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2pjacb | how do solitary animals protect themselves from predators while sleeping? | Provided they don't have a burrow/nest or some other such shelter. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2pjacb/eli5_how_do_solitary_animals_protect_themselves/ | {
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"Your provision nullifies the question, because that's exactly how most do it. They hide in a burrow or nest, even a temporary one, or high up in trees.\n\nSome also get caught and eaten."
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4ttdpt | how does talcum powder cause ovarian cancer? | Daytime television's law firms are fishing for clients in my area. How can talcum powder GET to an ovary to cause cancer -- how much of it did you have to spread around down there, for how long, etc? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ttdpt/eli5_how_does_talcum_powder_cause_ovarian_cancer/ | {
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"It's still not know for sure if it actually does, but there's a few factors to consider. \n\n1. Some talcum powders (prior to like 1970) contained asbestos, which is now a know carcinogen\n\n2. Talc is known to be an inflammatory agent, and a pretty potent one. Chronic inflammation has a link to some cancers because it disrupts the immune system, and your own immune system is your biggest protector against cancer.\n\n3. It is perfectly possible for any agent that enters the vagina to make its way to the upper genital tract, so it could reach the ovaries. If it reaches the ovary, it can cause an inflammatory response, which can lead to general tissue damage."
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6061l3 | what does it mean when a statistic states that exposure to certain things increases your chances of cancer by 5%? does that mean for the rest of your life? or just for a few days after exposure, and then you are safe? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6061l3/eli5_what_does_it_mean_when_a_statistic_states/ | {
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"Don't worry about it. I've known people who eat healthy and run marathons get cancer. People who smoke till they are 90 and die of old age. Healthy friends who drop dead. \n\nLive your life until you can't. ",
"It means that a group of researchers did one of two things. Either they studied a large number of people, asked which ones got cancer, found out what they did and looked for common denominators ... or they exposed cells to various substances in the lab and looked to see which cell lines developed cancer. \nIn short /u/cableguy406 is correct. These statistics are meaningless for an individual. They generally are published to sell drugs or make people afraid.",
"Statistical analyses don't always differentiate between the two. You might have a greatly increased risk that tails off over time, or a flat risk that remains the same. Either way, over your lifetime, you are 5% more likely to get the cancer than someone who was not expose.\n\nAlso, the increase is to relative risk, not absolute risk. If an average person has a 1 in 10,000 chance for getting that cancer, you have a 1.05 in 10,000 chance."
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3j3vxa | what happens to our teeth when we don't brush them? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3j3vxa/eli5_what_happens_to_our_teeth_when_we_dont_brush/ | {
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"The answer to your question depends a lot upon what you eat. The reason we need to brush our teeth to keep them healthy is because our diet consists a large part of grains and sugars. These things cause an environment in your mouth that is conducive to bacteria that cause our modern tooth and gum diseases. Archaeological evidence suggests that ancient peoples that predate the establishment of agriculture often times had healthier teeth than some modern people who do brush. The diet back then was largely composed of meat, fish, vegetables, fruits, and nuts. After the advent of farming, grains became a central part of human diets and thus tooth brushing became a necessity. \n\nOh and if you don't brush regularly and eat the way most western nations do (lots of grains, sugars, and fats), you'll probably start showing signs of gum disease in a few months and serious gum disease after a year. "
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3485lm | how does automated theorem proving work? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3485lm/eli5_how_does_automated_theorem_proving_work/ | {
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"First Order theorem proving, the most mature technique, define mathematical constructs that if true would imply that the program exactly satisfies its requirements. The constructs are built down to the level of each program operation. For useful programs, this produces a lot of statements. A computer program digests all the statements and uses logic to confirm the statements are self-consistent.",
"Automated theorem proving works as follows:\n\nA researcher has a theorem they wish to prove. The theorem is written out in specialised notation that makes it possible for the prover to manipulate the terms.\n\nWhat the prover then does is attempt to re-arrange, expand, and substitute portions of the theorem with known equivalent terms — and then check to see whether the theorem is simplifiable, whether portions cancel each other out, whether they can be eliminated altogether. \n\nThe goal of this is to automatically try to find similarities, or equivalences, in the theorem with statements that have already been proven. If a particular logical statement can be re-stated in terms of other logical statements that are already known to be proven, then the prover has demonstrated a proof for the theorem exists.\n\nSometimes it doesn't find a proof, but helps identify which portions of the theorem need further work, or eliminate or reduce the number of research fields that need to be worked in, in order to make progress on a proof.\n\nDoes that answer your question?",
"Imagine you are lost in a maze. At each intersection, you choose your path, which lead you to next intersection. If you make the right choose, you eventually find the exit. \n\nA human might try to escape the maze by making guesses about which intersection is best, using clues and intuition. A computer might to a brute force approach, and try a large number of paths systematically.\n\nThat is basically how they prove theorems. You start with known true statements, and rules that generate new true statements from them. You define what the theorem you want looks like, then have the computer apply the rules systematically to build an enormous tree of true statement, eventually hitting upon the theorem."
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3uxutb | "graham's number is a very, very big natural number that was discovered by a man called ronald graham." | My friend said "it's like he moved a stone and it was just there!"
What's a natural number, how does someone discover a number and what the hell is the deal with large numbers in general? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3uxutb/eli5_grahams_number_is_a_very_very_big_natural/ | {
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"It's not really that he \"discovered it\", it's that it's such an enormous number, but it still has an important relevance to advanced mathematics, which is something that doesn't apply to Graham's number + 1, or graham's number * 5.\n\nThe discovery wasn't so much a huge number, as a use for a number so large. You can't represent it by writing it out, like 30000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000. But even that is a hassle, so normally you see numbers like that written as 3 * 10^50. But even THAT wouldn't work for grahams number. But it doesn't work for this number either 3 * 10^1000000000000000000000000000000. But with that one we can represent it as 3*10^10^30. But even if you stack exponents up and up and up like this, it still wouldn't be able to represent graham's number: 3 * 10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10. Do this three more times, coming up with new notations to shorten how you write it out and you start to get close to the magnitude of graham's number. The fact that such a stupid large number like that has a role in mathematics is what he discovered.",
"a natural number is a number that is used to count the number of whole things like say atoms.... you can have 0 atoms or 1 atom or 25 atoms... but you can't have something like 1/2 an atom... atoms only come in whole or natural numbers. \n\nThe natural numbers (or counting numbers or whole numbers) keep going on, they never end... 0, 1, 2, 3, .... when does counting stop? In theory it doesn't... that means there are some really big natural numbers.... like \"the total number of sub atomic particles in the observable universe\". But, in theory, there is not a limit to how big numbers can get. Graham's number is a really big natural number bigger than 10^80, or 10^100 (a Googol) or 10^(Googol) (a Googolplex).\n\nI have heard it said that just trying to imagine all the digits in Graham's number can turn your head into a black hole. Suffice it to say, Graham's number is big but it is just a natural number like 0, 1, 2, 3, 4... it is just on down the line a bit. "
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4hwfnk | why is a vacuum the fastest substance for light to travel through? | Just like some mediums can increase speed of transfer (e.g conducting metals > vacuum for heat) | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4hwfnk/eli5_why_is_a_vacuum_the_fastest_substance_for/ | {
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"Heat and sound travel better through some materials because their travel is dependent on atoms of matter bumping into each other to transfer their energy (heat through conduction at least). Basically, they need a medium to hitch themselves to in order to travel, and generally the more medium available to them, the better (faster) they can travel, because having more atoms in close proximity means that more atom collisions will occur and transmit the energy.\n\nLight doesn't require a physical medium to travel through. In fact, atoms just potentially get in light's way, making things worse. \n\n\n\n",
"Lots of people in here saying that it's because light gets \"absorbed\" by a material but that is not strictly true. I mean it does sometimes, but it's not the cause for the speed of light in a material, or the refraction.\n\nWhat happens is more quantum mechanical in nature. The wave function of the light basically forms a resonance with the electrons in a material, which interferes with the wave function of the light, the result being a wave with the same frequency as the original light but a phase delay.",
"This video provides an excellent explanation to your question by looking at why light slows down in glass (sixty symbols video):\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThey go through and discuss a few theories that don't work so well, but at around 7:30 provides the actual explanation.\n\nEssentially, due to light consisting of an oscillating electric and magnetic field, these interfere with electrons in the atoms in glass (due to electrons having a charge, and charge interacts with electric and magnetic fields). These electrons then 'jiggle' around causing an overlapping oscillation in the electric field, creating a superposition of waves that travel through the glass at a slower speed than if there were no electrons to interact and interfere with the light. (My best attempt at an explanation and may not be 100% correct)\n\nAlso if you're interested in why glass is transparent, the same channel does an equally excellent explanation on this video: \n\n_URL_1_",
"Other good answers here, but I just want to clarify that vacuum is not a substance. It's not a medium. It's the *total absence* of substance.",
"When you're on the highway threading your way through gridlock, haven't you ever wished there weren't any cars- so you could just drive as fast as you wanted? A vacuum is just that- no other cars on the highway.",
"Vacuum isn't a substance. It is the lack of a substance. Since it is basically empty there isn't anything that can slow down the photons, meaning the light isn't hindered by anything. Heat is a completely different subject, since heat is atoms colliding. There aren't many atoms to collide in the vacuum and therefore it is not a good transferer of heat. "
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7z97z3 | what's the difference between government and state? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7z97z3/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_government_and/ | {
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"A state is a political community, usually defined by the control of a particular territory and the fact that it is \"sovereign,\" meaning that there is no other, higher government above it. \n\nA government is an entity that makes and enforces the rules for some area. \n\nStates usually have some sort of government. But not all governments control a state. There can be a city government, for example, or a governing body for something like the UN, that doesn't really make policy for any particular state. \n\nSometimes, government is also used to refer to the particular group in power in a state. So, in England, for example, the people who control the parliament are the \"government,\" and the government changes every time the ruling party changes, even though the underlying system of governing (Democracy/constitutional monarchy) remains in place. "
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9tkzm1 | with the massive volume of existing records, how is the uspto able to accurately determine patent/copyright/trademark infringement? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9tkzm1/eli5_with_the_massive_volume_of_existing_records/ | {
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"They don't consistently catch these things. Generally speaking if you're looking to patent something you're the one that's going to be doing the patent research to make sure you're not going to be infringing on someone else's patent, because that means you're going to get your butt sued.",
"The USPTO does not determine infringement, that's a matter for courts - intellectual property holders generally find the (potentially) infringing parties, and sue them. What the USPTO *does* do is examine patents and trademarks to determine whether to grant certain rights to the applicant. For a patent, the right is to prevent others from practicing your claimed invention (making, selling, offering for sale, importing). A trademark holder, on the other hand, can stop others from using the mark when it would result in a likelihood of confusion to the average consumer.\n\nThe USPTO decides whether or not to grant these rights to applicants during an examination process, which I think is more relevant to your question (given your concerns over the vast amount of literature that exist). Trademarks are easier, since you can just consult a database to see if anyone else has used the same mark (it's actually a bit more complicated than this - e.g., marks should not be merely descriptive, unless it has obtained a secondary meaning, and there's a few other exceptions as well).\n\nPatent examination, on the other hand, *does* have to deal with the problem of there being an overwhelming amount of literature in the public domain. When an inventor files a patent application, the patent office will categorize the invention into a particular group, known as an art unit, which [can be pretty specific](_URL_0_). Each art unit will have patent examiners that are (or are supposed to be, anyway) experts in that one particular field, and they perform a search to find prior art that relates to your invention. So, for example, if you invent a new type of manufacturing process for aluminum, the person examining the application will be trained to search literature relating to that particular topic (and will only ever examine these types of patents). If your invention is a new breed of avocado, it's going to a completely different examiner in a different department. \n\nPrior art gets missed all the time, too. There are mechanisms to challenge patents after they have issued by presenting prior art that would invalidate the patent. This can be done with the USPTO or you can challenge the validity of a patent in a court. For example, A sues B for infringement, so B might argue that, yes, we're doing all of these things we're being accused of, but A should have never been granted the patent in the first place.\n\nAlso, as for copyrights, they are never examined. If you want to register a copyright, you just fill out a form with the Copyright Office (*not* the USPTO), and then ta-da! it's registered. "
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28b2bi | when i feel a breeze, is it the air around me shifting or traveling particles from a far off location? | I was sitting at a baseball game and felt the breeze hit me. I can't see it, but it is moving and I would like to know what it is actually made of and where it is coming from. Is what is reaching me something from my surrounding that came to me from some long domino effect of air particle movement? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/28b2bi/eli5when_i_feel_a_breeze_is_it_the_air_around_me/ | {
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"Wind currents *aren't* waves moving through a medium, like sound. Wind currents actually move atmospheric particles vast distances, like flowing water.",
"Some background on the topic before I answer your specific questions.\n\nSo the air is made of atoms. These atoms fly in random directions. The atoms change directions when they hit something, whether it's another atom, something in the air, or you. This is always happening.\n\nOutside, when there's a difference in pressure, it causes wind. If there is high pressure to the west of you and low pressure to the east of you, the wind will blow from high to low pressure. This means the atoms overall are moving from west to east. The part of your body facing west will feel the wind.\n\nTo answer your specific questions.\n\nWhat is the air made of? Mostly nitrogen atoms (more than 3/4 of all atoms), most of the rest is oxygen atoms (less than 1/4). 99% of the air is nitrogen and oxygen. Most of the remaining 1% are argon atoms. Most of the remainder of that remainder are carbon dioxide.\n\nWhere is it coming from? The air likes to be in equilibrium, meaning the pressure will be the same everywhere. The sun doesn't heat the earth evenly, this uneven heating causes high and low pressure areas. The wind is caused by the pressure trying to equalize.\n\nIs what is reaching you coming from a domino effect? Yes. Atoms in air only travel an average of [68 nm](_URL_0_) before they hit another atom*. That's an incredibly small distance, 6.8*10^-8 meters or 0.0000027 inches. Much smaller than you can see with the naked eye. So the atoms in the high pressure zone have more energy from the sun. They hit another atom and transfer over most of the extra energy. This atom hits another and transfers over most of the extra energy. This happens in a manner of nanoseconds. The wind is just the result of atoms losing excess energy.\n\n*Some may claim this is inaccurate because this number is for a random movement and wind is systematic, but it really doesn't matter because there is always random movement and the number still proves that there's a domino effect."
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64wlfl | why can't we make two cpus work like we can with gpus? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/64wlfl/eli5_why_cant_we_make_two_cpus_work_like_we_can/ | {
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"We can and we do. All modern CPUs are multi-core, that means, roughly saying, two or more CPUs in one.",
"We can not only are most modern CPUs mad up out of several CPU cores that work together, but you also have mainboards that you can put more than one CPU on.\n\nThe problem is that not all problems are easily taken apart so that several CPUs can work on them at the same time.\n\nIf you have a big problem that you work on with several people you will try to take the problem part into lots of smaller problems that several people can work on simultaneously. Unfortunately often some parts of the problem depend on other parts being finished.\n\nThe sort of problems that GPUs work at can be very easily divided into parts that can be worked on independently. This is why you have quite a lot of cores in GPUs.\n\nHowever CPUs work on a wide variety of task many of which can not as easily be taken apart and often you have problems that will simply have to be solved one step at a time. Having more cores or extra CPUs is not very helpful for this sort of problem.\n\nFor normal computers this means having just a few cores and a single CPU is usually enough. For servers you can have 2,4 or even 8 CPUs with over a dozen cores each in the same computer working together."
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35k6bt | why are baby birds (ducks, chickens, maybe more?) yellow? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/35k6bt/eli5_why_are_baby_birds_ducks_chickens_maybe_more/ | {
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"They aren't all yellow. I'm not sure why they're more commonly yellow, but baby chickens are ducks are not exclusively yellow. Truth be told, most of the birds we hatched were more red than yellow. ",
"Chicks and ducklings are more commonly yellow because most domestic chickens are leghorns and most domestic ducks are pekins. These are all-white breeds that have yellow down. The vast majority of breeds of chicks and ducklings are not yellow; check out a hatchery website."
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6z8laa | how do rich and famous people contact other rich and famous people? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6z8laa/eli5_how_do_rich_and_famous_people_contact_other/ | {
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"Famous people, like 50cent, can get in touch with Oprah, through their agents - who schedule publicity events, meet & greets, collaborations, fundraising & charity events, etc. Usually, Oprah would contact her agent to schedule an interview with 50cent by contacting 50cent's agent - her connections are more powerful, her agents probably has the direct number to 50cent's record label and production team. If it was vice-a-versa, it is most likely Oprah's agent would either decline or schedule the interview for a later date.\n\nOnce 50cent and Oprah get to meet each other in person, they eventually exchange contact information. They update their contacts through holiday gifts, birthday cards, etc. Ever send your grandma a card, then write off: \"P.S. I don't live with mom & dad, I got my own place, please send cookies to this address.\" So, 50cent doesn't personally write such things - his agent does, probably.\n\nThis is why you're considered a *somebody* when you attend a large charity event, full of celebrities, a red carpet entrance, etc. because you might end the night with several phone numbers from the world's most influential people. You now have a shot at having an interview with someone who's widely at the center of attention.\n\nNow, you can make a profit on this, you can pick their brain, you can sell them stuff, you can do all sorts of things now - all they have to say is *yes*, especially their agents. \n\nBut if you want to contact, say.. Bill Gates. You'd do a better job at it through a personal letter addressed to his foundation. It will travel up the vine until it reaches him or his agent. It may be read - so it's sometimes important to send multiple letters. Most of the time you'll receive one of those automated *personal* reply back; but if you get lucky, you might get a genuine letter back from the man himself.",
"I work with a lot of famous people.\n\nWhen it comes to actors, most famous actors (even ultra famous stars) are managed by only a few agencies in LA. When I've had to talk to famous people on the phone I usually go through their agent or manager. I give them my phone number and they say something like \"Oprah will call you around 4pm today\". I imagine if Oprah wanted to talk to Brad Pitt (assuming they don't already have each other's number) she'd call her manager who would call his manager and then they either just exchange private numbers or set up a call. \n\nNow a days it's easy to block a crazy number so I find famous people are pretty quick to give out their personal numbers to people they are working with. Probably the most famous number I have in my phone is 50 Cent when I did a photo shoot with him and he asked me to text him the pics directly.",
"I was watching *Ellen* the other day when she interviewed Halle Berry and they were talking about the fact that there's an online dating tool for celebrities only. Makes sense, I guess, but how weird is that?\n",
"\"Have your people call my people.\"\n\nOnce you reach that level of notoriety, you will have a lot of non-famous people with whom you communicate on a regular basis. Agents, CPAs, tailors, private pilots, lawyers on retainer, etc. \n\nSo Bill Gates would probably ask his accountants if any of them know JayZ's accountants, and make a connection that way. Hell, it might even be the same person, or work in the same accounting firm.",
"Ive seen celebrities reach out to each other through verified Twitter or other social media accounts. Granted this could just be their agent communicating on their behalf, private messaging via social media seems to be the most efficient way these days. "
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4a140t | why are small dry-celled batteries (d, c, aa, aaa, aaaa) named so weirdly? what happened to the name b, and why did they keep adding more as instead of using more letters? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4a140t/eli5_why_are_small_drycelled_batteries_d_c_aa_aaa/ | {
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"Battery names were standardized by ANSI in 1924. The smallest was A and it went up from there. Later, smaller batteries were introduced and they were named AA, AAA, etc. This resembles many gauges where gauges past 0 became 00, 000, etc. The B and A batteries just fell out of popularity, along with the larger batteries past D.\n",
"Try going to the store and asking for B Batteries. \n\nDo you want B Batteries or do you have a stutter?",
"Today I told some people I had some double D batteries.. and then afterwords i though, oh wait, there are no DD batteries, thats only bra sizes. I hope they didn't notice, one was a chief. "
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16mnfg | what does if mean for a company to go into either 'administration' or 'liquidation', and what is the difference between them? | So HMV is the next company in a long line of companies to have gone into administration. I like HMV, and my friend works for them, and I know it's a bad thing so I'm a bit worried.
You hear this stuff happening all the time, especially with things the way they are economically. I however don't really know what it all means and, being a moron, I need it explained to me like I'm a child.
Thanks :) | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/16mnfg/eli5_what_does_if_mean_for_a_company_to_go_into/ | {
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"Administration: Someone steps in to run the company until a buyer can be found, new founds can be found, or they decide to liquidate the company.\n\nLiquidation: You liquidate the companies assets. I.e. You convert the companies assets into a more liquid form. Liquid in a economical term that is, i.e. money. So in short, they try to convert everything the company has into money. Mostly they sell stuff, but sometimes they will do other things to make it into money. "
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jtags | - "skipping a generation" - genetic traits | For example, my wife is absolutely convinced she will have twins because it runs in the family and skips a generation, and it's "her turn." what the hell? how does genetics know what generation we're on?
no fancy technical terms, legit explain it like I am five. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jtags/eli5_skipping_a_generation_genetic_traits/ | {
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"Genes get passed down in pairs, one from Dad and one from Mom. Genes come in two types, generally, 'dominant' and 'recessive'. Dominant genes are like bullies, they push other genes around. It only takes one dominant gene to make sure that trait happens. Recessive genes are like shy kids. They're only strong when there's enough of them working together to be confident.\n\nTake a trait like hair color. Let's assume black hair is dominant and red hair is recessive. If mom has red hair, she has two recessive genes. Dad has black hair, so he could have two dominant genes or one dominant and one recessive (and the bully dominant black hair gene wins).\n\nSo, mom and dad have a kid, and he randomly gets a dominant black hair gene from dad and a recessive black hair gene from mom. His hair will be black. Now, he marries a black-haired woman who has one dominant and one recessive, and their son randomly gets recessive genes from both sides. Well, you'd get a kid with red hair whose parents both have black! The gene has 'skipped a generation'.\n\nThat said, having twins or not is a very unlikely thing to have skip a generation. It's much more complex than just one gene that says twins or no twins. Your wife is probably just finding a pattern based on coincidence that doesn't actually exist.",
"Genes get passed down in pairs, one from Dad and one from Mom. Genes come in two types, generally, 'dominant' and 'recessive'. Dominant genes are like bullies, they push other genes around. It only takes one dominant gene to make sure that trait happens. Recessive genes are like shy kids. They're only strong when there's enough of them working together to be confident.\n\nTake a trait like hair color. Let's assume black hair is dominant and red hair is recessive. If mom has red hair, she has two recessive genes. Dad has black hair, so he could have two dominant genes or one dominant and one recessive (and the bully dominant black hair gene wins).\n\nSo, mom and dad have a kid, and he randomly gets a dominant black hair gene from dad and a recessive black hair gene from mom. His hair will be black. Now, he marries a black-haired woman who has one dominant and one recessive, and their son randomly gets recessive genes from both sides. Well, you'd get a kid with red hair whose parents both have black! The gene has 'skipped a generation'.\n\nThat said, having twins or not is a very unlikely thing to have skip a generation. It's much more complex than just one gene that says twins or no twins. Your wife is probably just finding a pattern based on coincidence that doesn't actually exist."
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evvqh2 | how does the 3ds 3d function look stunningly 3d at a moment's notice? what changes about the screen to make your eyes perceive depth? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/evvqh2/eli5_how_does_the_3ds_3d_function_look_stunningly/ | {
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"Here's a diagram: [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\nWhen the 3D is on, the screen displays two separate images, arranged in alternating vertical slices (AB AB AB). This is combined with dark layer (the parralax barrier) that blocks the backlight, creating two images visible from slightly different angles.\n\nOur eyes, of course, see from two slightly different angles, so you match that angle and each eye gets a different picture. Some careful rendering later, and you can fake a 3D effect.\n\nNote that the screen's resolution is halved when you turn on the 3D"
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pfprq | who the hell is jeremy lin, and why is everyone i know going batshit crazy over him? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/pfprq/eli5_who_the_hell_is_jeremy_lin_and_why_is/ | {
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"Yao Ming 2.0"
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5uc00c | what are the benefits/drawbacks to certain products being made "from concentrate". | For example, dish-soap. Some are made from concentrate and others are not. The same goes for food items like juices, which also are/aren't made from concentrate. What does the addition/subtraction of "concentrate" do to the effectiveness of the product? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5uc00c/eli5what_are_the_benefitsdrawbacks_to_certain/ | {
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"Concentrates of liquids like dish soap and juices take up less space on shelves, and in the case of dish soap it cleans better with a smaller amount when it's concentrated. As for juice, it's easier to get a taste you like if you start with concentrate, since you just keep adding water until it tastes best.",
"It depends on the product. Concentrate normally means they've taken water out of something to make it 'stronger'. \n\nFor cleaning products, I suspect it is marketing. The thinking with that would be we assume and associate concentrate with with being stronger, so a concentrate cleaning product must be X times better than a non concentrate product.\n\nFor juices, again it can be marketing. **NB**:Where I live, juice from a supermarket has no concentrate. If it did, it would be a fruit *drink*, not fruit *juice*. A fruit juice has 100% fruit juice, a fruit *drink* has some fruit juice (usually not much) + all these additives, sugar etc. In this context concentrate means they have taken some water out of the juice to make it stronger. They've then put some of this concentrate juice into the drink along with other things to make a new fruity drink. \n\nAnother possibility (common in fast food joints), concentrate means they've taken some water out, transported it and added water back in, all to cut down on transport costs. In McDonald's (again, at least where I live), they link the concentrated drink, whether it be Coke or juice, directly into the [dispensers](_URL_0_). The dispenser also has a water hose and when pressed there is some ratio of water to concentrate that is supposed to come out. ",
"For juice, it's typically worse because it's had water removed and been frozen, and then reconstituted with water vs. being fresh squeezed juice that remained juice.\n\nIn terms of soaps, it's usually better because they've made them more concentrated, thus reducing the amount of water in the soap... this means you're not lugging unuseful water weight home and you can use less by volume to get the same effect -- there's no need for the soap to have as much water since you're using it at the sink, in the dishwasher, or washing machine with water anyway.",
"Part of the reason juice companies use concentrate is so that they can keep their juice tasting similar throughout the season, despite different types of oranges being harvested from different countries even. By mixing the concentrates, it gives a uniform blend to their juice throughout the year. For example, when the winter oranges are harvested, part of their juice is added to summer concentrate, and part of it is frozen or canned. Then during summer, vice versa.",
"I'd like to believe it's more about economics. If you can manufacture and ship 1 unit of product that the end user can turn into, say, 10 units simply by adding water, there's more money to be made by the company, and money saved by the consumer. Water is cheap at the consumer end, but costly to package and ship.",
"For soaps and such, it just means it's more concentrated, as the name would imply. Dish soaps and laundry detergents are typically mostly just water. The water added makes it mix easier and measure out easier. It also makes it look like you're buying more of something on the shelf, so you think you're getting a better deal (12oz soap for $1 vs 24oz for $1).\n\nMost of the top juice replys are somewhat wrong. Juice (like orange juice) goes bad after not too long, even stored and refridgerated, and orange growing season is not steady all year. So science (florida university in the 1940's) figured out that heat and pressure can remove most of the water and many other compounds/nutrients from the juice to store for much longer, and then add it back when they need to use it. This leaves it tasting not the same as fresh squeezed, though.\n\nAlso, \"not from concentrate\" juice isn't really much different. Instead of freezing after removing water, they de-oxygenate it and store it as a liquid. This also strips much of the flavor and vitamins out of it, which are added back (usually added back from extractions of the orange peels. This is for concentrate and not from concentrate.) to it after being stored for up to a year. ",
"[Here is a great clip from the Adam Ruins Everything episode on nutrition about orange juice.](_URL_0_)"
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2fri0g | i googled "~" and this came up, no search results or anything. what happened? | _URL_0_ | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2fri0g/eli5_i_googled_and_this_came_up_no_search_results/ | {
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"In Unix/Linux (Mac OS X is based on BSD, which is a type of Unix), the ~ character indicates a user's home directory. You browser can be used to look at your hard drive, so it interpreted the \"~\" as you wanting to look at your home directory.\n\nWhen you say you googled \"~\", did you actually type it into the search bar on _URL_0_, or did you type it into Chrome's omnibar?"
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4bs92c | why is mentioning skin color is offensive and has a racist connotation. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4bs92c/eli5_why_is_mentioning_skin_color_is_offensive/ | {
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"Yellow is racist because it was used to alienate Asians back in the 18/19th century. Much like how \"Muslims are taking over the West\" now, it was \"Yellow horde taking over the West\" back then. I am unsure of Red as I'm not American. \n\nAs to why White is okay? It's because it doesn't carry any negative stigma towards caucasion people, in the same way as Yellow does to Orientals back in the day. ",
"A lot of it has to do with history. Obviously the US has had issues with race in the past, and that makes it a touchy subject, I'd imagine a similar situation in Germany with the third Reich. And with regard to the descendants of the people native to North America, there was the whole \"manifest destiny\" and various wars and battles fought to steal land from them. Or the Japanese during the 40s. This country doesn't exactly have a great track record when it comes to race. But then many don't, I suppose.\n\nThe other component is you can't possibly know for sure where someone is just by their looks. For instance, I remember seeing a picture of a black guy and the caption was, \"do you want to call this man African American? You'd be wrong, he was born and raised in Britain.\" And as you point out, just because you're from Africa doesn't mean you'll have darker skin. The term Caucasian actually refers to a particular place in Europe, so calling all white people Caucasian isn't particularly accurate either.\n\nThe point here is calling someone Mexican or white simply because of their skin isn't the full story. They could be a transplant or have a background you're not familiar with, and calling them by what they look makes you look ignorant.\n\nAs long as you make an effort to avoid terms, and proceed with caution around people, you'll be fine. Honestly there's no reason at all to comment on people's race - just leave it out entirely and you'll be fine. Thank you for being conscientious about this.",
"Well, let's back up--there's a lot there in your question.\n\nBlack: I'll admit that there's not a consensus in the black community about what people should be called. Some people like African-American, but you're right in saying that not all Africans are black. And also, I had friends who came from Jamaica or Haiti, who hated being called African-American. They would tell people they were West Indian or Caribbean. But I've called people Black & people who were black have called themselves black--everything's been fine. But, if you're using black in a way that makes someone think that they're *only* black, you might see how that could offend someone. It's not what you're saying, it's the context you're using it in.\n\nRedskin: It's a problem because it's what the European fur-traders used to call the scalps. As in, I have foxskins, bearskins, and redskins to trade. And those scalps were pretty lucrative--the government had a standing bounty on all native men, women, & children. because they were seen as dangerous So with \"redskins\" it's not so much the color of the skin, but rather bring Native Americans back to a time when they were literally hunted & killed.\n\nYellow: The terms \"yellow\" and \"Chinamen\" were what Chinese & other Asian immigrants were called when they were poor migrants working on the railroads in the Western American territories. \n\nTL;DR, it's not so much about the color. It's about what those groups want to be called. If you're labelling someone with a name they find offensive, it doesn't so much matter if you mean it offensively or not. When I was a kid, I used to call my brother a \"clove.\" It was a dumb inside thing--I think he dropped a clove of garlic or whatever & I found it hilarious--we were like 8, who knows. But it really used to upset him, even though the word \"clove\" isn't a charged word at all. For him, it became a charged word because it brought him back to a memory when he felt \"less than\".\n\nTL:DR Part II: Fuck the football team from DC.",
"Here's a general rule that I try to adhere to when deciding whether or not I can or should use a term. If the phraseology I'm about to use was ever used by society en mass to hurt, disparage, or isolate the group of people I'm referring to I don't use it.\n\nThat's where the connotation comes from. History. Oftentimes you're telling a group or a person they should accept this habit which for you is only a matter of convenience. For them it may have mean so much horror. Like a long history of never being quite American enough.\n\nIn addition under most contexts the skin color of the person or people has nothing to do with the interactions I need to have with them. Just how good they or I am at whatever needs to happen between us.\n\nedit: For reference I'm a Black guy.\n\n \n\n ",
"My wife is a white-skinned immigrant from Morocco .. when she got here she asked me why she can't put \"African American\" on her paperwork - despite the fact she's more African than any of the black people in the room. It's an interesting phrase we still use for some reason. "
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2b6erq | why does the salt and ice challenge hurt? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2b6erq/eli5_why_does_the_salt_and_ice_challenge_hurt/ | {
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"Salt lowers the freezing point of water; salt water can be 0, -5, -10 Celsius and still not freeze. Radiant heat from your skin melts the ice, ice mixes with salt, salt water rapidly and efficiently conducts heat from the point of contact into the ice cube, until the skin is the same temperature as the salt water (which, as we said, was significantly below normal freezing of water). The efficient energy transfer of water means the skin nearvy can't just heat it back up to normal."
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4o7d1u | why calculators have 789 on the top line (descending 456, 123) but phones have 123 on the top line (descending 456, 789) | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4o7d1u/eli5_why_calculators_have_789_on_the_top_line/ | {
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"Well the layout on phones is because Bell Labs did a study and found that 123 on the top was the best. Calculators is a little harder to figure out, [the wiki talks about it a bit](_URL_0_), but it's probably because very old calculators had columns of numbers with the [smallest numbers on the bottom](_URL_1_)."
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1sxxfi | how the imgur system can be over capacity for certain images, but i can still load other imgur images. | I'm not a website/network savvy person. I would just figure if the system was overloaded that nothing on the system would display. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1sxxfi/eli5_how_the_imgur_system_can_be_over_capacity/ | {
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"Imgur and other very large websites aren't run from a single mainframe, they have many different computers often in many different physical locations. \n\nIf only one has access to a given image and it's over capacity it'll crap out while other computers, if not also over capacity, can operate just fine."
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1eg2i6 | the latest irs scandal | whats going on? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1eg2i6/eli5_the_latest_irs_scandal/ | {
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"The IRS was targeting certain groups based on their political affiliation. They were audited more frequently, their applications for tax exempt status were not processed, and probably some other things I cannot remember. This was based purely on the fact that these certain groups, with \"patriot\" or \"tea party\" in the name, or those with a stated purpose of \"educating the public about the constitution\" or \"making America a better place to live.\" \n\nThe big deal is, these groups are (by and large) political opponents of the President. Additionally, at least one IRS higher up lied about it before congress back in July. \n\nIt is getting a lot of press because (1) these political groups have complained about this exact issue for the last two years and were labeled tin foil hat wearing conspiracy theorists; (2) Nixon did the same stuff which was a small but significant part of why articles of impeachment were filed against him leading to his resignation; and (3) the IRS Chief, Steven Miller, has \"resigned\" as a result of the scandal, but he told the press he was going to resign in June anyway. Which looks like a scapegoat.",
"wwvtarheel did a great job of summing it up, but there is one additional aspect he did not mention.\n\nThe inquiries made to these groups were much more intensive than were needed, and in many cases may have crossed the legal boundary of what the IRS is permitted to ask.\nFor example: Asking for board minutes of all meetings since the group was founded.\n\nAsking for groups’ Web pages, blog posts and social media postings\n\nAsking for list of all donors and volutneers to the group\n\nIn some cases, they asked specific groups about any conversations they had with elected officials or the media, and asked for transcripts of the conversation.\n\nRequesting copies of any web pages that are restricted to members only.\n\nOfficer Resumes, and lists of immediate family members of officers.\n\nIn short, the sort of information that would be considered highly confidential to most groups, and could easily be exploited by political opponents wanting to do opposition research.",
"John Stewart gives it a pretty good treatment:\n\n_URL_0_\n\n",
"The IRS was targeting for special scrutiny in their tax filings certain groups based on the fact that they had the phrase \"Tea Party\" or other such similar indicators in their tax documents. \n\nThat is all we actually know for certain. The head of the IRS was forced to resign in response to the scandal. ",
"Starting from the beginning, the Citizens United Supreme Court case allowed unlimited political donations to political action committees (PACs, the largest of which, now getting huge amounts of money, are known as super PACs). They were still required to disclose their donors, though.\n\nNon-profit organizations don't have to disclose their donors, and so a bunch of \"social welfare\" organizations were created to essentially launder money from donors to campaigns.\n\nThe IRS noticed the surge of applications to be a \"social welfare\" organization, noticed that many were thinly veiled political organizations, and so rather than investigating them on a case-by-case basis, used politically-charged keywords to flag organizations automatically. The keywords were definitely skewed to filter out more conservative than liberal organizations.\n\nThe issue isn't (or shouldn't be) the additional scrutiny, but the way the organizations were flagged."
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40t4o6 | the difference between non-brand name batteries that come packaged with toys and brands like energizer and duracell | That's it. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/40t4o6/eli5_the_difference_between_nonbrand_name/ | {
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"Sometimes these are packaged with non-alkaline batteries that are cheap and hold much less power.\n\nBut if the batteries are labeled \"alkaline\" they are pretty similar to the name brands. As with groceries, lack of a brand name doesn't always mean anything's wrong with it."
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1jx2m2 | how does the magic trick industry work? | I know there's a lot of secrecy around tricks, but from my understanding there are engineers(?) who design magic tricks.
Do these people go study somewhere to learn how to make the tricks?
Are there apprenticeships?
Are these people a super combination of engineer/psychologist who know how to mess with our senses?
How do they sell the tricks to the magicians? How do they market themselves?
I'm so curious, any information is appreciated. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1jx2m2/how_does_the_magic_trick_industry_work/ | {
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"Magicians typically design stuff themselves. They may hire an engineer to figure out how to accomplish what they want but they design the basics.",
" > I know there's a lot of secrecy around tricks, but from my understanding there are engineers(?) who design magic tricks.\n\nThe secrecy is, of course, required, to make the show worth while. Most good magicians do indeed design their own tricks.\n\n > Do these people go study somewhere to learn how to make the tricks?\n\nI don't think there is a specific magic school. You can, of course, buy a few books and learn a few garden variety of tricks. But I think the real way is to attend a real show yourself and try to reverse engineer the tricks of the performer. If you can't seem to do that, then magic probably isn't for you.\n\n > Are there apprenticeships?\n\nI am unaware of any specific thing like this, but it may exist.\n\n > Are these people a super combination of engineer/psychologist who know how to mess with our senses?\n\nWell no ... they just understand a few things about human nature. First of all, we have a thing called \"joint attention\". This is the idea that if a person you are watching looks at something and points to it, you will look at that object.\n\nSecond a magician's favorite tool is misdirection. Nearly all magicians tend to be \"overdressed\" in some way, or have some mannerism that is distracting. For example in the duo Penn and Teller, Penn usually talks unusually loudly, while Teller never talks. Their height difference is also quite striking. David Copperfield has unusually coiffed hair, and will often show a bit of his chest. He also tends to have a lot of over-drammatization in his act. These distractions help enhance the \"joint attention\" effect in various ways.\n\nThe third thing is, of course, a skill at sleight of hand. That is to move or manipulate objects in a way that is fairly hard to see. This includes palming, bottom-deck dealing and so on.\n\nThe combination of the three are then used to basically create a show where the magician is manipulating your focus of attention in a particular way to particular areas of the stage while they do hidden manipulations outside your focus of attention. This is the basic premise of a magic show.\n\n > How do they sell the tricks to the magicians? How do they market themselves?\n\nFor magicians that sell tricks, this is just a matter of marketing. For example if you search for Mathieu Bich, you will find he sells tricks.\n",
"Almost any magic trick you want to figure out can be found at the library. there are hardly ever \"new\" tricks. just a new way of performing them. \n\nCheck out [Penn and Teller doing the cups and balls](_URL_0_). in their live show they do a bullet catch. now that idea has been around since guns, but how they do it is different, but its still the same trick really.\n\nthe secrecy surrounding magic is more about creating theatre to make the art mysterious. \n\nthat aside, if you want to get into making tricks the easiest path is theatre and set design. think of it this way, Amazing Randy is the guy who comes up with how he wants to present an illusion, and Adam Savage would be the guy to build it. ",
" > I know there's a lot of secrecy around tricks, but from my understanding there are engineers(?) who design magic tricks.\n\nYou can break magic up into two basic branches - Up close, and far away. Up close magic is what the average street performer does. The illusion happens right in front of you, (oftentimes in your hands.) - I'll get into that more later. Far away magic is what you see at big stage performances, like David Copperfield and Penn & Teller. The stage magicians will generally design their own illusions, and will construct it with help from engineers, craftsmen, etc. who are bound by an NDA preventing them from telling anyone how the trick is done. I have personally helped a big-name magician build an illusion before, but I won't say who it was or which trick it was. All I'll say is that it was a large stage display and it was purely mechanical in nature - Often times, people can't figure out how a trick is done because they get so caught up in thinking of super complex methods. Often times, the simplest way to pull off an illusion is the best way to do so, instead of making it overly complicated.\n\n > Do these people go study somewhere to learn how to make the tricks?\n\nAs far as I know, there isn't a specific place, like a school, where you go to study magic. A lot of it is individual mind work, and puzzling out how others have done tricks in the past.\n\n > Are there apprenticeships?\n\nMaybe if you count the assistants who help the magician. They are usually well-versed in how the tricks work, and sometimes even help design them. If you're looking for experience, getting a job as an assistant might be what you need to do.\n\n > Are these people a super combination of engineer/psychologist who know how to mess with our senses?\n\nNearly all of of up-close magic is based on pure distraction and sleight of hand. Watch some videos on youtube of street performers over and over again, and you'll eventually notice the slight movements that they do to draw your eye away from what they're doing. If they're motioning to a specific card with their left hand and drawing your attention to it, you can be pretty positive that they're doing something else with their right hand that you aren't supposed to see, like switching to a loaded deck that was in their pocket. So yes, I guess you could say that they're good at messing with our senses, because they recognize how easily we're distracted. As for larger stage shows, those are generally illusions, and are mechanical in nature.\n\n > How do they sell the tricks to the magicians? How do they market themselves?\n\nMajor magicians usually wouldn't buy illusions from another magician, as they're generally considered to be trade secrets - If word gets out about how the illusion is performed, then it becomes absolutely worthless. Most magicians will instead design their own illusions. You can find some smaller illusions for sale, like card tricks and sleight of hand, but anything more than that will usually be kept secret, out of respect for the trade.\nI'm so curious, any information is appreciated."
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6ik0o2 | the difference between a war and a military operation. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6ik0o2/eli5_the_difference_between_a_war_and_a_military/ | {
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"A military operation is just that - an operation involving military forces.\n\nA war - using both historical definitions and precedence - is typically a conflict of *sustained* military operations, generally between nation states and *historically* declared as a conflict - which has both legal implications to go along with formality. There are also typically objective/long term goals beyond \"defeat their army\" as wars have a political component to them.\n\nIn other words, while the definition of what makes a 'war' isn't quite strictly defined, there is a necessity of it being big in scale/magnitude/duration compared to skirmishes or individual battles. There is also a component of a war that necessitate some level of mobilization beyond typical peacetime forces.\n\nYou can have border skirmishes - like the ones China had with the Soviet Union in the 1970s - where military's clashed in military operations. However, these weren't wars because they were relatively isolated situations, with no open declaration of conflict between the nations, and with no specific/sustained long-term goals of such a war.\n\nMeanwhile, the US was most definitely at war with Germany and Japan. There were formal declarations of war, the conflict was long and sustained, and the goal was the defeat/capitulation of both Germany and Japan which had long-term goals. And there was definitely a mobilization: over 16 million Americans served in the military in WW2, and 50% of US GDP was dedicated to the war. Both are obviously far more than peacetime norms.\n\nI'll also use examples of the post-WW2 world, where there have been next to no declared wars but lots of conflict nonetheless that fit into being called a war.\n\nThe Korean War, for example, started when North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950. There was no declaration of war. The United Nations agreed to repel the North Koreans, and the UN command - led by the US - sent troops to defend South Korea. The US never declared war on North Korea - because, from the US point of view, this wasn't a US vs. North Korea formal state of war, but North Korea in violation of the new UN's laws and thus was a conflict between NK (and later China) and the United Nations. The term used for the conflict was \"police action\"\n\nThe Vietnam War is another example. It was long and sustained as well, and large in scale. But it was never a formal declaration of war, because the conflict wasn't technically about the US defeating North Vietnam directly. Instead, the US goal was to defend South Vietnam from falling. That did, however, mean destroying the communist insurgency in the South as well as destroying their suppliers/supporters in the North (which was attacked via airstrikes). \n\nIn more recent time, you'll see the definition of war be stretched a bit further with the irregular wars of the 2000's. For instance, the Iraq War saw the invasion of Iraq end very quickly in 2003. What followed was 8 years of insurgency which varied in intensity and even goals, with much of the violence of 2006-2007 coming between Sunni and Shiite groups fighting each other, while the US and newly formed Iraqi Security Forces were in the middle trying to fight the militias and insurgent groups. It stopped being a traditional war between nation states, and more of what a police force would do to put down an armed riot or rebellion.\n\nIf that seems confusing - well, it is! As I said, the historical precedence for formal declarations of war have fallen aside since WW2, as state vs. state conflicts have largely been rare and/or minor and typically defused before growing bigger. Instead, wars have often pitted irregular forces versus conventional forces, and civil wars/conflicts internal to states have often been the biggest source of strife in the latter half of the 20th century and today, none of which fit neatly into the idea of war we see from WW2, WW1, the Napoleonic Wars, etc.",
"A military operation is a very broad term. It can be anything involving the military, including fighting, policing, maneuvers, disaster relief etc. \n \n \nA war is a large scale conflict between two armies. Nowadays war is regulated by laws and treaties which define what can and cannot be done in war. War must be formally declared to be considered legal. The internal process for deciding to go to war varies by country but is often guided by a very strict legal process. "
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anfz2f | what is the difference between income and revenue? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/anfz2f/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_income_and/ | {
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"Net income is your profit. Gross income is essentially the same as revenue.\nIf I make 1 million dollars but it cost me 1.2 million to make it my net income is - 200,000 dollars. But my gross income is 1 million.",
"Revenue is the money a company takes in from selling their goods or services.\n\nIncome is the money left after paying the business' expenses... things like rent, employee salary, cost of the wholesale goods or raw materials, marketing expenses, office supplies, and such.\n\nLet's say you run a lemonade stand and sell 100 cups at $1 each. Your revenue is $100.\n\nBut you spent $40 on lemons and sugar. And $10 on cups. Your parents are charging you $10 to borrow a table and set up on their driveway. And you promised to pay your brother 10 cents a cup to help ($10). So your expenses were $70. This means you income from your lemonade stand was $30.",
"I disagree with the people saying that Income is Revenue minus Expenses. I would call that Profit. \n\nIncome is a general word for \"money coming in\" (or not necessarily even money!) It can be used in many contexts. You personally may have wage income and/or investment income. The government has tax income. Businesses have sales income, etc. You can have \"gross income\", which is total income before any subtractions or expenses. You can also have \"net income\", which is your income after taking out all spending. You can even get specific and talk about \"income net of taxes\" or \"income net of healthcare expenditure\" or \"income net of x\" where x is any particular category of spending. This just means you're subtracting only spending on x from gross income. \n\nRevenue is a much more specific word that means \"gross income for an institution\", where an institution is typically a business, nonprofit, or government. It would sound weird to discuss an individual's revenue (except maybe if they were self-employed). I don't think there's much of a reason for this aside from cultural/linguistic ones. ",
"Income includes appreciation or depreciation of assets, which impact the present value of a business unit, but don't generate any cashflow. Revenue is just gross cash income."
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72xpkc | i read that we get goosebumps when we are cold in an effort to trap heat. so why do we get them when we are scared? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/72xpkc/eli5_i_read_that_we_get_goosebumps_when_we_are/ | {
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"They make your hair stand up on your skin. With humans this doesn't do much. But with furred mammals (that is, basically all of them except us and the ones in the sea) it makes them look bigger and, therefore, the thing that's coming to eat them might decide it isn't worth the risk."
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2prbvw | what would happen to me if i successfully assassinated kim jong-un, escaped back to the u.s, and the whole world later discovered it was me? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2prbvw/eli5_what_would_happen_to_me_if_i_successfully/ | {
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"Well that's really hard to say for sure outside of \"A political Shit Storm\"\n\nVery possibly the USA would have to extradite you or put you on trial themselves for fear of retaliation by China or some such thing. If the USA does choose to stand behind you it would seriously sour relations with China and who can even say what that would lead to. Probably you would be better off seeking Asylum in South Korea. Come find me when You do, I'll help you get a job.",
"Assuming you're American, the US gov. will intervene in the case of capital offenses that are committed overseas. So, no, we won't extradite you to North Korea, but we will prosecute you as a murderer under federal law.\n\nThe DOJ has the option to not press charges if another country's court accepts the case, which is why cases like Amanda Knox's are handled by the country of origin. Since we don't extradite to NK, the DOJ would prosecute you and (presumably) charge you with murder.\n\nedit: You could be charged with war crimes and brought up in front of an international court. YMMV. There are plenty of people who have been charged with war crimes that never showed up to court, since nobody really enforces those rules with force."
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4xbq28 | since the major network channels are already free with an antenna, why are they so restrictive for streaming? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4xbq28/eli5_since_the_major_network_channels_are_already/ | {
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"Your local NBC station pays a fuckton of money to NBC to be the exclusive provider of those shows in your area. So, no other NBC station can legally stream to your area. \n\nIt's really a matter of not being able to prove where the person is. IP geolocation is notoriously unreliable (mine, for instance, regularly identified me as being in a city over 100 miles away). \n\nIf a station can't prove that you are in the geographic market they've paid for, they can't stream to you. ",
"What are the commercials for? Odds are a good number are for personal injury lawyers, local furnature or carpet stores, and a shit ton are for local car dealerships.\n\nThose area specific businesses advertise with this station because it goes out to local people. If someone in Alaska watches, Bob's Ford in Maine isn't going to be willing to pay the station for showing him an ad.\n\nYes you still get the big national ad campaigns but they are only a fraction of total and even some of them wouldn't want to pay for viewers in Canada, the UK or Australia who stream over the web.",
"Check out _URL_0_ you can stream network TV as long as you have a US address to set up a free account with. ",
"I think all of these answer don't hit the nail on the head. NBC, ABC, CBS et al are required to provide free OTA programming per the FCC. That's it. They aren't required to setup streaming services for free or anything else. So what do you do when you don't have cable subscribers? Charge for everything else.",
"It mostly comes down to money - and it's not just major TV networks that behave that way, but also the smaller ones. Note: This list of reasons isn't all-inclusive, but hopefully gives you an idea how complex TV streaming rights can be. I'm sure someone else can fill in or update my comments, since it's been a couple of years since I've dealt with negotiations directly.\n\n* The network still makes more money from broadcast and wants to push viewers to watch the show on there. This seems strange, because one would imagine streaming it online would increase their viewership. However, streaming doesn't always make up the profits from more lucrative TV deals. If a show is new and expensive, then networks are more likely to hold back streaming rights so they can get a return on their investment quicker. They can always put it online later.\n\n* It's not just viewership that's a concern directly. It's also brand recognition. Take a smaller network like WGN America. I'd imagine many of us would have a difficult time naming their shows, though some are really good. They want you to know that this is **their show**. When you're streaming online, TV shows can just become another click and disassociated from a brand. That's a big fear of smaller networks. (My thought is that they should still at least place it online on their own site, but there may be reasons they cannot.)\n\n* Local affiliates get in the mix. If you're a small affiliate in Wyoming, then you're revenue is small as well. In the contract, there is sometimes a clause adding restrictions to streaming. Depending on the structure, that means the company (say, Hulu or even the networks' own site) must negotiate new terms with many different affiliates. I bet that's required by the local affiliate too. But it's not on NBC, which likely has a different affiliate setup. Apple apparently ran straight into this wall when trying to build their own streaming service. See that affiliate logo on the video when you stream on ABC's website?\n\n* Music clearance: It's easy to forget that musicians have to get paid :) Rights to some songs are still negotiated on a distribution basis - what's available on TV isn't necessarily automatically available online. This is especially true of live shows, which is why you don't see many musical performances from SNL from the early 2000s online. It's rare, but it happens with non-live shows too. If networks have the rights to use the music online for a limited time, then they are often required to pay for re-editing the show with new music in order to keep it online after that window is passed.\n\n* Country restrictions: \"Why can't Company X or Show Y stream in my country?\" is a really popular question. Though it's outside the bounds of your query, I'll toss it on here. Simply put, take the thing I said about sometimes having to negotiate with various local affiliates and multiply it out by every country. Then, add on that in some countries, rights to shows are sold on a **regional basis within that country**. Companies can make it work - Netflix is starting to do so. However, it's a real nightmare and costs a crap-ton of time and of course money. (e.g. Netflix still isn't profitable but expects to be sometime in 2017.)",
"Broadcasting is indiscriminate and one way- the information is just being blasted into the air and you pick it up where ever you can get a signal. Its pretty costly upfront but very cheap to add more users (~free). You just need a device to capture and make sense of the information out there (antenna and TV). \n\nStreaming through the internet is two way, which means traffic. Here's the cynical side of things- since its now two way, they can track each user and make them pay. But to be fair, not everyone is asking for the same thing at the same time. Everyone is requesting the information separately, so someone has to pay for bandwidth for each extra user. And now you have information from millions of people flying back and forth, which takes a lot of capital, know-how, IP, innovation- it takes a lot of work. And were asking for more and more and more data from these suppliers. \n",
"This is complicated and hard to ELI5\n\nBroadcast networks (NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox) sign affiliation deals with local TV stations to carry their programming. Sometimes they own the local station themselves (in major markets like LA or NY) but most of the time the local station is a wholly independent company.\n\nThese affiliation deals give the local TV station the exclusive right to broadcast the TV shows offered by those networks in their geographic area. The reason for this is that the local TV station sells advertising in those shows, advertising that they can guarantee will be seen by people in that geographic area. So, ads for your local grocery store or a local or state election or national election if you're in a swing state, local car dealers, etc.\n\nIf you were allowed to watch an online stream, you would circumvent the local ad sales, and the network programming would be less valuable to the local TV station. \n\nAbove is the primary reason you can't stream online network TV, even if you \"pay\" for it through a Hulu account.\n\nSecondarily is retransmission fees from cable companies:\n\nWay back in the 80s/90s, local TV did not charge cable companies to carry their stations. CNN, HBO, TNT, ESPN, etc charge your cable company for the right to carry their channels but local broadcast stations were just carried with no compensation given to the local station. That changed in the late 90s/early 00s and local stations were given the option to charge for their signal if it was carried on a paid TV service. This is not required, and stations can request carriage for free. So, the big network stations immediately started charging. This means to carry your local ABC station, Comcast has to pay that local station. In most markets, 90%+ of TV viewers get their TV through some kind of subscription service (cable, satellite, phone company). So, 90% of their viewers are paying for local channels. \n\nThe moral of this part of the story is that even if they were able to geo-locate your IP address, they don't want to stream online because that would incentivize people to drop cable. They just eat it on broadcast because it's a pain to put up an antenna and in most suburban and sprawling TV markets, tons of people can't pick up the signal. Streaming would eliminate that \"forced\" paid viewing. \n\nEDIT:\n\nAnd finally the reason they don't go to paid online streaming is because their contracts with the cable company prevents that. Just like the local TV/network affiliate agreement is structured to protect the local station's advertising, the local TV/cable company agreement is structured to protect the cable company's subscriber numbers. Comcast isn't going to pay $1.50 per subscriber if local Fox is going to give you a way to watch online for free or cheaper than Comcast can charge. And local Fox isn't prepared to give up that income from Comcast while they build up the online streaming customer base. There would be a gap and it would be costly.",
"You've nailed a rather absurd result of a legal technicality created by a series of cases regarding the FCC.\n\nIt is illegal to take and rebroadcast airwaves for profit. However, it is legal to just take the airwaves and broadcast it in your own home. Then why can't we just use an **online** tool as an antenna to the same effect? Thats a damn good question and the unfortunate/short answer is \"because the courts say we can't.\" \n\nIt was this same legal absurdity you have identified that led to the creation of the company **Aereo**. \n\nAereo is a gleaming example of how absurd this legal technicality actually is. \n\nAereo got a bunch of signal receivers and captured all the TV shows. A consumer could then buy one of these receivers that Aereo was storing at their company and Aereo would send them *the consumer's* signal from *the consumer's* receiver. To do this, they **streamed** the signal to the consumer over the internet. \n\nWhats the difference between this and cable? Nothing except, as the other comments have noted, it would make for lost profits of companies like ABC who make money from bundling crappy networks in with decent networks and making you pay for all of them all the same. \n\nHowever, the court saw this as a company exploiting a legal technicality and prohibited it. To learn more about Aereo from someone who is vastly more knowledgable in the subject than I am, go [here](_URL_0_).\n\nThe other comments on here are mostly along the line of \"because they wanted money,\" or \"because it is profitable/here is how it is profitable.\" Appreciating that corporation's sole purpose is to make money, these answers wouldn't really seem to shed any light on the matter. However, because there is NO other reason - they are the most right. ",
"believe it or not, music / ascap rights underneath the commercials. it depends on how the contract was written. \n\nedit: also the negotiated fee for adbuys would ballon because they are now reaching a wider audience. a lot of local businesses cant afford that, and account execs can't give that away. slippery slope. not to say that won't happen in the future though, because that is how is all going ",
" > why does (person, company, government) do _______? \n\n$",
"I don't know why everyone is making this so complicated, it's simple.\n\nThe major networks produce shows. These networks then have contracts with your local TV station. \n\nSo CBS makes CBS shows, that they then sell to your local CBS 3 station. \n\nIf CBS put those shows on the internet for free, why would you watch CBS 3?!?! CBS 3 has a contract for exclusive access to those channels in your geographic area. Per the contract, there can be no other way to watch CBS nightly news (for example) inside the coverage area the station owns. Putting that content on the internet would violate that contract, plain and simple. \n\n\n"
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2nk4xh | what's the papery feel i get on my tongue when i burn it? | Also can be described as sand on my tongue or roughness | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2nk4xh/eli5_whats_the_papery_feel_i_get_on_my_tongue/ | {
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"I believe it is because your taste buds have been burnt off or killed so to speak. ",
"The nerves in your tongue which give sensory information to the brain have been damaged. ",
"a normal tongue has more nerve end density than your palate, so when you lick the roof of your mouth you notice the texture of your smooth palate rather than your rough tongue. when you burn your tongue, you temporarily lose sensitivity there so when you do the same lick, you don't really notice the palate anymore but how rough your tongue is. "
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333njs | how does google maps manage to get images of the insides of a business so that it can give virtual tours through google maps? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/333njs/eli5how_does_google_maps_manage_to_get_images_of/ | {
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"They ask the people, \"Ey yo homie, we be able to take pictures all up in here?\" And work from there.",
"I happen to know the owner of a small business (a neighborhood cafe) that was photographed by Google. He told me they called on the phone and asked permission and he gave it. Later they came and photographed his business, but they didn't even tell him they had been there. The owner didn't know that the photos had been posted on Google Street View until I accidentally discovered it and I told him. ",
"_URL_0_\n\nGoogle has many interesting technologies on how they collect this information. From satellites, to cars, to bikes, to backpacks. It requires photographs from billions of sources to do their magic.\n\nImagine taking a trip anywhere in the world and you remembering each moment forever. Then do it again! And if you go back to the same place again, you can remember exactly how it was the last time you were there.\n\nGoogle shows you the most recent time it remembered being where you were. (Based on when Google was last there)",
"Also a good marketing tool for some businesses. I believe you can also utilize some of the photos for your own promo material. A good way to get professional photos and get your business out there depending on the location / company. ",
"You can pay certified photographers to create it. [Google has their own list](_URL_0_)"
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3ot4ky | why do some some semi-trucks have deathly gladiator like daggers on the side of their tires? | I swear one almost ran me off the road | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ot4ky/eli5_why_do_some_some_semitrucks_have_deathly/ | {
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"Truckers like to stick things on their trucks. Those spikes are just ornamental and covering the lug nuts. They will pop right off as soon as they touch anything with some force. Mere contact with a truck moving at any speed is going to mess you up. ",
"Truck tires and trailer tires have metal flat bars attached to the rims, which stick out past the tire, so the driver can tell if he/she has a wheel locked up. \n\nA machine that heavy can drag a wheel that's not spinning without any loss in power or maneuverability. ",
"They are used as nut covers for the lug nuts. Their actual purpose is to keep the dirt and moisture out of the threads of the wheel studs. As a heady duty mechanic in the industry I can honestly say they do what they are intended to do. When they get all rusty and corroded it means a little more work for me.\n\nDo they need to be 4 inches long and spiked? No. Most truckers just use a standard wheel nut cover. The fancy ones are just a way for the driver to feel like he is better than everyone else. "
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98giwt | how does a body that's extremely out shape adapt to higher amounts of cardio? | Does heartrate/intensity determine how much better you'll become? Do you "get a little better" each time? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/98giwt/eli5_how_does_a_body_thats_extremely_out_shape/ | {
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"Anecdotally, that has been my experience. If you literally do 1 minute one day. Then 2 the next. And add a minute each day, you'll get to 30 minutes by the end of the month. Gradually increase your intensity. Take your time and it will keep getting easier and easier. ",
"There are metabolic changes that start when you exercise regularly. \nOne of the first things that happens is that the number of mitochondria in your cells increases. Your body literally makes more of them per cell. \nAnd we all know what they do...."
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dijesg | why aren’t there usually dentists in hospitals? | Almost every medical need you have can be fulfilled in a hospital except for dentistry work, why? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dijesg/eli5_why_arent_there_usually_dentists_in_hospitals/ | {
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"Some surgeons do \"dental\" work,like removing wisdom teeth, but usually just when there is a need for anesthesia . \n\nIn general though your regular dentist does not interact life threatening situations, very serious illnesses like cancer, has nothing to do with childbirth, accidents. Essentially a dentist isn't needed at most hospitals.\n\nBut I'm sure somewhere there are certain hospitals that might have dentists for some reason though",
"The better question would be why are dental and health insurance separated? From what I can recall modern medicine shows that people with healthcare insurance but no dental insurance have a higher rate of heart, cardiovascular and respiratory issues.",
"If you were setting up the medical professions from scratch today, they probably would be done together, but they (doctors and dentists) separated as professions hundreds of years ago. They are educated differently in different places. In the UK at least there’s still a strange separation between doctors and surgeons too, but I think that’s less of a thing in the USA.",
"My local hospital (Ipswich, UK) has a whole dentistry department - very common in our hospitals. They tend to deal with work that a normal dentist is reluctant to do, e.g. work involving general anaesthesia.",
"I was told by an ER nurse that they have a dental surgeon on call in cases of severe teeth problems.",
"Here in Aus, emergency dentistry is accessible at hospital Emergency Departments and Surgical Units. Predominantly used by victims of car crashes or other violence.",
"A hospital I worked at had a small dental department, under the label \"oral and maxillofacial surgery.\"",
"From experience in my family, there is a dentist \"on call\" at some hospitals. I dont think they work there, but they have someone that is ready for emergencies.\n\nWhen we were in colorado skiiing years ago on vacation, my dad had a tooth that got infected and woke him up at 1am in exruciating pain. So he went to the hospital and got some pain killers while they called in a dentist who gave him a root canal at 3am.\n\nSo they are availible, but probably pretty rare to have to have emergency dental work when no dentists are open.",
"my local hospital has a dentist but i just happen to live near a major hospital if not the biggest in the state. i was in there for a dental surgery but i had to go under in order for them to do the surgery but we also have specialized dental surgeries where the longer surgeries usually take place",
"Oral surgeons are dentists and needed in hospitals to make sure teeth align when repairing injured jaws",
"Your PCP likely isn’t in the hospital neither is your dentist. These visits r typically in and out, which isn’t what a hospital caters to. For extensive dental surgery, one would still likely go to an ambulatory surgical site similar to many other an ambulatory surgical specialty center. Hospitals will sometimes have a dental oral surgeon on board for traumatic jaw and mouth injuries that cannot wait. \n\nAmbulatory = medical clinic/not a hospital.",
"They do, oral surgeons are a must for a tier one trauma center. But in that case the hospital and by extension the surgeon is concerned with saving your life or stabilizing your condition rather than cosmetic work. If you smash your jaw to pieces you go to the hospital because it's an emergency, they will have someone who can piece you back together, wire your jaw shut and make sure you don't bleed out, but that isn't the time nor the place to make sure you have a pretty smile afterwards.\n\n After your jaw has healed, you would go to a specialist for further work, ie a dentist, the same way a hospital may give you a soon graft, but your still more likely to go to a plastic surgeon to fix the scar after it heals."
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92o5zu | water is transparent but a stream of water has shadow. | I was waiting for the bus and I realized that the fountain upwards stream had shadow, but since water is transparent how is this possible? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/92o5zu/elif_water_is_transparent_but_a_stream_of_water/ | {
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"It's because water isn't totally transparent. It blocks some light. Technically it's translucent.\n\nGather enough of it together it can cast a shadow.",
" In order to see something, light needs to strike that thing and bounce into your eye. You can see water, so at least some light is being reflected. That light doesnt hit the surface behind the water, so it leaves a shadow. ",
"Mostly, this depends on the shape of the water.\n\nWhen light moves from air to water or back, it bends (refracts) based on the angle it hits the water or air. Because a stream of water is round, the light bounces away from the stream when passing through it, leaving a shadow where the light didn't end up.\n\nThis is why the bottom of a pool is not in shadow: the light hits the top of the pool mostly straight, and so continues to the bottom. If it is refracted, it is all bends the same direction, so you still get an even amount of light at the bottom.\n\nSimilarly, if you have ever seen a waterbug, or other lightweight object floating on the surface of a pool, you will notice they create round shadows where they touch the water. This is because they make \"dents\" in the water which bend the light away and leave a dark spot.\n\nThe opposite effect happens with light from air to glass: a magnifying glass concentrates the light by bending it inward.\n\nTL;DR: light bends when it hits the water. If the shape of the water is round or curved, all the light bends away from the water, leaving a shadow.\n\n",
"Two things combine for this: refraction and reflection\n\nIt's like how you see the ocean sparkle with light from the sun, some light is reflected away, even if it's clear. \n\nRefraction redirects the light. Just like how a lens can focus light on one point, water will focus the light in random directions, since it is moving. The net effect of this leaves a little bit less light going directly through the water, since it is probably going to be interrupted at some point.",
"Here's the simplest explanation I can come up with:\n\nYou can see the water, right? That means that *some* of the light that's hitting it is bouncing off the surface of the water to reflect into your eyes...so it's blocking *some* of the light, hence the shadow.\n\nIf you look closely at the shadow you'll see it's not as dark as a shadow cast by an totally opaque object. some light gets through, some doesn't.",
"A block of glass is transparent and won't cast much of a shadow. But a bunch of clear glass marbles will.\n\nThe steam that we see is water in a gaseous state condensing in air and becoming liquid again, forming tiny water droplets, like many tiny marbles. The same happens when a fountain sprays water.\n\nWater acts like a prism. While it lets light through, it also changes its path slightly. Do this once (one big body of water, one big block of glass, etc) and the water appears transparent because the light's path is only changed a tiny bit. But do this many many times, and the many changes of the light's path lead to light being lost, creating a shadow.",
"Light can go through water, but it comes out bent in a different direction. The places that light gets bent away from are in shadow.",
"Well... The most accurate explanation for this is the turbulent flow of water.\n\nTake the example of white water rafting.\nIt gets its name because of how the water in the river appears to be white.\nThis is due to the fact that inside the river, there are various small, powerful streams of water that are flowing in different directions and collide with each other. This collision, creates air bubbles. Air and water have different refractive indices, so they trap the light that falls on them. This is why the water appears white and shiny.\n\nBut, if every water particle flows in the same direction, there would be no turbulence and the water would be completely transparent.\n\nNow, coming to your stream example, shadows appear due to small streams within the water body flowing in different directions, and catching the light at a different angle than the rest of the water.",
"Congrats, you now have a solid example of the difference between transparent and invisible. ",
"The water stream has an odd shape to it, letting the water be visible. You can see water because the light is being refracted at a different angle, which is why water is not invisible like air. The same way you can't see though a water stream very clearly is how light tries to go through water in the lumpy shape of a stream. There will be less light that goes straight through, leaving a shadow.",
"Take the lenses from eyeglasses - whether the magnifying glass type or the other. Try to image a point source (like the sun or a light bulb) on a piece of paper on the ground. The light coming through the lens area will be concentrated or spread out, depending on distance. Similarly a stream of water will cause the light to bend, concentrate or spread out depending on what angle it strikes etc. Overall effect will be that of spreading out the light - which means the actual area of the water stream will have less light - and will look like a shadow compared to the other area around it - where light from the sun is going directly to the paper.",
"I think water in laminar flow is also translucent. The reason for the shadow is because of the turbulence in the flow, because of which light refracts differently. ",
"Appreciate that this is totally not the answer to the question but water is technically not completely transparent - it’s very very pale blue. If you fill a white pool, or even a bath with water you can see this. It’s just you need a lot of water to do this and in some quantities it appears transparent.\n\nThis has zero to do with why water casts a shadow. It’s just a thing.",
"Water is not completely transparent, it absorbs some light also reflects some\n\nThat’s why on a smooth pool of water you can sort of see your reflection as well as the bottom of the pool.",
"Water is see-through but it is not invisible. \n\nIt is not invisible because it bends the light going through it\n\nIt is also bending the light when the light passes through it from the sun to the ground. This bending creates a shadow because other light hits the ground without bending. \n\nSome light doesn't actually bend as much going through the water so the shadow is not as dark as it could be. If you held a stick next to the water stream, the stick's shadow would be darker as the stick is blocking the light completely. ",
"Index of refraction mismatch. For air is approx. 1.0, and for water 1.33, so for normal incidence using the Fresnel equation: \nRo=((n1-n2)/(n1+n2))**2\n\nSimilarly, for common glass in air, n1 = 1 and n2 = 1.5, and thus about 4% of the incident power is reflected. \n\nSince a portion of light is reflected a shadow is observed due to the difference in light intensity between that passing through the medium (losing a reflected portion) and the light not passing thru the medium. ",
"Can you see the stream? Then it's blocking some light. Things that block light have shadows.",
"From my understanding there are actually two things at play here, and I'd love for someone more qualified to let me know if this is correct. I've seen some good responses about the refractive qualities of water and how the bending of the light can create that effect, but there's also a loss of transmission through different surfaces.\n\nPhotons of light will lose energy as they are transmitted through different surfaces. This happens even through air - light cannot travel indefinitely (unless maybe through a complete vacuum), as the particulate matter in our atmosphere will scatter some of the photons and there will be some 'transmission loss'.\n\nLoss of transmission will happen through water also, and will result in the water casting a shadow. As a side note, in some cases water can also act to focus or reflect the light on a certain spot, which is where we get caustic lighting from, i.e. the circular light patterns you see on a shallow sea floor that constantly shift.\n\nIt's the combination of refraction and loss of transmission that gives water it's shadow. In very, very clear water that can look almost totally transparent, refraction is mostly the cause of the shadow through the running stream, but usually there's a bit of both phenomenon at play.\n\nHope it helps, and I hope someone with better knowledge can clarify my mistakes, I'd like to know if I'm misguided in my understanding of anything here."
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ciq04r | why does cold alcohol seem to go down easier than when hot/warm | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ciq04r/eli5_why_does_cold_alcohol_seem_to_go_down_easier/ | {
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"You generally don't taste things as well when they are cold, so cold alcohol is a bit easier to take that warm. You actually taste it just a bit less. This is the same reason why melted ice cream at the bottom of the bowl is just so darn yummy. One of the theories behind this is:\n\nYour tongue sends signals to your brain. Warm food actually changes the way your tongue sends those signals at the level of the individual cells, so the signal is actually stronger with warmer foods!",
"There's an immediate numbing to your taste buds that take place when something cold is put on them, and thus they are less active. For strong alcohol, like grain alcohols, this makes the terrible taste of the large amounts of ethanol in them less apparent, while letting the other flavors come to the forefront."
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33373h | why can't router firewalls block ddos attacks? | Why can't residential router firewalls block out even the smallest DDoS attacks from a few botnets? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/33373h/eli5_why_cant_router_firewalls_block_ddos_attacks/ | {
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"because the router has to check and see if the request is real or from a DDOS. Doing so takes processing time from the router. As such a DDOS can bring down the router. \n\nBasically the beauty of a DDOS is that it cant just be blocked because in order to block it you have to look at it and by looking at it you are using processing power.",
"The short answer is - it's a matter of volume. Your uplink to the ISP is probably anywhere from 1.5 up/5 down to 50 up/100 down - or whatever. It doesn't matter; if that attack is \"even the smallest\" (volumetric, there are other things that fall under the definition of DoS or even DDoS, but I'm assuming you mean volumetric) as long as it's more than your piddly home connection then your uplink is saturated and you can't get out and your downlink is saturated so more shit can't get in. Switches and routers can buffer, but not THAT much - dependig on age and brand it's anywhere from a few k to a few megs.\n\nEven if the traffic is getting dropped AT that firewall, it still takes up bandwidth to get to that firewall. On top of that, the firewall has to process (to decide whether to drop or pass that packet) each individual packet - this takes CPU cycles. I doubt your uplink can take it, but even if it can, most residential firewalls (heck, even some enterprise products I've worked with) won't take over much (if at all) over 100k packets per second (pps). Those DNS reflection attacks are not only large, but are made up of Many tiny packets. \n\nSo, tl;dr - your firewall and uplink will still get fucked.",
"By the time the excess traffic gets to a residential router, your connection is already saturated with traffic. Even if you reject every single packet, it's too late to do any good.",
"There are several classes of DDoS attack: volumetric, TCP state exhaustion and application level.\n\nVolumetric attacks are simply about consuming more bandwidth that the target has. If you're running a website which has a 100MB/s network connection, which is connected to a hosting company's network and the company has 2GB/s of overall network capacity, an attack of 200Mb/s will almost certainly take the site offline while keeping the hosting company up. Its fairly trivial to be able to generate (or rent) DDoS capacity well in excess of 5-6 GB/s which is more than enough to take most sites offline.\n\nTCP state exhaustion attacks are high volume packet streams which overrun the ability of a firewall or router to process all the packets. Every TCP packet which is handled by a router requires a small number of resources to process, in the case of firewalls, a firewall state is recorded. Send a few million packets per second down a line and you'll need a damned powerful router to be able to process all that traffic. In most cases, you get memory exhaustion in the device and it falls over.\n\nLayer 7 attacks (application layer) exploit the ability of an application to be able to service the requests. Attacks like \"[Slow Loris](_URL_0_)\" work by trying to keep as many active connections open to a web server. Web servers can only handle a finite number of connections. If you send a lot of connections to a server and keep them open as long as possible, the web server will fall over. \n\nProtecting against DDoS attacks requires a multi-tiered approach. Most attackers will use multiple different techniques in an attempt to down a site. Use of services like Prolexic or Black Lotus will defend against volumetric attacks but are extremely expensive. Use of a CDN, especially one with application-level filtering is recommended to distribute your site around to multiple geographic sites (close to the eyeballs) and requires an attacker to down all of the sites simultaneously. Finally, a hosting environment which leverages load balancing and the ability to scale resources up and down depending on traffic volumes helps manage even large legitimate load. ",
"Imagine you’re rich. You have a private estate.\n\nYour router is like a butler. The real‐life DDoS attack is that someone spread the word that there’s a party at your place.\n\nYou have no intention of hosting a public party, but tonnes of people are showing up anyway. Your butler is turning them away at the door, but it’s not enough. They have to get to the door before your butler can turn them away. They’ve crammed your driveway with carriages and they just keep coming.\n\nPeople with legitimate business at your home—servants, delivery boys, dinner guests—are stymied by the horde at your gates. The DDoS attack is successful.\n\nYou need to stop the unauthorised traffic further upstream. You could start with your ISP. In the analogy, that would mean turning people away before they enter your neighbourhood. You can handle a lot more traffic there than you can at your door."
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4e0l8g | why do some companies *cough*reddit*cough* make their apps country restrictive? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4e0l8g/eli5_why_do_some_companies_coughredditcough_make/ | {
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"It isnt country restrictive.\n\nReddit is test running the app in the countries with the largest volume of redditors. That way they find out whether or not it's a worth while commitment before investing a shitload of money into it.\n\nAlso, other companys can have a hard time getting things approved in certain countries due to too much red tape and restrictions therefore it's not financially viable.\n\nSo in retrospect it tends to be the countries fault, not the companies.",
"Legal and/or customer experience. There may be laws in certain countries that require the developer to do certain things and the developer hasn't done those things for that country.\n\nOr the app is missing a lot of what a local audience may expect and the developer would prefer to just not provide the app at all than risk providing a terrible experience."
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8gao0w | when japan attacked pearl harbor, why did we retaliate by bombing innocent civilians in japan | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8gao0w/eli5_when_japan_attacked_pearl_harbor_why_did_we/ | {
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"Same as with any war, to cripple the population and put pressure on the government to surrender. "
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2dd0hv | why can't a military knock out isis's military capabilities with a few airstrikes? | You often see ISIS traveling in convoys with a large amount of soldiers and weaponry. Why doesn't an opposing nation attack these convoys to take them out at knees, or at least severely limit their military might? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2dd0hv/eli5why_cant_a_military_knock_out_isiss_military/ | {
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"Two things. Proper military positioning to carry out a strike. The real enemy is the philosophy of ISIS",
"Western nations are beginning to move military assets into the region and are starting to start air strikes. It does take some planning to ensure you don't bomb some random people and even then people *still* fuck it up and bomb innocent people.\n\nIn addition ISIS doesn't have uniforms and their equipment is very mobile. So they blend in with sympathetic locals and once the fighting gets tough they back off and blend back in.",
"ISIS have very sophisticated tactics in avoiding air strikes. From what I understand their routes from Syria into Iraq are very secure on the ground and it's difficult for human intelligence assets to get close enough to these routes to provide the kind of information required for air strikes. I'm sure the U.S. wants to be absolutely certain of their targets before they start dropping bombs. ",
"They'll just not gather in large convoys or formations once strikes start occurring regularly. From that point on it is very difficult to get actionable intelligence on the group and its leadership. Important information travels virtually exclusively via courier so unless a military force physically locates and intercepts them, they won't have information that could deliver a critical strike. \n\nIf the military capabilities of the group is destroyed than they will transfer back into a terrorist-organization instead of being organized as a traditional military force. Troops on the ground would be required to actually destroy them. ",
"The same reason civilians die in the fighting in Gaza, ISIS is intertwined with civilians and it's not clear who is an enemy and who is not. Also the US cannot solve all the worlds problems."
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8vpovn | how come on maps showing plane routes the curved lines always go north then south, why not straight? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8vpovn/eli5_how_come_on_maps_showing_plane_routes_the/ | {
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"because they are going straight and it is the map that is distorted. All maps excluding globes have to be distorted to some degree. ",
"Ahoy, matey! Yer not alone in askin', and kind strangers have explained:\n\n1. [ELI5: Why can't planes just fly from one place to another in a straight line? ](_URL_7_) ^(_7 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: Why do Asian (Korean, Japanese) flight routes go way up North of Russia? ](_URL_0_) ^(_24 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: How exactly do planes compensate for the curvature of the earth when they are flying? ](_URL_1_) ^(_45 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: Why do planes mostly have a curved path to their destination as opposed to a straight line? ](_URL_4_) ^(_13 comments_)\n1. [Why do planes not fly \"as the crow flies\" but use longer paths instead? ](_URL_2_) ^(_6 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: Why don't planes (mostly airliners) ever fly in a straight line? The flight path is always an arc be it East/West or North/South ](_URL_5_) ^(_37 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: Why do planes take what seems like huge detours instead of straight lines to the destination? ](_URL_3_) ^(_ > 100 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: Why does a flight from the UK to Florida go north over Greenland then back down down the east coast of the U.S.? ](_URL_6_) ^(_11 comments_)\n"
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4wj1ow | why can't police look at brain activity to detect lying? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4wj1ow/eli5_why_cant_police_look_at_brain_activity_to/ | {
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"House MD used some very fringe science at times.\n\nIt's near impossible to tell whether a person is lying about a situation completely or whether they are lying about a particular detail. \n\nSimilar to actual \"lie-detector\" tests, they can be fooled by something genuinely believing what they are saying.\n\nThis was the case in the Season 1 finale when House was treating Stacey's husband."
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1mtrhi | relative to their size, how do spider's webs span such huge divides? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1mtrhi/relative_to_their_size_how_do_spiders_webs_span/ | {
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"It depends on the spider, but usually they just attach one end of the silk, then walk around to the other side and attach the other. Then they walk along the line and drop a vertical line to make a Y shape. Then they go back and tighten the horizontal line by eating the excess and reattaching. Then they set about building a ring of non sticky scaffolding circles, before adding the sticky circles in between. \n\nThere are also some species that make a sticky 'kite' of silk by making a flattened bundle at the end of the line, then use air currents to send it over the initial gap (sounds crazy but I'm totally serious)."
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21l7sr | why do math formulas use letters that aren't in the word they represent? | For example, In E = mc2 Einstein concluded that mass (m) and kinetic energy (E) are equal, since the speed of light (c2) is constant. Why is the speed of light represented with a "c" instead of "s"? What does "c" stand for? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/21l7sr/eli5_why_do_math_formulas_use_letters_that_arent/ | {
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"_URL_0_\n\nUsually, the letters are chosen to represent what they stand for as far as possible.",
"You try and make a logical connection between the symbol and the variable, but often all the good letters are used up! And what the symbol means depends on the situation - G could be a gravitational constant to a physicist, but mass flow rate to a chemical engineer. So while scientists and engineers will try and pick intuitive symbols, you should always define what each symbol means.\n\nSome common conventions are that lowercase e is Euler's number, lowercase pi is 3.14etc, T is temperature and t is time, and k refers to a constant, but they're all violated in one place or another. "
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2vput0 | if a plane was flying at top altitude and lost all engines, would it be able to glide for a while? or would it just drop? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2vput0/eli5_if_a_plane_was_flying_at_top_altitude_and/ | {
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"Private pilot of single engine aircraft here. Most airplanes can glide to the ground in the absence of engines if they are properly loaded and piloted. I cannot speak for military or experimental aircraft.",
"All aircraft are designed to glide the case of engine failure. Up high, the air density is minimal compared to ground level. So initially, you would glide, but your descent rate would be high until the density of the air improves and your descent rate decreases.\n\nSo yes, you would glide, and if you're doing it properly, descend at a constant indicated airspeed, but the rate of descent would not be consistent. ",
"Aeronautical Engineer here. \n\nWhile I can't add anything new here, I'd be happy to give an explanation that breaks the ELI5 rules if you want :-)\n\nEdit: CrookedSmoker, dickwad69 [sic] and Puddle-Duck have the right idea",
"There are several ways to think about this.\n\nBefore getting to planes, remember that a plane is just an object with a velocity, like a baseball or a bullet. Baseballs and bullets don't have engines so they are always slowing down once thrown/fired. A plane with no engines just becomes an object with a forward velocity, slowly decreasing due to air resistance.\n\nAnother consideration is to realize that really, nothing short of a brick wall (or another plane travelling in the opposite direction) can make a plane \"drop out of the sky\" - this is a term used solely in breathless news media pieces to increase drama. Even an explosion would merely result in a mass of plane parts with the same forward velocity they had before, all slowly decreasing and scattering.\n\nFrequently the word \"drop\" is used in news media for any sort of steep descent, without bothering to explain what really happened.\n\nA better source of aviation news is _URL_1_\n\nSo on to planes. Whether or not a plane easily glides with no engines largely depends on how it's designed. All passenger planes are designed to glide. They won't glide as efficiently as a glider, but they will happily glide. A military fighter, on the other hand, is more akin to a lump of metal with a large rocket on one end. Without thrust, it won't \"drop\" but because of the trade-offs made in it's design, it's wings won't perform as well as passenger planes. They will need a higher speed to generate lift, and with no engines that means the only way to speed up is to point the nose down at a steeper angle than you would in a passenger plane.\n\nFinally, there are numerous examples of planes that have managed to land safely with no engines, here are 3 very famous ones:\n\n_URL_2_\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_3_\n"
]
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[],
[],
[],
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Transat_Flight_236",
"http://avherald.com",
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"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549"
]
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|
||
o6w33 | surround sound | I'm curious as to how the stereo knows something is in surround sound or stereo. Also, if something is playing in surround sound, how does the stereo know where to send which signals (front, back, center, sub)? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/o6w33/eli5_surround_sound/ | {
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"So, this is pretty complicated stuff, not really easily explained. So basically, the question here is how does 4 (for example) channels of audio get transformed into 2 signals? Basically there are [several standard encoding and decoding patterns](_URL_1_) that exploit [phase shift](_URL_0_) to tell the stereo where to play the sounds. There's difference in the pattern between the two cables, the phase shift, that tells the stereo where to play the sounds, which it decodes through the known decoders.\n\n\nEdit: Wanted to add that only 5.1 sound is supported by this method, any higher speaker degree is not supported by stereo cables."
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"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_decoder"
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3tb9gl | why, nearly everyday, is there a post on the front page detailing a groundbreaking medical discovery (i.e scientists discover how to stunt growth of cancer cells), but then i never hear about it elsewhere? | Go. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3tb9gl/eli5_why_nearly_everyday_is_there_a_post_on_the/ | {
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"Because Reddit loves to post any promising development which is years away from becoming a possible thing. Most potential drugs developed by companies do not make it all the way to approval and marketing.",
"Billy has always been a fan of baseball. One day, he discovers a strange lightweight metal rod that he believes would make a great baseball bat. He begs his parents to get some money so he can get some grip and other materials to turn the metal bar into a bat. His parents, convinced that this is a decent idea that will keep Billy distracted, agree.\n\nNow Billy has a prototype bat with the metal that he found. He tests the bat against other bats and shows all his friends that it performs much better. The local baseball coach sees Billy using the bat and wonders if it can be sold as a commercial product.\n\nBut now, any number of issues could prevent the bat from commercial success:\n\n**Possible effects on people**: The metal Billy found may actually be harmful to humans with long exposure despite the nice performance properties.\n\n**Sourcing**: Maybe the metal was a scrap piece of extremely expensive metal. It would cost too much to get this metal and make them into affordable metal bats.\n\n**Manufacturing costs**: Billy may have been a fanatic at handcrafting his bat but trying to make them on a large scale would cost too much money per bat.\n\n**Reliability**: Billy may not have used the bat long enough to realize that the metal becomes brittle after a few uses which can cause the bat to perform worse over time or even break.\n\n**Regulations**: The little leagues may ban the bat because it is too different (in terms of weight, size, etc.) compared to the standard bats.\n\n**Company buyout**: Another company may purchase their bat invention in order to stop it from being manufactured. This prevents it from going on the market so there is no additional competition that would force companies to lower prices.\n\n**Management problems**: Having a startup to sell the bat means hiring additional people in addition to just Billy and the coach. It's possible to hire the wrong person or hire people that do not get along which would could cause the startup to fail.\n\nEDIT: Added a few more issues and fixed formatting",
"Largely because mass media science reporting is generally *awful*. Most of the time, these treatments are in what's roughly equivalent to pre-Alpha development.",
"It's mostly related to how science funding works, and how poor scientific journalism is. Visibility equals funding, so universities have got smarter and push news to news agencies and journals that a) are not equipped to evaluate the true merits of the discovery b) need positive news to counterbalance often negative running stories c) hype the discovery even further to sell copies. Science is hard to appreciate and the ifs and buts every scientist sticks to his claims (that may be trivial for somebody in the field) are the first to get lost in the many passages from his desk to the front pages because they are technical, boring and hard to hype upon.",
"How many front page posts from 5 years ago do you remember? It takes a long time to comercialize a scientific breakthrough.",
"Whenever you hear that something kills cancer in research / in a petri dish... just remember that a gun kills cancer in a petri dish, too. \n\nOften times the most promising ground-breaking research doesn't pan out farther down the line when they start trying to apply it to full grown humans. Maybe it breaks down in our biology (e.g. in our stomachs or when injected), before it can do what it needs to do? Perhaps it has major side effects? Perhaps it works well in rats and pigs in testing, but does nothing for humans? \n\nAny number of things can, and often do, go wrong.",
"Because it'seems never as big or clear of a breakthrough as the reddit title makes it sound.\nTLDR: Don't believe anything from r/futurology.\n\n\nThis is how it works:\n\n\n* Researcher does something. Let's say some measurement of a quantum effect.\n\n\n* Researcher writes a paper overstating the importance of said work, and downplaying the drawbacks/remaining challenges as much as ethically possible, often using key words that only other researchers would understand the importance of.\n\n* Said paper is read by a mass-media journalist, (often before it's been peer reviewed, responded to, or repeated) who writes an article based on his minimal understanding of the paper, *then he writes a headline designed only to bring clicks to his article.*\n\n\n* Redditor sees said headline, summarizes the headline presumably without even reading the article (let alone the paper) and sits back and waits to be teleported to the office.",
"Most discoveries are small steps on the way to producing a cure. If it's successful, you will hear about it elsewhere, but by then it'll be marketed under a different name.\n\nIf you want some background on the headlines: _URL_0_\n",
"The media would rather run stories 24/7 about a missing plane, or the Kardashians, or Anthony Weiner's penis.",
"You what kills cancer cells? Bleach. There's a reason we don't use it to treat cancer, though. Many of these 'miracle cures' are basically bleach. They kill cancer great in petri dishes, but the side effects in humans are too serious. I suspect other technologies are similar: they work great in a lab environment but can't withstand the rigors of a real and messy world.",
"When I was a 'journo' I'd use sources like _URL_0_ to find nice stories that I could rewrite so they were unique and then promote them on social media sites.\n\nEurekalert is already Buzzfeedy in its headlines, and you can tell when you read a little deeper into the article that the research was not as groundbreaking as the headline makes it appear. It might be a mouse model, it might be just a survey of 2000 people, it might be a study involving 20 people. \n\nThen when I wrote it up, I would purposefully try to avoid anything that highlighted how meaningless the study was, and I'd try to write something even more Buzzfeedy than the actual article. AIDS cure 'around the corner', 'Study: AIDS can be cured by bananas'. If I put some of the headline in 'snatch quotes', i.e. apostrophes, or put a colon indicating that someone had said something, i.e. 'Cameron: Fuck Daesh', then I would have covered my ass from misrepresenting the topic, provided I didn't totally misrepresent it.\n\nAnd I was churning out 5,000 words a day, often researching and spinning a 200-word article in 20 minutes. I would honestly just skimread the original source, I'd only actually read it to fully understand it if I was personally interested in the research. Furthermore, my understanding of complicated science is nowhere near good enough to be able to criticise a scientific study, all I'd do is 'spin' it. Churnalism, it's called.\n\nShockingly, one of my skills is being able to push things to the top of Google search results. Quite often, when writing something more meaty, my research would be reading whatever was at the top of Google search results, which I know full well is written by someone who's just as big a moron as me and who's just as pressed for time as me.\n\ntldr, the internet is a tapestry of bullshit.",
"Different disease organizations (I don't know the proper term here) will release a new breakthrough every six months or so to get more funding. I've had diabetes since I was one and my parents started noticing it when I was a kid. ",
"[This is not mine, I take no credit for it, but it's fairly accurate.](_URL_0_)",
"Because the lots of things kills or slows cancer, the trick is finding something that also doesn't kill the people that have the cancer.\n\n_URL_0_",
"I created a Subreddit for these types of articles but it never really took off. /r/curesforcancer\n\nA subreddit where you can post articles and links on new findings of the cures for cancer (usually in mice) that appear in the news 3 times a week.",
"Why possible cures often don't come to much:\n\nFinding something that kills cancer cells *might* be the start of something good, but more often than not, it isn't. Why? Well look at it this way, put some cancer cells in a petri dish along with a grenade and pull the pin out. When you come back, the cancer cells will be very very dead. However this is not a particularly useful treatment for cancer, as it turns out, it is pretty good at killing non cancerous cells (and any lab assistants that you forgot to tell to duck)\n\nIn real life the possible treatments are less black and white (e.g. it happily kills cancer cells, is harmless to almost all the other cells in the body - except one particular type - like liver cells)\n\nThat's also why it takes so long for a drug to come to market. First they test it in test-tubes on cell cultures, then they test it on white mice; then chimpanzees and then the human trials can begin. At any of the se points they might discover something that makes it non-viable\n\nWhy you see them on the front page:\n\n\"Miracle cure for cancer\" attracts more upvotes than \"Limited trial in-vitro indicates that this chemical has a small chance, at some point way down the line of contributing to a treatment for some cancers\"",
"SMBC comics is perfect for this ELI5! \n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\n",
"A few possibilities:\n\n1. Practical matters make it so that the treatment can't be used in a widespread way (too expensive, too risky, only works in a very specific type of disease, company goes bankrupt, etc.)\n\n2. The study was in an artificial setting such as in lab animals or in a test tube/petri dish, and didn't translate to actual living humans. Alternatively, further testing of the same kind failed to replicate the results because it was just a fluke.\n\n3. The treatment is being used, but you don't hear about it as much because it's a real improvement but only an incremental one. For example, maybe it's a \"miracle drug\" for late-stage lung cancer, but what that means is it makes people who would have lived 2 months live for a year or two. This is a very real improvement, but it's not going to make it so that you suddenly don't have to worry about getting lung cancer. However, I bet if you or someone you loved had late-stage lung cancer, you would be very happy\n\n4. A similar factor is that for a lot of common cancers, we have treatments that work pretty well if the disease is caught early enough--and if the disease is later on and already spread through the body, it's almost impossible to cure even with our most high-tech modern medicines. Because of that, new treatments tend to start being used in people with very advanced disease who have failed all the treatments that we already know work. Only when we have conducted additional studies to show that the new treatment specifically works better than the old treatment can we \"move it up\" in the line.\n\nNumber 3 is one that people overlook a LOT. We have tons of new drugs coming out that make a big difference in the survival times of various diseases. Look at HIV! It's gone from being a horrific death sentence to being a serious but manageable chronic condition. You could make a timeline of the medical breakthroughs that led to that, but for the average person it's not like there was a big study that showed \"HIV IS FIXED!\" and then everything got better. We've had a slow introduction of better and better drugs to manage the disease, and drugs that can work when those drugs stop working, and etc. etc. until we get to the point where \n\n",
"Because the vast majority of biomedical studies that lead to publications are unrepeatable junk.",
"Because most of these discoveries are bullshit.\n\nFor example, how many times have you heard about a cure for cancer in the news? The problem is that cancer is not a disease, it's a generic name given to a over 100 diseases with different symptoms and causes. So it barely makes any sense to talk about a cure for cancer.",
"While I think the top post by /u/PrionBacon is very helpful, it's really only reflective of pharmaceutical/medical device development stories on the front page rather than the occasional research article that we see on /r/all ever so often (and quite a bit over in r/science).\n\nAt least for biological discoveries - stories headlined with phrases like: \"we now understand how X causes Y disease\", \"Scientists show how normal X can fight Y\" or \"Discovery X can help prevent Y\", etc - the ELI5 is, IMHO, this:\n\n\nMost of these discoveries aren't made in humans. This is important because while humans and animals share a lot of similarities (genetic homology, tissue types etc), humans are also different from animals in many important ways. Therefore, because of these differences, the discoveries made in animals aren't always translatable to humans.\n\nEven when discoveries (I don't really like this term with regards to human research because its more often a finding than a true discovery) are made in humans, it doesn't mean the discovery is true for all humans and disease. And even if discoveries are ground breaking and truly impactful (RNA interference for example), there is still a lot of work that needs to be done to figure out how the discovery can be used to create a therapy. \n\nI don't know the history, but think of it this way: Think of the first person to invent the computer. Do you think he/she knew all of its capabilities and appreciated the entirety of its potential? That they invented the foundation for the internet? \n\nThose things took time. So do biological/biomedical discoveries. ",
"Billy has always been a fan of baseball. One day, he discovers a strange lightweight metal rod that he believes would make a great baseball bat. He begs his parents to get some money so he can get some grip and other materials to turn the metal bar into a bat. His parents, convinced that this is a decent idea that will keep Billy distracted, agree.\n\nNow Billy has a prototype bat with the metal that he found. He tests the bat against other bats and shows all his friends that it performs much better. The local baseball coach sees Billy using the bat and wonders if it can be sold as a commercial product.\n\nBut now, any number of issues could prevent the bat from commercial success:\n\nPossible effects on people: The metal Billy found may actually be harmful to humans with long exposure despite the nice performance properties.\n\nSourcing: Maybe the metal was a scrap piece of extremely expensive metal. It would cost too much to get this metal and make them into affordable metal bats.\n\nManufacturing costs: Billy may have been a fanatic at handcrafting his bat but trying to make them on a large scale would cost too much money per bat.\n\nReliability: Billy may not have used the bat long enough to realize that the metal becomes brittle after a few uses which can cause the bat to perform worse over time or even break.\n\nRegulations: The little leagues may ban the bat because it is too different (in terms of weight, size, etc.) compared to the standard bats.\n\nCompany buyout: Another company may purchase their bat invention in order to stop it from being manufactured. This prevents it from going on the market so there is no additional competition that would force companies to lower prices.\n\nManagement problems: Having a startup to sell the bat means hiring additional people in addition to just Billy and the coach. It's possible to hire the wrong person or hire people that do not get along which would could cause the startup to fail.\n\nEDIT: Added a few more issues and fixed formatting",
"Because science and technology journalism stinks on ice. Scientifically-illiterate reporters parrot back any wild-ass claim they hear, as long as it's cool and exciting. Bonus points if they can tie it to a SF movie. REAL science is usually too boring and hard to bother with. And the general public is too scientifically-illiterate to tell the difference.\n\n[Today's SMBC](_URL_0_) comments on this.\n",
"Likely because you have /r/futurology still subbed. They post a decent amount of overhyped bullshit all the time. ",
"Money and/or use. Is the breakthrough making any $$ yet or creating a human interest story? If not, fat chance of coverage.",
"**Basically this is how medical research works:**\n\n1. Basic scientist discovers interesting finding- posts about it on Reddit. \n2. Basic scientist tries to get funding to explore further, animal model research, etc (about 90% of discoveries die at this stage due to lack of funding, 10% left).\n3. Discovery is confirmed and scientist looks to find backing to do clinical trials (99.99% of discoveries are dead at this stage, 0.001% of discoveries proceed to clinical trials)\n4. Drug goes through clinical trials, is shown to be effective in humans and is released to public (0.0002% of discoveries make it past this stage, or 2 drugs for every 100,000 discoveries)\n5. Drug is released for sale, 1 person out of 20,000 users gets a sick from it due to unknown reasons, media panics, drug is withdrawn and no one gets it (this part is an exaggeration, but the reality is that plenty of treatments that historically saved millions, like smallpox vaccine, would never be approved today due to modern tolerances for side effects being so low)\n\n*Total time and money spent: ~12 years and ~$1.4 billion.*\n\nThe sad part is that because this process is so time consuming and expensive, only discoveries that could end up very profitable end up ever being explored further. It's entirely possible that among the millions of discoveries that were never explored, a cure for a major disease was lost. A great example of this is with the ebola outbreaks last year. The new experimental drugs companies are rushing to test aren't new compounds. Most have been known about since the mid 1990's but no one bothered to fund a clinical trial to test them until it became a major issue (ie profitable).\n\nMedia rarely covers scientific discoveries at stage 1-3 above. At that point, already 99.99% of discoveries are weeded out. \n\n**TL:DR For every 100,000 discoveries you hear about, only 2 actually become a drug or treatment. This process takes 12 years on average and costs ~$1.4 billion so only discoveries that can lead to super profitable treatments ever get explored. Media usually only covers these 2 that actual are successful and ignores the 99,998 that aren't.**",
"most of the replies sound like speculation. so I'll add a little of my own, more optimistic speculation.\n\nI think that in the modern era we're seeing groundbreaking discoveries left and right. It's become so common to find new ways to fight disease or new discoveries about the brain that it gets reported less and less.\n\nbut Reddit has r/science So you hear about it all the time simply because there's a place on here dedicated to science news.\n\n",
"There are lots of ways to kill cancer cells.\n\nIn a test tube. The problem is using it inside a human body.\n\nSure bleach kills cancer. But you can't inject it into your bloodstream without being killed also.",
"There was a man who managed to use sea water as alternative fuel. He disappeared shortly after. ",
"You do. It's just posted on Reddit some years later with the headline \"Goddam bastards charging $1000 a pill for new breakthrough drug.\"",
"Because most science journalism is terrible. Here’s how it works:\n\n1. A team of scientists at Harvard cultures cancer cells in petri dishes. They then expose the cancer cells to tiny quantities of unobtanium. Some of the cancer cells weaken and/or die. They publish their results in an academic journal, the abstract being “Unobtanium may kill cancer cells in vitro. Further testing is needed.” \n\n2. The AP wire turns this into “Harvard scientists claim unobtanium can kill cancer cells”, leaving out the in vitro part. \n\n3. Good newspapers pick up the story as “Unobtanium may kill cancer tumors”. \n\n4. Crap newspapers turn that story into “Unobtanium may be cancer cure”. \n\n5. Linkblogs turn that into “Harvard docs say unobtanium will cure cancer!”.\n\n6. Doctor Oz tells viewers to drink unobtanium tea so they won’t ever get cancer.\n\nAnd what none of these news sources is telling anybody is that unobtanium only showed the potential to harm cancer cells, and only did so in a lab.",
"Because the science and futurology subreddits are full of shit. SOURCE: I'm a scientist. \n\nBasically a lot of people are more interested in being exciting than being correct. This includes the posters, the media, and often even the scientists conducting the study. So, the science is bad, they're overstating their case, or they're not disclosing serious flaws and short-comings of the work, or the media/poster isn't given a fair/accurate treatment of the work. Bad is mistaken for good, and this explains why the study eventually fizzles and why you never hear about it again. Science and industry will eventually self-correct and weed out all the crap. So the exciting-but-incorrect study dies.\n\nAlso, most people don't understand what makes a study good science versus bad science, believable versus not believable (again, this even includes scientists as much as the media and Reddit posters). But most people understand what makes something exciting versus not exciting. And so exciting makes its way to the top of Reddit front pages over and over again. Because people understand that. Naivete and gullibility play a big role here too. If it's exciting, people get emotional and dream. And they figure that scientists or the media wouldn't *lie* to them... right?",
"Because researchers aggressively promote the promise of their medical research to attract additional funding. Announcing a \"breakthrough\" is usually just savvy marketing",
"If you'll notice, the common theme in every article is mice. Mice are always being cured of deadly diseases. \n\nAdvances in mouse healthcare are incredible, but it really isn't necessary to keep reminding us, which is why you don't hear about it again.\n\nThat would just be like bragging.",
"1. Sensationalism get's attention and attention makes money.\n\n2. Something can technically work but not be economically or otherwise feasible to produce for mass consumption.\n\nAll that needs to be said about it.",
"Just because the scientists observe something in the lab doesn't necessary make it a \"groundbreaking discovery,\" as the media would like us to believe. It has to be repeated by multiple other labs and that is just the beginning... thats why a majority of these \"discoveries\" never go anywhere. \nThis also ties into why some Nature (one of the highest scientific research journals) articles get withdrawn. They are comprised of \"sexy\" science that attention grabbing, but are inherently flawed in their research methodology, data collection, etc.",
"As a research scientist, I'll add the following: if you actually read paper from reputated journal, we actually (almost) never say we made a \"major breakthrough\", \"curing x cancer\". Some people may relate to the xkcd comic regarding handgun can also kill cancer, this is true for individual scientist as sometime we can have blind spots (as the demographic of this comic is researchers); but in terms of having this absurd result passed your supervisor, your research team, and to be published by a peer reviewed journal, this is, again, near impossible.\n\n\nSo what really happens is media are often being ridiculous on reporting these findings, they almost always over claim what we intended to say. Even worse college/university PR are starting to do it as well because of all those imaging building and advertising.\n\n\nAnd of course the academia is changing as well, because in 2015 \"seeking funding\" is a fundamental part in scientific method; we often report on how our findings could potential turn miracle applications even if it's way too early to say.",
"Reddit skews too young to have built up a hard outer layer of apathy, honed by decades of broken promises. \n\nSource: I have voted in several elections and bought products. ",
"Much like many fortune cookies can be augmented by adding the phrase \"in bed,\" many medical discovery headlines can be made more honest by adding the phrase \"in mice.\"\n\nAnd mice are many, many times simpler than humans.",
"All the top responses are fucking essays. All you need to know is that journalists need to get views on their articles and they exaggerate/twist scientists' words to make things seem more incredible than they really are (headline grabbers). The exaggeration is often intentional, and sometimes it has more to do with the journalist not fully understanding something and making incorrect claims. \n\ntl;dr journalists exaggerate scientific discoveries every day",
"Because the general media is more interested in showing you hot girls and bad things that happens in the world, coupled with some \"high quality\" tv shows to keep you entertained than scientific things.",
"Partially because all these \"groundbreaking discoveries\" are things conducted in a lab in very specific conditions that may not even be applicable to the real world. Often, all these cancer stories are that they have found something that may potentially help a specific type of cancer under very strict conditions. It is very important in the field, as it helps develop more efficient cures and understanding, but it isn't the miracle drug that everyone wants. \n\nWhile this is true with all scientists, biology in particular often yields huge results to the public many years later, as you have to jump through a million hoops of multiple testing on a variety of species before testing it some humans a few times to see if it helps. ",
"groundbreaking xyz medication kills cancer cells in closed testing. xyz medication burns a hole in your good flesh too. ",
"We live in an era where the only thing that matters is what is said at the time. People refuse to be held accountable for what they say and do even five minutes later. So naturally, news follows the trend and makes absurd claims knowing that nobody will call them on it & that tomorrow, nobody will care. ",
"One word my friend, sensationalism. I never go on /r/futurology because of all of the sensationalist articles. They cure cancer every week. ",
"The reason we are seeing impressive medical discoveries made more frequently is because medicine has becoming an Information Technology. Let me explain.\n\nFor almost all of medical history, we would hypothesize, test, record observations, and go from there. Now that computer hardware is nearly at the capacity of the human brain, the most powerful computational tool currently known, we can more accurately simulate molecular, and in some cases atomic interactions inside the human body.\n\nWe now use computers to predict how chemicals will react in the body.\nWe now use computers to analyze microscopy samples to look for patterns that previously would take teams of scientists far longer to discover.\nWe now use computers to crunch huge sets of data of hundreds of thousands of people in a matter of hours or days.\n\nBut wait, there's more! Because medicine is now an Information Technology it follows the same laws of progress, namely Moore's law. Moore's law, in a nutshell, says that the computational power of a processor doubles every 2yrs, halves in size every 2yrs, and halves in cost every 2yrs.\n\nBut..... we're past Moore's law in many ways. If you map the exponential rate of progress on a graph, Moore's law would part of the most recent chunk of time. We're past that chunk, now at a rate of ~1.5yrs for the 3 aforementioned metrics. We will soon approach a point where the curve has progressed so much that it will appear almost straight vertical on the graph. This will happen within our lifetimes, in just a couple decades at most, bringing in the era of quantum computing and super-intelligent AI.\n\nToday's technology builds the technology of tomorrow. The rate of progress is quickening. A $1000 laptop will have as much computational power as a human brain mid 2020s, and soon after it will have as much computational power as the human race.\n\nI suggest checking out IBM Watson's oncology capabilities, their videos explain how AI benefits medicine and how humans simply can't keep up with the trove of quickly outdated information being taught.",
"Read the comments. 99% of the time somebody explains why the title of the post is crap and how the real discovery isn't as impressive as the title is making it out to be.",
"Lots of people on reddit are interested in, close to, or in the scientific community which makes these discoveries. Some reasons we don't hear about many of them from things like news outlets is because:\n\n-The information is too scientific. If it takes a graduate degree to unpack it, the media won't bite. (Literacy problem)\n\n-The information is too novel or hyperspecific to one set of circumstances. (Application problem)\n\n-The information comes from a source that is not known to be a scientific heavyweight. (Credibility problem)\n",
"Because all of these news articles heavily exaggerate the findings so that people who don't know about science will share the crap out of it.\n\nOr, people will infer way too much from the title of an article. Every few months there's an article about how scientists have 'discovered some bacteria that converts (insert type of hazardous material here) into butterflies and rainbows'. People then assume that this solves the world's problem with (insert hazardous material here). However, what if it's extremely costly to produce this bacteria? What if it can only perform its function in a very specific environment that is almost impossible to produce? What if it takes a huge amount of time to perform a task that has relatively small benefit? Usually, people don't ask these questions of themselves and therefore assume these headlines to be about game changing discoveries, when they in fact aren't.",
"Because there's a large audience of people who want things explained to them simplistically (as if they were five year olds?) and the truth doesn't fit as well in a headline or get as much traffic.\n\ntl;dr: clickbait works",
"Journalism Rule No. 1 - If it bleeds, it leads. \n\nMedical and science stories aren't as interesting to the general public and modern journalism is all about RATINGS or PAGE VIEWS. \n\nRatings/Views = Ad Revenue. They aren't concerned with giving you the news, they are concerned with making money. The only way they will do that is high interest stories. Sex and violence sell, science doesn't. \n\n",
"I cured all forms of cancer but I just don’t like your guys’s attitude so I’m keeping it all to myself and whoring all the anti-cancer benefits.",
"Do you ever read the comments? Almost always there is a top rated comment about why the medical discovery isn't all that it's made up to be.",
"Bogus articles written to boost shares of companies. I tend to ignore stuff from /r/science and /r/Futurology mostly.",
"Essentially, the medical report you read is often from the results of Phase 1 Clinical Trial, which is where a \"proof of concept\" emerges. This is the moment that a team of researchers discover that a molecule has some demonstrated effect on a disease.\nHowever, there are normally three phases of clinical trials (over about 15yrs). These other two trials test the molecule in humans for effectiveness and safety, and determine the most appropriate dose and administration method. \nBy the time a molecule is first considered, to the time all three phases are completed to the satisfaction of the manufacturer and various govt health systems, you get a drop-out of ~90% for molecules that don't quite make it (unsafe, not as effective as hoped, too expensive to produce etc). So about 1 in 10 of your newspaper reports will come to fruition as a drug for doctors to prescribe ... in ten+ years time. \n\nSource: I do this shit all day long to pay the bills. ",
"Because the space between \"possible under laboratory conditions\" and \"mass producible and commercially viable\" is a gulf larger than any canyon on earth. ",
"I know this is too late, but here's the best analogy imo\n\nPeople think a scientific published paper is the equivalent of climbing to the top of a mountain, when in reality each publication is like one step climbing that mountain. After many many publications, and tons of work, you will climb that mountain. But each step in such a difficult task is also worth celebrating. ",
"Simple ELI5 response:\n\nA discovery is a discovery. Just that, they \"discover\" something has medical applications. However these things often have to undergo years of clinical trials and testing to ensure safety before being let loose on the public. \n\nPeople sign up, or agree to, new and experimental treatments. Then the results are studied and there's a second wave of trials. Then possibly a third, or fourth.\n\nA discovery today might not reach marketplace application for a decade or more. \n\nThat applies mostly to pharmaceutical discoveries but things like new radiation treatments for cancer and even surgical techniques can be impacted as well.\n\nThen you got the legal red tape in dealing with government regulation. Just look at male birth control for the U.S - years behind other nations. ",
"Reporters are morons when it comes to science. The actual tests indicate that they could have a medical discovery that needs much more research. Then once it is confirmed it needs extensive work to turn into medicine. Then it needs extensive testing.\n\nReporters prefer to scream \"OMFG CANCER CURED !!!!1!!!\" because it gets more clicks than \"Maybe we have a small piece of the puzzle necessary to create anti-cancer medicine.\"",
"Universities have public relations departments that cherry pick results which are incremental and write press releases that make it seem like that they are revolutionary. These press releases will typically not be critical and list potential drawbacks and complications. \n\nThis is not unique to cancer or infectious disease research. This happens across the board. ",
"the cancer industry has a long history of burying and denying treatments if they can't make money out of them. this documentary covers some of the issues, spanning many decades: _URL_0_",
"FYI: i.e. means 'that is', not 'in example'. If you want to show something for example, use 'e.g.'. ",
"Because \"groundbreaking\" is another word for \"ridiculously experimental\". \nLearning something truly new from a research project is like step 10 out of 1,000 steps to an actual useful item, and some of them never, ever, make it to step 1,000 because they weren't really step 10 to usefulness at all, but step 10 down a dead end. \n",
"In graduate school and then in medical school, we had a saying:\n\"Researchers read articles, students read abstracts, and journalists read titles.\"",
"The results of experimental research is typically 15 to 20 years before the development of a treatment based upon these findings. I am trained as a scientist and this factor is well established. ",
"Back in the 70s and 80s before the internet, there was a news stand in the grocery store check out counter filled with tabloid type cheapo news and news magazines. Although these things didn't actually contain news, they presented themselves and operated under the conceit that they were in fact newspapers with the news mainstream news was afraid to print. When in fact, it was mostly celebrity gossip and weird what-if sci fi stuff. Anyway, since they were all on the rack competing against each other and trying to be a last minute impulse purchase for shoppers waiting in line, the headlines were big and bold.\n\nI dont need to explain it because you see it on the front page every day. Cure for Cancer, Graphene breakthroughs, UFO spotted, Dog saves child....its stunning to think about since I spend so much time here and I used to mock these tabloids. The sad thing is, I am not even in a line waiting to check out the groceries. I am just sitting here reading this garbage as a primary activity.",
"Actual scientist here. When a paper gets published in an academic journal, it will often be accompanied by a press release. This release is organized by the school, usually written by the researchers in coordination with the university's press office, and organized specifically to be read by laypeople and journalists. This press release has to be relatable while still highlighting the significance of the work. Most people don't care about your esoteric research topic, they care about practical implications and big picture ideas. Similarly, you can't say \"this was a good study but made at best a very limited and specific advance,\" simply because most people won't care and they won't understand why they should (because good science is almost always incremental). So, you write a simple, overblown release to get the press people off your back so you can go do research again, the press people send it everywhere, and journalists often just copy and paste it (my personal releases have been written basically as science journalism pieces by the press folks and I've seen it usually copied word for word). \n\nThis is win-win for everyone: the researcher gets some good, meaningless press and then left alone, the University gets to claim they're doing cutting edge and impactful research, and journalists with tight deadlines get it straight from the horse's mouth. It just sucks because it means that 99% of the science journalism pieces you read are way overblown and overreaching. But to be honest, that's all the average science news consumer wants to hear and is capable of understanding. \n\n**TL; DR: Most of it is exaggeration, because it's just easier for everyone involved.**",
"TIL that nearly everyday, there is a front page post detailing a groundbreaking medical discovery",
"There are probably hundreds if not thousands of potential barriers which could prevent the bat to perform worse over time or even break.",
"Because knowing how to do something is different from knowing how to do it cheaply or reliably.",
"Scientist here. I'm am immunologist and medical research scientist. \n\nOne answer is because of publicity. With that comes awareness and hopefully....funding! This is more applicable to academic labs.\nResearch is really freaking expensive. Our monthly cash burn is $250,000.\n\nAlso, it's because the amount of testing required to pass a new drug is hardcore. We need to get the dosing, dosing interval, safety profile, toxicity, adverse effects, etc, etc all sorted before we can put it on the shelf. This takes about ten years and MILLIONS OF DOLLARS. Testing in mice, sheep monkeys, humans trials x 3 and final release. MILLIONS OF DOLLARS.\n\nSo, when uninformed 'tards start going on about autism and I'm in the lab busting a hump to determine toxicity in mouse models 20 years before the product may or may not reach the public, it kinda pisses me off a little.\n\nEdit: I forgot to add, at any point these tests/trials can fail. After you have invested millions it may not be effective in humans, contradictory to animal models. Or it could be toxic to humans. They just pull the plug. Goodbye millions of dollars. Back to square one.",
"The discovery/breakthrough is usually years from being publicly available.\n\nHospitals that are linked with Universities such as Davis Health system, use new techniques without announcing it nationwide to avoid media frenzy and continue developing medicinal techniques.\n\nSuch as leading two 'angle noodle' wires through a certain vein by the groin area all the way up to the brain to put a coil on a brain anyeurism. This technique replaces sawing off the top portion of the scalp to access the brain that way.\nIt was used on my dad in 2014, and the operation was only developed 7 months prior, so obviously they asked, either do this threatening procedure to fix a life threatening problem, or allow them to use the new, advanced procedure.",
"Because you probably don't read medical journals, and until the years of further testing, confirming, and trials are completed, these groundbreaking discoveries are really just fluff pieces about what may be coming.",
"Researchers: your guide to hitting the headlines - _URL_0_",
"Because scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they *could,* they didn't stop to think if they *would.*"
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26bd5w | when it comes to nutrition facts in gum, are those if you just chew it or if you swallow it? how do they figure out the nutrition information in gum? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/26bd5w/eli5_when_it_comes_to_nutrition_facts_in_gum_are/ | {
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"Gum bases are synthetic rubber and do not contain any nutrition. The gum has identical nutrition whether you swallow it or not. This is assuming all flavoring is imbibed if the gum is not swallowed. \n\nHere is an old letter from a message board from the Wrigley Corporation:\n\nFrom: [email protected] | This is spam | Add to Address Book \nTo: [email protected] \nSubject: \nDate: Fri, 26 Sep 2003 14:27:29 -0500 \n\nDear Mr. Buck: \n\nThank you for writing to let us know you are concerned about the digestibility of chewing gum. \n\nMany people seem to harbor misconceptions about chewing gum, and we've received many letters over the years asking about the digestibility of our product. To give you some background, chewing gum is made of five basic ingredients -- sugar, corn syrup, softeners, flavors and gum base (the insoluble part that puts the \"chew\" in chewing gum). The first four ingredients are soluble and are extracted from the gum as you chew. Although gum base is not intended to be swallowed, if it is, gum base simply passes through one's system as other roughage does. This normally takes only a few days. \n\nIncidentally, chewing gum is a food product, so all ingredients used in it may be used in chewing gum in compliance with U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulations. \n\nIn response to your second question about the nutritional facts, since we manufacture Wrigley's gum to be only chewed, not swallowed, the nutritional information would reflect what you get from chewing the gum. The ingredients are released during your chew and mixed in with your saliva and swallowed during the duration of your chew. Therefore, most of the ingredients would be ingested even before you might swallow the gum. \n\nThank you for your interest. We hope this information will be helpful. \n\nSincerely, \n\nDenise Young \nConsumer Relations Coordinator \nWM. WRIGLEY JR. COMPANY \n\n_URL_0_\n\nEdit: My first > 100 karma post is because of gum and research. Thanks! My MBA candidacy has taken me far. \n",
"I haven't bought gum in a while but last time I did it was a pack of Orbit. If you read the nutritional info it said \"2 pieces = 5 calories *\" in fine print it said \" * rounded from 8 calories.\" So in actuality each piece is 4 calories. I know it's only a couple calories but it's messed up that they can lie about the calories by 37.5%.",
"hmm vvery interesting"
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1ufqkm | what would i have to do if i had an amazing business or product idea but had literally not the slightest clue of how to execute it? | For example, if I came up with a product. A convenient and innovative product that I know is not on the market. But I have no clue how to draw a prototype or contact manufacturers or ANY of that stuff. I JUST have the idea. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ufqkm/eli5_what_would_i_have_to_do_if_i_had_an_amazing/ | {
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806jdi | why is visceral fat so much worse than subcutaneous fat? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/806jdi/eli5_why_is_visceral_fat_so_much_worse_than/ | {
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"Visceral fat is the fat they accumulates inside your body between your organs. Subcutaneous fat is the fat that's under your skin. As your visceral fat increases, it can start pushing on your vital organs and possibility damage and or impair them. You ever see a guy with scrawny legs and arms, and a big ol' pot belly that's tight as a drum? That's visceral fat, and those are the dudes that tend to drop dead from a heart attack...",
"**TLDR; it's statistics, bro.**\n\nThere is a lot of confusion in nutrition science between causation and correlation. Visceral fat has a higher correlation with metabolic syndrome and its associated diseases than subcutaneous fat. It's doubtful that either \"cause\" anything. Similar to the idea that fat \"clogs\" arteries, it makes intuitive sense that visceral fat, since it's abdominal fat, is crowding your organs and damaging them. That may be the case, but I've never heard that put forward as a causal mechanism by which visceral fat causes detriment to health outside of lay audiences (myself being a lay person).\n\nIn fact, [fat accumulated in the liver](_URL_0_) is a better predictor to disease than visceral fat. It just happens to be that visceral fat also correlates with having a fatty liver.\n\n"
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3tygnc | why do some of us "block out" traumatic experiences while other people retain all memory of their traumas (even if those traumas are sometimes much worse)? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3tygnc/eli5_why_do_some_of_us_block_out_traumatic/ | {
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"What you're talking about is called a psychological defense mechanism called \"repression\". \n\nDefense mechanisms are ways to deal with various stressful things in life. Such as hitting things, crying, etc. \n\nIn this case, your brain simply makes that part of the brain inaccessible to your consciousness so that you don't have to stress over it. \n\nAll humans are different. We all deal with stress differently, because we were all raised differently and have different genes. Some events are more traumatic than others. \n\nSo some people forget those things, and others don't. It's a myth that repression was disproven-- it's *very* real. \n\nEdit: okay, apparently I'm wrong, and my college-level psychology classes have taught me nothing. Please look at the below comments for better information. ",
"[Psychogenic amnesia](_URL_0_)\n\nSome people are just more susceptible to suffer from this disorder. It isn't related to the severity of the trauma, but rather stress associated to the trauma. \n\n",
"Not in every case, but sometimes the memory part of the brain gets shut down, and it's impossible to remember as it simply wasn't stored in the brain. I had a 3 story fall that I cannot remember, but for some reason I remember what side of the porch I went off of.",
"Everyone has different levels of emotional resilience, self-awareness, self-reflection, coping mechanisms and overall philosophies towards life in general. All of which are shaped from an early age and reinforced as we mature. Sometimes with actual traumatic experiences and sometimes by our levels of empathy towards others, especially strangers. \n\nIt also depends on the nature of the traumatic event. Being caught up by a twist of fate in a disaster, natural or man-made, is a far different thing than being stalked, almost murdered or raped. Even man-made disasters vary: surviving an airline crash is far different than being one of those who were spared in the Paris attacks. \n\nHuman beings are fantastically complicated and varied creatures.",
"In actual empirical studies, repression is insanely rare. If the injury is physical and could theoretically affect the head as another poster mentioned with an anecdote about a fall, it's much more likely to be related to TBI. Most \"repression\" has an organic cause, is relatively conscious choice, or is normal forgetting. Look up peer reviewed articles by Loftus on the subject. She's considered one of the experts on the issue of \"repression.\" The way in which Freud used repression has been demonstrated repeatedly to be not reflected in reality. The only slightly scientific explanation other than the situations listed above is that multiple studies have shown that memory is at its worst when there is either extremely low or extremely high arousal (too much or too little epinephrine and norepinephrine). However, this would not be repression, the memory may just be less clear, a traumatic event may be encoded and consolidated as well as an event that occurred when you were at a low arousal (tired, distracted, etc). ",
"Personally I used to be a complete wreck because I obsessed over all of the traumatic experiences I had growing up and as a young adult. After I turned 21 I started drinking heavily and saw an amazing decrease in depression and anxiety. Now when traumatic things happen I laugh and chug a fifth, spend a day too hungover to move and then get up feeling emotionally refreshed and ready for the next blow. I'm generally a very happy guy now, I just get brownout drunk every weekend. ",
"_URL_0_\nSee? Largely a myth. It's so rare, it's almost not worth treating like a real phenomenon.",
"Marginally relevant slightly anecdotal story that no one will read:\n\nWhen I was 12 I was struck by a pickup truck that was going about 45mph. It shattered my femur and caused catastrophic brain hemorrhaging. I went into cardiac arrest and was defibrillated on the scene. Aside from the moments in which I was \"dead\", I was apparently awake throughout the entire ordeal, particularly after EMS arrived and was keeping me awake and somewhat alert. It took me a couple years to fully recover physically and I was fortunate to keep my legs and suffer no apparent permanent cognitive damage. I still walk a bit funny 15 years later.\n\nAnywho, despite being awake for all of it, my memory began three days later after I awoke from the first surgery on my femur. For years I remembered nothing of the accident. Then, over time, it began to come back. First in fleeting images of lying on the cold pavement surrounded by paramedics, the neck brace, my clothes being cut off on the scene. Then in long stretches, like episodes, riding the hood of the truck and being slung from it, the sensation of my shoes flying off, the impact with the truck, then the road. The only thing I can't recall at this point is the pain, assumedly because I immediately went into shock and couldn't feel it. My assumption is that the memories were always there, and that my brain unlocked them over time when it was certain they wouldn't cause me psychological peril. The brain has a remarkable ability to protect you when it's healthy.",
"There have been several studies on \"repression\", and there are differing opinions of the existence and mechanisms at hand, it's not widely understood. \n\nSee: Elizabeth Loftus, she has done several studies that suggest repression is not actually a thing, people have a tendency to \"rebuild\" very inaccurate memories. She is the mother of the \n\"misinformation effect\". \n\nAlso see the story and legal battle regarding a young girl who was suggested upon that she was sexually abused by her father, when the abuse never actually happened. ( Lofft v. Lofft, 1989 )\n\nIt is in my opinion, that repressed memories do not exist, along with much of Freud's theories.\n",
"Fun fact: Science has now shown that to *avoid* trauma-based aftereffects such as PTSD, the victim must be kept awake as long as possible, and not be allowed to sleep.\n\nThe point is, the brain “processes” and stores the day’s activities during REM sleep. The more recent the activities, the stronger they get imprinted into the mind. As such, studying within the 3-5 hour span before going to bed is the ideal time to do so with respect to REM sleep committing that knowledge to longer-term storage.\n\nWhen you experience a traumatic experience, however, the last thing you want to do is let your mind store it into long-term memory in all of its glory (or gory, as it were). Instead, you want to stay awake as long as possible, with plenty of mental and social stimulation, so that the brain has too much to process during REM sleep to spend much time or effort on the trauma. You will still remember it, you may even get PTSD from it, but the aftereffects will be far less severe than if you took a long sleep right after the trauma.\n\nFrom what I have read, even as little as a 12-hour gap between the trauma and sleep can be noticeably beneficial to reducing negative aftereffects. 18-24hrs seem to be the maximum before the effectiveness of this action plateaus.",
"I don't quite agree with the top two answers. Repression has been widely questioned, as have all of the dissociative disorders. It's not a defense mechanism, it really comes down to allocation of resources and survival.\n\n[\"Repressed memories\"](_URL_3_) can be created in an experimental context quite easily. In fact, this is why so many people question the presence of repressed memories because it is so difficult to test and so easy to manipulate and create. \n\nThe thing is that stress facilitates memory formation. [Acute stressful events](_URL_2_) are more easily remembered. I do not mean acute as in small, I mean acute as in \"not chronic.\" Think about it this way, if you have a seriously stressful event, you want to remember the hell out of it so you can avoid it again. These are the people who remember their traumas quite well because it is not a chronic situation. \n\nBut what if you have a stressful situation that continues to present itself? One which you cannot escape? Well then there's no point in allocating resources to the formation of these memories because doing so does not help one to avoid the situations. In these cases, individuals tend to \"go somewhere else\" while the trauma is unfolding. We remember what we attend to. If we don't attend to the trauma, we don't really remember it. Here's a fun example that [doesn't come from trauma literature](_URL_1_). \n\nWe remember what we attend to and what we practice. When people \"block out\" memories, they probably didn't actually form them entirely to begin with. There may be a fuzzy memory that trauma occurred, but not the details. When people retain the memories of their trauma, it's because the trauma either isn't chronic, or they are attending to it for some reason or other (so don't assume that if someone remembers it that their trauma is somehow less than someone who does not remember it. This is not the take away). \n\nTrauma can increase in severity when people attend to it and ruminate over it, especially when they ruminate on the emotional aspects and not the factual ones. This is part of why [Tetris is known to reduce PTSD symptoms](_URL_0_) when performed after a traumatic event or flashback - because it takes resources away from emotional processing which alleviates some of the emotional rumination. \n\ntl;dr: There's a lot of science that suggests it's not repression or amnesia, it actually comes down to not forming the memories in the first place when under chronic stress. \n\nedit: to clarify, when I wrote this the top two answers were repression based defense mechanisms and amnesia.",
"As someone who remembered very little of the first sixteen years of their life I find the replies here interesting.",
"Agreeing more with arguments of neurotransmitters and neuropeptides, brain structures, and lack of memory creation. When an individual experiences extreme levels of stress and/or fear, their brain produces an excess of chemicals such as norepinephrine, epinephrine, glucocorticoids, ACTH, and dopamine. These chemicals help with memory formation and storage in moderate doses, however in excesses they can limit or completely stop memory formation and retention. (Recovered Memory and the Daubert criteria, Constance Dalenberg).\n\nSome people's brains have managed this influx of chemicals without memory impairment, while others can't. I have no evidence as to why, I'm just guessing here, but perhaps it depends on the varying degrees of trauma, perhaps some people who are not effected may have been exposed to significant stress, grief, or trauma before, which has helped their brain adapt to the larger quantities of neurotransmitters and maintain memory functionality. \n\nAnd in response to some of the other comments, I was raped when I was about 5 or 6, I repressed the entire memory, but the symptoms were there even though I couldn't recall anything. I was depressed, I was irritable, I was uncomfortable around adult males, and I reenacted sexual assault and abuse with my dollhouse figurines (when the wife was bad, her husband raped her). It wasn't until I was 14 that I was researching abuse and realized I was probably abused. I consulted with two therapists who both agreed some abuse had taken place. I wanted to remember but I couldn't. They refused to do hypnotherapy because of the risk of false recovered memories. Later I recovered a memory, but I'm not sure if it's real. All I know is repression is not a choice, it's not conscious refusal to acknowledge abuse, and it's not Freudian bullshit.\n\nTl;dr: high levels of brain chemicals cause memory formation and retention to malfunction, some people can cope with chemicals, some can't. I was sexually abused with repressed memories. ",
"I think you are confused with dissociation. Dissociation can be healthy, it can also be a disorder. In either case, dissociation is how we put away experience that is overwhelming / intolerable. Source: _URL_0_",
"I used to think i had depression as well. It runs in my family and my symptoms were spot on at times. After some counseling though, PTSD came up and everything clicked. Once i was able to fully understand what was going on with me, the treatments were tailored to it, and, the results were amazing. Really night and day. I never thought of PTSD as a possibility for me... But it was so right. It's worth looking into for yourself. Trauma does more than you realize, especially at a young age. ",
"I have a friend who was adopted from Russia when she was 12. She grew up speaking/writing fluent Russian. She was an orphan in Russia and went through a bunch of awful shit before being adopted by an American couple. She learned English in a year and in that year completely forgot ALL her Russian. She can no longer speak/understand Russian whatsoever & everyone thinks its because of trauma that her brain blocked out her language. The weird thing is is that she tells me she dreams in Russian. I know she recently went back & has been trying to relearn it through Rosetta-Stone. I don't think she's been very successful though. It just blows my mind she completely forgot 12 years of her native language in one year...",
"The mind goes into defensive mode to keep sanity. Rape victims many times only remember bits and pieces years later because their mind was blocking the disabling mental pain.",
"I also experienced this first hand 12 years ago. I fell 20ft. Thru a metal roof and can tell you in detail what I did that morning up to the accident. My next memory was also 3 days later I came to in the hospital. Crazy part is I only lost consciousness for about 30 seconds I was told and woke up with extreme aggression and shattered my heel and was trying to get up and walk around. They calmed me down and I functioned normally..ate, went to bathroom, carried conversation with friends and family but I don't remember anything until. 3 days later. I don't even remember starting to fall..it's all blank for those days and I have never regained those memories...maybe a good thing but sometimes I wish I knew what all happened that day.",
"Good question. I went paralyzed from the belly button down at age 12 due to Transverse Myelitis - released from hospital on my 13th birthday. Back pain, fell like a raggedy ann doll and was numb before I hit the floor completely. I excelled at math and french language before.\n\nAfter, I couldn't recall or speak french to save my life. I really struggled through the rest of my school career with math and it's only become worse.\n\nThere were only a few seconds of pain ... perhaps too many days alone at that age in hospital with no answers. Not sure. Came back to haunt me though big time ... it's like the mind protects itself until it's assumed you can process bits of trauma at a time.\n\nStill suck at math, but better with en francais, though I can still mix up phrases.\n\nAlso, I look at pictures of myself as a child at the park or home and it seems not connected to me whatsoever. Like an entirely different human being and I can't recall a lot of memories from 'before.' No brain damage involved.",
"Most of what the current top comment says is technically correct, but really burys the lede. Those of us who work with trauma victims know that disrupted memory is the reality in the majority of cases. \n\nThe experience of extreme psychological stress producing neurobiological states that interfere with memory function, especially indexing functions. This often results in fragmented and disjointed recall. \n\nThere is also evidence for and an evolutionary explanation for \"repression\" as a defense against overwhelming horror. This is especially relevant in victims of complex trauma (inescapable, prolonged trauma such as child abuse, torture or severe domestic violence). In those scenarios, the organism's fight or flight response is utterly overwhelmed and dissociative strategies emerge to support endurance. \n\nWhen victims cannot physically escape prolonged suffering they find ways to separate their psyche from the experience, which can provide a blessed freedom from some memories. This is particularly common among child victims ... and certainly overlaps with normal forgetting.\n\nBut most trauma victims will have somewhat at least moderately disrupted recall, even those with so called \"simple trauma\". \n\nSource: Several years experience providing counseling to adults with histories of profound childhood trauma. \n\nA great book on the subject is Judith Herman's \"Trauma and Recovery\".",
"It's a glitch in the matrix.\n\nIn all seriousness, though, psychogenic or dissociative amnesia is real. There may not be a satisfactory scientific explanation at the cellular, molecular or electrophysiological level yet, but the same limitations are apparent with most other mental health conditions.\n\nDissociative amnesia (a more common term when talking about PTSD rather than repression) occurs in the absence of head injury. If amnesia is caused by head injury (TBI) it is not psychogenic but 'organic' in nature.\n\nThe biological mechanism of dissociative amnesia has not been fully elucidated, but there are suggestions of the involvement of [state-dependent learning](_URL_0_).",
"When i was 13 my father killed my mother. My sister used to get really upset because she didn't understand that i don't remember much from where we used to live including details about our mother. Im 29 now and for years ive tried extensively hard to trigger those memories. I feel like my life started when I turned 13.\n\nI dont remember trying to forget or repress anything when it all happened but i can say yes it felt like a very traumatic point in my life and i hope nothing to that extent happens again",
"So I had emotionally abusive parents... And I have removed that relationship from my life. And the way I dealt with it is by repressing those memories. I don't recall them but I have all these word documents full of the events. Anyway... I don't think it's a rare thing to repress life events...",
"I'm not finding responses dumbed down enough for me. I was triggered and reverted back to a scared child. I don't remember any of it but it was a long night for my fiancé. He even recorded me singing kid rhymes and then screaming. A big one that hit was I screamed \"I don't want to do naughty things.\" When he told me and had me listen all I could remember was being scared of one of my parent's friend but don't know why. It's been a couple years cause I've been on good meds but I suffered from night terrors as a teen and young adult, I'm told that's not normal too. Am I too dumb to understand the psychology by it or unsure they even know because of the things I've experienced.",
"I have little to no memory of the first 9 years of my life. Short bursts or a few seconds of happiness that need to be brought up by a photo or a memory. What happened at 9? My dad hung himself.\n\nI always thought it was just a case of bad memory until my grandmother died 2 months ago. Then the brain threw on the switch again. I now have few memories of my grandmother and i have to really force those. "
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8c1q4t | how fast are things moving in the human body? | Say I lift my hand up to check my fingernails, how fast is everything moving to make that happen? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8c1q4t/eli5_how_fast_are_things_moving_in_the_human_body/ | {
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"it varies depending on what part of \"everything\" you're talking about.\n\nThe main things, though, are the impulses fired from the brain down through the nervous system, which take some fraction of a millisecond, and the time it takes for your muscles to move your hand, which depends on the strength of your muscles, mass of your arm, and a few other factors.\n\nMost of the rest of your body isn't really involved beyond what's already going on; blood is pumping through your arm at what is probably a very-slightly-higher-than-resting rate due to the light activity, but it was pumping through there anyway, it just sped up a tiny bit since you weren't at a rest anymore. \n\nThe muscles in your legs likely don't move at all, nor the muscles in your abs. Your digestive tract will continue digesting whatever's in there at its normal rate under most circumstances, unless your fingernails cause you to panic and have an adrenal response that temporarily slows/stops digestion and potentially voids your bowels."
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45fiai | how do people graduate/finish school early | when i was in school you had to complete grade 1-10 then do year 11 & 12 to complete SACE, every now and then i see some story about someone who finished high school at 14,15,16.How do they complete 12 years of school at that age???? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/45fiai/eli5_how_do_people_graduatefinish_school_early/ | {
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"Their school might offer programs that combine 2 years of information into one. Or maybe they test out of certain courses. Also different countries start school at different ages or different years of required education",
"They don't complete 12 years of school, that's how.\n\nThey do some school, and everyone involved agrees it would be a waste of time to have them sit through the same stuff as everyone else, so they skip them past several grades.\n\n16 isn't really that crazy, I graduated high school at 17, and I went through every grade. Someone who graduates then could have just skipped some elementary school grade, or started 1st grade when they were 4, instead of the more normal 5.\n\nPeople who are younger just skipped more grades, or accomplished the requirements for graduating in less than 4 years, which cuts out a year.",
"So at my high school you had to get 22-24 required credits to be able to graduate. Each year would give you 1 credit in that course and included things like 4 credits English, 4 credits Math, 2 Credits of Electives ( extra curricular activities), 2 Credits of Physical Training, et cetera. It was designed for a student to have 5 required courses a year with each student being able to select 2 electives each year. \n \nUsing those 2 free electives a student could double up on certain courses. They could take calculus one year and trigonometry the next, knocking out all 4 credits of math in just 2 years (they're still taking the required algebra each year). \n \nIf a student('s parents) were rich enough they could pay to go to summer school to take courses or even enroll for classes at the local college who offered some classes that the high school would recognize as earning credits. \n \nSo a student could double up on math over 2 years while attending summer school for extra science and english classes, and attend college for the remaining credits, and could theoretically be set to graduate by age 15-16, since high school credits didn't start until age 14 (9th grade)."
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28iz2q | why do we die, and not live eternally? | PLEASE READ THIS
I tried searching this topic, but I couldn't find anything. If this was asked and explained, please link me to that thread and this one will be deleted.
My question probably sounds very uneducated and stupid.
I know that people die because of foreign diseases and viruses and bacteria and disabilities, etc. But what I don't understand is old age related death. Why does old age bring death? What happens when we're older that makes death a more appropriate time after retirement age?
Why can certain living organisms live to be 100+ (such as sea turtles), even some 200+ (certain whales that I learned about in my biology class), but not humans?
Forgive me for being so stupid and naive about this topic. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/28iz2q/eli5_why_do_we_die_and_not_live_eternally/ | {
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"I heard once that cells can only reproduce a certain number of times. I think it's related to this: \n_URL_0_ \n > Telomere shortening is associated with ageing, mortality and ageing-related diseases. In 2003, Richard Cawthon discoved that those with longer telomeres lead longer lives than those with short telomeres However, it is not known whether short telomeres are just a sign of cellular age or actually contribute to the aging process",
"What diseases and viruses do to our bodies is attack our cells, organs, etc. They essentially break down parts of the body that we need, until they no longer work and we pass away. The same thing happens with old age. Our organs get tired and overworked and they no longer are able to manage. Our cells stop reproducing as they once did and their fight for our immune system becomes too much of a hassle. ",
"Create a detailed blueprint for a picture. Draw the picture. Now keep copying that picture from the blueprint. As years go on the blueprint becomes more fragile. The paper becomes more flimsy. You may spill coffee on it ect. Over 80+ years and literstly trillions of copies this happens to your DNA. ...Or eventually you can't see what your blueprint 100% correct and make mistakes (cancer)"
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1dg9a6 | clothing sizes | Why do we not have universal clothing sizes? even shoe sizes?
Its simple enough to say each country started with a different measurement and just stuck with it. Why not set guidelines for manufacturing and come up with a universal standard? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1dg9a6/eli5clothing_sizes/ | {
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2jy51x | how does this hoverboard on kickstarter work? | _URL_0_
The kickstarter lacks enough technical specifications and their product info is pretty grandiloquent and pretentious. I don't know what to think, specially because they don't specify exactly how does it work. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2jy51x/eli5_how_does_this_hoverboard_on_kickstarter_work/ | {
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"That's the secret: It almost definitely doesn't."
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2l0d7b | how is masochism possible when pain isn't supposed to be pleasing, but warning us? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2l0d7b/eli5_how_is_masochism_possible_when_pain_isnt/ | {
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"Hi there.\n\nTo put it simply, we cant control pain itself but we *can* control how we respond to it. Thats a physical reason.\n\nPsychologically, you cant really make many broad generalizations about masochists, or anyone really. Some masochists endure because it reminds them they are alive and helps them to focus on being content with being alive, some genuinely enjoy pain itself and actively force themselves to regard it as pleasure through small incremental steps, some enjoy the state of numbness one can achieve when so much pain is inflicted that the area just doesnt get stimulated by anything afterwards.",
"For some people pain releases \"excess\" endorphin/enkalphin in the brain.\nThey are natural opiates. So I suspect the initial pain is not pleasurable\nbut the subsequent release of natural opiate like substances is pleasurable and reinforcing. I treated a feather picking bird with naloxone, a drug that blocks opiate receptors. After a few treatments\nthe parrot stopped the painful picking as it was no longer positively reinforcing. I suspect self-cutting in some people works by the same mechanism.\n \n"
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3t8zic | why is pentagon outside of washington d.c. , the us capital ? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3t8zic/eli5_why_is_pentagon_outside_of_washington_dc_the/ | {
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"First of all, understand that there is no legal requirement for all federal government buildings to be in DC. In the case of the Pentagon, back in 1941 as America entered WWII, when the Department of Defense was still called the Department of War, the work and employed people unsurprisingly outgrew the existing facilities they had in Foggy Bottom. Franklin Delano Roosevelt commissioned the development of a new building that would be large enough. Originally, the building was to be built on a roughly pentagonal plot in Arlington Farms (hence the pentagonal design), but FDR thought it would interrupt sightlines from Arlington Cemetery into the city. They instead moved it to an old airfield (Hoover Field), but kept the original architectural plan to save on costs of having to draft a completely new design.",
"Since the Pentagon is the headquarters (HQ) of the US military, and the President of the US is the Commander in Chief (CinC) of the US military, it makes sense to put the HQ near where the CinC lives, so that comunication between the two can take place quickly. Bear in mind that they built it in the 1940s and so while there were telephones and radios, it was still much harder to get a hold of people who were far away quickly than it is today.\n\nNow, if you mean why are two very important government functions located so close to each other when they could both be easily taken out by a single nuclear weapon? Again, they built it in the early 40's, before any nuclear weapons had been detonated. This is why they build the NORAD complex under Cheyenne Mountain later on, so that the whole command structure couldn't be taken out so easily. ",
"It's because there were only a couple of places large enough for the size of the building they wanted. The first was next to Arlington Cemetery and was pentagonal. Planners decided that it would block the scenic view of the area, so it was moved to its current location, but kept the pentagonal shape of the original design. ",
"Plenty of agencies have the HQ's outside of DC proper but within the larger DMV region.\n\nIf you ever here a show about the CIA talking about \"Langley\" it is because Langley Virginia in Fairfax County to the West of DC is home to the George Bush Center for Intelligence, the agencies headquarters. \n\nMeanwhile, Fort Meade, an Army installation in Anne Arundal county Maryland is home to the HQ of the NSA, along with many military and other formations related to cyber-security and warfare. "
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2i2l5j | why do people make gains quicker than other people | I know this guy who is showing off all his back muscles and shit. He has been working hard for 3-4 years to get where he is today. I started out in a similar shape to him and I have his results already after around a year.
I feel bad for the guy so I'm never shirtless, don't wanna ruin his mood. But why does this happen? Why do people make gains faster than others? My race is Anglo-Polynesian if that is important. I have a penis also. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2i2l5j/eli5_why_do_people_make_gains_quicker_than_other/ | {
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3vifny | what are the downsides to a 401k? | I've been reading posts about it and everything sounds all good and dandy. You put money in, companies match and put in an equal or more amount. More money! So.. I don't understand why my dad and a lot of my Asian friends' parents think that it's a rip off and don't put their money into their 401k. What are the downsides aside from having a smaller paycheck? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3vifny/eli5_what_are_the_downsides_to_a_401k/ | {
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"They're generally very conservative investments. If you're willing to put some time & effort into investing, you can probably get better returns.\n\n...and the money in your 401k can't be used for Pai Gow.",
"You are investing in stock which means you are not guaranteed to get your money back in the end. It is risky.",
"The money is essentially locked there until you retire unless you want to pay severe tax penalties to withdraw it early.\n\nIt may also not be the best tax situation if you're not currently making a lot of money or pay a lot in interest since it would be taxed at a very low rate today, but much higher in the future.\n\nThe funds in the plan may or may not be top performers, that varies by plan and allocation.",
"Well if the economy crashes, your out that money, but then again if that happens there are probably bigger problems to deal with...",
"Yeah, so does anyone actually have a case that couldn't be applied to *any* long term investment?\n\nEspecially since you're doubling your money right out of the gate?",
"Money in a 401k cannot be accessed until you turn 59 1/2 without incurring a 10% penalty. This is literally the only downside.\n\nIf you plan to live to the age of 60, 401k's are one of the best investment opportunity available to you. Along with IRA's, 401k's have special tax exempt statuses that make them uniquely beneficial.\n\n401k's and IRAs are special accounts sponsored by the government to encourage people to save for retirement. They are a great investment opportunities and they have historically always been a good tool to use when investing. The government is basically losing tax money on purpose to allow its citizen's to save more money for retirement.\n\nThe only other potential \"downside\" to 401k's is that there is a limit on how much you can contribute to it each year. (The government doesn't want to lose too much money). If the limit was higher a lot of people would (and/or should) contribute more to their 401k's.",
"The biggest downside from my experience is most places don't offer them, and the ones that do even less frequently match anything.",
"I know you're asking about the downsides of 401ks and I'll mention a couple in a second. From your description it sounds like you have at least a basic understanding of 401ks. Are you familiar with all the benefits? If not please read [here](_URL_0_). It really is a bad decision to not take advantage of the employer match and the benefits (particularly tax benefits) a 401k offers. Now the downsides. Your money is locked in to the 401k unless you want to pay a hefty tax penalty. Typically your account is managed by one company and you have a restricted choice of investments to buy. The company will give you a range of investments with different risk levels so you can go for high risk high reward when you're young and change to more solid investments when you're older. Those are the only real downsides I can think of.\n\nEdit: Looks like my downsides were already mentioned. ",
"If your employer is matching the only real downside other then paying a penalty for early withdraw is that by deferring the tax you might end up paying a very high rate. Remember that not very long ago the top tax rate was almost 90%. Also there is also nothing prohibiting congress from levying a tax specific to 401ks. \n\nNot that these things are likely but they are the one drawback to deferring taxes. ",
"The downside is that you can't withdraw the money before age 59 1/2 without paying huge penalties. A 401k is intended to save for retirement. It's good to have an emergency fund outside of the 401k just in case.\n\nIf you're going to save, contribute to your 401k up to your company's match. Easy call.\n\nIf you're going to save more than the company will match, the question is a little more complicated. Remember that with a 401k you're paying taxes when you withdraw the money in the future, which should be after you retire, rather than paying taxes now. Usually people will have lower marginal tax rate when they retire because they have a lower income. So most people can reduce the total taxes they pay with a 401k.\n\nOf course there is some risk because a 401k is invested in the stock market. But in the long run you will come out ahead. No well-diversified portfolio will lose money over a several decade span. Make your money work for you!\n\ntl;dr Your friends' parents are idiots. Don't listen to them",
"If your employer is matching contributions, then there is really no downside since the employer's contributions are free to you (taxes assumed to be deferred until you withdraw the funds when you are a senior citizen). The main thing to watch out for is investment options that have service fees that are higher than market rate. Usually the employer will limit which funds can be selected, and you may not be able to choose the lowest fee funds. However, if your money is being matched by the employer, then you are automatically starting out with a 50% or higher profit depending upon how much is being matched.",
"I have no idea where those people you know are getting their \"rip off\" ideas from. 401(k)s are a very good thing for your employer to offer you. It is basically free money shielded from taxes until later, once you are planning on retiring.\n\nThe only downside, really, is that it cannot be liquidated whenever you want without tax penalties. Do not be afraid to start a 401(k) with your company.\n\nAlso, to expand another concern brought up by u/Lithuim about the funds in the plan not being top performers, I would suggest getting informed on what investment firm your company is using for this. Depending on the firm, they may be more than happy to sit down with you free of charge and explain how your money is being invested and why they are investing it that way.\n\nSource: BBA in finance working for a private wealth management firm.",
"EDIT: Explained the employer contributions a bit more clearly. \n\nAt the very least put in enough money to take full advantage of your employers match. That is the best guaranteed return on an investment anywhere. \n\nThe best part of putting money into a 401k for me is that it comes out of your paycheck before taxes, just like health benefits. \n\nLet's look at some simplified numbers.( These are just to illustrate the point)\n \n\nFor the moment let's ignore other pretax things like your employers health insurance plan. \n\nLet's say you earn $1000 before taxes. \nIf your taxes amount to %30 (state + federal + city + etc) That's $300 right off the top that you'll never see. \nYour paycheck would amount to $700\n\nNow lets say you put 10% in a 401k. \n$100 goes into your retirement and you are now taxed on the remaining $900.\nYour taxes are now only $270\nYour paycheck would work out to $630 \n\nThat $100 in your 401k but it only cost you $70 \n\n\nOf course, earning a few % every year on that money is boring, and you MIGHT be able to do better investing on your own if you spend a significant amount of time and effort. Most people won't bother. If you're going to try, at least take advantage of any matching contributions that your employer might offer. My current employer matches up to 4% of my total income, so let's use that. \n\nLet's say I contributed the minimum to take advantage of that. \n\nLet's keep using that $1000 before tax total to keep the math simple. \nSince my employer matches dollar for dollar up to 4% I'd have to put in $40 \n4% of $1000 =40$\nEmployer matches 4% of $1000=$40\ntotal 401k contribution is $80\n\n \n\n\nThe government won't tax my employers matching contributions until I pull the money out when I retire. \n\nMeanwhile the tax is still based on $960 \n%30 of $960 = $288\nMy paycheck would still be $672\nIf I hadn't put in anything it would be $700\nSo that 80$ only lowered my take home pay by $28\n\n\nThat's a deal I'll take any day of the week. \n\n\n\n",
"To add to all other answers, be wary of the fees of the 401k funds you're investing into. some of the fees that they charge *are* rip offs. \n\n**EDIT: Made this comment at 3AM and went to bed. Now that I'm up, here is more information. I do hope this gets more visibility, not for the karma, as sweet as it may be, but because I really believe it to be helpful**\n\nI went through creating a 401K portfolio without much help. In my experience, I was drawn to all in one funds, because they were simply easier. What are all in one funds? As I understand it, they invest in US equity, International equity, and typical bonds to diversify. (Investing in those 3 areas is considered a typical three-fund portfolio) Also, as target date approaches, they grow more conservative. Depending on your situation... but something like 'T.Rowe Price Ret 2055' would be an example of one. It happens to be one that I had available to me. The operating expenses (or fees) on this was 0.76%. There were various funds ranging in expenses but all pretty much below 1%. So I thought \"Psh, what's the big deal? just pick the closest year to my retirement and call it good!\" Well. Not so fast.\n\n1% fees sound small. But it can end up being 10-16% of your expected returns. Over 30+ years, some can end up eating up 50% of your returns due to compounding effects.\n\n_URL_0_ is a website that is a great tool to look at these things. \n\nHere is an example of a portfolio from _URL_0_.[_URL_1_] Long story short, if you look at the top right of the image, at 0.55% operating expenses, starting balance of $10K, with annual return of 5.71%, amount projected to be lost is 53.0% of returns. We are literally talking tens of thousands of dollars.\n\nNow all of these numbers are projections. They can also be skewed depending on what you are investing in, what the expected returns are, etc. The purpose of this post is not to tell you how to invest your money per se, because the amount of risk you take with your investments is up to you and how far away from retirement you are should play into that as well.\n\nNow, is 401K bad? It is up to you to decide, but I do not think so. You just have to do your research. I still invest into my 401K. I looked through the funds that were available to me. I found I could invest into BlackRock S & P 500 Index. This one had the lowest fees, 0.04%. Other than this one, the next lowest fee was 0.34%. So I changed my allocations so 100% of my money goes into this particular fund. This goes away from the \"three-fund portfolio\" approach. I am still in my 20s, so I am okay with taking a bit 'riskier' approach. For example, this particular fund took *huge* hits in '02 and '08 crashes to the tune of -23% and -50% drops respectively. But eventually, with time, it bounces back. Even with those crashes, the 15 year history shows 13% return. Since I know my retirement isn't coming for 35-40 years, I am okay with this. I will also be looking to utilize IRAs to go into International and Bond allocations as well, to complete my three fund portfolio. \n\nHere's the thing, if your company matches 401K, it's free money. Take advantage. \n\nIf you look at where you are in tax brackets and you happen to make a certain amount of $ that is borderline, you can also reduce your taxable income with allocations. \n\nAlso, it's never too early to start preparing for retirement. \n\n**TL;DR:** The concept of 401K as a whole, in my opinion, is in no way a rip off. However, these are all multi-billion dollar financial institutions that know how to make a lot of money that are involved in the process. If you don't look out for yourself, you definitely *can* and will get ripped off. I'm just one guy and don't consider myself an expert in any way, shape or form, so take my opinion how you want. But if you want my advice, if you have 401K available to you, invest. If your company offers matching, you're stupid for not taking advantage. But spend some time, do your research. Don't think of it as a hassle. It may seem like an annoying chore but your 2-3 hours of sitting on the computer, (which, let's face it, if you're on Reddit, you're doing that anyway), may just literally turn into $50K decisions for your future, maybe more. \n\n\n**EDIT2:** Below, /u/DownvoteToDisagree asked about what fees are considered high. I suppose this is relative? But if you ask me... \n\nInexpensive: 0.2% or less.\n\nAverage: 1%.\n\nExpensive: more than 0.2%.\n\n(The average mutual fund is very expensive.)",
"Putting off retirement savings in favor of short term goals is foolish (yes, even paying off debt). Here's why:\n\nWhen you're young, you have options. If you have dept, you can file for bankruptcy, or just not pay it (You won't go to prison). If you lose your job, you can get another job.\n\nWhen you're old, you have ZERO options. If you're 75 years old and sick, you cannot get a job. You can't just \"not pay\" for your assisted living. Being poor is hard. But being old and sick and poor is another mater all together.\n\nNot contributing enough to at least get the full match from your 401k IS foolish. There are no short term goals that justify that.",
"I work as a financial planner. I would say the potential negative side is that your tax bracket could be higher when you're eligible to draw money from the 401k; You may pay more in taxes at that point if your yearly income makes your tax bracket higher. You're getting extra money from the employer and that would cover whatever differences your tax status causes. A lot of the people who don't invest in their 401k invest in a taxable brokerage account. You definitely have more choices when it comes to your investments but you pay taxes every year on your realized gains unlike a 401k or IRA. This can make very large differences on how quickly the money grows. The fees you pay for investing in a 401k also can't be beat. If your 401k uses Vanguard or American Funds you're typically paying a fraction of a percent. \n\nAs an advisor it doesn't make me money to tell clients to invest in their 401k but it's almost always in their best interest to do so. Our team always emphasizes putting money in a 401k if you have the ability to do so because of tax benefits and the lower fees. Couples in the age range of 40-70 come into our office everyday admitting they wish they would have put as much in their 401k as they could have. \n\nIf you're in that 20-40 range like me you have to recognize that we won't have pensions like our parents and social security will go through radical changes in the next few decades. Our generation's ability to retire will rely on how much we decide to save and not on pensions and social security. \n\nWe'd all love to have some extra money in the checking account but taking advantage of tax deferral and matching contributions is something that you'll be happy you did later on. \n\nIf you can afford to put money in the plan then do it. If making those contributions will put you behind on bills then don't",
"You might die before you can withdraw the money. It'd go on to whoever's in your will, but you wouldn't get to enjoy it.\n\nI guess you wouldn't care much though, as you'd be dead."
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20j9k8 | eli8: (question from an actual eight-year-old) how do we know how hot the sun is? | My kid would like to know. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/20j9k8/eli8_question_from_an_actual_eightyearold_how_do/ | {
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"That's a great question that took surprisingly long into the history of physics to figure out! I'll skip the historical details ([although you should read about it here](_URL_0_)) and cut to the chase: It turns out that everything with a non-zero temperature emits light all the time. This isn't necessarily the type of light that your eyes can detect, but it's there all the same. It was discovered experimentally long before it was explained theoretically (it took until the year 1900), but now we have a pretty good understanding of what's happening inside things when they glow. In fact, it's the same reason that a hot object in a fire will begin to glow red, and why fire itself is orange at the top.\n\nThis radiation is called Blackbody Radiation, named so because the form of the radiation is derived by assuming that the body is completely black, i.e., it absorbs all incoming light and doesn't scatter or reflect any. The only light that is emitted is actually generated inside the object, not just reflected from a nearby flashlight. The useful thing about blackbody radiation is that the spectrum of light that's emitted is determined by the temperature and nothing else. That means that we can measure the spectrum of emitted blackbody radiation from an object and immediately know its temperature.\n\nThere are some caveats though; some materials don't play by the rules, instead choosing to emit light that's not well-described by the blackbody radiation spectrum. Luckily for us, the sun is one of the most ideal blackbody radiators that we've discovered: that means our estimate of the temperature (on the surface anyway) is really quite accurate. ",
"Imagine [a piece of metal in a factory](_URL_1_). You know how they glow red when they get hot? Then, when they get even hotter, they glow other colors, going up to yellow and white when they get super hot? So, taking from this, you can understand that if we're looking at the metal and it's \"red hot\", it's a particular temperature; if it's yellow, it's a higher temperature; and so on. If your eyes could see the infrared part of the spectrum, you could tell when it's just *warm* rather than really hot. If you have [very expensive and sensitive cameras](_URL_0_), you can simply look at the thing and tell exactly how hot the surface is. As a thing gets hotter, the colors of light that it emits tend to \"creep\" upwards on the electromagnetic (light) spectrum: from infrared, to red, to yellow, to blue (and since it's also emitting the lower-wavelength colors, these tend to mix to form white), and **really** hot things can go higher, into wavelengths like ultraviolet and X-rays and such.\n\nWith a little knowledge of science, we can do the same thing with the sun. Just look at it, see what wavelengths are coming off of it, and in what amounts, and figure out how hot it is!",
"Eight year olds ask the greatest questions that you can't answer! I nanny for an 8 year old and recently she asked me how hot the center of the earth was and what would happen if you poured water into the center of the earth. (It would evaporate before it got there. Duh.) No.. a lot of water. (I speculate another similar answer.) Okay... but what if it was so much water that it couldn't evaporate that fast? So now all of a sudden we're speculating what would happen if there was a way for ocean water to somehow get into volcanoes and somehow start cooling the center of the earth by a noteworthy amount and that would clearly also heat up/partially evaporate the ocean water. Long story short I think she's trying to kill us all...."
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3c70kt | how can lightning destroy electronics even with fuses/surge protectors in place? | Basically we had a massive storm the other night and I'm pretty sure lightning hit the house or very close to it. I woke up to find my TV/amp/ps4/router being fried despite them being plugged into a surge protector and them all having plug fuses plus the house fuses, none of which tripped. How can this happen? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3c70kt/eli5_how_can_lightning_destroy_electronics_even/ | {
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"Lets step back a second here. \n & nbsp; \nFuses work work because a little piece of metal melts, breaking the electrical connection. You mentioned house fuses, but since you used the word \"tripped\" I think you might actually be talking about circuit breakers (mechanical devices that are break the electrical connection but can be reset when they trip; when a fuse blows, there's no resetting it, just replacing it). Either way though, the idea is simple, there's no longer a continuous loop of electrical conductors making a circuit, at some point an air gap has been added so that the conductors are no longer touching each other. \n & nbsp; \nWhere's the conductor that the lightning bolt used to cover the distance between ground and cloud? There wasn't one. Lightning Bolts have so much electricity, they're like \"Screw the fact that air is an insulator, I'm going anyway.\" And if it can shoot through the air between cloud and ground, it's going to laugh at the tiny little air gaps in blown fuses or tripped circuit breakers. \n & nbsp; \n(And your surge protector? Those are designed to protect from electrical surges occurring within the electrical grid itself, such as the momentary spikes of current when other loads come on or drop off the same electrical line. They're not meant as lightning protection, and probably said so right on the packaging, in really tiny text.)"
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20d6hf | why can i scoop and carry around my 120-130 lb sister with relative ease but can hardly pick up a 40 lb barbell in one arm? | As the title says:
I can scoop and carry people (think man carrying wife into hotel room style) who are 120-140 pounds for up to 5 minutes or so, but when I go to a gym and try to lift a 30-40 pound barbell (in one arm) I can hardly do it for ten reps before I get knocked out.
ELI5 please. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/20d6hf/eli5why_can_i_scoop_and_carry_around_my_120130_lb/ | {
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"Because you're isolating the muscles used when you lift weights. You're using several muscles when you pick up a person, and you can shift your balance and adjust the way you're holding that person to take tension off of tired muscles and redistribute the load to other muscles.",
"Weight is distributed. Check out this simple equation. \n\nP=F/A. Increase area reduce pressure. Though it's for liquids, simplistically, it works. ",
"Depending on how you pick things up, leverage comes into play. Scooping up another adult usually means the weight is closer to you, and thus different muscles are used compared to picking up a barbell with just your hands. Try scooping up a barbell in the same way you scoop up a person and it will likely be a lot easier. Likewise, try lifting up a person using only your hands and it will likely be impossible.",
"A few reasons:\n\nFirst off, lifting weights with one arm and carrying a person have vastly different mechanics. To carry a person, it is easy to 'scoop' them into your arms and close to your body. The closeness to your body makes lifting much easier, than say, a barbell that is fully extended from your body. \n\nSecondly, lifting a barbell 10 reps requires different muscle uses than carrying a person. For a simple barbell lift you are only lifting with your arms and some core muscles. While carrying a person, you are keeping them in a position such that your center of mass is directly over your feet so the majority of work is done from your core and legs while the arms are being 'locked'.\n\nI came to these conclusions based on some simple physics with moment arms, it is easier to lift weights closer to your body because there will be less moment (force x distance). While carrying someone, the weight falls mainly around the inside of your elbows and all you need to do is keep the arms raised. Lifting weights, the weight is all the way to the hands and you need to consistently raise and lower the arms for 10 reps. \n\nTl;Dr - Lifting barbells uses mainly arms + core, while carrying a person uses mainly legs + core while the arms only need to be kept locked close to the body.",
"In addition to what others have said, other people are probably willing to let you lift them and they provide some momentum. For example, there's a big different between lifting up a child who wants to be held and trying to drag a crying one away from something they shouldn't be touching.",
"Try carrying your sister like you carry the dumbbell. See if you get to one rep. Then try carrying the dumbbell like you carried your sister. "
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2m34p6 | why can't we drink seawater when we're dehyrdated? | If the technical definition of dehydration is the loss of water and salt from the body , then why can't we drink sea water, which is water mixed with salt? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2m34p6/eli5_why_cant_we_drink_seawater_when_were/ | {
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"The amount of salt that is mixed in saltwater is very high, and upon drinking, (in a nutshell) your body will try and equalize the solute to solvent concentration in your blood, causing you to pee out water. So in the end, you will become even more dehydrated. ",
"Seawater has about three times the salt content of urine.\n\nThat means for every cup of seawater you drink, you body has to come up with 2 more cups of water to eliminate it."
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382joi | why do some cars have one white backlight and one red backlight? | _URL_0_ this is what i mean, the right one is white and the left one is red. why | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/382joi/eli5_why_do_some_cars_have_one_white_backlight/ | {
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"I'm not sure but looking at other Mazda 3s, and the odd split in that pic, I'm going to say you're looking at a split screen pic of 2 different cars with different rear lamp configuration. ",
"Pretty common for cars here (UK) to have this, mine does. The red light on the left is the fog light and the white one on the right is the reversing light."
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jed3a | why does the product of a number and zero equal zero? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jed3a/eli5_why_does_the_product_of_a_number_and_zero/ | {
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"0 means none.\n\n0 * 1 is none of 1, and none of something can't be anything.\n\n",
"When you multiply one number by another, you're saying that you have the first number of the second number (which is the same as saying that you have the second number the first number of times). For example, if you multiply four by three, you're saying that you have four threes (or three fours, it doesn't matter), which is twelve. If you multiply two by two, you're saying that you have two twos, which is four.\n\nDo this with zero and any number: You can either think of that as having zero of that number, or that number of zeros, but in any case the end result is that you have zero. For a \"physical example\", if I give you three cookies zero times, I've given you no cookies. Similarly, if I give you zero cookies three times, I've still given you no cookies.",
"Think of the number one as a toy you have. 2 * 1 would be like saying \"I have 2 toys!\" So 2 * 1=2. Now if you said \"\"I have 0 toys!\" That would mean that 0 * 1=0. Essentially, you're counting how many of something you have.",
"Basically, multiplication is like having x groups of y objects. Like 5 buckets with 4 apples in each. 5 * 4 = 20 apples total. If you have 0 buckets with 4 apples in them, you have 0 apples. If you have 5 buckets with 0 apples in them, you still have 0 apples.",
"0 means none.\n\n0 * 1 is none of 1, and none of something can't be anything.\n\n",
"When you multiply one number by another, you're saying that you have the first number of the second number (which is the same as saying that you have the second number the first number of times). For example, if you multiply four by three, you're saying that you have four threes (or three fours, it doesn't matter), which is twelve. If you multiply two by two, you're saying that you have two twos, which is four.\n\nDo this with zero and any number: You can either think of that as having zero of that number, or that number of zeros, but in any case the end result is that you have zero. For a \"physical example\", if I give you three cookies zero times, I've given you no cookies. Similarly, if I give you zero cookies three times, I've still given you no cookies.",
"Think of the number one as a toy you have. 2 * 1 would be like saying \"I have 2 toys!\" So 2 * 1=2. Now if you said \"\"I have 0 toys!\" That would mean that 0 * 1=0. Essentially, you're counting how many of something you have.",
"Basically, multiplication is like having x groups of y objects. Like 5 buckets with 4 apples in each. 5 * 4 = 20 apples total. If you have 0 buckets with 4 apples in them, you have 0 apples. If you have 5 buckets with 0 apples in them, you still have 0 apples."
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262f3s | what is the difference between intraocular lenses and surgeries such as lasik? | I've always thought they were essentially the same and today found out that wasn't true... | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/262f3s/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_intraocular/ | {
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"Intraocular lenses are artificial ones implanted in the eye.\n\nLasik is using a laser to change the shape of your existing natural lens."
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3y2qbd | what makes that vibration noise in your eyes when you make them look all the way up? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3y2qbd/eli5_what_makes_that_vibration_noise_in_your_eyes/ | {
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"You're hearing the tensor tympani muscle. There's a muscle in your ear that's tied in to your bones of your inner ear in order to dampen the noise of your own chewing. That muscle naturally compensates for the sound of chewing by contracting and \"muffling\" the movement of those bones. When you clench your jaw (or close your eyes tightly), it contracts that muscle and a contracted muscle actually \"cycles\" on and off (you can see and feel the same thing if you clench your fist tightly and hold it). When that muscle contracts (and consequently cycles) it gets transmitted to the bones in your inner ear the same way sound does.\n\nYou can, if you \"figure out the knack,\" contract only that muscle voluntarily and hear the same thing.",
"What vibrations man? If I look up all I go is cross eyed then get a headache. "
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5p9ztj | why didn't english develop as a romance language but french, italian, spanish etc did? | I'm often told that because of the Germanic influence of the Anglo-Saxons, English is at its core a Germanic language. But I don't understand this, since France was settled by the Franks, a Germanic tribe. Italy was settled by the Lombards and Goths, more Germanic peoples. Spain was settled by the Visigoths, yet another Germanic tribe. However, French, Spanish and Italian aren't referred to as having Germanic influence, whereas English is.
Did Latin not take a firm hold in Roman Britain, meaning there was little Latin for the Anglo-Saxon language to influence? Did the subsequent reconquest of Italy and parts of Spain by Justinian have an effect?
Regards | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5p9ztj/eli5_why_didnt_english_develop_as_a_romance/ | {
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"Britain was occupied by Rome from 43 AD to 410 AD, which is shorter than most other areas. During that time, the island was never fully occupied, and they always lived besides the Anglo-Saxons in Scotland. \n\nThe geographic isolation also plays an important role. On the main land, Spain, France and Italy may have been conquered by Germanic tribes after the year 500, they still had a strong common ground in Latin. Whereas in England, it was much easier to \"relieve\" the people from their Roman history. ",
"It's a very good question.\n\nLatin took hold in Roman Britain but in terms of weight of population there were simply far far far more Saxons than there were Romano-British. And of course the Romano-Britons didn't just speak Latin but also P and Q Celtic wheras the saxons just spoke saxon. Saxon won out\n\nIn contrast Italy was speaking a Romance language for many centuries before the Goths arrived, and they didn't stay long (and it's worth pointing out that many places where the Lombards settled do speak German today: Tyrol, parts of Lombardy).\n\nIt's a good point about Spain and France but as I understand it the Roman occupation was deeper in those areas and the Gothic occupation shallower. As to why the Franks adopted a latinate language, that's a very good question. My guess is it would have something to do with the primacy of the Catholic church in the early middle ages? Or maybe it was to do with Charlemagne? I know he spoke German but he set himself up as \"holy Roman emperor\" and used a latin system of writing and laws to emphasise the point.",
"It was occupied by Rome for centuries less than the other regions, and had a lot fewer Romans when it was occupied. So it has a lot of influences, but was not fully Latinized. \n\nIt was also conquered by the Germanic Angles, Saxons, and Jutes fairly quickly (historically speaking) after the Romans left. Partially conquered by the Norse a few centuries after that. And even when the French conquered in 1066 it was the Norman French who were the portion of the French conquered by the Norse. So while the Norman brought the French language to England and thus brought back Latin influences they also carried a lot of Norse influences that connected with the existing Norse influences. ",
"Because people have a very wrong idea of what the Barbaric invasions were, and of their numbers.\n\nPeople immagine this huge horde of fur wearing men with axe and long beards, but that is not what happened, at all.\n\nRome was not only a military superpower, it was also a cultural superpower. The germanic tribes didn't just decided one day to invade, they had relationship with the empire for at least a century. Some tribes even had mens serving for the roman army.\n\nBy the time they invaded the average barbarian wasn't THAT foreign to Roman Culture. Their dress would be very similar to those of the romans, and they liked some thing of the roman culture. \n\nThis means that when the empire fell the tribes that settled down in the occupied territory just started to mix with the locals. Germanic tribes displaced the men in power, but they had no means or will to displace the local population.\nThey were a minority and they kinda respected roman culture.\n\nBasically, they \"became\" romans.\n\n\nThis didn't happens in Britain because the tribes that lived there weren't fully romanized at that point. So when the \"proper\" romans pulled out of britain, they were still using their original language. Which was of germanic origin."
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2tvcfg | how does the whole "tax deductible donation" to churches work for the donator? | I grew up in a rather conservative, Christian home, where my dad always wrote checks for the offering tray on Sunday mornings. I remember him always saying donations were "tax deductible". As a child, that had absolutely no meaning to me. Now that I'm an adult and regularly attend church myself, I'd like to know what exactly a tax deductible donation is, and how exactly would I file that on my taxes, and what benefits I really receive from that. Simply, how does it all work in full circle? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2tvcfg/eli5how_does_the_whole_tax_deductible_donation_to/ | {
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"Anything that is tax deductible means that the money you donate is subtracted from your income when calculating taxes. For simplicity sake, let's say you earn $100 in a year year. Let's assume a 20% tax rate, so you pay $20 in taxes. But if you had donated $10 that year, your 20% would be based as if you only earned $90 ($100 - $10 deduction) and thus be reduced to $18.\n\nTo get that deduction, you first need to make over the standard deduction. You would also need some artifact from the charity that proves you actually donated. Then when you file taxes, there are forms you fill out that get figured into the tax calculations. Most tax software has an entire section for various deductions. Or if you have someone else fill out your taxes, you would give them the paper from the charity.",
"Depending on how much you make and how much you give, it may not be worth the effort. However, you can subtract the amount of money you donated from your total income and only be taxed on that amount. You don't get the money donated back, you simply don't pay taxes on it.",
"Long story short, you have your \"income\" (often referred to as your gross income) and your \"taxable income\" (or adjusted gross income).\n\n(all numbers for the US, since that's where I am) Most people just use the standard deduction, right now $6,300 for a single individual. That's basically a \"this figure is about right\" for all your tax-deductible transaction, such as clothes for work (I think) and all those other fiddly things a tax accountant can go over with you.\n\nWhat this means is that, for the purposes of the government taxing you, you didn't make that money. So instead of making $50,000, you instead 'made' $43,700. That's your adjusted gross income, and what's used to determine how much you owe in taxes.\n\nCharitable Donations are also Tax Deductible, which means you 'didn't make that money' as far as the government is concerned. But I believe it only applies if you chose to itemize your deductions instead of just taking the standard. Itemizing is more of a pain, and you really need to keep good records in case you're audited, such as receipts from your church for donating. So, for example, assuming you had no other things to deduct (and didn't hit any other limits), if you made $50,000 and donated $10,000 to your church, you would only pay taxes on (50,000 - 10,000) $40,000\n\n-------------------\n\nIt does *not* mean you can deduct that amount from the taxes you owe directly. If you owe $3,000 in taxes and donate $300 to the church, that doesn't mean you owe $2,700 in taxes.",
"Most churches will provide you with a form that you can plug into the charitable donations part of your tax exemptions, just as you would put in a receipt for a business lunch.\n\nEvery church tracks this differently, since I donate online I get my donation form pretty easily. I know of other churches that provide unique giving envelopes to make it easier for the church to track the amount each individual contributes.\n"
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5unq5q | why do smaller computer chips produce less heat? | How is it that creating smaller transistors inside computer chips reduces heat output? How is the opposite not true since larger components are more conductive? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5unq5q/eli5_why_do_smaller_computer_chips_produce_less/ | {
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"heat is caused by current flow. current flow is reduced when the transistor gets smaller. so smaller transistors = less heat. ",
"The heat in a circuit is caused by resistance in the conductors inside the circuit. Smaller chips have fewer and shorter conductors, so the electricity meets less resistance as it travels through the paths in the chip. \n\nLarger components have more heat conductive material, but that doesn't really matter, as they also have more electrical paths that cause resistance. The chips heat up almost instantly no matter what size they are, as even the biggest CPUs are pretty small. The heat needs to get out of the chip, not just spread throughout it. \n\nYou need a way to get the heat out of the chip, which is what heatsinks and fans are for. Small chips generate less, so they naturally require smaller heatsinks as well. In the case of a cell phone chip, the heat generated is so little that the metal inside the phone spreads and dissipates the heat quick enough. Cell phone processors are also designed in such a way that even though they're reasonably big in area, they're not using all of it at all times. They're often made with asynchronous cores, and the ability to shut down cores that aren't needed. "
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2wuzi0 | why are some military bases patrolled/guarded by private security companies? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2wuzi0/eli5_why_are_some_military_bases_patrolledguarded/ | {
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"Because training a soldier takes time and money. They are not going to waste trained soldiers guarding the staff car park and some open lawns. Which is usually the outer perimeter of a military base.\n\nThose contracted security guards will get a background check to make sure they are not criminals or have affiliations with unsavoury groups, but otherwise they don't have access to anything of great importance."
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20xht2 | why don't more tv station offer live streaming online with commercials? | I'm watching March Madness live online, there are commercials, but it's not that big a deal. I'm pretty sure the superbowl did the same thing. Why don't individual stations and/or cable providers offer this service? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/20xht2/eli5_why_dont_more_tv_station_offer_live/ | {
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"A lot of channels do have online streaming and catch up services. It is very expensive to maintain a hosting infrastructure that can cope with a large demand of high quality video streaming and many don't see the benefit. Also, as mentioned, some are contractually bound to staying on tv "
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8np6hz | what's the reason behind of 666 being the number of the beast? | Both biblical and anthropological,if posible. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8np6hz/eli5_whats_the_reason_behind_of_666_being_the/ | {
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"In Hebrew, there is thing about letters representing numbers 1-10 10-90 100-900.\n\nSomebody wrote a Bible, while being angry at current emperor of Roman Empire, Nero, whose name spelling represents 666 (or sometimes 616). \n\nOf course he could just say \"Nero's devil\", and got to get creative.\n\nMore and fully explained here: _URL_0_",
"In the classical era [Greece, Rome, etc] it was not unusual for a language to grab a few letters from its alphabet to double as numbers.\n\nRoman numerals are the most familiar: I, V, X, L, C, D, M and so on, but most written languages at the time used this concept in one way or another. For example \"Maximillius\" would be \n\n > M+X+I+M+I+L+L+U\n\nOr, \n\n > 1,000 + 10 + 1 + 1000 + 1 + 50 + 50+ 1 + 5\n\nOr 2,118 if my math is right. Remember that the Romans generally treated U and V as interchangeable; it is only later in language evolution that the two diverged. You would not include letters that do not have a number-usage in your equation.\n\nIn Revelation, the writer does not identify the anti-christ, but does offer clues he thinks might help believers to identify the antichrist; among others, that the letter-numbers of the name should add up to 666. Unfortunately, this can apply to a huge number of names; especially if you include organizations, nicknames, add or exclude middle names, add or exclude first names, use initials...whether you identify U and V as the same or different letters...\n\n[Edit: not to mention which language are you taking the letters from!]\n\nA lot of candidates have been identified over the centuries, fortunately none have as yet brought about the end of the world.",
"6 protons 6 neutrons 6 electrons = Carbon. Essential for life, spirit bonded by matter. Harsh reality, this universe. \n\nGood question.\n\nEdit: Actually, this is a genuine hypothesis if you look really deep into Gnosticism and the esoteric. That the body itself is the beast, 666. It is insatiable. As soon as we are born we become its slave. If we don’t feed it, we go crazy and die. If we don’t quench its thirst, we die even quicker. We are at the will of our bodies. Our body is a physical vehicle and our mind is a type of spiritual vehicle but it is still not free. The mind is influenced strongly by the body and the experience of life. Our thoughts are shaped by what the body experiences and our thoughts often times determine our perspectives (the only time they dont is when you are not thinking). The mind is bondage just as much as the body is. It is not necessary to suffer in this, but if we do not tend to our minds, we will go crazy. If we do not tend to our bodies, we will die.\n\nWe are slaves to life itself.",
"It comes in The Revelation, the last book of the Christian Bible. The writer, known to theologians as John the Divine, describes a vision he had of the end of the world. This involved the overthrow of Israel's enemies and the coming of a new age in which God would rule for all of eternity.\n\nChapter 13 talks about two \"beasts\", one rising from the sea and one rising from the earth.\n\nThe second beast is described as having horns like a lamb and a voice like a dragon's, and he puts a mark on every person's forehead or hand without which they cannot buy or sell anything. And in verse 18, it says this:\n\n > Here is wisdom. Let him who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man: His number is...\n\nand then a number.\n\nThis book is an example of \"apocalyptic literature\", which was very popular around that time. Rome ruled over Judaea, but not all Jews were very happy about the arrangement: there were actual terrorist groups fighting to free Israel from their Roman oppressors. Apocalyptic literature was often written to encourage these efforts, so it was a dangerous thing to be caught with: for that reason it was written in religious metaphors as a kind of a code, so that to the Romans it would look like the incoherent ravings of a religious nutcase. Unfortunately, nearly 2,000 years later, most of these metaphors are lost on us.\n\nThis verse is basically saying, \"If you can understand the code, you'll figure out what the beast represents. Here's a clue.\"\n\nThe text was written in Koine Greek, the \"ordinary\" Greek (spoken by ordinary people, not poets and philosophers) of the 1st century. Like Latin, Greek used letters to represent numbers. Most manuscripts that exist give the number as χξϛ, which represents 666; the oldest manuscripts, though, give it as χιϛ, which represents 616, and may be the original number of the beast. As it turns out, though, that may not be significant.\n\nThe best theory is that if you convert 616 into Hebrew -- which also uses letters for numbers -- you can get NRO QSR. Most vowels are not usually written in Hebrew (readers have to just know what the vowels are), so this represents \"Nero Qaisar\", i.e. \"Nero Caesar\" in Latin. 666 also works, though: that gives you NRON QSR, for \"Neron Qaisar\", which has \"Nero\" with an extra grammatical ending.\n\nMost theologians think that Revelation was written after the death of Nero and during the reign of Domitian. There are at least three possibilities here:\n\n1. Although it uses the future tense, this actually refers to past events. This is quite a common thing: prophetic literature would often start with a list of things that had already happened, but in the future tense, so that readers would think: \"Yes, that came true, this came true, this thing also came true, so the rest will also come true!\"\n2. There's an extra layer of obfuscation: having figured out the 616 or 666 refers to Nero, the reader has to understand that Nero is actually a coded reference to Domitian.\n3. There was a widespread belief at the time that Nero hadn't actually died and would return in the future; or even that Nero had died, but would return from the dead.\n\nEDIT: Thank you, kind people, for the gold. I never thought this post would get this response...\n\nEDIT 2: I'm doing my best to respond to as many comments as I can, but there are now over 1700 of them. But just to address one point here: My explanation here is only one of several theories, and there are several problems with it. However, as far as historians and theologians are able to tell, this explanation does seem to be the best fit, so it's the one that's most commonly accepted.",
"I've read a bunch of comments regarding Nero, some of which were very thorough, so no need to rehash that. I'd like to share a different interpretation that I heard a year or two back from a Catholic seminarian.\n\nNumbers in general hold a lot of significance in the Bible. The number 7 represents perfection, so 6 can be taken to represent imperfection, being one less than 7. According to this seminarian \\(I am by no means a scholar in any form of Hebrew\\), ancient Hebrew did not have superlatives like, for example, \"holiest\". Rather, you would repeat the word three times, such as \"holy, holy, holy\" \\(something we still say at mass today\\). Thus, the number 666 could be taken to mean something like \"the most imperfect\", as opposed to God who is the most perfect.\n\nI want to state very clearly that I can't vouch for the validity of this explanation, but I personally found it very interesting so I thought to share it. Maybe someone else here could provide more clarity.",
"There’s a series by Morgan Freeman called Story of God. In the second episode it talks about apocalypse and there’s a section dedicated to the explanation of the 666 if you are interested.",
"What's funny is every barcode that can be read in normal and upside down has 666 in it. There there long bars on barcodes represents the number 6. ",
"Fun fact OP: If you have 1 of every denomination of metal coin from the Japanese, that's a 1, a 5, a 10, a 50, a 100, and a 500 in yen.\n\nAnd that adds up to... 666.",
"\"And a voice like a dragon's\".....dah fuk?",
"I see a lot of bad answers here, and I'm sure ill be buried them all. \n\nGenerally you have two possible categories. \n\nOne. You accept that the bible is true and prophetic, then you could get any answer for who the beast is, since it could apply to any time and place.\n\nTwo. You don't believe the bible to be devine inspiration, and you affix a later date to the text and get answers like Nero, or something equally concrete.\n\n7 being the number of god and 6 being the number of man is an important symbol that should be accounted for. (6 is short of perfection).\n\nAlso note that it ties to the Anti-Christ. Anti doesn't just mean \"complete opposite\".\nIt has more of mirror imagery. If you look in a mirror and raise your right hand your reflection raises its left hand. It is the Anti-you. The anti christ will imitate Christ and deceive people. Any interpretation has to fit that pattern as well.\n\nIn short, the number of 666 will be someone pretending to be Christ, (or taking his place, but not claiming to literally be hin) and is just a man. False prophets. Wolves in sheep's clothing. That sort of thing. ",
"So, revelations was based on a dream?",
"Biblically it is in Revelation. Revelation is what is called apocalyptic literature. It is a distinctly Jewish thing. The cultural references and codes of numbers are meant to make sense to anyone in that society and not to outsiders, like the Roman occupiers. \n\nHebrew letters represent numbers as well as letter sounds and as such they have many cultural numbers of significant. God’s number is 7, it represents perfection. 6 is evil because it falls short of perfection. The same number 3 times is emphasis, 666 is the most 6 you can be. \n\nIn second temple era Jewish tradition they blamed the Queen of Sheba’s marriage to Solomon for the long line of pagan queens and ultimately the exile to Babylon. If you add up all the numbers of gems and precious metals listed in her dowry it adds up to 666. That is why in Jewish numerology 666 also represents the fall of Israel. If you study other apocalyptic literature of that era 666 comes up frequently. \n\n(Source: Father is an Intertestamental Hebrew Literature scholar and chair of Biblical Literature at a seminary. His apocalyptic literature course is probably his most popular. This has been 90% regurgitation of his dinner party answer to the question. Evangelicals are weird and this question has been asked at so many parties and dinners it’s absurd.)",
"I always thought it was about 6 just falling short of 7. The number 7 in the Bible emphasizes completion, thoroughness, perfection in a way. And the number 6 being repeated three times is kind of a statement that you’re falling short of Gods standards.",
"7 is the perfect number biblically, and alot of the old (and new) testament is VERY symbolic when it comes to numbers; 3, 6, 7, 12, 144 (12x12) etc.\n\nIf 7 is perfect, the 6 falls short of 7 (perfect), and does so 3 times. And the number 3 means: whole or complete biblically. So complete/whole imperfection. \n\n\nBorn and raised Christian, went from preschool thru undergrad in christian schools and studied the bible daily throughout.",
"There’s also a musical connection to that number as well. An interval of 6 semitones produces a tritone which is the most dissonant of intervals and called the devils interval a long time ago. Used in metal music and horror movie scores to create tension. An interval of 7 semitones is a perfect fifth and sounds beautiful by contrast. ",
"There are various interpretations. In Christian theology there are four main views regarding revelation: \n\n1. Futurism - this is the belief that Revelation refers to future events yet to happen. This is the most common view among dispensationalists which are highly prevelent in American evangelicalism. \n\n2. Preterism - this is the view that Revelation refers either partially (Partial Preterism) or fully (Full Preterism) to the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. Full Preterism is considered a heresy as it denies a future ressurection. Partial Preterism is probably the most common view among non-evangelicals such as Reformed, Lutheran, and even some Catholics. \n\n3. Historicism - this is the historic view of many Reformers such as John Calvin and Martin Luther. It is held today by a small amount usually in Covenanter and confessional Lutheran circles. This is the view that Revelation does not refer to simultaneous events but rather spans over the course of history: from its writing to whenever the Second Coming happens. \n\n4. Idealism - This is the view that Revelation doesn't refer to historic events (strictly speaking) but rather is a vision showing the struggles of good and evil on a cosmic scale. This is becoming more popular. Originally really only liberal theologians held to it but a more serious version is held by conservative scholars like Vern Poythress, G.K. Beale, and Joel Beeke. It my opinion, this is the correct view. \n\nEach has a different view of what 666 means. For the Futurist, it is a yet to be meaningful name that will be revealed in the future. E.g. we don't know what it means but when the end comes we will. That's why American evangelicals tend to be obsessed with the number and trying to find it everywhere. \n\nA partial preterist believes that it refers to Nero. This is the exegesis given by the top comment here. Should be noted that PPs mostly (with some exception) believe the Book of Revelation, being about the fall of Jerusalem, was written before said event so it was written pre-70 A.D. The other three views by and large believe the book was written in the 90s A.D. \n\nA historicist believes the number refers to the Papal office in Rome and he who holds the office. The fall of the beast in Revelation marks a future event when the Pope will be defeated. \n\nAn idealist believes 666 does not refer a single person specifically but marks sin and evil in its various manifestations on earth. 7 is a number of perfection on scripture, with threefold meaning fullness (a superlative e.g. God being called Holy Holy Holy in Isaiah 6). 6 is a corruption of 7. 666, threefold 6, is the fullness of curruption, sin, evil, etc. \n\nSo in the end, what 666 means depends on one's school of eschatology. ",
"This may not be the traditional answer, but I am an active practitioner of a philosophy called Thelema, and the myth surrounding 666 was important to its founder, Aleister Crowley. \n\nHere are some of the connections he drew about the significance of 666. Most of these connections work off of Hebrew and Greek which assign a numerical value to their letters (each letter is both a letter and a number).\n\n > The Number of the Beast is 666. The number is of prominent significance in the system of Thelema. It is the sum of the numbers inside the 6-by-6 magic square, which is associated with the sun by some Kabbalists, astrologists, and numerologists, who still use it today...\n\n\n > It can be said that the Hebrew letter shin (ש), which is written at the beginning and end of the Hebrew word for \"sun\" (shemesh), conceals in itself the number of The Beast, because its shape is like three vavs (ו) conjoined together, whose numerological value is 6.\n\n\n > The following words and phrases have 666 for their numerological value in Hebrew:\n\n\n > Το Μεγα Θηριον — Greek for “The Great Beast”. Koine Greek is the Greek dialect by which the books of the New Testament were written, including the Book of Revelation, where the original mention of The Beast's number is recorded (13:17-18).\n\n > תריון — ThRYWN; a Hebrew spelling of “θηριον” / “therion”, Greek for “beast”.\n\n > סורת — SWRTh; Sorath; the evil spirit of the sun.\n\n > נכיאל multiplied by 6 (111x6) — NKYAL; Nachiel; the intelligence of the sun.\n\n > השטן שב — HShTN ShB; HaSatan shab; Hebrew for “The Satan has returned”.\n\n_URL_0_",
"There's a lot of theories behind it, as well as the entire book of Revelation in general. Among the ideas is that there is a general fascination with numbers in early Jewish culture. Hebrew uses it's letters as numbers too, and attributes varying degrees of holiness to different letters and thus numbers (very similar to Bhudism. FOr those in aware, that meditation thing of repeating \"ohm\" is a real thing because it is the holiest letter to bhudists and [this symbol](_URL_0_) that is used as like the identifying symbol of bhudism is the letter \"ohm\".) In this kind of Hebrew numerology (I'm not actually Jewish, so I'm not like a scholar on this) 7 is the number of God and 6 is the number of man because man is made in the image of god but still less than god. 13 is also a number that means something. Anyways, this is one of the roots of why we have these kinds of numbers because in western Christian culture we kind of appropriate this. On casino slot machines you win on 777 right? That's the holy trinity, it is literally gods number 3 times which is ultimately a catholic appropriation of this Hebrew numerology thing. 666 isn't the Devil's number as much as it is man's number because it is a perversion of the holy trinity replacing god with man. In western Christian tradition, the devil isn't god's equal, he's just more like someone that pulls people away from God. The 666 thing is like the devil not so much taking people away from god for himself, it's more about taking people away from god for themselves (although I guess the devil is also diabolical so maybe it's like a turn from god to yourself and then the secret next step is to turn from yourself to the devil, it's all kind of cryptic). The main point is it represents people who have sort of been removed from or renounced god. In revelations you are required to have this mark in order to be able to buy stuff and like participate in the economy (much like a government issued ID) but the implication was that submitting to this authority was renouncing gods. In the story it's meant to illustrate how many willingly renounce god and how generally the faithful are made to suffer for their faith and probably die martyrs.",
"What I have always been taught is that Satan's number is 666 because he comes back to earth on the 6th trump, 6th seal, and 6th vial. Jesus comes back on the 7th trump, 7th seal, and 7th vial and that's why his number is 777. Trumps, seals, and vials are sort of ''signs'', from my understanding, that tell you when the end times are supposed to arrive. I don't know much more but this link \\( [_URL_1_](_URL_0_) \\) goes into some detail on each of them.",
"\nAlthough that,I have to tell you,in China,\"6\"is a lucky number.When someone say \"666\" to you(in China),it means that guy thinks you are very _URL_0_ completely different between China and western countries."
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db7qk1 | why does splashing water on someone’s face after they’ve passed out or something similar wake them up. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/db7qk1/eli5_why_does_splashing_water_on_someones_face/ | {
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"It might work, sometimes. It's probably because splashing cold water on your face triggers the diver's response, which is an autonomic system that causes your body to believe it is about to drown, and it needs to start swimming or it is going to die.",
"Face, hands, underarms and pubic region have lots of nerves and are very sensitive. Sudden exposure to hot or cold like splashing cold water will cause an immediate sympathetic response meant to startle you away from possible threat. This contributes to an adrenaline jolt waking you up.\n\nStartling someone awake is the best way to wake up anyone. And it even works when someone has passed out. This works because even when you're out cold, your body does try to protect itself from threat.\n\nUnrelated, but a curious fact: When someone is sleeping raise their hands above their face and let go of it - Their hand will never hit their face. If it does, either the person is in coma or possibly dead."
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7uvhn6 | if two perfect singers sing the same song and can sing the same octaves and notes, how do those two singing voices still sound different? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7uvhn6/eli5_if_two_perfect_singers_sing_the_same_song/ | {
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"Because they do not have the same timbre (color of sound for lack of a better explanation), may not share the same exact pronunciations, and do not share the same vibrato. ",
"Every person, and every instrument, plays each note slightly differently. If you take A over middle C, it will always be 440 Hz no matter whether you sing it, play it on a piano, play it on a saxophone, etc. But just because the note itself is 440 Hz doesn't mean that all of those 440 Hz notes sound the same. Each instrument is playing a 440 Hz fundamental frequency, but it's also playing a bunch of other significant frequencies that are multiples or fractions of the fundamental frequency. The overall sound produced by the fundamental frequency, and all of the other frequencies, is distinct for the different instruments - and that's what we call the \"timbre.\"",
"What you're looking for is something called 'timbre'. If you picture a perfect note as an oscillation at a certain frequency, what you're basically imagining is [a sine wave](_URL_1_): all 'perfect' pure notes at a given frequency and the same amplitude (volume) will sound the same. A C is a C is a C.\n\nExcept, obviously, it isn't. That's where timbre comes in.\n\nBasically, it's referring to slight variations in the note wave. Think of it as note fuzziness, if you like. They still have the same wavelength, so they're still a C, but it's not longer [just a straight up-and-down pattern like you'd get from a tuning fork](_URL_0_). The patterns of fuzziness are unique to different instruments, to different materials and to different singers too. It's the reason why a guitar playing a C and a violin playing a C sound different but are still playing the same note.\n\nThe singers are still hitting the same note, but their voices have a different timbre, so the 'wave' is fuzzy in a different way.",
"This can be answered quickly by simply questioning why does everyone's *speaking voice* sound different? \nBecause your anatomy is not the same, you have learned to control our diaphragm and vocal chords differently, accent differently, and are unique. \nNurture + nature/genetics. \n ",
"Try and look up the differences in sound between sine waves, square waves, sawtooth waves, etc. They could all have the same loudness and frequency, but the sounds will be different for each. Now extrapolate this idea to crazy funky real life sounds and you can imagine all the different types of waveforms you can have which still has the same frequency and amplitude. ",
"You get a trumpet to play a song, perfectly.\n\nThen you get a flute to play that same song, perfectly.\n\nThen you get a violin to play it again, perfectly.\n\nThose 3 instruments - even though they're playing the exact same perfect notes - still sound different. They have a different \"sound\" or \"tone\" (ie timbre).\n\nSame thing for human voices. Different humans have voices that are basically different instruments, so they sound different, just like in the above examples.",
"I picture will describe it better than words.\n_URL_0_\n\nIn that picture you see how something can wiggle through time. For a constant tone, its doing the same pattern over and over again. The fundamental (lowest or deepest) note is the frequency that the pattern repeats. So even though the shape is different, they have the same frequency. You can make any wave form by adding together many waves of different frequencies.",
"Different human voices have different harmonics. This is what makes the same note sound different.",
"There are a multitude of factors that makes everyone's voice sound different. The human voice is an incredibly complex thing, involving a combination of the lungs, the larynx, the vocal cords, and the mouth itself (tongue, palate, cheek, lips) all working together. Naturally these are physically unique to each individual, and each has its own effect on the sound.\n\nThen you have the influence of the brain that's controlling all these things. Speech is a complex activity, and everyone learns how to do it slightly differently. Aside from the most obvious differences (like accents, and the many forms of speech impediments) there are innumerable smaller differences that are harder to categorise, but all go together to make each person's voice unique.\n\nThese differences are there regardless of whether that person is singing or speaking - though interestingly, they'll often be very different to each activity, as people usually learn to sing quite differently to how they naturally speak. Also, with singing you have the added differences of vocal technique. There's really no such thing as a \"perfect singer\" as posed in the question, as perfection is a concept that means very different things in different musical genres. A \"perfect\" opera singer is going to sound very different to a \"perfect\" jazz singer.\n\nAll these things mean that no two singers are ever going to sound entirely alike. What's really remarkable is how easily the human brain is able to pick up on these cues when hearing a voice, and tell your favourite singers apart in the midst of a chaotic song as easily as you could tell apart your friends from their voice alone.",
"Musical notes are not pure tones, meaning they aren't composed of one and only one frequency. An A note at 440 Hz, for example, probably has a mix of some 880 Hz, 1320 Hz, etc (multiples of the fundamental 440 Hz frequency). The amount of 440 compared to 880 and 1320 leads to the same note sounding differently. So your voice might sing an A with more 440 than 880, but someone else might have more 880 than 440, which would sound different.\n\nHere's a graph showing how different instruments playing the same note can be composed of different volumes for each harmonic.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nYou can see they each repeat their pattern 440 times per second (Hertz), but the individual building blocks of the pattern are shaped a bit differently. ",
"The simplest explanation I can think of:\n\nSound comes in waves. What happens is that some air gets pushed harder, so it pushes into the air in front of it, and that pushes into the air in front of that, and so on. But when the air moves forward, it creates a bit of a vacuum behind it, so it gets pulled back too. This way, the air kind of shakes forward and backward, kind of like what happens if you move the end of a slinky forwards and backwards; you can see parts of the slinky get closer together and further apart, and that moves down the slinky to the other end. When that happens with the air, that eventually reaches our eardrums and makes our eardrums go forwards and backwards, and we call that *sound*.\n\nHow quickly your eardrum goes forwards and backwards is called the *frequency* of the sound, and the higher the frequency, the higher the note. The note A above middle C is usually understood to mean a sound that goes forwards and backwards 440 times per second, which we call 440 Hz (Hz stands for hertz, meaning cycles per second).\n\nYou can plot out a graph of where your eardrum is over time. So at such a time, it's in the middle, and then a little bit later, it's forward, and a little bit after that, it's in the middle again, then it's backward, then it's in the middle again, then forward again, and so on. If the note you're hearing is an A above middle C, the shape of this graph will repeat 440 times every second. But what *is* the shape? We know it goes forwards and backwards, but does it just go in a straight line? Does it go forwards and stay there, then quickly backwards and stay there? Does it make a smooth curve? Does it make weird jagged curves that go in different directions before repeating? Whatever the shape is, it repeats 440 times a second, but it could be many different shapes. And each instrument, each person, each vowel, each thing, makes a different shape. Two singers singing the same note will sound different because, while they'll both be making waves of the same frequency, those waves will have different shapes!"
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3vbkkj | does legalization of a illicit drug increase usage? | Did marijuana legalization increase usage? Would cocaine or heroin legalization increase usage? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3vbkkj/eli5_does_legalization_of_a_illicit_drug_increase/ | {
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"Metrics are tough to come by because lots of people don't answer questions like that honestly. Even where legalization has passed there may be a social stigma to admitting you smoke weed especially to a random person who could be a cop/federal agent.\n\nHowever CO has [seen increases](_URL_0_) but is it *really* an increase or are people just more likely to admit it?",
"No. It's been shown in studies that teens in the US have steadily decreased marijuana usage since it became legal.",
"Hey bubba you should read about Portugal post decriminalization \n\nMaybe there's a decrease, maybe not, but Portugal is where we're going to find out the answer ",
"[15 years ago Portugal decriminalized drugs](_URL_0_) (so not quite legalization). \n\nThe general gist of what happened was that drug usage did not increase or decrease, but the negative side effects of drug usage were severely limited. Basically, if you're not worried about getting arrested, you're more likely to seek help. And you're also much less likely to engage in risky behavior or deal with shady people in connection with feeding your drug habit.\n\nPortugal provides a very interesting long term study on the effect of decriminalization and is really worth taking a look at. In fact, if you just google \"portugal decriminalization\" you'll find tons of articles and studies on it. \n\nBut overall, I think if you were to survey non drug users, you'lll find that \"because it's illegal\" is hardly the primary reason. If that were the case, you'd find that a huge number of people take up smoking cigarettes when they turn 18. ",
"Based on the experience of countries that have legalized drugs, quite the opposite. Most notably, underage drug use drops, because while illegal dealers will sell to anybody with the cash, legal dealers can lose their license or even be arrested for selling to underage customers.\n\nThe Netherlands also saw the average age of hardcore drug addicts increase, which meant that fewer younger people were getting addicted to the hard stuff, and existing addicts were aging.\n\n"
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5m18de | why would a computer replace a simple character (') into a complicated series of nonsense ( & #39;) when copying and pasting certain text? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5m18de/eli5_why_would_a_computer_replace_a_simple/ | {
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"Certain characters like punctuation have those codes like & #39 to differentiate between a displayed punctuation in text and something that's part of code to execute.",
"' is used in HTML code to mean something, so the computer might see the ' and expect code-related stuff to follow it, then get confused and barf an error when no valid code follows. \\ & #39; is one of the possible ways to encode \"put a ' symbol here and do nothing else\"",
"Because the simple characters have special meaning in certain contexts. In a web page, for example, you use < > to tell the browser about the structure of the page. If I wanted to make a paragraph with red text, I would write\n\n < p style=\"color:red\" > This text would be red < /p > \n\nIf I want a literal < or > , I need a way to tell the computer that \"this is a literal < , not the start of an instruction\", and it needs to be a sequence that won't be used anywhere else. \n\nThe way web pages take care of this is to use an & followed by a description of the character to mean the literal character. So if I want a literal `'`, I can use ` & apos;` or ` & #39;` (an apostrophe is character number 39). If I want a literal ampersand, I can use ` & amp;` or ` & #38;`.",
"All these are great answers. To add on, these are known as 'escape sequences'; every language (markup or programming) that deals with strings has them, and they generally differ from language to language.",
"Because a programmer messed up. \n\nComputers make use of *formal languages* like programming languages, query languages and markup languages, that have very strict rules about what text can go where. For example, in SQL (structured query language, a language for searching and retrieving data from databases), if you want to find Joe Smith's birthday you might write something like this:\n\n SELECT birthday\n FROM employees\n WHERE first_name = 'Joe' AND last_name = 'Smith'\n\nNote how I put the words \"Joe\" and \"Smith\" between single quotes? That's because in SQL, text outside quotes is commands for the computer, and text inside quotes is just text.\n\nNow what happens when I try to write a query to find Mary O'Reilly's birthday? If I'm not careful, I might write a program that does this:\n\n SELECT birthday\n FROM employees\n WHERE first_name = 'Mary' AND last_name = 'O'Reilly'\n\nAnd this query is wrong, because the apostrophe in \"O'Reilly\" is supposed to be part of the name, but the computer interprets it as saying that the last name that you were giving it is just \"O\", and as if the `Reilly` bit is a command instead of a name. Not good! (People with apostrophes in their names [often have problems with computers](_URL_1_). It's even worse for [people with the last name Null](_URL_3_).)\n\nErrors like this are what leads to [SQL injection](_URL_0_) and [cross-site scripting](_URL_2_), two of the most common security bugs around, where a hacker is able to trick a computer program to misbehave by feeding it input that causes it to run bad queries like that one.\n\nThe right way to write the latter query is:\n\n SELECT birthday\n FROM employees\n WHERE first_name = 'Mary' AND last_name = 'O''Reilly'\n\nIn SQL, two consecutive double quotes inside a quoted value are a signal to tell the computer that you're not ending the quoted value, but instead you want an actual quote inside it. Other systems have different rules, like the ` & #39;` that you mention.\n\nAnd this points to a different problem, which is that most computer programmers suck at defending their software from these attacks. That's the reason you're seeing ` & #39;`—somebody put in a defensive measure that converts apostrophes into ` & #39;` to defend their application from cross-site scripting, but they did it wrong and now it's mangling *legitimate* uses of the apostrophe.\n\nTypically this mistake happens because a programmer puts the code for detecting and replacing the apostrophe too close to the part of the program that reads input data. Such logic should always be done the opposite way—rules like that should be applied *as late as practical* before you send the output to the user."
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1slt48 | hypothetically, what would happen if a human just never went to sleep? | Ex: We would still need sleep, but what if we just stayed up and never laid down to sleep? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1slt48/eli5_hypothetically_what_would_happen_if_a_human/ | {
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"You'll lose your mind (hallucinations, delusions, etc.) and die eventually. (Death being after a couple weeks, maybe months if you're having at least a few hours sleep every now and then.)\n\nYou'll also likely suffer a sort of blackout from time to time where the brain pretty much shuts off for a few seconds or maybe minutes even if you're in the middle of something.",
"It's called [fatal familial insomnia](_URL_0_). It's a real thing, and as the name implies, it's eventually fatal.\n\nIn the final stages, due to the hallucinations and delirium, it looks very much like dementia."
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jc12f | the political argument against gay marriage. | I (think) I understand the religious side of things, but, not unlike Louis C.K. himself, I'm a bit perplexed as to how an argument against gay marriage is formed strictly from a political point of view.
If this has already been asked, be kind to link me to the original post and I will promptly delete this. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jc12f/eli5_the_political_argument_against_gay_marriage/ | {
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"Note: the way I feel on the issue is absent from this post\n\nAll men and women are created equal, right? So how could anyone deny anyone else the right to fall in love with someone? Well not everyone sees it that way. Take a leap of faith on this...\n\nImagine if every man and woman, gay or straight, had the *right to marry someone of the opposite sex*. Yes, I know this doesn't work out for gay people, it doesn't do it for them. But imagine if you interpreted the law that simply: each man and woman is free to marry someone of the opposite sex.\n\nAll of the sudden, the typical pro-gay marriage argument of \"I believe everyone should have equal rights\" is ignored if you're talking to someone who believes all people--gay or straight--have the right to marry someone of the opposite sex. This is why someone can oppose gay marriage and when you say \"I believe all people should have the same rights\", they say, \"I believe that, too.\"\n\nTo put it simply, all people--gay, straight, black, white--have the ability to marry someone of the opposite sex. Gay people don't want to exercise the right? Well fine, they can take it or leave it, but *that's* the right afforded to us by the US Constitution.\n\nAgain, there's a degree of Devil's Advocate here in my response.\n\n",
"I can't think of a good secular reason. In my opinion, marriage as a secular institution exists in order to prevent one partner from running away from their family and leaving the remaining partner plus children in poverty.\n\nIf people are going to have families, it makes some sense to allow them to marry in order to protect these families.\n\nThe definition of a family is the only issue here. Maybe there are secular reasons to be strict or careful about the definition of a family, but I cannot think of a good secular reason why two adults can protect their family via marriage but two other adults, who are analogous except for being of the same gender, cannot.\n",
"Many people, including those who work in government and politics, have a hard time understanding the concept that the behavior of the government is not supposed to be dictated by religion but by secular morality. To many people the concept of \"secular morality\" doesn't make sense. They believe that good and bad are reflections of God's will, and if the job of the government is to prevent bad things from happening, it's the job of the government to uphold God's will. While I think this is a dangerous and unconstitutional way of addressing the role of government, it's a shockingly popular point of view.",
"People think that society should be made from core families with mom, dad, and kids. When people start to not marry, and have casual sex and kids everywhere and stuff, society goes bad. Gay is bad, because it's not the kind of a family they think society should be made from.",
"The most common non-religious \"argument\" I've seen come up lately is basically \"traditional marriage is tradition because that's how it's always been\" (Even though, really, it *hasn't*).\n\nThey say, \"oh, give them civil unions, but don't call it *marriage*.\" It's an attempt to sound tolerant, but they just end up sounding like they are advocating \"separate but equal\" to me.",
"Note: the way I feel on the issue is absent from this post\n\nAll men and women are created equal, right? So how could anyone deny anyone else the right to fall in love with someone? Well not everyone sees it that way. Take a leap of faith on this...\n\nImagine if every man and woman, gay or straight, had the *right to marry someone of the opposite sex*. Yes, I know this doesn't work out for gay people, it doesn't do it for them. But imagine if you interpreted the law that simply: each man and woman is free to marry someone of the opposite sex.\n\nAll of the sudden, the typical pro-gay marriage argument of \"I believe everyone should have equal rights\" is ignored if you're talking to someone who believes all people--gay or straight--have the right to marry someone of the opposite sex. This is why someone can oppose gay marriage and when you say \"I believe all people should have the same rights\", they say, \"I believe that, too.\"\n\nTo put it simply, all people--gay, straight, black, white--have the ability to marry someone of the opposite sex. Gay people don't want to exercise the right? Well fine, they can take it or leave it, but *that's* the right afforded to us by the US Constitution.\n\nAgain, there's a degree of Devil's Advocate here in my response.\n\n",
"I can't think of a good secular reason. In my opinion, marriage as a secular institution exists in order to prevent one partner from running away from their family and leaving the remaining partner plus children in poverty.\n\nIf people are going to have families, it makes some sense to allow them to marry in order to protect these families.\n\nThe definition of a family is the only issue here. Maybe there are secular reasons to be strict or careful about the definition of a family, but I cannot think of a good secular reason why two adults can protect their family via marriage but two other adults, who are analogous except for being of the same gender, cannot.\n",
"Many people, including those who work in government and politics, have a hard time understanding the concept that the behavior of the government is not supposed to be dictated by religion but by secular morality. To many people the concept of \"secular morality\" doesn't make sense. They believe that good and bad are reflections of God's will, and if the job of the government is to prevent bad things from happening, it's the job of the government to uphold God's will. While I think this is a dangerous and unconstitutional way of addressing the role of government, it's a shockingly popular point of view.",
"People think that society should be made from core families with mom, dad, and kids. When people start to not marry, and have casual sex and kids everywhere and stuff, society goes bad. Gay is bad, because it's not the kind of a family they think society should be made from.",
"The most common non-religious \"argument\" I've seen come up lately is basically \"traditional marriage is tradition because that's how it's always been\" (Even though, really, it *hasn't*).\n\nThey say, \"oh, give them civil unions, but don't call it *marriage*.\" It's an attempt to sound tolerant, but they just end up sounding like they are advocating \"separate but equal\" to me."
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90m5g0 | what makes me mess up hand writing so much? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/90m5g0/eli5what_makes_me_mess_up_hand_writing_so_much/ | {
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"Disclaimer: not a professional. It's possible that you may have a form of agraphia, a disorder that impairs a person's ability to write in much the same way that dyslexia impairs the ability to read. It's more common to have agraphia if there are other impairments as well, such as dyslexia or with a physical impairment.\n\nIt's also possible that you simply get distracted easily and subconsciously think of the wrong letters while distracted. Again, I'm no expert, but I suggest maybe seeing one if this causes major issues for you."
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abween | why are so many people overweight/obese? | Like I get why there would be an amount of people who are both underweight and overweight, that makes sense, but why is it over 2/3 of America's population? Note that I am not trying to be offensive, it is fine if you're overweight/obese, I just don't understand why it's such a high amount of people, at least in America. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/abween/eli5_why_are_so_many_people_overweightobese/ | {
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"America likes unhealthy food and sells it for cheaper. So people without much money can only afford unhealthy food. ",
"Because our diets are *so shit*. Fast Food is ridiculously cheap (and not even really food), and healthy food (at least in the US) is not cheap. People will just naturally gravitate to the cheaper option because, in this oh-so-wonderful economic system we have, people (especially poor people) need to make sure they have money for other shit. ",
"Here's what I wrote three weeks ago when a similar question was asked:\n\n\" If you can find the single answer to that, you're probably in line for a Nobel prize. Personally, I think it's a combination of a lot of things.\n\n\\-Capitalism: The entire food industry is predicated on getting people to eat more, buy more, and get \"value\" for their dollar (which often means getting multiple times the amount of something that would be a reasonable serving). I believe it was Frito-Lay that had problems moving into the Chinese market because between meal snacks weren't a cultural thing. So what'd they do? Run a huge advertising campaign to make snacking a thing.\n\n\\-Size and age of the country: The US is pretty young as far as countries go, and has had higher than horse speed travel widely available for most of its existence. The suburbs are a thing in the US more than anywhere else in the world, IMO. That means we don't walk places, and outside of the biggest cities, we really don't take taxis either. I'd be interested to see how somewhere like Manhattan compares to the country as a whole.\n\n\\-The Great Depression: This had a huge impact on the generation that grew up during that time period, such that they taught their kids that wasting food and not cleaning their plate was one of the worst things they could do, regardless of whether or not they were hungry. If food was still scarce, this would not be a problem, but food is plentiful, so we were just conditioned to overeat.\n\n\\-Overall Diet: The US was primarily an agriculture/hard work society until the modern era, and the cuisine matched that energy output. Lots of meat and protein, lots of fat, lots of calorie heavy foods. Which is what you need to bring in the harvest, work the steel mill, etc. Now we've all got desk jobs and still eat those calorie-bombs.\n\n\n\nThat's my opinion, and it's worth just a little bit less than you paid for it.\"\n\n & #x200B;\n\n & #x200B;",
"One of the main causes would be portion size. Food dishes are much smaller in other countries. Plus, we Americans eat a lot of fried foods, fatty foods, sugary, and oily foods, especially in the south. Add to that the fact that healthy foods are often more expensive and time-consuming to prepare than cheap fast food.",
"a combination of an increasingly sedentary lifestyle (we're lazy and our jobs no longer require the exercise that day to day life used to) and diet (processed foods are cheaper both because of some fucked up subsidy programs, and because there is less waste in the supply chain than healthy, fresh foods because they last much longer.) ",
"Our ancestors evolved in (and gave us the genes for) an environment where food was often scarce. They had to eat when rich food was available, and pack on the pounds for later.\n\nUnfortunately in our incredibly wealthy modern world, where food is *almost always* available, this means we tend to just keep packing on weight.",
"Broad brushstroke here, but most Americans generally exist in a state of mild anxiety and existential crisis. \n\nOur society raises us to think in terms of black and white instead of shades of gray. It creates sharply defined categories where you're in or out, and instead of falling neatly into those categories most Americans balance on the edges, not quite sure where to fall. \n\nWe're raised to believe that success is equal to winning, coming first, material gain, leadership, and most people spend the early decades of their lives fervently pursuing such empty goals. \n\nWhether they achieve them or not, eventually the reality of the human condition sinks in and they become anxious and depressed. \n\nFood is one of the easiest, most acceptable and most accessible self-soothing drugs that Americans can turn to for a brief reprieve from the sense of emptiness, loneliness, meaninglessness, and impermanence that pervades their days. ",
"Very simple answer. It's more comfortable to eat and be sated, than to be a little hungry upon occasion. Of course there has to be bounty for this to be possible. It boils down to not giving a shit. The whole big is beautiful BS doesn't help. There is no shame involved in being fat.",
"We eat too many carbs. Grains and starches are pushed as being a big part of our diet and we really only need a small amount.\n\n",
"Being fat is multi-factor, and there is no one single answer to \"fixing\" the obesity epidemic. Just a footnote, the [obesity epidemic is a world-wide problem](_URL_1_) and not strictly limited to USA. TLDR at the bottom\n\n1. Nutrition, diet and food: the biggest influence on how much we weigh is how and what we eat. Eating more simple carbohydrates (like processed sugar and starch), \"bad\" fats (trans-fats and saturated fats) can [change our biochemistry](_URL_3_) to take on more weight and elevate the \"bad\" cholesterol. The problem is that such foods come from tasty foods: simple sugars are very sweet, and fats come in large amounts in meats. Humans (and other omnivores and carnivores) have [evolved to detect such tastes and associate it with feeling good.](_URL_0_) This is because these are calorie-dense, meaning a little of the food can provide a lot of energy with little effort. The reason we evolved like that is because back before humans invented farming, we needed to hunt and gather; when we caught some animal then we can get a lot of energy without having to go out to hunt and gather, exposing ourselves to the elements, competition, or other dangers. Also, moving less means there's more energy left for more (biologically and genetically) important things like reproducing. Hence, we evolved a reward mechanism that makes us look for calorie-dense foods, and like it when we eat it to minimize movement. In a more modern context, processed foods such as fast foods and frozen foods are much cheaper and tastier than fresh foods. This is because processing them makes them last longer, tastier and requires less money on storing them. The problem is that processing foods destroys the nutrients in foods by adding a lot of sugar and/or salt for preservation or taste.\n2. Culture: I'm not American, nor have I visited, lived or worked in USA, so I'm basing this on what I hear from other people and over the internet. A lot of Americans like to work long-hours without being very productive. This means that they **get off work late, go home late but have to get up early for the next day**. Such lack of time means they don't want to cook (since cooking is a lot of investment of time and effort), so they reach for pre-made foods like microwavable dinner, which are high in sugar, salt and fat, which make them fatter (one of the reasons why food delivery services are a big thing now: click, pay, wait and your food is here).\n3. Money and time: fresh food with lots of nutrients are more expensive. If given the option, most people will choose the cheaper option over the expensive one. And frozen, processed and/or preserved foods are cheaper than fresh food. Also, cooking a meal takes a lot of time and effort, at least compared to microwaving some food or making instant noodles etc. Our bodies need a reason to change: without a some stimulation, our bodies will start to stagnate or wither. So exercising is a great way to stimulate our bodies to build muscle and lose fat. But the **problem is that exercise is hard, difficult and overall unpleasant**, especially if one doesn't regularly exercise. I think this is related to how we've evolved (but no evidence; this is my conjecture): we don't like to move so we can save energy for survival and reproduction.\n4. The way our cities are built: in a lot of \"newer\" cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Toronto, and a lot of North American cities is that they were designed with cars in mind. If you compare the road map of older cities such as London (UK), Berlin and Paris (FR) to the aforementioned cities, you'll notice that the older European cities' roads are a mess: they're short, zig-zag around a lot, and narrow. This is because European cities existed long before cars or machines so the cities grew people-centric: distances between each buildings and conveniences are mostly in walking-distance. In contrast, NA cities' roads are long, straight and wide to accommodate cars better: they were designed cars first, people second. This means that distances between building-to-building are greater in NA cities and it gets more inconvenient to walk, meaning you'll have to rely on cars to get around. This means more cars on the road, making walking or cycling a lot more dangerous, meaning even more cars. The [reliance on cars and less on walking diminishes physical activity](_URL_2_)**,** making us fatter.\n5. Capitalism: if you ever walk around in a city you'll see hundreds if not thousands of ads, signs and logos vying for your attention. These tactics work, as many people will see some store sign and think \"oooh ice cream\" or \"oooh burger\" and just walk in. These advertisements make us spend more, eat more. **Restaurants also add more sugar and salt to be more tasty, which make us more fat**.\n\nI have only listed SOME factors that contribute to the obesity epidemic based on what I've researched and studies. There are more qualified people out there who can tell you a lot more about things.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nTLDR: we like sweet fatty foods, and urban environments encourage us to be fat",
"I'm six months or so into Keto after struggling with my weight my whole life. I'm down 33 lbs (258 to 225lbs). \n\nI'm 100% absolutely convinced that food is as addictive as any substance. I used to crave carby foods - rice, chips, fried everything. Crave isn't the right word - I needed pizza at least weekly. Same with other stuff like that - I used to hit up a chinese buffet and stuff myself full of rice and fried crap weekly.\n\nAfter about 2 weeks on a low carb meat/veggie based diet, those cravings completely disappeared. It was the weirdest thing ever - I simply did not want to eat some of the crap I had been essentially living on. Then, the weight started to just fall off. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nI also want to mention the \"clean your plate\" theory. It was absolutely drilled into me by my parents (and them by their parents who grew up in the 30's) that you do not waste food. This was something that stuck with me my whole life. Once I started with portion control (and believe me, it felt wrong to throw food away after I was satisfied, instead of eating until I burst), I realized how much I ate but just flat out didn't need. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nLots of good reasons here - but just wanted to chime in with the perspective of someone who's battling obesity.",
"Overweight people eat too much food. More technically, they consume more calories than they use, which the human body turns to fat. It's really that simple. If you don't like how much you weigh, tally up what you eat on a regular basis and eat less of it.\n\nWhy people overeat is a complicated problem involving our consumption based society, socioeconomic factors like wealth and education level, etc."
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"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3680351/",
"https://www.who.int/nutrition/topics/obesity/en/",
"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1586006/",
"https://examine.com/nutrition/how-are-carbohydrates-converted-into-fat-deposits/"
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3vccvl | do non-mammals get any comfort from being petted? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3vccvl/eli5_do_nonmammals_get_any_comfort_from_being/ | {
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"Have you seen the lovely owl?\n\nEdit: [the lovely owl](_URL_0_)",
"Can't speak for all animals but I'm pretty sure that most birds and reptiles (at least domesticated ones) get some comfort out of it. ",
"A better place to ask this would be /r/snakes. I don't believe they do, they don't crave social contact",
"There is a video of a uromastyx (A lizard) rolling over onto it's back and letting a guy pet its belly. Disclaimer: there are claims that it is actually a fear response, but while I'm not an expert on lizard behavior, I suspect they don't deliberately expose their bellies when they're afraid",
"As a bird owner, I'm certain that at least some birds do, though they like it more when it's closer to grooming (little scratches on the feather shafts) than the way you'd pet a dog. ",
"Birds do. I used to pet my chickens. I know parrots ruffle their feathers for gentle pets. ",
"I had a friend who's fish loved to be petted. I've never heard or seen that happen before or after that",
"ELI5,why do animals like getting pet?"
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6ur653 | why do electronics get significantly hotter when charging their batteries? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6ur653/eli5_why_do_electronics_get_significantly_hotter/ | {
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"When charging a battery, you literally have a flow of energy entering your phone. Not all of it can be \"put in\" the battery, so it escapes in the form of heat energy",
"Electronics aren't 100% efficient. Because energy can never not be energy blah bah, the inefficiencies become heat.",
"Because you load your electronics with higher voltage and current than it drains the batterie. This results in higher resistance and higher temperatures. If you drain a batterie fast enough they'll get hotter too\n ",
"2 things:\n\n1) Any battery has a certain amount of resistance to energy flow based on how it is built. As a battery is being charged, the flow of energy through this \"internal\" resistance is at a maximum. The battle between this energy trying to get into the battery, and the resistance of the battery itself, results in heat. Think of this part of it like when you rub your hands together to stay warm, where one hand is energy, the other is the metal it must flow through to charge the battery.\n\n2) A battery is just a way to store energy. We do this by converting electrical energy into potential energy using chemistry (you can say \"chemical\" energy if you want). Depending on the battery type, many of the chemical reactions that happen to store energy (charging) are exothermic, which means they RELEASE energy, in this case in the form of heat.\n\nHope this helps. "
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5yei92 | why do everyday electronics usually require more than one battery to be inserted to work where others, such as cars and phones, only require one? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5yei92/eli5_why_do_everyday_electronics_usually_require/ | {
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"Every day batteries are a standard size - 1.5V or occasionally 9V. Never seen something need multiple 9V batteries so we'll stick to 1.5V.\n\nUsing multiple gives you whatever voltage you need. 2 gives 3V. 4 gives 6V. Bigger batteries give you more duration. So, having lots of small batteries means you can switch the same batteries between your TV remote and gameboy or smoke alarm while still being flexible. \n\nPhones have one battery designed specifically for that phone. You can't transfer it. That makes that battery less flexible and more expensive since only that phone can use it. \n\nCars were all standardised on 12V, so we make one single 12V battery - again because there is no need for changes in voltage, we just make bigger batteries as needed. Although some larger vehicles do need 24V and have 2 batteries like smaller devices. ",
"Most normal, round batteries (like C, D, AA, AAA) are one-cell batteries. Depending on what they're made out of, they can be anywhere from 1.2 volts to just over 2 volts. A lot of batteries, like 9V batteries and car batteries, are actually made out of a bunch of smaller cells hooked up in a row. If you take apart a 9V battery (I don't recommend this), you'll usually find 6 AAAA-size 1.5V cells (1.5 x 6 = 9). Car batteries also have 6 cells inside, and each one makes 2.1 volts (car batteries are actually 12.6 volts).\n\nEdit: So, some things that you think only have one battery actually have a bunch of individual battery cells.",
"You are confusing Battery and Cell.\n\nA battery is a collection of cells wired in parallel or series for a higher voltage or current output. \n\nA 1.5V AA, A, C, D is a Cell\n\nA 9v is a Battery. If you open it up, it will contain 6 1.5v cells.\n\nThe 6v block battery in your flashlight is a collection of smaller cells.\n\nThe 12v battery in your car is a collection of lead-acid cells.\n\n"
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bhg7z4 | why do arcade cabinet machines still often use crt monitors instead of lcd monitors? | I have seen new/modern arcade cabinets for sale that still use CRT monitors. But don't LCD displays have better quality display and are cheaper? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bhg7z4/eli5_why_do_arcade_cabinet_machines_still_often/ | {
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"There is no input lag on crt monitors, but for arcade hardware, it's more about the wiring specifications.\n\nThe JAMMA hardware spec is what most arcade motherboards use. A cabinet is typically wired so that the loom inside is JAMMA compliant, compiling the wiring for the monitor, power supply, controllers etc in one place.\n\nWhen it comes to old games, the JAMMA loom plugs right into the side of the motherboard. The Mobo works with this standard and nothing else. \n\nNewer games with newer cabinets do use LCDs however. The greater benefit being the monitors no longer need the capacitors serviced. If you have ever seen an old arcade cab where the graphics are fuzzy or discolored, it needs the caps replaced.\n\nEdit: I forgot to mention that as far as graphics go, many games were programmed with CRTs and scan lines in mind, and transposing that to a digital monitor compromises a lot regarding authenticity.",
"The ELI5 answer is that the toys (like the gun for duck hunter) that work for the games don’t work with flat panel displays."
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3300qf | how is ball lightning able to last so much longer than regular lightning? | Saw the video with the orbs outside the plane window today and while the reddit consensus is that it was faked, it still got me thinking about ball lightning. I have always wondered how it is able to retain its form for so long. Does anyone know?
Here is a picture of a large occurrence of ball lightning as reference:_URL_0_ | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3300qf/eli5_how_is_ball_lightning_able_to_last_so_much/ | {
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"Ball lightning, while observed semi-rarely over the past 100 years, is very hard to study. Becase of this limitation, there isnt alot known about what causes Ball lightning and what exactly it is."
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"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning#/media/File:Great_Balls_of_Lightning.jpg"
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8k4xi5 | why is it that when we choke on something, our eyes tear up? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8k4xi5/eli5_why_is_it_that_when_we_choke_on_something/ | {
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"The idea behind it is that your body triggers a reaction to lubricate the airways and tears are just a side effect of that. If you want to add some speculation to that it could also be an evolutionary reaction to non-verbally signal that you need help to other people. That's pure speculation.",
"There’s two things happening here, first you secrete more fluid and second you are blowing air up into where the water in your eyes would usually drain. Your eyes need water constantly to stop them drying out and becoming damaged. When choking, your air way is blocked so you start blowing air up through the holes where water would usually drain trough your eyes.\nThe extra secretions are to help lubricate your mouth and help remove any blockage. Combined together, the effect is that your eyes water!",
"Tear ducts are always producing tears to keep your eyes lubricated. The excess drains into the nasal passage. \n\nWhen you are choking the first thing your body does is increase all the various secretions in that area in an attempt to help get it out. It's like a fire in a building. All the sprinklers in the area come on even if it's overkill. Better safe than sorry. \n\nAll that gunk increases the pressure in your nasal cavities and prevents the tears from draining properly. So they back up and your eyes get watery. \n\nSame thing happens in reverse when you cry. The excess tears in your nose can cause it to run. ",
"Not really an ELI5 answer, but pretty straightforward:\n\nAn object in the larynx stimulates a nerve (internal laryngeal nerve), found in the piriform recess of the side of the larynx, that branches off of the vagus nerve. Stimulating the vagus nerve causes a parasympathetic response, which includes saliva and tear production.",
"Couple of things here really. Choking is an airway emergency and causes a sympathetic response: airways get bigger, heart beats faster, muscles prime for acceleration. We're geared for fight or flight when we are choking. However, that dries out your airway and that is bad for when something is stuck in it. You have little hairs that propel things upwards via secretions in the airway. Stimulating the laryngeal nerve pathways causes a cough reflex. That drives up pressure in the airway to try and forcefully expel whatever is stuck, but it needs secretions to help move it upwards. That laryngeal stimulation causes the parasympathetic activity to increase and produce tears and secretions. Very interesting from the standpoint of biology really. "
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2quhjl | how can restaurants like subway and mcdonald's put "no purchase necessary" on their sticker peel games when you have to buy a product to play? | I've walked in and asked, employees had no idea | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2quhjl/eli5_how_can_restaurants_like_subway_and/ | {
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"you can write to an address and they'll ship you a free game piece. ",
"You don't have to buy a product. You can send them a written request and they'll send you a game piece. Of course, you don't know about this unless you read the rules, either when you buy something eligible from McDonald's or when you go to their website:\n\n_URL_0_",
"You don't have to buy to play. If you read the contest rules, they tell you how to get a game piece for free.",
"Because the law in Canada says that they have to provide a means to enter the contest without making a cash purchase.\n\nIts covered by the same legislation that makes it illegal to have a paid lottery (unless you are a government approved provincial body or an approved charity) aka why there are those \"Skill testing questions\":\n\n_URL_0_\n"
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3gypa6 | the power and duties of interpol. can they act like a regular cop in us and arrest somebody? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3gypa6/eli5_the_power_and_duties_of_interpol_can_they/ | {
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"The US give up no sovereignty and gives no jurisdiction to Interpol. If Interpol needs to go after someone in the US they file extradition paperwork and give information to US law enforcement who will then go and arrest the person and hand them over to Interpol. ",
"INTERPOL doesn't really have \"officers\" as you understand the term. They're really just a coordinating body that makes it easier for police agencies around the world to communicate with each other. They don't actually arrest people."
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5ypdu5 | falling asleep in the bathtub and drowning | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ypdu5/eli5_falling_asleep_in_the_bathtub_and_drowning/ | {
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"Unless you drug yourself, are a toddler, or are seriously physically impaired you're at no risk of drowning in a bathtub."
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9h8usx | it’s just as difficult to connect to a new bluetooth device today as it was 10 years ago. why has this technology seemingly not advanced over the years despite its use increasing dramatically? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9h8usx/eli5_its_just_as_difficult_to_connect_to_a_new/ | {
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"The process itself is extremely simple. For something like say, a car or something, the bluetooth options may be hidden in some menus, but the actual connection process itself is extremely simple. Turn the device you're connecting to in pairing mode. Pair to the device. If applicable, enter the PIN displayed by the device. You are connected.\n\nConnection difficulties are generally the result of mega-cheap bluetooth chipsets. Your $15 bluetooth headphones might work perfectly fine. Or might be cranky pairing intermittently/always. As with anything else involving technology, quality of hardware, firmware, and software may vary. Do research before you buy.",
"Bluetooth spec is crazy complex. The first version with all the profiles was 1500 pages. Plus it was written by phone companies who did not understand TCP networking but instead knew a lot about serial connections. So one of the base protocols is a full serial emulator. It’s really crazy. From the programming standpoint, Bluetooth is the hardest protocol I know of to implement."
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5xrkkq | why do trees randomly stop growing at meadows/clearings? | What is it that makes them stop growing in specific spots. Wouldn't seeds fall all around the tree thus meaning more trees? (A forest clearing into a grassy meadow for example) | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5xrkkq/eli5why_do_trees_randomly_stop_growing_at/ | {
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"Orchard farmer here, taking a crack at it. Soil types, acidity, runoff, even bedrock coming to the surface can affect the types of plants that may grow there, wind in the prairies tend to knock trees down. For the sake of argument, I'm omitting these instances. \n\nOften in forests, we will find zones which have a localized disease. In particular beetle kill reduced swathes of forest more than fires in areas of Colorado. I'd like to think nature is still reclaiming, but our lives are so finite to use anecdotes as factual observations. I do notice when I revisit my old stomping grounds in the woods, they're often unrecognizable.\n\nI will defer to science, but that's my observation.",
"Fire as a result of lightning storms is one reason. Here Florida, we have large areas of forests that contain wide fire-carved paths creating isolated groups of trees spaced in the carved out path. The trees will try to grow back, but another fire may extend the grasslands and shape of the forest is constantly changing.\n\nRocks, soil type, water availability and altitude may also impact where trees grow.",
"Actually this is mostly to due with competition of resources.\n\nMost people would think of a lot of reasons for something not to grow, but mostly whats going on is some other vegetation will make sure that baby tree wont start up.\n\nIf you go look at a clearing right now, and find the habitat buffer, sometimes its a /hard/ line of forest to meadow, and you'll look down on the grass and see that it recedes almost as if it was cut like that, by some invisible force, and then the trees grow and there's forest understory without the same meadowgrass right? the grass doesn't grow under those trees normally, meadow is meadow and forest is forest. \n\nFor this example however we can take normally the most prominent resource that is normally competed like this, which of course for vegetation mostly means sunlight.\n\n If i'm a fir tree i normally can't grow in shade, which is why as a fir tree, i normally dominate the canopy of a forest, i'm the tallest, my leaves are out there the highest, im yuge. Normally if i land my seeds somewhere where there's some bear sunlight, i'll grow quick, and i grow quicker than all the other plants, so much so that i'm selected and adapted to form a gigantic forest canopy of a tree. \n\nWell it sucks for that seed if there's grass over it. Just enough grass to cover up the seedling from sunlight ensures even if this seed has enough water and nutrients in the ground that the grasses aren't taking up, this seed won't have the resources to ever overgrow the meadow grasses. \n\nNormally as far as trees go, there are some that can grow in the shade, but these seeds need a lot more water, nitrogen, potassium, some other stupid resources that we need to factor to understand why this thing won't grow. Chances are its something that normally is never the same in every situation. Most of these aren't really huge trees. Why is that?\n\nWell i just described selection for the tree to grow huge, to be a forest tree. Most big forest trees grow together, maybe a fir tree, heres an oak, they all grow quick and huge and at once, then they will dominate the canopy and that forest won't usually have anymore trees grown at the size and capacity of the canopy trees. \n\nBut you see in a meadow these grasses need to inhibit the tree seedling from starting, the grasses must be there before a tree starts growing, otherwise this tree will grow and dominate and take the sunlight from the grasses. So normally a meadow has a different history than the forest it borders. This is because if you see a meadow bordering a forest, you can bet its been clear for q u i t e along time, otherwise that meadow would've been wiped out in a heartbeat. It is a constant back and forth in the meadow/forest borders, grasses try to get the sunlight before tree seedlings, tree seedlings will try to grow where they can and try to out compete for the sunlight. \n\n\nThis is why grasses (besides the prairie lands, those are low to the ground grasses, because the soil wont even let trees grow anyways and the grass doesn't need to spend so much energy making large shoots to outcompete) normally start like small leaves in the ground and then grow tall. They floresce on tips of long shoots, and try to ensure their seeds blow all across the meadow that more of the same grasses are. To the grasses, they really really want to completley cover that soil in their own mat of grass, they want to keep a meadow going, as this ensures sunlight /just/ for the grasses. Forest trees on the other hand might use wind-seeding as well (coniferous, fir trees), but their fertilized seeds drop from the tree itself. You can look at the distance that these seeds drop, and it will almost always conform to where the canopy of the parent tree actually extends out the farthest, where mostly there is a good bet some sunlight will be shining through. The tree wants to ensure its seedlings have some sunlight, and will drop these seedlings to try and grab that sunlight before another forest tree will lurch up and take that part of the canopy sunlight aswell. \n\nSo when you talk about trees, this is the norm. Some trees like fruit trees can actually grow somewhat well in the environment of a meadow, but this doesn't normally constitute a type of formidable forest tree that you are thinking of, with the giant and wide base. Trees that grow in meadowlands are actually quite the distinctive and amazing little plants, because for some reason they hit this perfect niche that is normally not seen at all. Most of the time either trees are in a forest, or there is no trees and you are in a meadow with grasses."
]
} | []
| []
| [
[],
[],
[]
]
|
|
6zai3t | why does this jpg image move like a gif? | _URL_0_ | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6zai3t/eli5_why_does_this_jpg_image_move_like_a_gif/ | {
"a_id": [
"dmtr5b5"
],
"score": [
10
],
"text": [
"Turns out that if you take a .gif with animation and rename the file type as .jpg, the code that displays the image still figures out that it's a .gif. all of the animation will still play. If you download the one you gave for an example and check the properties, they show that it really is a .gif."
]
} | []
| [
"https://i.pinimg.com/originals/0b/cb/b6/0bcbb6cad5aabbae418170355f9b6114.jpg"
]
| [
[]
]
|
|
a59dxq | what is the difference between a stutter and a stammer, and what causes them? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a59dxq/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_a_stutter_and/ | {
"a_id": [
"ebksvvv"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"From my experience a stutter is failure to speak fluently and is something people have issue controlling and is an aspect of their speech. However a stammer is just a fault in someone's speech and is a once off thing rather than a conditional based affliction."
]
} | []
| []
| [
[]
]
|
||
5blntj | how do motor proteins actually "walk" within a cell? | Various animations on the internet show the motor protein kinesin walking within a cell. Is this an approximation? How does this happen and (based upon what physical evidence) how do we know it "walks" like this?
_URL_1_
_URL_0_
_URL_2_ | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5blntj/eli5_how_do_motor_proteins_actually_walk_within_a/ | {
"a_id": [
"d9pgpj2",
"d9plskp"
],
"score": [
8,
2
],
"text": [
"A combination of experimental techniques and inference.\n\n* A laser is used to create a very short pulse of x-ray, which temporarily freezes molecules in place\n\n* Many motor proteins moving along strands of microtubule in-vitro are frozen and imaged simultaneously\n\n* Assuming that every protein motor has the same behaviour, you now have a set of frames that you can reconstruct into an animation of the shape of the proteins changing over time\n\nIt's analogous to setting up many cameras along the side of a racetrack and taking single shots of horses galloping past. Although each image is of a different horse you can reconstruct the galloping pattern by choosing images that are have only small differences between the position of the legs. It is slightly easier with molecules, because they really are all identical.",
"I don't know how they got the evidence for it, but I do know how it works. Like everything else in the cell, it uses ATP hydrolysis to move its \"legs.\" When ATP is bound to one of the legs it is more tightly bound to the microtubule it is on. When ATP is hydrolyzed to ADP + Pi, the binding becomes looser. As one leg is hydrolyzing ATP, the other leg is having ATP bind to it so that it stays on the microtubule. The leg that hydrolyzed ATP and now has ADP then moves \"forward\" while they other leg anchors it down. [This figure](_URL_0_) does a pretty good job of explaining it as well."
]
} | []
| [
"http://imgur.com/gallery/WOTJdLp",
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-uuk4Pr2i8",
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMKlPDBRJ1E"
]
| [
[],
[
"https://i21.servimg.com/u/f21/17/30/76/23/kinesi11.png"
]
]
|
|
6jktzw | if there's "good" bacteria in both our mouths and gut, why are antibiotics seen as bad for digestion while mouthwash is recommended daily/frequently? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6jktzw/eli5_if_theres_good_bacteria_in_both_our_mouths/ | {
"a_id": [
"djeyij9",
"djf63xv",
"djf68ys"
],
"score": [
3,
2,
7
],
"text": [
"Antibiotics kill all the bacteria in your gut. Good or bad. Which can make digestion worse for a few days(and why you should eat yogurt after antibiotics treatment, to help restore the good bacteria). \n\nMouthwash is just floor cleaner [advertised]( _URL_0_) as something you should use everyday(so you have to buy more of it) and since it isn't toxic(if you don't swallow it) there is no institution that cares if they lie about how \"good\" it is for the biosphere in your mouth. ",
"Bacteria are essential for a heathy gut and effective digestion. As far as we are aware, bacteria are not essential for the function of the mouth and many are implicated in the formation of dental caries (tooth decay).\nAs already stated, whether or not to use mouthwash daily is largely a matter of marketing.",
"This is an extremely active area of research, as metagenomics is a brand new field and the technology to determine bacterial makeup of body locations as in mouth, gut, vagina, skin, etc is brand new and receiving nearly daily advancements. We are just beginning to accurately study diversely populated areas with any accuracy, so correlations are simply not available. Currently we can culture only 1% of known bacteria! Thus long term conclusive information regarding harm or benefit of killing vs maintaining bacterial diversity in body locations is ongoing. Overwhelming, it seems diversity favors health benefits vs sterilization. It may be harmful long term to sterilize your mouth every day.\n\nThat being said the gut has many immune stimulating properties that are not found orally. A mouth infection will be local, whereas a gut infection may lead to systemic shock, hormonal imbalances, inflammatory arthritis, systemic weight gain, CNS sensitivity or chronic attack as in Gillian Barr syndrome, Crohn's, colitis, weight loss and nutrient depravation etc. etc. The gut is a control panel where the body synthesizes incredibly powerful biomolecules that the mouth is unable to do, so infection/lack of bacteria is much more important there. 3rd year microbiology student studying gut metagenomics."
]
} | []
| []
| [
[
"https://youtu.be/0YdvFBxBD5g"
],
[],
[]
]
|
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