a repost. The infographics on the earlier posts of this nature aren't loading properly, and I would appreciate any helpful diagrams with your explanations. Thanks! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2bprp3/eli5_how_do_the_double_irish_and_double_irish_w/ | {
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"The EU operates a free trade regime such that a state can't attempt to tax an entity based in another country selling to its citizens. In the US context its very similar to the way US states behave, if I live in NY and buy something from a company in MA then NY doesn't tax the company in MA for profits they make but instead they are taxed in MA.\n\nIn the EU Ireland has the most favorable tax rate so many corporations HQ there in order to pay the lower tax rate. If you buy a Dell computer in France you are not doing business with Dell France but with Dell Ireland. In effect businesses funnel all sales through an Irish office to pay a lower rate of corporation tax.\n\nIreland has a tax treaty with the Netherlands which massively reduces Irish tax burden for profit transfers there (technically its an entire exemption but some revenue will be subject to taxation due to licensing arrangements). Once in the Netherlands there is a small tax imposed (again licensing arrangements) but then it is transferred back to Ireland to a separate entity (2nd Irish subsidiary, hence the \"Double\").\n\nA quirk in Irish tax law means that a company that is actually controlled by foreign managers can transfer all profits to that country tax free so the 2nd Irish subsidiary is actually controlled by another subsidiary in another country (outside the EU, Bermuda is popular).\n\n[This](_URL_0_) illustrates the process fairly well.\n\nSome countries (most of the Middle-East, Africa, Australia, Asia) has lax revenue shifting controls so companies also shift earnings from these subsidiaries through Ireland to similarly reduce their tax exposure.\n\nWhile this is typically mentioned in the context of US corporations it actually has no impact on US tax revenue at all, its impossible to shift US based revenue out of the US and due to IP transfer fees (fees a subsidiary has to pay to its US parent to account for brand, technology etc developed in the US) some of the non-US revenue does make it back in to the US and instead primarily impacts EU income. In the Google example in 2012 they had an EU effective corporate tax rate of 4.4% while a US effective corporate tax rate of 29.1%."
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1ix976 | how do they get water up large skyscrapers | I've always wondered how they get water up massive skyscrapers like in new york or in india, please help!
Edit: Thanks for all the answers and videos! I appreciate having my question answered by a great community! and made my Front page! Thanks again!!! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ix976/eli5_how_do_they_get_water_up_large_skyscrapers/ | {
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"with pumps! the pressure that is supplied by the water main available in most cities is usually only adequate to get water up around 6-8 stories. any building higher than that needs to supplement the water pressure in its system with pumps. ",
"_URL_0_\n\nThank you for asking this; I really never thought about it before. ",
"Water controls designer here. \n\nAnother way they do it is they will have a hydropneumatic tank every couple floors. Basically what you do is have a big tank and you fill half of it with water and the other half you pressurize with air. Then the air pressure pushes the water out to your faucets. When the water level drops in a tank, a pump is called to fill it back up and an air compressor turns on. \n ",
"Plumber here, pumps have a thing called an impeller that can increase water pressure by about 100kpa per impeller, you put as many impellers on as you need to increase the pressure.\n\n* On small building to about 10 stories you would install a electronically controlled variable speed pump, they have like a water wheel on the outlet the more demand there is for this the more the pump increase the RPM on the impellers.\n\n* To control pressure you install a pressure limiting valve on the floors to limit the pressure to a set amount.\n\n* For really large high risers the same principal applies except you install resoviors every 10-20 stories, these are trickle fed from pumps below or tanks on the roof and then the pump takes over to pressurise the floors below. All floors have pressure limiting valves as this is code requirements to prevent overpressurisation of the pipework and fittings per floor, you cant have basin taps popping and flooding.\n\n*You dont do gravity fed from a roof tank to a whole building as with gravity fed you have to install very large pipes to get the flow up per floor, this is why you install resovoirs per floor and pump accordingly.\n\n* Luckily for us plumbers we have hydraulic engineers who work out the diversity factor and the amount of water required per floor and therefore the flow rates and the pressure required to deliver the flow rates. Once you have the flow rates and pressures you turn to your tables to work out your pipe sizing,\n* The cost of the pipes determine how often you need to install a tank and resovoir to bring the cost down to reasonable to install.\n\n* EG installing a 150mm water main riser is much easier and cheaper than installing a 300mm water main riser.\n\n* Im not sure if I made it sound simple or complicated. Anyway after 20 years you know what to do, and by the design on the building there is normally only a couple of options that will work,,,,\n",
"Hey OP! From the replies it looks like you got a pretty great answer! Therefore, with your new knowledge, I'll share a cool efficiency pump solution and a really neat fact about trees!\n\nNow you've learned that they either pump the water alllll the way up to the top of the building with multiple pumps or they store the water in tanks on they way to the top floor. But how can we make this efficient? Well if money isnt too much of an issue you can replace these impeller pumps (pumps that use spinning blades like a fan or boat propeller to push water) with hydraulic pistons! Assuming you know that big machinery can lift giant amounts of dirt or other things (duh lol), well they use hydraulics to do this. If we apply this technique to a giant piston at the base of the building and we carefully watch and maintain pressure we can efficiently push large amounts of water right up to the top with only ONE \"pump\".\n\nOkay, time for the cool fact! Maybe after reading through your responses you've pondered \"why cant we suck water from the top like a straw?\". Well there's a good reason for this and its because it's impossible! To understand why this is impossible, you need to understand a bit about pressure. So first how does a straw work? Well when we \"suck\" on a straw we are lowering the pressure on top of the water inside the straw and the top of the water wants to get back to where it once was (our atmosphere's pressure) so it climbs up the straw while you suck that air out until it gets to your mouth.\n\nSecond, how do we measure pressure? Well one method we have been doing the same way for years has been the difference in the height of water inside a U tube called a Manometer. If one end of that U tube is connected to what we are measuring and the other end is connected to what we are measuring against (usually the open atmosphere) then the water levels in the U (in the up-down direction from the earth only) will change and we can calculate pressure from it using gravity and the density of the water in the Manometer.\n\nOkay so we know how a straw works, and we are less than fuzzy on calculating pressure, but we still dont know why sucking water up a skyscrapper is impossible, it sounds pretty possible so far... Well here's where things get tricky. You see if we have such a low pressure (TONs of air sucked out) the liquid at the highest point inside our straw or manometer begins to \"fall apart\". That is, it actually starts changing state into a gas. Since there's no pressure keeping the liquid together, it starts expanding to try and fill in the empty space (by empty we mean litterally nothing. No air or any matter in that space).\n\nSo here's where we hit a limit on how far up a straw or a skyscrapper you can suck water. From our little Manometer lesson, we know that a difference in water-height means theres a pressure difference. Well the same thing applies to a straw, or in our case a reeeaallly long straw. If we keep sucking on a super long straw (straw is directed up-down from earth), eventually the top of the water inside the straw will hit such a low pressure that it will begin to change into a gas! Technically \"steam\", but its not hot.\n\nSo at what height difference does this happen? Well it all depends on gravity, what the liquid's density is, and what our atmosphere's pressure ks. So with pure water and on Earth you can only suck up 10.3 metres until it starts turning into steam! Therefore sucking water up a skyscrapper is impossible!\n\nNow here's the crazy cool fact. Many trees are taller than 10.3m and we've all learned that their roots \"suck\" water out of the ground. But if that's true, how does a tree get the water to the top? Wouldnt the water turn to steam inside the tree? They do it not by sucking, but by actually pumping the water up. The roots actually just absorb the water then the tree has thousands of very very very tiny tubes that expand and contract to push the water up the tree. So a tree is basically a collection of thousands of pumps!\n\nHope you enjoyed my little essay post and maybe learned something while I car pool to work! Im sorry I couldnt link sources or videos or images to further explain, as im using my phone. Have a good day :)",
"Here is a list of video links collected from comments that redditors have made in response to this submission:\n\n|Source Comment|Score|Video Link|\n|:-------|:-------|:-------|\n|[zahnerphoto](_URL_0_)|11|[A crab getting sucked in a pipe subsea](_URL_4_)|\n|[somnolent49](_URL_13_)|7|[Delta P](_URL_15_)|\n|[mickeydjw](_URL_14_)|1|[Anna Faris Cindy- Scary movie](_URL_6_)|\n|[mrzar97](_URL_1_)|1|[Strip The City Dubai - Desmontando a Cidade Dubai Legendado](_URL_11_)|\n|[gearaholic](_URL_2_)|1|[Dirty Jobs - Safety Third - Water Tank Replacement](_URL_16_)|\n|[z-fly](_URL_7_)|1|[Skyscraper Water Supply Strip the City](_URL_9_)|\n|[FTpotato](_URL_8_)|1|[The Most Amazing Thing About Trees](_URL_3_)|\n\n* [VideoLinkBot FAQ](_URL_12_)\n* [Feedback](_URL_10_)\n* [Playlist of videos in this comment](_URL_5_)",
"They don't just pump it to the top floor, they pump to every so-many floors to holding tanks, and then pump it from that floor's tank to the next tank so many floors above. Usually, it is something along the lines of every 25-27 floors has a holding tank that supplies the floors below it with water and water pressure.\n\n_URL_0_",
"Buckets. Lots and lots of buckets.",
"Really big elephants."
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6epw9w | how did media control symbols become standard (play, pause, fast forward, etc.)? do other parts of the world use different symbols? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6epw9w/eli5_how_did_media_control_symbols_become/ | {
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"_URL_0_\n\nThere is actually an international standard for all forms of icons.\nI'm going off of personal knowledge here, so correct me if I'm wrong, but during the 80s when electronics started to become more widespread globally and production switched from the west to the east, many of the manufacturers understood they would need a standardized way of denoting controls on electronics. They held a convention to draft up a list of virtually any kind of control one would need as a symbol that could be understood. There like a huge book of hundreds of symbols.\n\nTL;DR the symbols we used are arbitrary and standardized internationally.\n\nEDIT:removed the extra \"d\".",
"The media control symbols for play, fast forward and pause originate from tape players. \nThe play button pointed to where the direction the tape would go, pressing it would move the tape. \nThere used to be a button that was a triangle pointing the opposite direction that would cause the device to play backwards. \nThe fast forward button is just the play button repeated, meaning the tape would move faster than play. \nSince there was a backwards play button, it was repeated for fast rewind. \n(Also note the term \"rewind\" refers again to tapes being wound up again.) \nThe pause button just looked like the tape head (thing that read the tape) and would mean the tape head would do nothing. \n\nThe square stop symbol actually comes from musical notation, and means [\"large rest\"](_URL_0_)",
"They come from audio tape players. Audio tape used to be on a supply reel on the left, with a take-up reel on the right. So, to play it, the tape moved from left to right, in the direction of the arrow. Fast forward and fast rewind are just two arrows showing \"double speed\" and which direction the tape moves in. \n\nPause probably comes from a similar background: In order to keep the tape moving smoothly and precisely, there is a device called a pinch roller. The tape is pinched between a rubber roller and a vertical metal spindle called a capstan. On bi-directional tape players, there is a capstan/pinch roller on either side of the play head. When the pause button is pressed, the tape remains pinched between the pinch rollers and the capstans. The pause button is reminiscent of the two capstans holding the tape in place. On many decks, you couldn't fast-forward or rewind from pause because the tape was held in place by the pinch rollers. You had to disengage them to allow the tape to move. That's why the Stop button doesn't have the capstan images.\n"
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2wkmeo | what does 'all property is theft' mean? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2wkmeo/eli5_what_does_all_property_is_theft_mean/ | {
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"It is a saying that implies that anything you can own involves the exploitation and/or abuse of someone or something that is not being compensated, and that you can't separate the property itself from it's origins... That you can't, for examply, own a pair of shoes without separating them from the fact that it likely used child workers to make them, or the rubber in them came from rubber trees planted on land taken generations ago from the indigenous people originally there.",
"This statement is a basic tenet of anarchism, that everything belongs to everybody, or rather, belongs to no one, so that all are equal. No government or individual can own the land in which they reside, and therefore no government can exist. If that seems strange to you, you're probably not an anarchist."
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6fwbo1 | why has the global temperature spiked so dramatically in the last 10-20 years even though that's the timespan we've become aware of global warming and started trying to combat it? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6fwbo1/eli5_why_has_the_global_temperature_spiked_so/ | {
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"Guess what happened before 20 years ago? Rampant pollution while being oblivious. \"Just exhaust it, planet Earth will pick up the slack and balance out\" was the mentality back then.",
"Because awareness doesn't imply doing something about it, the efforts to combat it are tiny, oil was cheap, and the alternative tech wasn't there.\n",
"Combat it? Hell, we can't agree it's real. We're putting more co2 into the air every year, didn't notice til the shit hit the fan. Way too late now. \nWe're xxxxscreweded! (Edit4eli5)",
"We've actually been aware of global warming for [a long time](_URL_0_).\n\nThere are several problems, though:\n\n* By the time we were aware of it a lot of damage was done.\n* Even today a lot of people still don't believe it's real, or don't believe it's caused by humans.\n* Nobody can agree on the right way to fix it, but any solution will likely be difficult and expensive."
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9ue6yk | would hiv/aids cancel out leukemia? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9ue6yk/eli5_would_hivaids_cancel_out_leukemia/ | {
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"Not really, HIV is a virus, AIDS is a deficiency of CD4 white blood cells, and leukemia is a cancer causing elevated abnormal nonfunctioning white blood cells (there are more types than just CD4) \nThat about as ELI5 as I can get, there is alot more science behind it, between the progenitor cell lines and such. "
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fdbhvi | how did mining work back in the day? did people just picaxe long tunnels into the rock hoping they’ll find something useful? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fdbhvi/eli5_how_did_mining_work_back_in_the_day_did/ | {
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"Yes and no. Depending on what's being mined.\nTypically they'd find a vein and surface level evidence. (Think of gold washed down a creek, it comes from a vein somewhere)",
"Historically, prospecting involved thoroughly searching a wide area looking for mineral deposits on the surface. The best places to look were creeklines or ridges/hills, and any mineral deposits signified that there was likely more beneath the surface.\n\n\nThe Romans used aquaducts for hydrolic mining, where they'd basically use a ton of water to wash away the soil to expose the rock and any veins of metal.\n\nThe first mines were largely for stone, and required less precise methods to locate good areas to mine.",
"It depends a bit on how long ago \"back in the day\" is. For the mines I've visited here in Norway that's around the 1600s. At that time, the mining was mostly accomplished with heat (wood fires) to make the rock brittle and manual picks or chisels. Using fires to heat the rock and then flash-cooling with water can also break rock faces apart. As chemistry advanced and explosives became cheaper and safer, they gradually took over. \nMining was a craft and geological experts were used to survey the mine and identify where to dig in what direction. Norway largely imported these experts from Germany and France, and you can still see some evidence of this foreign influence in for instance street names in [Røros](_URL_0_).",
"Before modern methods of geology, finding ore in the rock was often a matter of luck. The ore might have shown itself on the exposed surface, or it might wash out and deposit on the surface. If they found a large ore deposit, they could follow the ore veins deep into the rock.\n\nBy the way, pickaxes we know today aren't a typical mining tool, they're more for breaking heavy dirt and rock on the surface. Instead, they used hammers and chisels in order to be able to get highly precise strikes on the same spot over and over. That's why you can still see [this logo](_URL_0_) on the coat of arms of many historical mining towns in Europe."
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4ajoum | how does someone go from being christian to jewish and vice-versa? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ajoum/eli5_how_does_someone_go_from_being_christian_to/ | {
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"It really depends on the sect of either faith. I'm not an expert on Judaism so I won't comment there.\n\nTo become Christian you have to either (depends on the group):\n\n* Accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Personal Savior. Either publicly or privately depending on the group.\n\n* Have a testimony or religious conviction that you have been saved by Jesus.\n\n* Be baptized. Some denominations might ask you to take classes/go through a program before doing so.",
"Judaism discourages conversion (but encourages people once they've been accepted for conversion). So you'd first have to convince a Rabbi that you're serious about wanting to convert. Then you'd have to engage in study so that you know enough about what it means to be and live as a Jew (which will vary depending on denomination). When your Rabbi thinks you're ready, you'll appear before a Rabbinic Court, and convince them that you're ready. If they agree, then you can go through the ritual immersion (in a ritual bath called a *mikveh*) and, in the case of men, circumcision. "
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atk6l6 | why is feet bone structure much more complex and composed of so many bones, while hands are much more simple? | Wouldn’t make sense for hands to be more complex than the foot due to the fact that hands are the much more used than feet are? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/atk6l6/eli5_why_is_feet_bone_structure_much_more_complex/ | {
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"There are 27 bones in each hand. There are 26 bones in each foot. Can you please explain what you are talking about?",
"What makes you say the structure of a foot is more complex than a hand?"
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1rte90 | what exactly happens to my body when i get the flu. | I know the symptoms of the flu, I want to know why? I am interested in the reason our body react the way it does (Body aches, Chills, Dizziness, Headache, lethargy, nausea and vomiting, sore-throat, fever, to name a few) I heard before is a way your body has to force you to take it easy and rest so that all your energy goes to fight the virus. I'd like an explanation of why specifically we have the symptoms we do with the flu, as opposed to, for instance, be momentarily paralyzed until the virus is gone. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1rte90/eli5_what_exactly_happens_to_my_body_when_i_get/ | {
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"For most viruses, all the symptoms are your body's attempt to slow the progression of the virus while it searches for an antibody.\n\nThe virus is taking over cells and reprogramming them to produce more of itself. The only way to actually stop it is to produce the right antibody. I don't really know how that whole system works, but your body essentially produces millions of randomly shaped antibodies until the right one is made to stop the virus.\n\nTo explain some of the symptoms; a sore throat is acid being produced to kill off infected throat cells, this is a non-direct attack that kills healthy cells too. A fever raises the body temperature hopefully killing off or slowing weaker infected cells, chills make you seek warmth to crank your body temperature up even more, shivering produces more heat.\n\nVomiting speeds up the expulsion of dead cells. Your lymphatic system deposits them in your stomach, normally you would digest these and they would exit your body through stool and urine. But vomiting can get rid of a lot of stuff quickly, and it reduces strain on your kidneys that are also taking an increased load.\n\nThese responses are not perfectly utilized, over reaction of the immune system can make the symptoms way worse than they need to be. You vomit when there is nothing to vomit, and a high fever can kill you etc.\n\nSome viruses directly cause side effects that are not an immune response.\n\nIt is a lot more complicated than this and I don't know what I am talking about really, there are a lot more systems and doo-dads doing complex things in your body."
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2hs5vg | air conditioning | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2hs5vg/eli5air_conditioning/ | {
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"[This](_URL_0_) is the basic cycle of the refrigeration cycle. There is a lot of thermodynamics but basically it works on the fact that the liquid inside the air conditioner has a low boiling point and can transfer thermal energy well/ as it it pumped through the cycle the liquid experiences phase changes and these changes cause a transfer in energy causing the heat from the outside to be taken out of the air and this cooler air blown out of the air conditioner\n",
"The air conditioner has a compressor which pumps a fluid called Freon into tubes outside the house which raises the Freon's pressure. And the opposite side of the compressor pulls the fluid into tubes inside the house through a tiny hole called an orifice, lowering the Freon's pressure. \n\n\nLow pressure causes boiling fluids which take in heat, but high pressure causes condensing liquids which give off heat. \n\n\nSo the low pressure soaks up the heat from the air inside the house while the high pressure sheds the heat into the air outside of the house. "
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4by43y | why is it a mark of quality for a watch to be "swiss-made"? couldn't a swiss company make a crappy watch? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4by43y/eli5_why_is_it_a_mark_of_quality_for_a_watch_to/ | {
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"Of course - but like much advertising it trades on beliefs and mystique rather than facts.\n\nSwitzerland does produce some truly amazing watches, but it doesn't have a monopoly on it.\n\nNot sure whether they'd bother to produce really poor quality stuff these days simply because anything they could do badly the Far East could do just as badly but cheaper.",
"Cheap watches use what are called, \"stock\" movements. As to say, they didn't develop the actual movement, they just packaged it. Good watch manufacturers create their own movements. \n\nBeyond movements, complications make the watch more desirable and prestigious. Chronograph, world time, power reserve, stuff like that. \n\nIs any of this specific to Swiss watches? No, not really. "
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5jiwxf | if working out is just damaging and repairing muscle tissue, couldnt we just mechanically damage the tissue and recouperate saving time and energy? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5jiwxf/eli5_if_working_out_is_just_damaging_and/ | {
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"You can actually build muscle with electro stimulation. By putting electrodes on your skin in the right place the muscles will contract with each pulse of electricity. It's not a pleasant feeling. My roommate had a stimulator for his back muscles when he was injured and to fuck with me he just threw the contacts on me. Fucker, it's unpleasant. Supposedly Bruce Lee use electrostimulation to work his muscles out when he was doing something he had to do that wasn't physical. ",
"Finally something I might have insight on! First off, you can use electric pulses to build and repair damages tissue. I have had terrible knees for years, I started physical therapy at around 17. However, the cartilage damage was so bad in my knee, that I couldn't build the muscle in a healthy way to keep my knee in better traction. Long story short I had surgery. I am 22, and recovering. Because of the nerve and tissue damage I cannot build muscle in my leg through exercise alone. Instead, when I go to PT they hook me up to a machine that sends a small electric charge into my knee, making the muscles contract, nerves reactivate, and swelling in my knee go down. Because of this machine I am able to do my exercises after with little pain. So, regular exercise is needed to build muscle quickly and healthy, but you can use electric shock therapy to help your body out! It is really amazing.",
"A big part of fitness is good heart health. You won't get that from electro stimulation etc. Fitness is called a lifestyle for a reason. It takes a lot of time and is a mix of cardio exercise, muscle exercise, and above all else proper diet. You cannot work yourself out thin. Not all calories are consumed at the same rate despite the undying and factually incorrect tautology that a calorie is a calorie. You aren't a Bunsen burner. You don't process all fats and sugars in the same way. Trying to work myself out thin and buying into a calorie is a calorie really held me back when I first started trying to get into shape. \n\nThere are no short cuts. That's why fitness is universally respected aside from in some groups of contrarians. You can pay to make it easier and you can live the life of leisure that makes it easier to find time, but at the end of the day rich or poor being in good shape represents a large amount of time and effort spent on your fitness. ",
"Depends on what you're thinking of - several of the comments refer to electro stimulation, which could work. If you're thinking 'I'll just cut my muscles and get stronger', that won't work. Your body adapts to the environment it experiences, so if you try it by cutting muscles, you won't get stronger, just a little more resistant to being cut (and this isn't much good either, because while it might make your skin/muscles slightly tougher, a knife can do more damage than you could ever hope to prevent with mere human tissue).",
"I have absolutely no credentials to back what I am saying outside my amateur understanding of fitness and weight lifting, so take what I say with a grain of salt. \n\nAs others have said, it is possible to build muscle with electrical stimulation, but I have to believe there is probably a limit to how accurate or efficient that stimulus can be.\n\nMoreover there is actually a brain body connection that is also trained when weight lifting. When gaining strength as a result of weight lifting some of those gains don't come from additional muscle, but instead from your brain learning how to more efficiently use those muscles. \n\nSo assuming you could force the body to build 50lb of muscle absolutely perfectly, it probably wouldn't be able to use much if any of it.\n\nA probably bad example would be riding a bike. Someone who can't ride a bike probably has all of the physical necessities to do so, but their brain hasn't learned how to use them to actually ride a bike. The same could be said of the artificial muscle growth above. The body might be physically capable of lifting 300lb, but the brain wouldn't know how to utilize the muscles to do so.",
"It's not damaging muscle and repairing it. There's also a lot of cellular signaling involved for nutrient/energy sensing that feeds into a complicated mostly opaque box of anabolic/catabolic programming that takes additional inputs such as immune signaling, DNA synthesis/repair, reactive oxygen sensing, etc. Also hormones and other signaling factor triggered through the brain. Working out is very complex. ",
"In the future, could we just have machines doing this to us and all have six-pack abs and great muscles from getting shocked while laying around watching TV? I hope so!"
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5q092t | how do composers write music? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5q092t/eli5_how_do_composers_write_music/ | {
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"It's all a grand formula called music theory. With Hans Zimmer and most other composers the steps go kind of like this: find a theme, build a central melody and build around the melody. Finding a theme is first step of the creative process and a theme can be deliberately sought after by a composer or it can just come to them. Hans Zimmer wrote the score to the Dark Knight because he was paid to write a Dark Knight soundtrack. Beethoven wrote his fifth symphony because he was contemplating his life after going near deaf. Think of this as the overall spirit or personality of the piece. The next step is developing a melody or motif, this step often includes most of the technical structuring of the piece. This can include time signature, playing directives, key signature and tempo. Think about the iconic Dark Knight theme and how it fits the theme of the movie itself. Or perhaps think about the easily recognizable opening of the Fifth Symphony (short short short long) that reappears throughout the piece. This step is probably the most important step in the composition process and is the heart of the piece. The last step is usually to develop a harmony and 'background'. This includes most of minor instrumentation, bass line and beat. This step is important and it's what separates a good composer from a great one, however it isn't as central to the piece as the first two steps.",
"There are common patterns, some are regional, others are from a certain era of music. \n\nMost pop music today (and for the past 60 years) follows simple progressions of harmonies (also called chords) that are satisfying to the ear. \n\nComposers will employ knowledge of what has worked and blend it with their own tastes and the feeling they're trying to project. \n\nSource: music student\n",
"Music teacher here, who often composes her own music (short ear tests for students) and helps students write arrangements as part of teaching. Your question has various facets, because music is a very broad subject.\n\n > How do composers write music?\n\nOriginally I presumed you meant actual, physical writing on staff paper. I'm old-fashioned and use physical staff paper. Most use software to mix instruments and sounds and write out the notes.\n\n > Is it by \"trial and error\" until something sounds good? Or is there some kind of \"recipe\" they follow to get what they're looking for?\n\nThere's no set method or recipe for when I compose. Sometimes I hear it in my head and write it down. Sometimes I'm playing something, play the wrong notes, and realize it sounds good. Sometimes I need to compose something on a musical idea.\n\nAs for Hans Zimmer's case, I don't know exactly what his process is, but I presume he has a copy of the script or descriptions of what happens in the movie. Based on that and his experience, he composes something to suit each theme (the incidental music on a stormy night, the motif that follows a character, etc.).\n\nThere are a few basic ideas most musicians are aware of, even if they're not specifically instructed on it. Playing in a minor key, for example, is creepy. Progressing upwards in the scale sounds hopeful. 3/4 time sounds elegant (waltzing).\n\n > how does he know what will sound good?\n\nThe short answer: a lot of practice and experience.\n\nThe slightly longer answer: music theory. There's a lot of background knowledge applied behind the final piece you hear. You learn what notes sound good together (chords) and next to each other (progressions), along with how music is built and structured, common types, combinations of instruments, etc. You can learn it by ear without formal training, but only a select few (Mozart) manage that. "
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a44r4v | if atoms have a positive nucleus with electrons that orbit it, why don’t they collapse into themselves? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a44r4v/eli5_if_atoms_have_a_positive_nucleus_with/ | {
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"There are 4 forces in an atom. Strong, weak, gravitational and electromagnetic. It's the electromagnetic force that's responsible for keeping the electron orbit stable. Think of a rope with a ball on the end and you're holding the other end. Your hand is the nucleus and the ball is the electron, now throw the ball around your hand. If you pull the rope the ball won't collide with your hand, instead, the ball continues to travel around your hand. The rope represents the electromagnetic force. \n\nAnother issue you can think about is that the nucleus has protons in it so how are they held together when they should repel? The strong force acts like glue to hold the protons together. \n\nTL;DR: The electromagnetic force and strong force hold an atom together.\n\n(Correct me if I got anything wrong)",
"There are many levels of understanding this.\nIn the simplest terms, one can think of the electrons as spinning around the nucleus in circles. In the same way as you feel pressed outwards on a carousel, the electrons don’t want to stay on circles but move outwards. This outwards force is cancelled by the attraction between the positive nuclei and negative electrons (opposite charges attract) so the electrons stay on their circular path. In fancy physicist terms, the electric attraction acts as the centripetal force to keep the electrons in their orbits but is not so strong as to make the electrons fall into the nucleus. \nLook up the Rutherford model of the atom for more detail. \n\nIf we want to be a bit more advanced (don’t worry if you don’t understand everything from here on, this is starting to get into university level physics), there is one problem with that description. We know from other fancy physics that when a charged particle moves in a circle, it loses energy and slows down, which would mean that the electron falls into the nucleus after all! The way we solve this problem is by saying that there are a certain group of distances between electron and nucleus where the electrons don’t lose energy after all, and the electrons are only ever allowed to be at these distances (this doesn’t seem like a good answer but it works well with the experiments - and since this idea we have gained a much better although much more complicated understanding of why some distances are special). \nThese different distances have different energies, just as an object has a higher energy when we lift it up (which increases the distance between earth and the object). The electrons can jump between those distances (or ‘levels’ as physicists call them) and can emit or absorb light (they emit light when jumping down and need to absorb light when jumping up to higher energy levels - you can’t get more energy out of nothing). This is what happens in neon lights, the electrons in the atoms jump to levels with lower energies and we see the light they emit. Look up the Bohr model of the atom if you want more details or mathematics. \n\nIf we want to get even more technical, we need some more hardcore quantum mechanics. Basically, the electrons aren’t really like billard balls but more like a diffuse electron mist, or electron cloud. The reason we often think of them as Billard balls is that when this cloud is very bunched up it looks like a solid ball from far away and it is easier to think and calculate with this image (even if it isn’t technically correct). The shape of this cloud that forms the electron (also called the save function of the electron) is determined by a certain equation, the Schrödinger equation (in fact, all matter and not just electrons work like this!). If we calculate the form of this cloud, we find that only certain energies are possible, for which the cloud has different form. And the distance where most of the cloud is turns out to be the Special distance that is allowed for the electron (nice when things work out). And none of these forms have any cloud right at the nucleus. If this last explanation feels a bit like “the maths says so, so it’s true”, that’s because it is - quantum mechanics is really weird and often the only insight one can get is to do the calculations and see that something must be true. ",
"Quantum mechanics is weird and quite counter-intuitive and there isn't really an ELI5 version of the physics behind it, but some explanations help more than others.\n\nWhile the \"solar system\" analogy of electrons as particles orbiting the nucleus in circular orbits persists, it's not really a good explanation of what's really going on at a quantum level.\n\nThe electrons are actually behaving in a more wave-like manner at an atomic level, smeared out over a certain distance - not so much that the electron is physically larger (it's not) - but that its state is described by a quantum mechanical wave function whose interpretation can be somewhat probabilistic.\n\nIn terms of position, the electron can be thought of as *probably* being where the wave function is strongest. In terms of momentum, though? It turns out that the more certain we are about the position (e.g. if we were to say the electron collapsed into the nucleus), we must accept a very high uncertainty of momentum. And as momentum is linked to kinetic energy, the total energy of an electron that is definitely \"too\" close to the nucleus is not only not certain, but almost certainly far larger than an electron that is further out but with a lower kinetic energy.\n\nIf you solve the wave equations, it turns out that the lowest possible energy state is a \"smeared\" cloud, and as you add electrons, they start filling the more complex orbital patterns you see in textbooks (as only one electron can be in the exact same state at once).",
"Gosh there are a lot of different ways to conceptualize this.\n\nThis is actually a pretty historically important question. Ernest Rutherford, the physicist who actually created the model of the atom we learn early in elementary school (Where there is a nucleus that has a positive charge and orbiting electrons with a negative charge) asked this question himself straight away. He personally believed that it was momentum that kept the electrons orbiting the nucleus, just like how the earth is kept in a steady orbit by it's momentum around the sun instead of just falling in.\n\nBut that conceptualization has some flaws. Namely, electrons routinely emit energy in the form of photons, so if it was only momentum keeping them orbiting the nucleus, that momentum should be radiated away in the form of light and the electron should still collapse into the nucleus.\n\nThe problem remained unsolved for a while, and actually helped spark others in the field of what became quantum physics. You see, that model of the atom isn't very accurate it turns out. The electron isn't just a particle in orbit around a nucleus, but rather it's a cloud of probabilities of being at specific places around the nucleus and with specific momentums. Note that the electron still does in fact have a much higher chance of being closer, or even INSIDE the nucleus because of the electromagnetic force!\n\nHowever, here's the thing. Heisenberg discovered that, for various reasons, you can't both know the position and the momentum of an electron. If we constrain the position of an electron to \"closer to the nucleus\", the probability density cloud shrinks in size and, as a result, the momentum of the electron increases. This increased momentum means it has a higher energy, and actually increases the probability density cloud, because it can suddenly \"afford\" to be further away! These two \"forces\" actually sort of balance each other out and create an equilibrium point where the electron is most likely to be that ISN'T actually as close to the nucleus as possible. We call this the bohr radius, and it's where an electron in a hydrogen atom in ground state ends up \"orbiting\" in the traditional model. It's, of course, not so much that the electron orbits at that distance but rather, statistically, it is most likely to be right at that distance.\n\nBut like I said, there are several ways to conceptualize this, and that's just one. You can also learn about it in terms of potential energy vs kinetic energy for instance, but I'll leave that to someone else. "
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g2dfxm | what makes rent so high in some areas for small apartments, and so low in others for relatively large apartments? | I don't understand how rent prices change so drastically based on the area. Does it relate to taxes? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/g2dfxm/eli5_what_makes_rent_so_high_in_some_areas_for/ | {
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"It can be largely based on surrounding areas income but it’s mostly just location. Are you in close proximity to a large employer (like a medical center?), close enough that people wouldn’t *have* to drive? Then it’s gonna be higher, marketed towards medical employees. It’s based on a lot of factors, but for most apartments that aren’t really near any significant employer but are surrounded by general urban sprawl, just check the average income for the surrounding neighborhoods and such. If it’s high, probably in a ‘better’ part of town. Low, ‘worse’ part of town and the rent reflects it",
"Supply and demand. Some people are willing to lay down more cash in congested urban areas, where that same amount would pay for much more of an apartment in rural towns with low populations that aren't as competitive with their rent money.",
"it boils down to: location, supply and demand mostly.\n\nthat tiny place near the beach from which you can walk to the city centre with the cool research lab where you work right next door will probably have more people willing to live there than the large appartement on the other side of the city, somewhere out in the suburbs, next to a sewage plant."
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4uh618 | why do bulbs (that glow white) become green and stays illuminated for a while? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4uh618/eli5_why_do_bulbs_that_glow_white_become_green/ | {
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"I assume you're talking about fluorescent bulbs. They work by having a gas inside which generates intense ultraviolet light when you pass an electric current through it.\n\nThe inside of the glass tubes is coated with phosphor, this is a range of chemicals which glow in different colours when they absorb energy, in this case the mix of phosphors has been chosen to generate white light when uv light pumps energy into it. \n\nWhen you turn off the power the uv generation stops, but the phosphor still has enough energy to glow faintly. The phosphors that glow greenish are most efficient at using the stored energy to glow so they go on longer and the light glows pale green for a while.\n"
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21ln84 | can anyone explain if there is any actual valuable take-away from schrödinger's cat? or just an abstract thought experiment? | I would like to clarify that although my question does infer the question "What is Schrödinger's Cat all about?" my question is **What does the cat do to help explain a unique phenomena we otherwise wouldn't know or understand, and what significance there is to all of it?**
I've read a bunch of documents, even saw the simple youtube video below
_URL_0_
but honestly the only way it comes across to me is as **"A tree in the forest that has a fell made a sound and didn't make a sound at the same"**. Is it saying that 50/50 events that aren't observable to people are inconsequential? And if that is correct, why would anyone even care about this analogy? Did people previously think this was neat or something? Very confused and my brain is like I'm 5 :)
Im genuingly curious. Thanks for your help. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/21ln84/eli5_can_anyone_explain_if_there_is_any_actual/ | {
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"Schrodinger's Cat helps explain the idea of superposition in quantum theory -- superposition being the idea that things can be in many states at once, and it's only once they're observed or measured that they take on a specific form (which can be influenced by their observation). It's one of those quirky things about quantum mechanics, but Schrodinger's Cat accurately describes how it works in a way that the layperson can understand.\n\nEdit: Formatting",
"To elaborate on /u/doc_daneeka 's point, the disturbing implication is that, in the box, the cat **is** dead and not dead. Not just it could be either. \n\nHe was in part pointing out that it's easy to say \"particles are weird so they can \"exist and not exist\" and just segregate that from normal experience. But if you tied that \"quantum\" aspect of the particle to something in regular experience, like being alive or dead, then it seemed like madness. ",
"Firstly, the 'answer' to the Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment is not agreed upon. We simply don't have a universal answer to what actually happens. If you read the Wikipedia page, you get a short list of what the different interpretations on quantum mechanics say. It's not like actual physicists have one opinion and outsiders have another. Actual high level physics professors don't agree.\n\nOkay. When quantum mechanics came around it was realized it said really absurd things about tiny particles. You couldn't know whether a particle was here or there. In fact, it's even worse. It seemed like the universe hadn't decided yet. When you actually looked directly at the particle, it suddenly seemed to be only at one place. Einstein was extremely upset and said that he may not know what God thinks, but God surely doesn't play dice with reality(he was talking metaphorically about God).\n\nIt's somewhat okay to accept these weird things about tiny particles. I mean, we can't really see them anyway. But what Schrödinger pointed out was that that's a mistake. He thought, what is true of the small must also be true of the large. And to illustrate this he came up with his cat experiment. If a particle's position can be at different places at the same time, why can't a cat be dead and alive at the same time? His experiment poses exactly that question. What is the physical mechanism that allows weirdness at the small scale, but not the large? \n\nAs I said, this is actually unresolved and there are a number of different possible answers. All of them really absurd.\n\n_URL_0_"
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3hduel | why is bed-wetting associated with serial killers? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3hduel/eli5_why_is_bedwetting_associated_with_serial/ | {
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"It is part of the Macdonald triad. The Macdonald triad proposes that three behaviours in youth (extended bedwetting, fire-starting, cruelty to animals) are indicative of later violent tendencies.\n\nThe thing is though, we aren't actually sure if the Macdonald triad is actually statistically a thing. Some studies say it is, some studies say it isn't, some studies say that those behaviours (among others) are linked to childhood neglect and abuse which puts a child more at risk of violent tendencies. The people who believe in this say that bed wetting longer than average can lead to feelings of shame and loss of control, which can then result in fire starting and animal cruelty (trying to regain that control), especially when they are punished by parents for this bed wetting. But like I said, there is a lot of debate if it is a thing at all.",
"I find them scary all right?! Jeez!",
"I think it's shame and bullying. The worst accusation you can make of a kid in grade school is that they wet the bed. Those who are known to are shamed and bullied and thus especially if the kid doesn't have a good support network he ends up feeling like people are assholes and that he deserves revenge."
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6q6lu8 | when watching a screen, do our eyes focus purely on to the distance of the screen or the percieved depth of the picture? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6q6lu8/eli5_when_watching_a_screen_do_our_eyes_focus/ | {
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"Purely on the screen. Same if you're looking at a photo: the depth isn't real and doesn't affect your focus."
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2yg1nq | do my dogs think i'm just a big dog? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2yg1nq/eli5_do_my_dogs_think_im_just_a_big_dog/ | {
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"It's hard to say what dogs actually *think*, but there are some things we can infer from their behavior and from their body chemistry. We have recently come to understand that dogs' brains are capable of generating oxytocin in the same way ours are, and under the same circumstances. When you interact with other humans, when you hold hands or hug or put an arm around someone's shoulder, your brain generates the hormone oxytocin, and this hormone strengthens human relationships. It's been referred to as the love hormone, because it's the chemical that seems to be most responsible for feelings of love and affection. \n\nThe fun thing is that dogs' brains do this as well when we interact with them. When they're being loved-on, hugged, petted, etc., their brains also produce oxytocin. Our best guess is that dogs probably realize that we are not dogs. They know that we're not dogs. They probably don't have the means to comprehend what we actually are, but they know we aren't dogs. But through tens-of-thousands of years of selective breeding, they've still come to view us as vitally important to them. They absolutely see us as part of their \"pack.\" The part of your dog that is still a wolf tracking through the wilds with its pack sees you as a part of that pack."
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4bt6pn | why do we only see fog when it is at a distance? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4bt6pn/eli5_why_do_we_only_see_fog_when_it_is_at_a/ | {
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"Fog is a collection of tiny water droplets suspended in air at or just above ground-level. They are too small to see individually but they bend light never the less. As you get further away, there are so many droplets bending light that the objects further away from you can't be seen because the light from those objects isn't (entirely) traveling to your eyes.",
"Fun fact: you see this effect in normal, clear air as well. \n\nIf you ever looked off toward the horizon, you may notice that the further out you look, a bit of a haze develops. Even in clean air. \n\nIf you looked at, say a building right in front of you, the details would be sharp. Take note of the distance between you and the building. That's how much air you're looking *through*.\n\nIf you go really far away and look at the building, even through a powerful telescope, you'll see that the details aren't as clear, and the color is a little off. The distance between you and the building you're looking at is much greater. Consequently, you're looking through a lot **more** air. \n\nThis happens when you're in fog, or air with pollutants in it as well. The only time this doesn't happen is if you're looking through a vacuum. ",
"Nah, you see it right there in front of you. Have you never walked through fog? It's beautiful."
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1pfzea | what would happen to you if only your head was above water for a long, long time? | Let's say you are given proper food, air, sunlight and temperatures. Also, what would happen given the above but your body was inside a vacuum instead of being submerged? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1pfzea/eli5_what_would_happen_to_you_if_only_your_head/ | {
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"Depends how long and what kind of water.\n\nThe skin is capable of passing stuff in and out of the body. If you're under water this presents a problem, if the water is pure enough the overall transfer will be water into the body and salts/minerals out of the body (bones and blood would have major issues). If the water is very salty the process reverses to drive up salt in the body effectively dehydrating you (this is why you can't drink seawater). If the water had just the right amount of all the necessary components then it's harder to say what will happen, I can't give you an answer there.\n\nA vacuum would be less forgiving, lets assume a space-like vacuum.\n\nAny moisture in your skin exposed to the vacuum would boil away, the skin would draw more moisture from the body and the process goes on until you're a dried out meat husk. Not to mention of course that your digestive tract is a hollow tube from end to end, if only your head was protected then everything would be sucked out the rear anyway. There's slightly more to it but the end doesn't get any better for you. The whole ordeal won't take long at all, only a few minutes at most.\n\nObviously less intense vacuums would be much less severe, but given enough time death would be the likely outcome. Our lungs are designed to work with equal pressure, if the outside of the chest is a vacuum then exhaling becomes more difficult, your chest will want to expand into the vacuum. While not as dramatic as in space your skin will still dehydrate faster than normal, this could make you bleed and, as air is required for clotting, it might not stop."
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cvqyfg | why are paddling pools blue etc instead of black to absorb the heat and keep warm? | Surely it would be better to have a black/heat absobant base than blue/white which seems to be the standard so that the water keeps warm.. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cvqyfg/eli5_why_are_paddling_pools_blue_etc_instead_of/ | {
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"Blue reminds people of the seas and oceans (or rather shallow water near the beach). Black would be creepy to many people (b/c it looks like deep water). \n\nAbsorbing heat can make the water too hot, and most pools are sold in areas with a lot of sun, and people want their pools to stay cool. \n\nLighter color makes it easier to see dirt, so you know when the pool is clean.",
"Blue pools are A) familiar and B) remind people of \"clear blue waters\". That being said, my parents new a guy who had a black bottomed pool. It was the coolest thing about his house.",
"Who wants to swim in a hot pool in the dead of summer?\n\nWho wants to swim in a dark pool?"
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3gzsfg | does poison ivy really get worse each time? why? | I've heard that every time you get exposed to poison ivy it's worse than the last time. Google results appear to confirm, but describe little more than your body having "the memory of the last infection" or something to that effect. Is it really worse each time, and if so why does that happen? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3gzsfg/eli5_does_poison_ivy_really_get_worse_each_time/ | {
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" > \"the memory of the last infection\"\n\nYour immune system has greater reactions to things it recognizes more quickly, and it recognizes things more quickly by being exposed to them in the past. I think this is why you can develop allergies to things like super powerful epoxy if it touches your skin too much. \n\nEssentially, when your body recognizes a foreign and potentially dangerous substance, it produces antibodies that attach to that substance and serve as markers for other parts of the immune system to destroy things. After the threat is neutralized, your body continues to circulate antibodies for that substance, in case it shows up again. Then if you are exposed to that substance again, the immune reaction is even faster and more dramatic as a result, because there are already a lot of antibodies for the thing floating around. "
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387aou | why are services like uber and airbnb considered by some to be disruptive to the economy? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/387aou/eli5_why_are_services_like_uber_and_airbnb/ | {
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"Hotels and cab companies are regulated and taxed, they have to follow certain rules in order to keep their operating license. If I rent you my house for a short stay or pick you up and drive you around the government doesn't get any tax revenue from that and I'm not bound by the same licensing requirements. Because the hotels and cabs I'd be competing against do have to pay taxes and follow those regs I'm operating at an unfair advantage. Of course I can charge less than Yellow Cab, I don't have to pay for official inspections or cab medallions.",
"When they're described as 'disruptive' it's referring to how they disrupt an industry, not the economy.\n\nIt happens when a business enters a traditional market which has an entrenched way of 'doing things' and does things in a completely new way.\n\nIn the case of Uber for example, they used smartphone, geolocation, mapping and app technology to disrupt the industry.\n\nEveryone with a smartphone can be their customer, and everyone with a car can be their driver. \n\nThat advantage is huge and when combined with the reduction in overheads it means they can outcompete most traditional cab companies.",
"They are not disruptive to the economy, the are disruptive to the barrier of entry for a specific section of the economy thus penalising companies that work in the walled in section.",
"Hotels have to adhere to certain safety standards that can be very costly. They have to have fire escapes, trained staff, emercency plans and so on. It's all heavily regulated. If you however rent your room with airbnb you don't have to have any safety measures. So you have an advantage that lets you rent your room out a lot cheaper than a hotel can.\nEdit: grammar\n\nAdditionaly especially in cities with very high rents airbnb can lead to even higher rents because it's more profitable to rent your appartement to tourists for a couple days than to rent it out long term. So while less people go to hotels people living in these cities are facing higher rents because normal appartements are converted in to commercially used airbnb rentals.",
"Everyone so far has missed the real reason these services are disruptive to the economy. All of these services, when you work for them, classify you as \"independent contractors\". Essentially, this means that you are in work for yourself. The company doesn't employ you, just provides a matching service between people who have a need and yourself. \n\nThis is disruptive because it's indicative of a greater trend in the economy. Post WW2, the political economy of the U.S. was built upon the relationship between you and your employer. Many of the social services and safety net programs provided by the nation state elsewhere were provided or supplemented by your employer here such as medical insurance, retirement savings, vacation time, disability insurance, etc. Now, since more and more jobs are considered independent contractors, and our laws haven't moved in to fill the gaps, it has shifted the responsibility for these things to the individual, which has some interesting consequences long term.\n\nIn addition, this also further highlights the changing relationship between capitalism and the individual. Originally, companies were very reluctant to engage in layoffs when they were running into hard times because there was an implicit agreement of mutual responsibility for each other between the two parties, reinforced through unions. Also, the number of people you employed was a matter of prestige for your company. Slowly, this he shifted to the current situation where companies are rewarded by the market for laying off employees quickly when needed. The next step is an ideal where you actually employ as close to zero employees as possible. I heard it described on NPR yesterday that the ideal form for a company now is a completely self sufficient and self contained money making algorithm that requires no input in the form of human capital. \n\nSo, basically, these services are disrupted because they're accelerating the breaking down of traditional employer-employee relationships and our \"old economy\" at a time when we don't seem capable of making the changes in our society that would ease this transition. Depending on your particular viewpoint, you might consider it to be increasing the overall misery in the world.",
"If you owned a multi million dollar taxi company your would also say that it's disruptive to the economy. \n\nIt's always about people with money getting less money. You can use my rule of thumb:\nIf a ceo of any company says something it bad for you, not safe, harming the economy, ect. It's becouse he is losing money. (there are some exceptions)\nRule 2: \nIf a politician says anything from rule 1 he is being payed to say that from said person in rule 1.\n\nTLDR:greed. ",
"Same argument the British used to keep the Indians from making their own salt. Artificially propping up a market is not a free market.",
"People are claiming that this disrupts business models only, not the economy. However, that's not entirely true. As far as AirBnB goes, they're highly disruptive to economies with a high cost of living and a large amount of tourism. I live in NYC, where there are thousands of AirBnBs throughout the city. People have been renting out multiple apartments and putting them up as mini hotels, which displaces people who actually want to live there. It ends up pushing down the number of available apartments in an area, which pushes rents higher and sends prospective tenants to up-and-coming neighborhoods, which pushes longtime residents out even further. High disruptive, indeed.\n\nFor those who claim that this practice is just smart business, I think the others below/above start to answer these concerns: these hotel/apartments aren't regulated; they aren't insured; there's no oversight whatsoever. Not to mention that they're blatant violations of lease agreements for those very reasons—not just because of greedy landlords (though of course every city has those, too).\n\nFor those who own their apartments it's slightly different, but also disruptive. I own in a Brooklyn coop, and its value takes into account a lot of things. One of those things is that I'm living with other tenants who (hopefully) want to be there long-term, and put energy into making my building more lovely, livable, and ultimately, more profitable. Having hotelesque visitors running in and out of apartments runs antithetical to all those, and ultimately affects property values (and my sanity level). Again, highly disruptive.",
"Because they provide better service at a better price than the older businesses in the local economy.",
"I think this is a pretty good example of people thinking government is out to fuck them, where in reality it's government doing exactly what they're supposed to do: keep the public safe (through insurance and safety regulations).\n\nNow, that's not to say cab medallions are extortionist and that corruption doesn't exist, but for the most part, keeping Uber in check is probably a good thing.",
"If you have the time, I recommend you listen to [this episode](_URL_0_) of the Freakonomics podcast. It's called \"Regulate This\" and it does a great job of presenting both sides of the discussion. I believe the production value is top notch and very ELI5 friendly.",
"How do half-truths/lies like this get upvoted? Uber drivers do report and pay taxes on their revenue (otherwise they'd be evading taxes, which is illegal). It's disruptive because the taxi medallions are an anti-competitive restriction used to artificially constrain supply and keep prices at above-market levels. With Uber, prices have lowered to market levels and a lot of taxi drivers don't like to accept what that means for their bottom line. ",
"Because people don't understand how capitalism works. \n\nIf you provide the best service for the lowest price, then typically you gain the majority market share.\n\nDinosaur companies that aren't able to evolve to match the new competition then get upset, and demand something be done to help them (see black cab drivers in London).",
"ITT: People saying: \"They aren't taxed or pay a license fee\"\n\nPaying less in taxes or fees isn't *disruptive* to the economy, guys. The government is not the economy. Any time anyone does something more efficient, it's a bonus to the economy. It's disruptive *to their specific industry*. Which makes sense, as outdated, less efficient business models *should* be disrupted by a more efficient, more versatile company.\n\nAlso, don't feel bad for the industries that are 'forced' to get a license, and thus have a 'disadvantage' when competing with companies like Uber. Those onerous licenses have acted as a barrier to market for decades - artificially suppressing the number of people in the industry and giving them far higher job security and profits than the market suggests they deserve.",
"Let's look at airbnb first. Let's compare them to a major hotel chain...Hyatt, perhaps. Airbnb has virtually no cost to add an additional room to their offerings. Hyatt, on the other hand, would have to build an entire hotel, staff it, and maintain it, just to offer *one* additional room. Airbnb has over 1M properties in over 190 countries around the world. Hyatt is has about 550 properties, in 50 countries. When you think about the economies of scale and agility, Airbnb has disrupted on many fronts. Not to mention the fact that they have 600 castles. CASTLES. Hyatt has none.\n\nNow we can think about Uber. As a company, it costs them next-to-nothing to add a new driver or a new car. They have disrupted the economy by allowing drivers and passengers to work/ride where they want, when they want. Uber has set the pace for the on-demand economy, empowering consumers and workers to rise above the scarcity-based economy to one of abundance.",
"As far as AirBNB goes, just in case no one has said this, I live in California along the coast. There are a lot of little houses, cottages and such. People live there, day in and day out, go to work, eat dinner etc. Then some rich fuck wit buys the house next door for an \"investment property\"... and starts renting it out on AirBNB... all of a sudden, your nice, quiet little neighborhood becomes a fucking nightly raucous party by assholes on vacation by the beach for 2 days and think that just because they have the days off, everyone in the neighborhood does too... that has become a bit of a problem.",
"Interesting note from airbnb's research, people who stay in their homes leave more cash, in more diverse neighborhoods than hotels.\n\nFor example, a tourist comes to NYC, there's a high likelihood they stay in midtown (where many hotels are zoned) at a Hyatt (to pick a chain). They (tourists)!cluster their spending in midtown, and much of the money spent on lodging flows back to Huarte corporate\n\nContrast that with an airBnB stay. They're much more likely to stay on the boroughs (or places besides midtown), they spend more on local mom and pop's and their lodging costs go back to the owners, who live (and spend) in that same neighborhood. \n\nThis data is a big part of why cities have gone from outright opposition to working to harness airbnb. ",
"Think of them as \"Loophole businesses\". They found a method that allows them to skirt government regulations and taxation to provide a advantage over their established competitors. The proper way to fix this is new tax laws and regulations to close these loopholes but this can causes backlash against politicians who do this. The elimination of these loopholes is happening now and this is why the backlash is happening.\n\nThe biggest loophole business is Amazon as it and other Internet sellers often don't require sales tax. Imagine if Walmart suddenly didn't have to collect sales tax and how much a drain that would be on government budgets. \n\n",
"I was just in Barcelona and was reading about multiple protests locals held to demand airbnb be banned. Their arguments were twofold. 1) Rowdy drunk tourists were now spread out across the entire city rather than concentrated in hotel areas. If an airbnb opened next to your home, it met an end to your sleep and peaceful evenings. 2) It increased speculation in the housing market, investment companies had a increased incentive to purchase residential homes, thus driving up costs, and possibly creating a housing bubble.\n\nThat said I used airbnb to say in the guest house of an amazing older couple, and saved a ton of money while meeting some great locals.",
"I feel like Uber is a service that lets you hitchhike for cheap, and AirBnB lets you couch surf for cheap. Without some regulation/insurance behind them, they're considerably riskier than established services. Hence, why said established services probably cost more.",
"Because big conglomerate companies aren't getting a cut and it's cutting into their business. Those same business owners stuff the pockets of politicians who go on a tirade and make media say things like it's bad for the economy. If you are a product, which most people are, they don't want you to own your own life and avoid paying the mafia like entities that control the world.",
"Big problem is they don't adhere to laws and standards that apply to taxi companies or hotels including insurance and licensing. Uber drivers don't need taxi plates, don't have commercial insurance of even first party insurance, and don't pay the fees that other taxi drivers need to.",
"Because of taxicabs and hotels?",
"Let's pose the opposite question, just for balance. One day, while you're complaining about your grandmother getting into a car accident because her Uber driver was driving like an idiot (or even drunk) and she wrecked her back in the accident that wasn't properly insured... on that day you'll be talking with friends, saying, \"Why isn't the government regulating this? There should be rules and limits on who can drive people around! There should be regulations and protections for consumers! I would gladly pay more for better safety and reliability of service.\" \n\nAnd then the owners of the taxi companies that have all become upper-end limo companies due to the competition at the bottom end of the market will shake their heads.",
"They skip the government mandated policies and laws and can make more money by contracting the work out to unlicensed taxi drivers who maintain the cars at their own expense. ",
"Unmeasurable, untaxable revenue generation means people think the economy is worse than it is. \n\nHowever, I don't know why this is a bad thing. ",
"These services consolidate profits that were once broadly dispersed by various firms with many employees and dependent businesses to one firm with very few employees. This narrows the stream of revenue resulting in the exploding billionaire count we are seeing now. ",
"_URL_0_\n\nAnother example are the old switch operators for telephone calls. those jobs were lost to the transistor...",
"apart from all the other good reasons in this thread, Uber and Lyft do scummy shit like charge you 4 or 5 or 6x the standard fare, almost randomly, depending on what block you're on. you could take a ride that would be $10 or $15 in a taxi and owe $75 on uber. and that rate can drop or increase dramatically within the span of a few blocks, so if you call the car to the wrong spot, you're out a lot more cash."
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dfgrq7 | what is happening when the body develops a cauliflower ear? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dfgrq7/eli5_what_is_happening_when_the_body_develops_a/ | {
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"The ear fills with blood and fluid that calicifies and hardens over time if it isn't drained and taken care of right away.",
"From what I hear most people don't have it drained, because it's one of the msot painful things you can do. \n\n\nWhat I never understand: Does the blood just clot and stay there forever? Doesn't it break down or something at some point?",
"The question has been answered at this point, but I don't see anyone talking about how much it hurts when it's fresh. I had a bad bout with it my junior year of hs (drained 5 times over a several month period). At it's worst, it hurt my ear to walk, because it was so full of fluid that it bounced. I still sleep on my left side because of it, and woke myself up during the night rolling over."
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7gor1m | if someone were pushed into a bottomless hole, what would be the first thing that killed them and how long would it take? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7gor1m/eli5_if_someone_were_pushed_into_a_bottomless/ | {
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"If they could theoretically fall forever, my guess would be dehydration would kill them eventually. ",
"The air pressure would get too high and they would die due to oxygen and nitrogen toxicity once the air pressure got over 10 atm, probably within the first hour or two.\n",
"Dehydration would be the first to kill them.\n\nDuring the fall you would hit terminal velocity, which simply means the speed at which you could go no faster. At that point, you would just continue falling at that speed, but the wind blowing past you would accelerate your dehydration.\n\nIf this hole were in the earth, you would just keep falling back and forth, alternating gravitational orientation until you dried up like a raisin.\n\nThere are no other forces that would be in place here. ",
"In 7 minutes you would be 75,000 feet underground, where the pressure would cause organ failure, unconsciousness, and brain hemorrhaging. It would be possible to technically be alive for another couple minutes, but by 10 minutes anyone would be toast.",
"It's heat - assuming you're doing this experiment on earth. In under 6 minutes you'd die\n\nThe earth gets really hot as you go down. The world's deepest mines humans go in are almost 4km down, and are so hot they require cooling systems or people couldn't work there.\n\nThe terminal velocity of a falling human in air is 195km/h.\n\nMost humans will suffer hyperthermia after 10 minutes at 140 degrees f (60c) or above.\n\nCoincidentally, this is roughly the temperature of that 4km deep mine.\n\nSo basically after about 90 seconds of falling you'll hit lethal temperatures, it'll keep getting hotter, so about 5 minutes later or less your body will just shut down and die due to heat. "
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23awy0 | how do google glasses work if i can't focus on anything within three inches of my eyes? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/23awy0/eli5_how_do_google_glasses_work_if_i_cant_focus/ | {
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"I've wondered this too. Commenting to keep an eye on this thread in hopes someone will explain.",
"You can't focus on anything within three inches of your eyes because the lens in your eye can't accommodate (become stronger) well enough. You can only make the lens so strong and it turns out that the shortest focal point you can get with just your eyes is around that distance, so you can't focus on anything closer than that.\n\nWhat Glass does is focus the light for you. A little projector projects light onto a prism (the glass thing) and the prism will actually focus the light onto your retina, so your eye lens doesn't have to accommodate.\n\n[See this infographic.](_URL_0_)"
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