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1sgpem | why does beer travel through my body so quickly? | As opposed to all other types of drinks, alcoholic or not.
When ever I'm drinking lots of beer I feel like I'm always in the bathroom taking another leak...
Good Morning :) | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1sgpem/why_does_beer_travel_through_my_body_so_quickly/ | {
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"You are taking in a lot of water since beer is mostly water, but the main culprit is the diuretic effect of alcohol. Alcohol essentially tells the brain that there is too much water in the blood and the brain responds by telling the kidneys to take the water out of the blood and put it in the urine. Its the alcohol more than the water that is making you pee."
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2pewee | why wouldn't the nordic model work everywhere? | We always hear about how great Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and (to a lesser degree) Norway are to their citizens with their social services in exchange for a higher cost of living and higher taxes. Many citizens of the Nordic countries seem to approve of these social services, unlike in the U.S where everyone on welfare is portrayed as lazy and entirely dependent on government money. I always bring this up in discussions about the American government and economy and always get various responses as to why it wouldn't work in the U.S (we're too big, too rural in comparison to Scandinavia, and a slew of others I can't think of). Is there any real reason the Nordic model wouldn't work anywhere? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2pewee/eli5_why_wouldnt_the_nordic_model_work_everywhere/ | {
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" > wouldn't work anywhere\n\nAbsolutely there are reasons it won't work anywhere. The Nordic countries are relatively homogeneous. They don't have competing culture, ethnic, or religious groups competing for power and resources and feeling oppressed, left out, disenfranchised, or angry when they don't have those things to the extent they feel they need them. As soon as you introduce a population into a country that is a sizable minority the model is going to have issues. This model also breaks down when large regions of the country are substantially richer than others and funding the social services for the poorer parts. \n\nLets take some examples. Iraq: three major religious/ethnic groups that just don't want to be in a country with the other groups. The majority ethnic group (Arabs) have less resources than a sizable minority (Kurds). In a democracy they vote themselves the social services to be paid for by what the minority group (Kurds) see as their resources (oil), and return very little back to the people sitting on those resources. Add on top of this the religious division in the Arab population between Sunni and Shiite and you have a country that can't get to the Nordic model much less make it work.\n\nExample #2 America. America also has a sizable minority group (blacks), but unlike Iraq that minority doesn't live in just a specific region with valuable resources. America has largely solved the regional resource issues, even the minorities consider themselves American and everyone sees the regional distributions (today from urban areas to rural) as generally acceptable. America's problem is cultural and there are several cultural issues not just one that would have to be overcome in order for a Nordic model to take effect and work.\n\nFirst the culture of America stigmatizes and resents government, any government. Even more so it stigmatizes government aid of any sort. The American culture portrays those who need aid exactly as you described and its not just the rich who believe it its much of the poor also. In America to accept aid is to say you have failed. Yes there are large numbers that are completely hypocritical about it. They will vote against their own interest in stopping aid while lining up to receive it. \n\nThe next cultural problem goes back to the founding of the country. America was founded by rich white landowners who didn't want to pay their taxes. They rebelled against Britain specifically because Britain tried to get them to pay for services rendered (defense during the French and Indian War) and potential services in the future (further defense). Paying taxes is counter to basic American culture from the founding of the country. It doesn't matter what good comes of it. The richer the person the more they do to avoid paying them and see any new imposition of taxes as anathema. Since the rich control the media and the legislature they ensure that this cultural element persists, it seen a proper and the legislatures will never change the fundamental method by which the country works today. In order to break this cultural habit you need to remove the riches ability to influence elections by spending money, ie. you need a Communist revolution to happen in America.\n\nSo if you completely change the American culture (which is absolutely unrealistic) would a Nordic model work here? For a while, until the countries regions started separating more and more. Those regions are already in the process of doing that. We see it as a Red State vs Blue State thing right now but its often an urban vs rural. The Red states tend to be be much more rural, poorer, republican and in need of aid (while being in denial about that aid). The blue states more urban, democratic, and richer (in terms of being able to give the aid). Imposing a 40% or so tax on the blue states would make them much more resentful of that aid going to red states and exacerbate an already existing issue. There is only so long the blue states would support the red and get little or no return. This isn't an issue in smaller countries everyone tends to mingle more. But when its 3000 miles from one coast to another most people never deal with the other group and it becomes an us vs them mentality."
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cb1cgg | why can hippos outrun humans? | A quick google search says Male hippos can weigh 1,800 kg and reach top speed at 30 km/h. Meanwhile a professional sprinter will weigh 80-90 kg and still be slower than a hippo. Why can the average hippo weigh 20 times a professional sprinter, yet possess superior speed? Would they go even faster if they were trained to lose weight? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cb1cgg/eli5_why_can_hippos_outrun_humans/ | {
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"1. There is dramatically more to how fast a creature or person is than just how much they weigh. If this were the case, you'd expect mice to be many times faster than a human.\n\n2. Muscle mass, the fact that the hippo has twice as many legs, the fact that humans more or less evolved to be efficient LONG DISTANCE runners and hippos evolved to be fast in shorter bursts all factor into things. \n\n3. You're comparing a top speed to a sustained speed. The recorded record speed for a human was 44.72 km/h, recorded over a 20 meter distance - faster than the hippo. Granted, most professional sprinters are going to be a lot slower than that, but not 15km/h slower than that.",
"Why can a jet plane go faster than a car? It’s way bigger.\n\nIt’s about POWER!"
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6zvux1 | cells in a living animal are significantly damaged by freezing, however meat that is frozen for keeping doesn't suffer significant changes in texture or appearance you'd expect from the same cellular damage. why is that the case? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6zvux1/eli5_cells_in_a_living_animal_are_significantly/ | {
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"It's a matter of sensitivity.\n\nIf 1% of your cells are dead, you're in trouble. If they're all in your little toe, like frostbite on your little toe, you're going to lose that toe.\n\nIf 1% of the cells in a steak are damaged, it's a 99% tasty steak. Frankly, a lot of cells that are too damaged to stay alive are 100% as tasty as viable cells.",
"Cells in frozen meat do suffer damage. Try cutting a never-frozen chicken breast in half and put one in the freezer and the other in the refrigerator until the freezer one is frozen and then thaw it. Cook them both and see how the frozen one releases more liquid. That much damage in a living creature causes a lot of problems and the immune system usually gets rather excited with all of these cell innards floating around.\n\nThere are additional factors as well.\n\nMeat is usually a bit dehydrated, so fewer cells are going to be damaged by the expanding ice inside of them.\n\nFreezing water damages the structures *inside* cells, which can kill them without rupturing them. We don't care about this when we are cooking our meat since that destroys these things too.\n\nThere is a whole host of enzymes which break down if not replenished. When these get released outside of the cell, they can do all sorts of damage to their neighbors. Raw meat which has been sitting for a while has many fewer of these, they tend to be destroyed by heat, and the damage that the remaining do has totally different implications for our food than for living tissue.",
"Meat that is frozen does suffer significant changes in texture and appearance. That is why many people will not eat meat that has been frozen and why restaurants like Wendy's use the fact that they do not freeze their meat as a selling point. "
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2aybce | the baha'i faith. | Edit: Thanks everyone for the great answers! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2aybce/eli5_the_bahai_faith/ | {
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"It's a monotheistic faith started by a Shi'a Muslim in 1844. It stresses that there is one God who is loving but doesn't interact with the world, that all known faiths are a manifestation of this God, and that all people are equal, whatever the faith, race, caste, sex, gender, whatever. Rather than Heaven and Hell, they believe that your spiritual development will correlate with how close you are to God after death, and one achieves this development by fostering world peace, creating harmony between science and religion, elimination of extreme wealth and poverty, and elimination of all kinds of prejudice. ",
"The Baha'i faith places an emphasis on the unity of humankind (men and women equal, children equal, races equal, religion equal), acknowledging the validity of all other religions. Founded by Bahá'u'lláh, then carried on by his son `Abdu'l-Bahá. \n\nThe Baha'i faith is monotheistic, or a belief in one god. Practices include a fast in March, marriage is between a man and woman, no sex outside of marriage, no participation in partisan politics, no alcohol or drugs (unless prescribed by a doctor), no gambling, and mandatory prayer.\n\nThere are many, many more details regarding the Baha'i faith, but that's the general idea.\n\nE: clarity",
"I grew up Baha'i, but I'm not religious now. I might not be 100% on the details. \n\nBasically Baha'i believe that God reveals his message through different prophets or manifestations meant to reach different people in different times all to spread a very similar message of love and peace. Pretty much every major religious figure you've heard of is considered a valid prophet: Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Zoroaster etc. The most recent one that Baha'is stress is Bahaullah, who was a Persian man that preached that all religions worship the same god and are equally valid. Basically to a Baha'i it doesn't matter if you're Baha'i, Muslim, Christian, Jewish or what not. You're part of the one world religion. For example my brother got married to a Christian woman in a Christian church, that's perfectly acceptable as Christian churches are seen as part of the same single religion.\n\nAnother major stress is that humanity and mankind are one race making a very strong theme of anti-racism and sexism (although for some reason women still aren't allowed to serve at the highest levels of the Faith which is a major point of contention). Also although the Faith places some strict rules, alcohol, drugs and homosexuality are considered sins and forbidden; it has a strong theme of accepting the sinner with their flaws. I remember as a kid going to tons Baha'i events, they're very multicultural and accepting. It's really a religion of peace, love and accepting in my experience. \n\nBaha'is don't have many actual houses of worship. There's a major temple in Israel, but I don't know of any others. What they do is meet in local groups for prayer, usually at someone's house. There's also no clergy so you just meet at people's houses a few times a month in the evening. \n\nI'm running late for something so I gotta go, but I can answer more questions later if you have em!",
"My sister-in-law is Baha'i, and whilst I don't know a huge amount, she recommended this video to me. Check it out, it's pretty helpful.\n\n_URL_0_\n",
"The Baha'i faith is a monotheistic religion tracing it's roots from the same lineage as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (in that the founder of the faith, Baha'u'llah, is considered the next incarnation of these prophets). Baha'i's believe that all religions are equal (although I've known some Baha'i's to believe that their religion is the closest to the truth, being the most modern), and that spiritual attainment can be gained through any religion, as long as one forms a closer relationship with God.\n\nBaha'i's believe in religious, racial, and gender equality, and general egalitarianism (although this is sometimes challenged with newer social issues, such as transgender people and homosexuality). The Baha'i faith has a central headquarters in Haifa, Israel that administers global missionary placements, registration (Baha'i's can request verification that they are registered Baha'i's for voting purposes), and other affairs. It's also democratically elected: anyone can be elected to a seat at the Universal House of Justice, although campaigning is typically not done, and running for other forms of government is seen questionably.\n\nSource: My family is mostly Baha'i.",
"Baha'i people are the best people! They tend to push their religion onto you a bit but in the sense like we are bahai and stuff but very peaceful people. I went to a Baha'i school in India for a 2 years. Its called New Era High School.....oh my i miss dem days! It dont answer you question but I aint read or heard about Bahais for a while now so wanted to add my 2 cents. ",
"Everyone has replied with a good general idea, so I thought I'd share from a talk 'Abdu'l-Baha made in Paris:\n\"Religion should unite all hearts and cause wars and disputes to vanish from the face of the earth; it should give birth to spirituality, and bring light and life to every soul. If religion becomes a cause of dislike, hatred and division it would be better to be without it, and to withdraw from such a religion would be a truly religious act. For it is clear that the purpose of a remedy is to cure, but if the remedy only aggravates the complaint, it had better be left alone. Any religion which is not a cause of love and unity is no religion.\"",
"\"Look out, Bart! A gentle Baha'i!\"\n\n\"Alright, full conversion points!\"",
"A bit of trivia: Rainn Wilson, aka Dwight from *The Office*, is a practitioner of the Bahá'í faith.\n\n\n_URL_0_",
"One of the coolest people I've met traveling was Baha'i. He was an old Iranian soldier, living in eastern Africa with his family. He was a stern, quiet guy, but over dinner he told us a story about what had happpened to him the previous week. \n\nHe was in the city open air market at a bus stop when an intoxicated Rastafarian started giving him a hard time. They traded words and the Rasta clocked him. not unconscious, but laid him flat. The cops arrest the Rasta and he goes to jail. \n\nThe Baha'i guy is a big municipal consultant and has a bit of sway in the relatively corrupt country. He sets up a meeting with the Rasta in prison the next day. The guards grab the Rasta and bring him out to the prison garden where the Baha'i is waiting. They throw the Rasta to his knees. The Rasta has his head down, and he is shaking. The guards leave. the Bahai and the Rasta are Alone in the garden. The Baha'i grabs the Rasta by the shoulders, lifts him to standing, and hugs him. Tells him he forgives him and that he got the charges dropped. The two talk for a bit and then go their seperate ways. \n\nEvery time cruelty starts to affect my actions, I remember this story, I remember people can be good, and I try to be too. \n\n\n\n\nTl:dr. Rastafarian and Baha'i fistfight, shit gets all Christlike. ",
"I am a an 8th generation Baha'i, so I hope I serve as at least a somewhat reputable source of information on the subject. The mentions of anti-homosexuality I've read in these replies need context. The Baha'is as a general rule do NOT view homosexuality as sinful. Sin as a concept doesn't actually play much part in the religion. The problem arises from the Baha'i views on the purposes of dating and marriage. To a Baha'i, the purpose of dating is to compare one anothers personality to determine if they would be good partners for marriage and raising children. Extramarital sex is frowned upon as counterproductive to that end (sex tends to cloud judgment). Subsequently, marriage is seen as a construct to deepen faith, provide support, and bear/raise children. The first conflict is that homosexuality as a subculture revolves, by definition, around sexual preference and practice, which has no bearing on Baha'i ideas of dating. The second is the purpose of Baha'i marriage as facilitating the bearing of children. While a homosexual couple is perfectly capable of providing a loving and wholesome environment to raise a child, they are unable to produce offspring of thier own. While adoption is a wonderful thing (more, it's necessary to ensure that children in any circumstance get the chance at happy life), there is nontheless an emphasis in the faith on spiritual obligation to a child by its genetic parents that a homosexual couple cannot share in. The fullfilment of these obligations are seen as a major path for spiritual growth. Therefore, to the Baha'i mode of thought, entering into a homosexual marriage deprives both members of the potential for spiritual growth.\n\nSorry for the wall of text, but I think the destinctions needed to be made.",
"An important thing to consider is that Bahai's believe in something called progressive revelation. Which means that religion is revealed to progress the whole earth and comes in cycles. A good metaphor my father uses is that as children we wear baby clothing, when we grow up those cloths are not adequate for us and we need something else that will cater to our needs. Bahai's believe that their religion is the religion for today and roughly the next one thousand years, and that when the next manifestation of God comes along, the Bahai faith will in a sense become obsolete. \nFor more information-_URL_0_\n",
"My mother was friends with a woman of this faith and all I remember is us going to pot lucks to talk about other religions and understanding other faiths. Sometimes I stayed for the discussion or would hang out with fellow youngsters and watch movies... Personally the religion to me means dinner and a movie. But I like Navidtheman's description better."
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8c0jrm | why does a wooden pipe, itself, not burn while in use? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8c0jrm/eli5_why_does_a_wooden_pipe_itself_not_burn_while/ | {
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"The inside of the bowl of the pipe is typically treated with an organic flame retardant to help keep the wood from charring. Pipes can and have been made without any treatment and they will burn over time.",
"A pipe will burn but very slowly. As you use the pipe ash and residue builds up in the bowl, called a cake, which will prevent it burning further.",
"They're also made from briar, which is a super dense-grained wood. It burns, but a lot slower than tobacco.",
"You know how when you're roasting marshmallows and you burn one, but the inside is still fine? It's like that."
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5i5o5f | what exactly does the secretary of state do? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5i5o5f/eli5_what_exactly_does_the_secretary_of_state_do/ | {
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"The Secretary of State is the chief diplomat for the US. They travel the world, representing US interests, delivering private messages to world leaders, negotiating treaties, intervening on behalf of US interests as needed. ",
"He (or She) is in charge of the State Department, which is responsible for managing relationships with all of the other countries of the world. Most other countries have a similar position called \"Foreign Secretary\". All of our countries ambassadors, diplomats, diplomatic personnel, etc, work for the State Department. "
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zx0j2 | what happened in libya? why is everybody protesting against the usa? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/zx0j2/what_happened_in_libya_why_is_everybody/ | {
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"An anti-Islamic film was posted to youtube a few days ago. This sparked protests in Cairo and Benghazi Libya. An al Qaeda related group used the protests as a cover to launch an attack. That attack killed four people including the US ambassador. There have been protests since, but many people have carried signs in apology and sympathy to the victims of the attack. \n\nSince that attack, protests have continued and expanded. Showing that the embassies were vulnerable have meant many other protests have crossed into US embassies but so far no other attacks on staff. \n\nThey are continuing in large part because there is a belief that because the US government has not taken down the video that they support its message. "
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jijho | rhythm and melody | Especially in regards to rock music. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jijho/eli5_rhythm_and_melody/ | {
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"This is the easiest way I can think to describe these ideas.\n\nRhythm is what carries music forward, it is what gives music pace, and speed (or lack of speed!). In music it is important for band members to stay in time with each other, and rhythm is what helps them accomplish this. Think of rhythm as a ticking clock that keeps everyone playing together. Rhythm is provided by a drummer chiefly, but also by guitarists playing chords (rhythm guitar), and by the bassist.\n\nThe melody in a song is kind of like the foremost part, the front part, the part that sticks out, the part that grabs your ears. If you hum a song like Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, all you have is melody, that is melody. Melody is a string of notes! Melody in rock music is chiefly supplied by the singer, the lead guitarist, and the bassist in some cases. Rock music in general is not as melodic as some other forms of music, Rock is generally a rhythmic and harmonic form of music.\n\nHarmony, by the way, is the last piece of the puzzle, and you didn't ask about it but here's a short piece of it. Harmony is kind of the \"background\" sounds in a song. Harmony makes the melody sound better, harmony supports melody. Harmony is formed by playing multiple notes at once as specific intervals (in music that's called a chord). The role of playing harmony is chiefly that of the rhythm guitarist, and also the bassist.",
"Rhythm: it's the beat. It's what you tap your foot to. Drums and bass provide most of the rhythm, and are usually referred to as a rhythm section.\n\nMelody: melodies are provided by the singer and guitar player. Melody is the \"tune\" of the song. ",
"This is the easiest way I can think to describe these ideas.\n\nRhythm is what carries music forward, it is what gives music pace, and speed (or lack of speed!). In music it is important for band members to stay in time with each other, and rhythm is what helps them accomplish this. Think of rhythm as a ticking clock that keeps everyone playing together. Rhythm is provided by a drummer chiefly, but also by guitarists playing chords (rhythm guitar), and by the bassist.\n\nThe melody in a song is kind of like the foremost part, the front part, the part that sticks out, the part that grabs your ears. If you hum a song like Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, all you have is melody, that is melody. Melody is a string of notes! Melody in rock music is chiefly supplied by the singer, the lead guitarist, and the bassist in some cases. Rock music in general is not as melodic as some other forms of music, Rock is generally a rhythmic and harmonic form of music.\n\nHarmony, by the way, is the last piece of the puzzle, and you didn't ask about it but here's a short piece of it. Harmony is kind of the \"background\" sounds in a song. Harmony makes the melody sound better, harmony supports melody. Harmony is formed by playing multiple notes at once as specific intervals (in music that's called a chord). The role of playing harmony is chiefly that of the rhythm guitarist, and also the bassist.",
"Rhythm: it's the beat. It's what you tap your foot to. Drums and bass provide most of the rhythm, and are usually referred to as a rhythm section.\n\nMelody: melodies are provided by the singer and guitar player. Melody is the \"tune\" of the song. "
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dlj0fy | what is solar wind and why does it make planets without magnetic fields uninhabitable? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dlj0fy/eli5_what_is_solar_wind_and_why_does_it_make/ | {
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"The solar wind is a stream of highly energetic, electrically charged particles released from the sun's upper atmosphere as part of its nuclear processes.\n\nThe issue with this is that, in the absence of a magnetic field, it'll start tearing the atmosphere away from a planet, and then bathing the planet's surface in radiation, both of which are very bad.",
"Solar wind is all of the electrons, protons, and radiation particles that the sun gives off. As the sun does its regular thing of fusing hydrogen and helium, there is not only lots of light being created, but all of those \"explosions\" are also flinging LOTS of stuff away from the sun at really high speed and with a ton of energy. \n\nAll of this stuff is electromagnetically charged, which means that if a planet has a magnetic field, the solar wind just kind of bounces off of it and moves on. When a planet has no magnetic field, the stuff can hit the surface and damage things. When radiation that strong hits living things, it tends to do way too much damage for them to continue living."
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6zgvhj | why do we have different electrical outlets on different continents? it seems electricity was discovered and then everyone went different ways with it. is one setup better than another? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6zgvhj/eli5_why_do_we_have_different_electrical_outlets/ | {
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"Well voltage and frequency of AC supply varies by country so having different sockets is an advantage so you dont blow shit up plugging in the wrong one.\n\nAlso some countries have different safety standards for there plugs. The UK has arguably the best sockets in the world but other countries didnt feel the need to develop them the same",
"Before electricity, there were no fast ways of communicating across continents. When electricity was discovered within a nation, they never thought of waiting months to ask other nations about how they plug in devices. The nation just wanted to take advantage of the new invention as soon as possible! Therefore, there are so many plug standards as the first nations consulted their own engineers and scientists to make their own working plug.\n\nOnce people found out there were different standards, it was too late to change since so many buildings and devices have already been converted to one type of outlet.\n\nIn terms of different setups, there's two major kinds of standard voltage depending on the country: 110 Volt and 230 Volt. 110 V is the standard in North and Central Americas + western Japan. 230 V is found everywhere else. 230 Volt is more efficient power-wise but more dangerous due to the high voltage. 110 V is safer but it cannot supply as much power (ovens and refrigerators may need a separate high voltage plug). ~~Luckily, there are no plugs that can plug into both which is an easy way to burn out your device.~~ Nevermind... there are definitely plugs that can plug into both... check your adapter specifications and/or read your manual to prevent your devices from dying when using the wrong voltage!\n\nBoth of these outlets supply alternating current meaning the voltage goes up and down with time. They swing at a cycle of 60 Hz (cycles per second) in countries with a 110 V standard and 50 Hz in countries with a 230 V standard. This had influence on the refresh rate of TVs since TVs fixed their refresh rates to the power frequency to prevent strobing effects that would occur if the frequencies were mismatched. Nowadays with digital content, most TVs have been standardized to display at 60 Hz refresh rate.\n\nEdit: Clarifications in the last paragraph.",
"Dunno if its technically an answer to the question but Tom Scott has a good video about the UK plug/outlet design\n\n_URL_0_",
"Tom Scott argued that UK plugs are superior because if the wire gets yanked the last thing to go is the Earth wire apparently making it a bit safer. I'm not so sure, I do know that if you step on an upturned UK plug you are going to come out with a long string of four letter expletives. That shit seriously hurts. ",
"As I understand it, in the 1880s was the start of the second industrial revolution. It was mainly about power and it's generation. To simplify it by a lot, there was four heros of that age. (actually alot more but for now naming just this 4 seems sufficient).\n\nIn the US there was Edison and Tesla and in Europe there was Siemens and Doliwo-Dobrowolski.\nEdison popularized the DC power generation. As did Siemens. While Edison was more of a business man, Siemens was a scientist, showing to the puplic what dynamo electronics means. Tesla invented the syncron electric engine which was used in the building of the niragara Powerstation. Which produced a split phase AC. \n\nWhile Doliwo-Dobrowolski, inventer of the modern asynchronous electric engine, helped build the most importend Powerstation in europe at the time, the Reihnfelden low pressure River Powerstation. This design is a 3 phase AC system.\n\nThe 3 phase system is alot more sturdy and a bit cheaper to use. The old generators in Reihnfelden run for 100 years. The 3 phase system was especially great for high power machiner, so it used the 220 V from the start.\n\nEdison already forced a lot of communitys to his 3 line DC power, the short term financial decision was to keep the land lines and just use the split phase AC through it. Much like today with copper cables vs. glass fibre. That's why the US still uses the 110/130 V System. It was clear at the time that the 3 phase system was superior to the split phase, but as you might know GM was determined to stay on top.\n\nThe security aspect that 110V is safer is actually a myth based on Edison and Westinghouse ads. And of cause for the US it is not easy to accept that others might did it better, its against the \"best in everything\" myth, so there was no moving to the 3 phase system for the ordanary people. Heavy industry on the other hand uses 3 phase systems everywhere. ",
"It is very hard to change systems once one is adopted. Ontario Canada had electric power since the 1890s, the Brock #1 power plant at Niagara Falls. But there were other private systems before that.\n\nSo Ontario at one time had 2 systems, 25cyles per second and 60 cycles per second. This became so unwieldy that in 1950 they switched everything to 60 cycles. Teams of electricians went from door to door, replacing the motors in everyone's washing machines, refrigerators and other appliances. This cost a great deal of money, and inconvenience for a lot of people. Today it would be even harder and more costly.",
"See, electricity wasn't a single Eureka! moment by one single guy. Lots of people were already heading towards the discovery of electricity. Most inventions are like this. So now a bunch of people in a bunch of countries have differing plugs, because they didn't know what the other guys were doing. ",
"Electricity was discovered and the tech around it was invented before communication between countries was easy. Things were still done by letter or in person so communication between neighboring countries would take days or weeks, while that between the continents could take months. So every country came up with their own standards as tech was invented/re-invented by their scientists. \n\nBy the time communication was easy they already had different standards firmly established and so it was not reasonable for them to go to a uniform standard. In fact the only reason that Europe has for the most part one standard is that they had to rebuild after WWII and so took the opportunity to make things more uniform. ",
"UK plugs are superior as far as safety is concerned - they have a fuse in the plug, pins are rectangular for best contact surface and the ground pin is longer so it connects first and disconnect last. The sockets are better too - they have individual on/off switches and shutters in them for protection, you can't reach live wire unless ground is plugged in.\n\nThey are rather cumbersome and take a lot of space though.\n\nEuro plugs are a bit worse but still good, can't really reach live wire unintentionally, US ungrounded plugs are quite possibly the worst there are."
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2h4qbw | gender critical feminism | So I was clicking the random subreddits button today and I stumbled upon the subreddit. What is that? Is it a popular movement?
edit: ~~Downvoted for asking?~~ | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2h4qbw/eli5_gender_critical_feminism/ | {
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"It's a very extreme splinter branch off of mainline feminist movements that really, *really* hates trans people. \n\nThey believe, roughly, that discrimination against women is only based on their reproductive capability and that this is the defining characteristic of being a 'real woman'; therefore, they think, trans women (who lack the same reproductive organs) cannot be 'real women'.\n\nOf course, in doing so, they're ignoring that (a) plenty of discrimination has nothing to do with reproduction and that (b) plenty of non-trans women also lack such organs.\n\n-----------\n\nSetting aside the most sober explanation I'm capable of given above: it's a really flatly awful movement. That sub, in particular, reaches levels of hatred and head-in-the-sand blindness to rival the most crazy fundamentalists. They've made dozens of sockpuppets to come into trans subreddits and attack people, have made entire fake 'support' subreddits to tell insecure trans people how wrong they are, etc etc. Absolutely disgusting group of people, among the worst I've ever dealt with."
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1juv74 | how does one go about getting an internet connection without going through an internet provider? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1juv74/eli5_how_does_one_go_about_getting_an_internet/ | {
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"You need to make a deal with somebody that already has access to the internet no matter what. If you want to avoid residential ISPs? Good luck, but try calling your nearest internet backbone or exchange."
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3mbzq6 | what exactly is "spaghetti code" and what makes it so hard to deal with? | Whenever I hear someone make a reference to Spaghetti code it confuses me as they always seem to mention that fixing one bug just causes several more bugs. What exactly is spaghetti code and what makes it so hard to deal with? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3mbzq6/eli5_what_exactly_is_spaghetti_code_and_what/ | {
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"\"Spaghetti Code\" is basicly unstructured code. It often happens when you start something small and it blows way out of Proportion, so you have to add stuff that you never thought about when you first planed you Project. \nIf you have a Project which should be able to do A, B and C you can plan your code accordingly and have a neat piece of software where everything fits together perfectly and is pretty easy to overlook (in theory, that is) \nIf you have a Project that starts out as something that should be able to do A and you plan it according to it, but halfway through, you need to somehow put function B in it and when its finished, you attach C afterwards, you will end up with software that has roots that aren't meant for its final purpose, but have been heavily altered from what you planned to beginn with. \nThis code occurs when you don't implement everything properly into your existing code, but only patch it together afterwards because its a quick and dirty method of doing things.",
"To me...\n\nSpaghetti code is very complex code that has a lot of dependencies. The piece of code that the original is dependent on, is used in many places.\n\nEach time it is used in a different place, there is another chance of it causing a problem.\n\nSo you need to transform a variable. Let's say you want to strip trailing zeroes in a decimal. But sometimes you don't. And sometimes you want to remove leading zeroes, and sometimes you want it to be an integer. You keep using this block of code, and you keep making changes.\n\nPretty soon it is very complex, to handle all of these different scenarios. One day you go to 'fix' the way it handles trailing zeroes...and whoops, that affected the way it converts to integers. \n\nNow you went to fix one problem, and an entirely new problem cropped up somewhere else in your program.",
"When programming, it's common to \"reference\" code in another section, or to render certain sections in reference to another.\n\nFor instance, the home page of my website has a cool image slider app, and I want to use it in an article. It just happens to be the exact size I need. I'd just reference the code from the homepage instead of including duplicate code with my article. \n\nLets say we re-do the homepage, and the slider app gets modified to be a new size. That means my article was ALSO modified, since both reference the same code. That means it may display incorrectly, or not at all. Someone resolving this has to track down the reference to find where it came from originally, and then track down all of the other places it was used, and fix it in a way that makes it all work.\n\nMultiply that over hundreds of pages/apps/references, and you can see how it can quickly become a nightmare."
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2muixh | the appeal of the sexual humiliation fetish | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2muixh/eli5_the_appeal_of_the_sexual_humiliation_fetish/ | {
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"Some people finds the abdication of responsibility that comes when you are being \"forced\" to debase yourself to be freeing. It allows you to indulge in \"taboo\" actions without feeling the responsibility and shame, After all, someone else is \"making you do it.\" "
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4uzq3r | i sort of get photons but not really. do photons get created when i turn a torch on? how does that work? | Are photons spawned when I turn on a torch? How does that happen? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4uzq3r/eli5_i_sort_of_get_photons_but_not_really_do/ | {
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"Okay so first of all you need to understand what photons really are. Photons are basically packets of energy. We were always taught that light is a wave. However, the evolution of science gave way to something called wave-particle duality. Basically, any particle can be described as if it was a wave and any wave (light in this case) can be described as if it was a particle. Photons are basically light waves imagined as particles, and they carry energy.\n\nSo when you switch on a torch, the heat generated in the filament radiates away as light that you can see. In a way, yes, when you do that, you create packets of energy that manifest as light (photons).",
"Think of an atom a bit like a gobstopper. In the middle is a nucleus surrounded by 'shells' of electrons at different levels. When an electron gains energy it 'jumps' to a shell further from the nucleus. But this can create an unstable number of electrons in that shell, which makes the electron 'jump' back down. In order to do that, it has to lose some energy, and it does that by emitting a packet of energy - a photon.\n\nIn the case of a torch, the energy that causes the electrons to 'jump' is created by the resistance in the bulb filament, or in more modern LED torches, by jumping between layers in the diode.",
"Yes, it creates photons. How depends on the type of light source. Incandescent light bulb, they're created by blackbody radiation from heating up a piece of metal. Things are always giving off photons and absorbing photons as part of their behavior having a temperature. Accelerating charged particles, like electrons, give off electromagnetic waves, the smallest quantity of electromagnetic wave is called a photon. As you heat something up, the electrons randomly move around with more energy and you get a bunch of a random photons with higher energy, high enough energy to be visible light. Around room temperature they give off infrared light, which is people refer to infrared cameras as \"thermal\" sometimes. \n\nIf your light uses LEDs then its a quantum mechanical effect, basically as the electrons pass through the LED, there's a sort of energy cliff in the middle they fall down. It's traveling between a p-type to a n-type semiconductor technically, but what it really means is that the electrons are falling down in energy by a specific amount when the cross the LED. And so the extra energy is given off as a photon because for quantum mechanics reasons the electrons aren't able to hold onto it. So an LED give off a specific single frequency of light. \n\n"
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4leos8 | how are new laws always being passed, are we supposed to know about every new law being passed? | How do we know that we violated it? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4leos8/eli5_how_are_new_laws_always_being_passed_are_we/ | {
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"I can half-answer this question. \n\nThere is a legal principle called *Ignorantia juris non excusat* which pretty much says not knowing about a law doesn't excuse you from breaking it - but you shouldn't worry because in most cases of these new laws being passed, the public will be well notified if it affects them (such as restrictions placed on water consumption or if the minimum wage changes). \n\nAlso, some laws being passed would most likely have to do with specific practises like law, medicine, chemical testing or businesses that deal with animals (like zoos, slaughterhouses or companies that harvest supply things like eggs). ",
"A lot of law works on the basis of things like the [reasonable person](_URL_0_).\n\n\nThis helps to apply consideration where people break laws they did not know exist. Were their actions that of a reasonable person or were they clearly aware that what they were doing was wrong and did it anyway.\n\n\n'[Ignorantia juris non excusat](_URL_1_)' (latin for ignorance of the law excuses not) is the legal principle that you can't just claim to not know a law and therefore not be punished. This is logical because otherwise everyone would just claim they didn't know the law and be excused for their breaking it. \n\n\nThere's other principles and people beyond the reasonable person in law, I'm not a lawyer/legal student at all so hopefully someone with that background will come along and explain things a little more - but these are some of the principles i've heard about/tried to get my head round a little.\n",
"The reality is there is no way for any reasonable person to be able to keep up with all new laws. Some states will pass over 1000 laws in one year. How is someone supposed to keep track of that? That's just on the state level, not to mention the federal level. \nNew laws are passed to address specific issues, or to give favors to politicians' friends, or punish their enemies. Most of these new laws serve no real purpose to make us safer or to make the country better. "
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3s6o0d | railguns for a few years were basically science fiction and were thought to be unworkable. now people are building them in their garden sheds. what happened? | The explanation I heard (before they started popping up everywhere was that the rails kept experiencing excessive wear, was this true? And if so how was it done? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3s6o0d/eli5_railguns_for_a_few_years_were_basically/ | {
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"Railguns (in some form or another) have existed for almost 100 years. Nobody thought they were science fiction, but they are just not very practical.\n\nThe Germans designed some railguns in WWII, but the power requirements were too great for them to be implemented.",
"Like the other two have said, they were never really considered science fiction, and there were \"functional\" examples which are decades old.\n\nHowever, I say \"functional\" in quotes because while they technically work, they've never really been as practical as regular guns. It's only been fairly recently that the American navy has had much progress with creating railguns which are both powerful and resource efficient enough to even consider using, and even then they've still got a lot of kinks to be worked out.\n\nThe railguns you see people building in their sheds are both very expensive, and fairly useless as weapons. A .22 rifle is a more dangerous weapon. They're really just novelties.",
" > The explanation I heard (before they started popping up everywhere was that the rails kept experiencing excessive wear, was this true? And if so how was it done?\n\nFirst. Lets clarify something. There's railguns and there's coilguns. Rail guns have (usually) two metal \"rails\" that guide electricity and force a metal projectile at super high speeds. Coilguns use a series of magnets to \"ride\" the projectile out at super high speeds (like high-speed rail trains.) Today we're talking about railguns.\n\nRailguns use a lot of electricity and produce a lot of heat which can melt the insides of the railgun. The impressive fireball you see when they fire these things is the air and metals catching on fire from friction and awesome. Guided lightning with a bitty-bit of metal screaming at the tip.\n\nThese problems have been slowly being worked at as we develop better ways to store power and materials that can withstand the heat generated by the railgun. Eventually simplify the concept so that some dude in his garage can make one and fight decepticons with it.\n\n\n\n",
" > The explanation I heard (before they started popping up everywhere was that the rails kept experiencing excessive wear, was this true? And if so how was it done?\n\nThe rails still have excessive wear - they're largely novelty items and the science behind them has existed for a hundred years\n\nThe big difference is that in recent years, the US/Navy created a functioning railgun that has seemingly fixed the rail wear problem and can launch projectiles hundreds of miles at hypersonic speeds - a functioning weapon that isn't more than a one-shot novelty",
"Seconding what others have said, rail wear is still a major issue. Assuming you are refering to the post that is still on the front page - the guy commented that he expected to replace the rails every 50 shots or so. (_URL_0_) Scroll to the bottom, under the picture titled success. \n\nThen consider the size and weight of the thing. 50lb of gun + 200lb of capacitors that retail for approximately $50,000. \n\nAll this for a weapon about as effective as a 9mm, but with no magazine or semi-automatic action. \n\nThe concept behind rail guns has been around a long time, that was never science fiction. Rail guns as a useful weapon still is science fiction. "
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17er4n | if american citizens ever really did need firearms to defend against the government, would they stand a chance? | The post about why Americans defend their guns made me wonder if a militia of the people would be any problem for the American military. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/17er4n/eli5_if_american_citizens_ever_really_did_need/ | {
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"Think of it this way. The \"threat\" that the people would have to defend against is the military. The military is made up of regular people. They like having rights and doing good things as much as the average person. Not all of the members of the military would blindly follow whatever their leaders tell them to.",
"Depends on what the goal of the military is. Bomb Texas into submission and kill everything that gets in the way? In a gloves-off scenario they wouldn't stand a chance in hell.\n\nIf it's an occupation type scenario then yes, guerrilla warfare has always been the great equalizer.\n",
"You might want to ask an Afghan war vet that one. I would wager the average American is better armed than the average Afghani, and they seem to be putting up a decent fight.\n\nBut to answer your question, militias couldn't beat a military force, but they could make things very difficult for them. That keeps the military honest, and makes them think twice about acting against the public.",
"This is an idea that must be looked at in a broad context. It's too easy for people to sneer at the idea of Joe Redneck and his hunting rifle against an Abrams tank or a Predator drone. \n\nWhat if the American government truly becomes tyrannical, tyrannical enough for the people to consider violent revolution? First of all, you must consider the typical American mindset that is generally distrustful and independent of government. The American psyche is very sensitive to the involvement of government in his or her life, so it stands to reason that the majority of the populace would back such aggression against tyranny. A massive advantage already then exists for the populace in terms of numbers alone. Even half is north of 150 million Americans, most of which are well armed.\n\nThis revolution does not happen in a vacuum, either. If the American government starts perpetrating mass atrocities against its people, other nations will get involved on the side of the American people. Now, the corrupt government is fighting not only its own people, but the rest of the world as well. Further, it will not commit acts of mass destruction, because that would negate the reasons for becoming tyrannical in the first place - full and unfettered domination of America's vast resources.\nThere's no point in being a tyrant if your land is ash and radioactive dust.\n\nThe consequences of putting down such a revolution would be unacceptably high for a tyrant government, such that it would be forced to surrender or reform. That's why the American people would win in such a scenario."
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a92r2f | why do citizens of taiwan call themselves "taiwanese" rather than chinese, even though their government is the "republic of china"? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a92r2f/eli5_why_do_citizens_of_taiwan_call_themselves/ | {
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"Because they realize no one actually believes they are the legitimate government of China anymore. If they say Chinese, people will assume PRC. That's just how it is. It's the same way America in Spanish has different connotations - usually refers to the whole continents of North and South America - but people could still call themselves Americans - although another term is technically preferred - and be understood. ",
"Because over time they have been distancing themselves from China, to avoid implying that the government of mainland China has rights over them.\n\nSimilarly they often call their country just Taiwan these days.",
"To differentiate themselves from the people in what you would call just China, which is called The People's Republic of China.",
"We have a cultural/regional vs official split in many nations. For example, the Scottish people in Great Britain. Actions like this are in some ways showing resistance to a governing power who they feel doesn't really represent them, neither culturally or politically",
"It's been called Taiwan for a lot longer than the ROC has been there, and has changed hands on who is in power a few times. The Republic of China is the official name but they don't have to call themselves Chinese, especially as it may confuse people who typically think of the PRC of the mainland when they think Chinese.\n\nSorta like the US is officially The United States *of* America, being a part of one of two continents called America, but we refer to ourselves as Americans rather than United Stateans, or how you don't hear UK folks call themselves United Kingdomers, but British or Irish depending on what island they're on, and how folks from the Netherlands are called Dutch.",
"They are 華人 (Hua Ren), or people whose ethnicity is Chinese.\n\nMainland Chinese people are also 華人, but in addition they are 中国人 (Zhong Guo Ren), or people whose nationality belongs to China.\n\nIn the past, many Taiwanese also identified as 中國人. but nowadays the majority wish to establish a new identity independent of the mainland, so they would rather be called Taiwanese.\n\nThe government is named the “Republic of China” because it is the continuation of the original government of China before the communists ousted them to the island of Taiwan. Both governments (the communist and democratic one) claim to be the legitimate ruler of all China, and all China includes both the mainland and Taiwan.\n\nIf Taiwan declared independence, they would be considered a rebellious province seceding from China (the country). China (the communist party) would then exercise sovereignty over their own lands and invade to quell the rebellion. For this reason, Taiwan has never changed its official name to “republic of Taiwan”.\n\nTaiwan has gone through several convoluted measures to avoid any claims of independence, such as participating in the olympics as “Chinese Taipei”."
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25vx5n | why is it illegal to talk on the phone while driving in my state, while talking on a cd radio is not? | I realize texting and driving is not safe and I agree, but if you have the person on Speakerphone....or simply driving while talking and not looking down this is cause for a ticket in my State. Talking on a CD Radio is fine. Talking on the CB is just about as safe/unsafe as talking on the phone. I don't mean Dialing calls while driving...cause this would require eyes off the road. Simply talking and that's it... | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/25vx5n/eli5why_is_it_illegal_to_talk_on_the_phone_while/ | {
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"Theoretically, one is as dangerous as the other. But CBs have been around since the 1970s. When was the last time you heard of a CB causing an accident? You hear of accidents caused by cell phones and texting all of the time, partly because they are so widespread. Lawmakers kept hearing those stories, too, and began making laws.\n\nGenerally it is a good idea for lawmakers to go only as far as they need to, and no further. Logically they could have outlawed everything that takes the eyes off the road, such as, CBs, all musical devices, anything with a screen, eating, putting on makeup, et cetera."
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1su1hu | if a morbidly obese person were to lose all of the excess weight overnight (say 200-300 pounds), would that person have exceptionally strong leg/core/back muscles relative to his/her new lower weight due to having to carry around all the extra pounds for so long? | Sorry for the long title and possibly wrong subreddit. Just something that I've wondered about for some time. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1su1hu/eli5_if_a_morbidly_obese_person_were_to_lose_all/ | {
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"It depends how active they are, if they are what I call an active fat guy, then they probably would be very strong in the legs or anywhere else. It really depends on the person. For instance, my uncle is a little obese but he is an iron worker and works his ass off and is strong as shit, i'm sure if he lost weight, he'd be a BAMF.",
"Interesting thought. Assuming the lost weight was only adipose tissue then yes (I think) Keep in mind that their skin would be sagging in all directions.",
"Yes, absolutely. Imagine trying to walk 5 blocks or up a flight of stairs with 150 lbs on your back. Obese people do this every day. You better believe they've got strong muscles under there.",
"I'd say it depends on overall activity level. Those of us (male, 6'1\" 425) that are mobile and active would probably have stronger leg and back muscles than the average, non-athletic individual. \n\nThose obese people that are stagnant or homebound would likely be weaker, as they are often not even capable of functional movement. \n\nExcess skin would be a serious issue, depending on the speed of the total weight loss, but the benefit to bones and joints would be worthwhile. ",
"People who lose weight over a long time have this too. It doesn't have to be over night. \n\nThe general rule is that 25% of weight gained (over a normal BMI) will be lean body mass (ie muscle to support the fat). \n\nWhen you diet and lose weight you inevitably lose some muscle along with the fat, but not very much. For instance I have only been lifting weights for four months, but because I used to be 100lbs over weight I have huge calves (over 18 inches).\n\nHonestly the extra core muscle strength is one of the few benefits to being formally obese."
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6a23lm | how are atv's able to go through deep water without getting ruined? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6a23lm/eli5_how_are_atvs_able_to_go_through_deep_water/ | {
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"ATV engines are the same as any engine and will indeed die if you don't take some steps to prevent it, especially in the water. Most of the time you would use a snorkel system for your intake and exhaust, ensure all vent lines run a little higher and use dielectric grease where needed. "
]
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67h3du | what causes a persons hairline to recede and why does it usually look like a u-shape? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/67h3du/eli5_what_causes_a_persons_hairline_to_recede_and/ | {
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"Happens a lot more often to men than women. Causes range from infections of scalp that lead to loss of hair, to bad diet, chemicals, STRESS(yes stress is also a key factor), while bad sleep can only aggravate the situation. \nSome men have a hormone called \"dihydrotestosterone\" that when it's too much, stops the hair follicles to produce new hair. One of the reasons why usually this happens as we grow exponentially older is because our bodies tend to produce less nutrients and we see a lot of aging side effect beside hair loss like slower metabolism, decreased level of testosterone,etc.\n\nNow, we all have different hair from the start. Some have their hairline lower and some have it higher. It may look like someone's hair receded more because their hairline was simply higher to begin with. \nA lot of it is genetic and some of it is lifestyle. If you have your father/grandfather/great grandfather bald or receded hair, there is a chance you will be bold/have receded hair but you may not.\nMy father is bald, but his father has a full heads hair. I turned out to have full heads hair also, so it's a random chance how it plays out."
]
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47ptwu | why do countries that are trying to take over the world abide by war laws? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/47ptwu/eli5_why_do_countries_that_are_trying_to_take/ | {
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"The laws of war, such as how prisoners are treated, are to protect your soldiers as well as the enemy's. We talk about people trying to take over the world, but really, that's not a thing unless you are Genghis Khan. In every war, the leaders see that there will be a time when the war is over and they will have to deal with at least some of their enemies as peers once again.",
"Well, in some cases, those laws and norms are to everyone's benefit. Germany didn't use chemical weapons in WWII (though they did produce them) because using chemical weapons on your enemies means they'll use them on you and it's a loss for everyone.\n\nIn other cases, a country bent on conquest *doesn't* follow the laws and norms of war. However, it's worth noting that the majority of the laws and norms of warfare emerged after WWII and no country could really be described as \"trying to take over the world\" since then.",
"So that they don't further antagonize other countries. If I go and invade mexico for reasons that I believe to be true and just, and I do so within the laws and rules set forth by the Geneva convention and such then I can do so and other countries may or may not intercede. \n\nIf I invade Mexico and start using napalm and raping and salting the earth, it shows that I am ruthless and don't care for human decency, other countries will intercede just to get me off the map because if I win whats to stop me from doing the same to them?\n\nThis is just one perspective, obviously, but I think it's a good chunk of the reasoning. ",
"Most of the laws of war are mutually beneficial. For example, nations have agreed on the proper treatment of prisoners of war. If you treat enemy prisoners properly, then your captured soldiers will be well-treated, too--you both benefit. If you don't use chemical weapons, then your enemy isn't disadvantaged by not using them either. Et cetera.\n\nYou'll find that the ones violated most often are those that aren't likely to be reciprocal.",
"Another part of it is moral of your own armies. Even if you are ok with slaughtering civilians to damage your enemies moral, your soldiers might not be. The more you do the worse the unrest in your country can become, and eventually you could have to fight a civil war. ",
"[This](_URL_6_)\n\n[gets](_URL_1_)\n\n[asked](_URL_2_)\n\n[so](_URL_7_)\n\n[often](_URL_8_)\n \n[I](_URL_4_)\n\n[can't](_URL_3_)\n\n[even](_URL_0_)\n\n[argh](_URL_5_)"
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"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3s3nm4/eli5_what_would_happen_if_a_country_decides_to/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/34tt7j/eli5_how_do_rules_in_war_work_and_what_happens_if/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2bi2d4/eli5_are_there_really_rules_in_a_war_what_happens/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/274kin/eli5_why_are_there_rules_of_war/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jt9os/eli5_why_does_war_have_rules/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3n8jgv/eli5_what_makes_countries_follow_rules_of_war/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/45d6zj/eli5_why_are_there_laws_of_war_why_do_they_follow/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/nto5e/eli5_why_are_there_rules_on_war/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/xyb6g/war_isnt_a_game_so_why_are_there_rules_for_war/"
]
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474bqj | what's exactly a turing machine and what is the "minimum turing machine" that stephen wolfram discovered? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/474bqj/eli5_whats_exactly_a_turing_machine_and_what_is/ | {
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"A turing machine is a kind of hypothetical very simple computer. It consists of four parts; an infintely long tape, a read/write head, a set of symbols, and some rules. The symbols can be anything, but are usually represented as numbers; you can have as many or as few symbols as you like. The tape can have any initial symbols on it, anywhere (or everywhere) on the tape; this is important. The rules are of the form \"if the value under the head is X, then 1) write symbol Y (which may be the same as X), 2) move the head left or right one spot, and 3) either terminate the program or keep going)\". That's all the rules can be. It turns out that this very simple-sounding computer can be shown to be just as theoretically capable as the computer you're reading this on; that is, any computation your laptop, desktop, or phone can perform, this computer can perform with the appropriate set of rules. Even more interesting is the fact that, with certain specific sets of rules, the turing machine can perform *any* computation that you want. The computation to execute, then, is defined by the initial state of the tape. This is called a \"Universal turing machine\", because the same set of rules can execute any program. The minimal turing machine Wolfram discovered was (maybe still is) the smallest set of rules and symbols that produce a universal turing machine.\n\nThis is interesting because it gives an abstract way to reason about computers (and programming languages) in the general case. This model of computation is in fact equivalent to a few other common models (The Lambda Calculus being the other famous one)."
]
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zh1wk | what is cultural relativism? | I've attempted to plow through the Wikipedia article on this topic and wound up with my head spinning. Could someone simplify this for me? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/zh1wk/eli5_what_is_cultural_relativism/ | {
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"It's basically the idea that cultural values aren't inherently \"good\" or \"bad,\" just \"different.\" So, one culture might value hard work and earning money, and another might value leisure time and creative work. Neither is more or less \"good\" than the other, they're just different.\n\nThe next step is to look at the *very idea* of what is \"good\" or \"bad\" in a society, and realize that it's not universal. For instance, society in Europe in the Victorian era viewed homosexual sex as an abomination, an error, something wrong with the person -- in short, evil. Nowadays, we don't. They also didn't view it as wrong in ancient Athens, or Sparta. There are different reasons for all of these things (Victorians based theirs on the Bible and what rudimentary science of the human mind they possessed; we base our view on individual liberty and respect for love as an emotion; the Greeks based theirs on the view of homosexual love as inherently noble, sometimes as more noble than heterosexual love).\n\nMake sense?",
"The sci-fi author Larry Niven once wrote, \"Society has the morals it can afford\".\n\nThe idea is that there is no such thing as absolute right or wrong, just what works in a given culture.\n\nConsider child labor. In the developed world, we would consider it criminal if parents forced their 8 year old to work 12 hours a day at hard labor. To us, that is clearly wrong.\n\nBut a society of poor subsistence farmers, where that child's effort could very well mean the difference between having enough food for the winter and starvation. Is child labor so wrong for them?",
"Thinking another culture is weird or silly because their social norms are different from yours."
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2uvdo3 | jordan, the country. why is jordan an important player in solving the situation in middle east? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2uvdo3/eli5_jordan_the_country_why_is_jordan_an/ | {
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"Jordan maintains relatively good relations with western countries, including Israel and the USA. This means that it's in a good position to act as a middle-man in any potential talks or peace-brokering agreements.",
"Jordan is a stable, progressive Muslim country relatively free of radicals and with good relations to the US and Europe, that borders Syria. They also have relatively good relations with the rest of the Middle East.\n\n\n\n\n\n",
"There was a brilliant comment on that very recently somewhere on reddit. I will find it and edit this post which is meant to not forget about it.\n\nEdit: [found it](_URL_0_)!"
]
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416tiv | why do allstate and esurance run separate commercials when esurance is backed by allstate? | Are they shooting at 2 different demographics? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/416tiv/eli5_why_do_allstate_and_esurance_run_separate/ | {
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"text": [
"Allstate is seen as the full service \"pricier\" insurance option. While esurance as the quick cheap one. \n\n"
]
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dsw0ag | what is mindfulness and hov to achieve that state? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dsw0ag/eli5_what_is_mindfulness_and_hov_to_achieve_that/ | {
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"Disclaimer: Not a monk\n\nMindfulness to me really is creating separation between your thoughts and your conscience. This allows you to not have to act on your thoughts and allows you to see the reality around you a little clearer. So things like mood swings, depression, and so on get reduced.\n\nThe most common way to practice mindfulness is to do breathing meditation (sit some place comfortable, eyes closed usually, try to focus on breath, when mind wanders into some random thought no big deal just gently bring focus back to breath). You can also focus on sound and sensations in your body instead of just breath.\n\nTried keeping this short good luck.",
"Basically it's a technique where you shut down your inner monologue and abstract thinking for a while, to focus on noticing your surroundings and your body instead. \n\nFeel your socks on your feet, the springiness of your seat cushion. What does the room smell like? What are the small sounds you can hear? What colour is the light? What is the texture of the carpet? Be aware of your breathing, of swallowing, of the position of your limbs. Can you feel which way your hair is lying on your scalp? Can you feel your pulse in your arms? Which way is your penis pointing (if you have one)? Notice how you always expend just a little effort keeping your jaw closed? How there's darkness just around the edges of your peripheral vision? What is your tongue doing right now? Which direction is the sunshine coming from? \n\nPull all your senses into your awareness directly, try not to use words, but experience these things directly. Don't judge, don't evaluate, don't categorize, don't visualize, don't analyze; *be*. \n\nAll the sensory shit you normally filter out so you can worry about stuff instead? Open up the floodgates. Let it in. Hearing, sight, touch, smell, taste, balance, temperature, proprioception, hunger, *all* of it. \n\nLet it steal all the bandwidth and flood your brain with sheer experience, crowding out all the anxiety and self-talk and anger and inner-mental-space you normally live in, the domain of words and ideas and concepts and social constructs and memories and relationships and rules and shoulds. Dump and flush all of that by simply experiencing *everything around and inside you right now* instead. Be animal-you, and let person-you take a breather."
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eycd1s | what happens when the central bank of a country "injects" cash to it's economy? where does the money come from, and where does it go? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/eycd1s/eli5_what_happens_when_the_central_bank_of_a/ | {
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"Another method of injecting money is by applying buy-backs of governmental bonds, from the public.\nReducing cash in the market is usually made the other way around, by issuing bonds for the public, thus making them spend money that is going our of circulation.",
"Where does it come from Cotton Eye Joe?"
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2n89ck | why is it so much more expensive/difficult to make modern disc-based gaming systems backwards compatible (ps3/4, xbox one)? | I don't understand. Seems simple enough. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2n89ck/eli5why_is_it_so_much_more_expensivedifficult_to/ | {
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"PS2 games are written specifically to run on PS2 hardware.\n\nA PS3 can run PS2 games if it has that hardware, or if its software understands how to convert PS2 hardware commands into PS3 hardware commands.\n\nThe hardware method is the easiest to do from a computational point of view, and this is what happens in the Wii for the Gamecube, and early model PS3s for the PS2. However it makes the hardware more expensive because you need more of it, so in both of those cases the consoles were eventually released without backwards compatibility for a lower price.\n\nSoftware based backwards compatibility (emulation) is also an option and this is what was used on the Xbox360 for Xbox games, as well as the Wii's Virtual Console. The problem is that it's computationally expensive, so you need a much more powerful machine to get the same performance as the original, and the problem gets worse as you move to more complex games.",
"Not simple at all actually unless you go the hardware route. Basically there's two ways you can do emulation and that the software route or the hardware route. Hardware is simple because they simply stick the crucial components of the older hardware into the host system. The downside to this approach is for consoles it's expensive. \n\nSony tried this with the ps3 originally and had a $600 dollar console as a result that few people wanted to buy. It would have been even more expensive to try that for the current generation of consoles(ps4, x1) because of how advanced the hardware has become. \n\nFor example the ps1 had single core cpu clocked at 33 Mhz. The Xbox one has an 8 core cpu clocked at 1.8Ghz. Speed is not the only thing that has increased exponentially either. Just outright complexity in terms of architecture and instruction sets increased dramatically.\n\nWhich leads me into the other route with software emulation you have face an uphill battle because you have to make the newer hardware act like the old hardware and to get good emulation you really have to get as close to the original hardware as possible because many console games use tricks and what not tailor made to the original hardware.\n\nEven when you do achieve software emulation it's often very buggy and incomplete as in many games just outright wont work or only work partially. Like i said before this is because it;s difficult to get the newer hardware to behave exactly as the old hardware did.\n\nThe problem without going to in depth is that getting that newer hardware to act like the older hardware is a low and intensive process even for powerful computers. This is why you need a computer thats much stronger than the target hardware to be emulated.\n\nTo better understand imagine it like this. Say you're a human but I want you to act like a dog. How well can a human act like a dog? not very well right? you could get down on all 4s and try your hardest but you'll never act truly like dog and you'll be much slower at doing everything a dog does naturally. The situation is similar when it comes to emulation. \n\nSo yeah they don't have BC in the newer systems because it just isn't practical not because i they are trying to force people to buy newer games. All the consoles makers would love nothing more than to use BC as an incentive to get you to buy their console actually. and they have done so in the past when it was feasible."
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37ceey | why, instead of ipv6, dit the wise men of the internet not add an octect in front. | All current IP would have been 1.X.X.X.X.; new range would have been available in 1-254.X.X.X.X. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/37ceey/eli5_why_instead_of_ipv6_dit_the_wise_men_of_the/ | {
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"Because we'd rather fix the *hell* out of something so it lasts for friggin ever rather than stick a band-aid on it, if at all possible. IPv6 has a lot more features in it than just enough namespace for every figgin atom in the universe, most notably many security features. \n",
"Why add just one octet when you could quadruple the number of octets so there's no conceivable way you could ever run out?\n\nThat's part of what ip6 is. Even if you added just one octet you'd still have to update lots of Internet hardware and software, just as they have to do to roll out ip6. So you might as well make it more future proof.",
"It would've taken the same amount of effort, but only given us 2^8 more addresses (aka nowhere near enough) rather than 2^96 more.",
"For the same reason you can't just wake up tomorrow and change the length of a phone number from 7 digits to 8.\n\nAn awful lot of programming depends on an IP address being 32 bits long."
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5702mi | is there a limit as to how much weight a human could potentially lift? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5702mi/eli5_is_there_a_limit_as_to_how_much_weight_a/ | {
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"Yes, at some point muscle and bone will simply fail under weight. I don't know those numbers off the top of my head... but yes, there is an upper limit where the component parts simply fail."
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6ncqgv | how do anti-oxidants resolve free radicals ? | Like, I get that they can donate an electron. But then that antioxidant needs and electron donated from a different antioxidant and that one from another et cetera. How does your body close this endless loop ? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6ncqgv/eli5_how_do_antioxidants_resolve_free_radicals/ | {
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"Antioxidants are generally just holding pools to (sort of) safely hold free radicals until the excess electron can be dropped back into the electron transport chain. The antioxidants are generally molecules with at least some pi electron delocalization which sort of spreads the free radical out over more atoms, reducing the reactivity.\n\nI'm not sure if there has been any research on this but my gut feeling is that this is why high dosages of single antioxidants tend to have poor theraputic value and often have strong deleterious effects. A huge surplus of say, vitamin C will simply mean more modestly reactive molecules floating around, still bottlenecked at the next processing step. Each antioxidant has different strengths in what parts of the cells it protects and how far down the processing chain it resides. Having a wide variety of low levels of different antioxidants is probably the best strategy. this seems to be borne out by numerous studies that show eating a wide variety of fruits and vegetables has the strongest beneficial effect.",
"Almost always it involves a cycle.\n\nIn some places in your body, electrons are required while in others they are not desirable.\n\nTake a look at this picture, it involves an important antioxidant: Glutathione:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nReduced glutathione is often responsible for dealing with the potentially harmful Hydrogen peroxide, a powerful oxidant. (With similar properties for the purposes of this explanation as a free radical)\n\nAfter it is oxidized by the H2O2, it is then reduced through the action of NADPH, converting it to NADP+\n\nNADP+ is important for the pentose phosphate pathway, which is in turn important for a number of biological functions including synthesis of amino acids. It also converts NADP+ back into NADPH, allowing the cycle to start again.\n\n\nAs DanHeidal said, you can consider most anti-oxidants as batteries that convert the energy or electrons available from one potentially damaging source and uses them to do useful work elsewhere in the body.\n\n"
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63mhoh | how do you make a haiku? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/63mhoh/eli5_how_do_you_make_a_haiku/ | {
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"A Haiku is a poem written in a 3 line format. It doesn't need to rhyme, or have rhythm or anything like that. It literally only needs to follow the pattern of syllables per line 5 7 5.\n\nThis is a haiku.\n\nThis line has more syllables.\n\nThan the first and last.\n\n\n...is a Haiku.",
"It's a specific syllable pattern. 5-7-5 split into three. There's more to it than that but that's the basics.",
"Watch Jacksfilms haiku videos, he's created a tune that all haikus follow, because of the 5-7-5 format [here](_URL_0_) \n\nEdit: r/jacksfilmsbot told me to add a forehead joke so here it is: Jack's forehead is very big"
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jp1ov | why are anti-inflammatory drugs like ibuprofen a good idea when my body's natural response is to swell? | Is it really helpful to bring down swelling? If so, why does the body try to swell in response to an injury in the first place? Do NSAIDs actually make us heal faster?
EDIT: After seeing the contradictory answers here, I stepped on over to /r/askscience. [Here's my post.](_URL_0_) The answers there are a little more informative. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jp1ov/eli5_why_are_antiinflammatory_drugs_like/ | {
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"I was just thinking about this the other day, after I injured my foot and was told to ice it. I'd love to see an informed explanation.",
"It's not, we do it because we live a lifestyle where we can ignore the injury.",
"Did you ask /r/askscience?",
"I'm not sure if this helps, but think of it this way - If the bodies natural response to certain situations is pain, why do we use painkillers? I could be totally wrong, but I'm assuming we try to releive the swelling because its uncomfortable.",
"There are times when inflammation occurs when it shouldn't. These are definitely the times to take drugs to reduce inflammation.",
"You're assuming that the human body is a perfect design. It's not designed, it's evolved and shit gets too heavy sometimes e.g. too much pain or swelling. \n\nIn the old days people used to frequently die of tooth decay. ",
"Ok here it goes.... it takes blood flow and cells to regenerate and heal. When we are injured more blood is redirected to the area that swells. Swelling is fine and is a natural response to an injury but in some cases your body's healthy response can be unhealthy (like say if your throat was injured and swells... not good. The reason we take anti infalmmatories and ice it isn't really directly meant for reducing the swelling, it reduces the swelling which does what we're REALLY looking for and reduces the pain. Basically, we're reducing the pain indirectly by reducing the swelling. \n\nIt's like our body's allergic reaction... if something you are allergic to touches your skin, your body releases an antihistamine to block the \"invader\" from spreading and neutralize it. This also kills the cells that were effected by the \"intruder\" causing a rash. \n\ndid this help?",
"I was just thinking about this the other day, after I injured my foot and was told to ice it. I'd love to see an informed explanation.",
"It's not, we do it because we live a lifestyle where we can ignore the injury.",
"Did you ask /r/askscience?",
"I'm not sure if this helps, but think of it this way - If the bodies natural response to certain situations is pain, why do we use painkillers? I could be totally wrong, but I'm assuming we try to releive the swelling because its uncomfortable.",
"There are times when inflammation occurs when it shouldn't. These are definitely the times to take drugs to reduce inflammation.",
"You're assuming that the human body is a perfect design. It's not designed, it's evolved and shit gets too heavy sometimes e.g. too much pain or swelling. \n\nIn the old days people used to frequently die of tooth decay. ",
"Ok here it goes.... it takes blood flow and cells to regenerate and heal. When we are injured more blood is redirected to the area that swells. Swelling is fine and is a natural response to an injury but in some cases your body's healthy response can be unhealthy (like say if your throat was injured and swells... not good. The reason we take anti infalmmatories and ice it isn't really directly meant for reducing the swelling, it reduces the swelling which does what we're REALLY looking for and reduces the pain. Basically, we're reducing the pain indirectly by reducing the swelling. \n\nIt's like our body's allergic reaction... if something you are allergic to touches your skin, your body releases an antihistamine to block the \"invader\" from spreading and neutralize it. This also kills the cells that were effected by the \"intruder\" causing a rash. \n\ndid this help?"
]
} | []
| [
"http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/jqmlm/do_nsaids_reduce_healing_times/"
]
| [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
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]
|
|
9884m8 | why do women get short hairs around their face after they have a baby? | I had my son three months ago and I have all these wispy hairs about 4 inches long around my face. There is no way I grew 4 inches of hair in 12 weeks! And, I think I would have noticed if all of those hairs were breaking off. Talked to my stylist and he said “oh yeah, that happens.” But why!? How?! | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9884m8/eli5_why_do_women_get_short_hairs_around_their/ | {
"a_id": [
"e4e17bu"
],
"score": [
7
],
"text": [
"Your hair stops falling out while you’re pregnant. When you have the baby the oldest hair all falls out as normal. The little baby hairs are just the new hair growing in! "
]
} | []
| []
| [
[]
]
|
|
5wz4nv | whydo developers still use unreal engine 3 if unreal engine 4 is available? | Both were also released 2 years apart so I'm not even sure if there is a monumental change in features. I do understand that they are freely accessible and new is usually better hence my confusion | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5wz4nv/eli5whydo_developers_still_use_unreal_engine_3_if/ | {
"a_id": [
"dedynsa"
],
"score": [
11
],
"text": [
"Former game developer here,\n\nPrincipally the reason to stay on a given platform is either because of licensing or because you're invested on a particular version and there are breaking changes if you upgrade. So what is more important? Upgrading your engine and fixing what breaks or using the engine you have because it works right now? Does the investment yield a return? What are the financial and technical risks? A more mature platform that is actively developed and supported is going to be more stable than a newer platform that doesn't have as many miles.\n\nThe other reason you see old engines come out for new games is that those games started development before UE4 was even available. Unless you're Duke Nukem Forever, you don't abandon your platform once a new version becomes available. Studios don't have the time or money, most of the time."
]
} | []
| []
| [
[]
]
|
|
2298wz | how do animated movies (e.g., disney) go from paper to film? | In behind-the-scenes footage, we always see the artists working with what looks like pencil on white paper, and usually just drawing one character.
What the heck happens to covert that from a simple pencil drawing to a full-color frame with multiple characters and a background, and how does it get from paper to film stock? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2298wz/eli5_how_do_animated_movies_eg_disney_go_from/ | {
"a_id": [
"cgkkuma"
],
"score": [
8
],
"text": [
"They're not paper, but thin strips of plastic called cels. Animation is traditionally inked onto these cels, frame by frame. Each individual \"piece\" of animation is on its own cel, and because cels are transparent, you can put them on top of each other and create a scene. \n\nSo, all of the different aspects of a scene, different characters, different objects, backgrounds, can all be put on different cels and animated by separate people. The cels themselves can also be moved and manipulated. The completed scene is then placed on a machine that is basically a camera that photographs each frame in sequence, creating the illusion of movement."
]
} | []
| []
| [
[]
]
|
|
52rise | what wastes more energy turning you air conditioner on/off or letting it run? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/52rise/eli5_what_wastes_more_energy_turning_you_air/ | {
"a_id": [
"d7mmnyv"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"I would say it depends on too many things to simplify it. Say it's your house and it has single pain windows and no insulation, then the AC is battling agains heat gains all day to keep the place cool so it's very inefficient. But if your house is insulated like a cooler, good windows, doors sealed, walls with insulation, shades to reduce solar gains, then the AC will not have to work as hard at maintaining the temperature. Look at your fridge, the cooling is normally triggered everyone you open the door, but less often if you don't open the door as you lose the cold (gain heat) every time you open the door. "
]
} | []
| []
| [
[]
]
|
||
413tir | how can a huge statistic such as the world population be even remotely accurate? | Who's counting every baby born and every person that dies? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/413tir/eli5_how_can_a_huge_statistic_such_as_the_world/ | {
"a_id": [
"cyzc6o6",
"cyzf28z"
],
"score": [
3,
2
],
"text": [
"Well, governments do. They issue birth certificates and death certificates. Of course it's not totally accurate but the census teams do a lot of research to estimate how many records are missing and figure out the margin of error. That's included in the estimated population.",
"What is your definition of \"remotely accurate\"? The [population clock] (_URL_0_) says there are a little under 7.3 billion people alive right now. lets say that is 10,000,000 off, that's only 0.13% off, that is still pretty accurate even though 10,000,000 is a lot of people to not be accounted for."
]
} | []
| []
| [
[],
[
"http://www.census.gov/popclock/"
]
]
|
|
b4tox7 | if it requires a connection that is able to dowload a video faster than playing it anyway, why do streams need to buffer for a few seconds before being played? | If you go to Twitch and play some stream it won't play instantly but after a second or two. Why does it need to buffer? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b4tox7/eli5_if_it_requires_a_connection_that_is_able_to/ | {
"a_id": [
"ej93i1c"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text": [
"Because connections are not of constant speeds. By giving your computer a little bit of leeway, it mitigates the need for interruptions in order to briefly load."
]
} | []
| []
| [
[]
]
|
|
17c248 | why are massive ships launched sideways? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/17c248/eli5_why_are_massive_ships_launched_sideways/ | {
"a_id": [
"c8441j5"
],
"score": [
8
],
"text": [
"Ships are not always launched sideways, they are also launched stern first. However, when a ship is launched sideways as opposed to stern first, it's because there isn't enough room to fit the entire length of the ship. If you look at [this video](_URL_0_), you can clearly see that the ships would not fit in the room available if launched stern first. Furthermore, launching side first basically stops the ship where it lands in the water; ships are not build to travel sideways across the water. If launched stern first, the ship might keep moving astern when it lands in the water, possibly colliding with something."
]
} | []
| []
| [
[
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0pYqk8z714"
]
]
|
||
3owmko | why don't gyms convert the energy from exercises to electricity? | Renewable energy is arguably one of the biggest subjects lately and will be in years to come. And lots of it is just wasted in treadmills, stationary bikes and other exercise equipment that could be huge generators if just made small changes. This could reduce significantly the gyms' electric bill, or even make profit for selling energy to their neighborhoods!
Why doesn't this exists in every gym in the world? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3owmko/eli5_why_dont_gyms_convert_the_energy_from/ | {
"a_id": [
"cw13g99",
"cw13ir3",
"cw13pqb",
"cw150bs"
],
"score": [
2,
2,
6,
3
],
"text": [
"Do you have any data on the amount of electric charge thats actually generated by treadmills/bikes? what about verses the amount of money it would cost to switch to equipment that can actually efficiently supply electricity? because its a really high amount of refitting that you're suggesting. Thats generally the reason why this isnt done",
"i thought all the machines do generate their own power. i have an elliptical in the basement that doesnt need to be plugged in and and all the bells and whistles power up when its in use. ",
"_URL_0_\n\nA human can't produce a whole lot of power, maybe 100 - 150 watts per hour on average. Let's call it 100 watts per hour after the inefficiency of the generators attached to the machines is factored in.\n\nThe average house in the US uses about 30-40 kilowatt hours per day. So 300 to 400 hours of exercise to power a house for a day. Several times that to power a business like a gym. \n\nThe same money that would be spent modifying and maintaining a room full of generators would be better spent on a wide turbine or solar panels or better insulation for the building. That would be the greener option, both financially and environmentally.",
"They do. My University has all the bikes and elliptical wired in to power lights and such. \n\nWe looked into doing it at the PT clinic I work at, but the unit to do it costs a lot, like a couple grand per machine. Also you don't get as much power out of it as you would think. "
]
} | []
| []
| [
[],
[],
[
"https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_power"
],
[]
]
|
|
5kemwx | how an object in orbit rotates (or does not). | Specifically, how does the Space Shuttle orbit the earth, does its orientation change as it orbits, and how/why?
_URL_0_
Which is correct? Top example or bottom example? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5kemwx/eli5_how_an_object_in_orbit_rotates_or_does_not/ | {
"a_id": [
"dbncp1m",
"dbndotl"
],
"score": [
3,
2
],
"text": [
"ISS' rotation is synced with its orbit. In other words, it always has the same side facing the earth. Once this rotation is set up it will continue indefinitely. The rotation can be adjusted using thrusters and gyros. This is done to counteract disturbances, for example those caused by crew and equipment moving within the station. ",
"The først picture Would be correct, if the objekt is not rotating to start off with. As others have mentioned, the ISS is set to rotate, so one side is always facing the earth."
]
} | []
| [
"http://imgur.com/a/6DZQa"
]
| [
[],
[]
]
|
|
fzpuhv | is the earth itself a living being? | I know this has been posted before but I don’t feel anyone had a clear answer. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fzpuhv/eli5_is_the_earth_itself_a_living_being/ | {
"a_id": [
"fn5hdac",
"fn5hts0",
"fn5m17z"
],
"score": [
4,
7,
7
],
"text": [
"No. Planets do not exhibit any of the things we classify life as having (like viruses, rocks, and water).",
"The rock of the planet itself isn't alive, though it is a complex system. *On* the planet is a vast ecosystem made of things that are alive",
"Planets do not reproduce in a sustainable way. This is central to nearly all definitions of life"
]
} | []
| []
| [
[],
[],
[]
]
|
|
2s4er2 | why does alcohol damage plastics? | I cleaned my cpu once with alcohol and accidentally got some on a plastic piece next to it and it got stained. Why does this happen instead of just cleaning residue off without staining anything? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2s4er2/eli5_why_does_alcohol_damage_plastics/ | {
"a_id": [
"cnm5yb4"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text": [
"Plastics are organic polymers. Depending on the identity of the specific polymer you are referring to, it could be dissolved by an organic solvent like an alcohol. This is likely the cause of the discoloration you observed. Some polymers (ex: HDPE [milk jugs]) are more resistant to nonpolar organic solvents than are other polymers."
]
} | []
| []
| [
[]
]
|
|
6fjioj | what are djs doing when they have their headphones half on and half off? does that serve a purpose or are they trying to look cool? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6fjioj/eli5_what_are_djs_doing_when_they_have_their/ | {
"a_id": [
"diio830"
],
"score": [
11
],
"text": [
"The ear without the headphone is listening to the live mix, what the audience hears. And the ear with the headphone is listening to a track that hasn't yet been mixed in -- usually for the purpose of matching the tempo to the live mix so when it's faded in the live mix the transition is smooth and natural."
]
} | []
| []
| [
[]
]
|
||
2cea3h | why does animal abuse get so much more attention (at least here in america) than child abuse? | Every other day I see a post on some social networking site saying "this little puppy was kicked and hit several times for not obeying its owner's commands"; it gets tons of attention and shares. When someone posts something about child abuse (not as often) it doesn't get nearly as much attention.
Also, advocates against child abuse seem to get less attention than those advocating against pet abuse. I feel like as humans we should protect human children first and foremost | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2cea3h/eli5_why_does_animal_abuse_get_so_much_more/ | {
"a_id": [
"cjelzvm",
"cjem2z9",
"cjem52n",
"cjewdvp"
],
"score": [
5,
8,
14,
2
],
"text": [
"Think about this, comedy central runs commercials to donate to African kids so they can eat and commercials to raise money for homeless dogs. This has been going on for years so both must be making money. How can a person donate 15$ to dogs while kids are starving?",
"My guess: If you send 10 bucks to a child abuse organization - you are more inclined to 'check up on' or further investigate where that money goes, etc.\n\nWith animals - not so much...You donate your 10 bucks or whatever, get the tax write off slip and walk away feeling good.\n\nPlus - and probably more accurately - people will \"help\" a starving puppy with big, cute eyes. People see a malnourished child and think \"Somebody should do something\" or \"The government should do something\" and move on....",
"I have always wondered the answer to this question myself. People go crazy about animals and don't give a shit about people.\n\nIt boggles my mind that it totally cool for me to kill an animal and eat it, but people go ape shit if it lives in a cage that is to small before I kill it?",
"Because I like dogs more than children? "
]
} | []
| []
| [
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
|
|
69tx3w | what determines which cities appear on highway signs? | It seems almost random which cities are listed on interstate signs. Of course Boston should show up on interstate signs that pass through the state's capital, but who decides what lesser cities are listed alongside it? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/69tx3w/eli5_what_determines_which_cities_appear_on/ | {
"a_id": [
"dh9d28y"
],
"score": [
16
],
"text": [
"These are called [control cities](_URL_0_).\n\n > The control cities on the Interstate Highway network are selected by the states and contained in the \"List of Control Cities for Use in Guide Signs on Interstate Highways,\" published and available from American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.[3] Control cities on other US roads are often selected on the basis of general principles, as opposed to specific lists of towns.\n > \n > US federal lists are in practice not always followed[citation needed]. This may be the result of towns having gained importance since the list was last updated or in order to have local (intrastate) interests prevail over towns elsewhere. On the other hand, there are also instances where intrastate control cities have been left out so that long-distance focal points could be added. There are also instances where the name of another state has prevailed over the official control city, e.g. the signs in Boston heading to the state of Maine.\n > \n > On the US federal list, control cities have often been selected by virtue of being located close to an intersection of two US-interstates. This has resulted in a number of very minor localities having control city status"
]
} | []
| []
| [
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_city#United_States"
]
]
|
|
1who7v | how does obamacare give free healthcare to women but not men without being legally gender discrimination? | So I've been chronically ill for a while and have been seeing lots of doctors. I always have to pay for every test, and my insurance had stopped covering my appointments.
A girl I know is in a similar situation, but she isn't going through the same finical cost. Most
She's always telling me that doctors tell her she gets this for free thanks to obamacare- there are apparently lots of services that women get for free.
I did some research, and found that it's true.
Women get a free doctors visit, free screening for heart disease , cancer, and diabetes, and lower insurance
Wouldn't this be illegal as gender discrimination? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1who7v/eli5_how_does_obamacare_give_free_healthcare_to/ | {
"a_id": [
"cf22ppm"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
" > So I've been chronically ill for a while and have been seeing lots of doctors. I always have to pay for every test, and my insurance had stopped covering my appointments.\n\nThat's not legal under Obamacare.\n\nThe problem isn't what women get for free, it's that for some reason your health insurance is still screwing you, post-Obamacare.\n"
]
} | []
| []
| [
[]
]
|
|
4gxbae | why can it be confusing at times whether a metalic object is golden or silver? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4gxbae/eli5_why_can_it_be_confusing_at_times_whether_a/ | {
"a_id": [
"d2lk7w0"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text": [
"The natural \"colorless\" appearance of many elements resembles silver because this appearance reflects nearly all light it receives, rather than absorbing any and giving off a hue.\n\nSilver is very good at this colorlessness, and so we value it partly for that reason.\n\nGold and silver (and copper) are all entirely soluble in one another when you melt them. So it's possible to make a colorless alloy of gold; thus it's gold but looks like silver."
]
} | []
| []
| [
[]
]
|
||
1ms6cr | iranian politics and the role of the grand ayatollah | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ms6cr/eli5_iranian_politics_and_the_role_of_the_grand/ | {
"a_id": [
"ccc455y"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text": [
"Iranian Politics are a bit complicated and confusing at times but the system is roughly as follows.\n\n**The Parliment** (Majlis) is the first and easiest concept to understand. It's a parliament. It has to send everything it passes to the Guardian Council\n\n**The Guardian Council** is made up for 6 experts in Islamic Law, appointed by the Supreme Leader (read: Grand Ayatollah) and 6 jurists elected from the parliament. They are supposed to make sure all laws conform with both the Constitution of Iran and Islamic Law. The basic idea is to make sure that the country is going down a righteous path. They also use their power to block popular individuals and people who are reform minded from running for office. They veto bills from Parliament, sometimes, to prevent any one person from getting too much political clout. \n\n**The President** is the highest elected position. While he has a lot of power, he must deffer to the Supreme Leader on many issues. Functionally, the President is chosen to act as the voice on many issues. [Wikipedia](_URL_0_) describes the powers that he does have.\n\n**The Supreme Leader** is what it sounds like, the Supreme Leader. He is granted a lot of power. It is required that he be an Islamic Scholar. (Note: It used to be that he had to be the highest ranked Cleric, but this was changed in 1989) He has far reaching authority, including appointing and removing Guardian Council members, command of the armed forces, and signing decrees. Again [Wikipedia](_URL_1_) offers a list. He is, functionally, the guy that says what the country is doing. Then they do it."
]
} | []
| []
| [
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President_of_Iran#Powers_and_responsibilities",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Leader_of_Iran#Functions_and_duties_of_the_Supreme_Leader"
]
]
|
||
38c8y1 | why infrared light of a remote controller is visible using a mobile's camera? | If I look directly at the tip of a working remote I can't see anything, while if I look at it through my mobile's camera I can see a bluish light. And I'm able to [take a picture.](_URL_0_) | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/38c8y1/eli5_why_infrared_light_of_a_remote_controller_is/ | {
"a_id": [
"crty7ti",
"cru12sz"
],
"score": [
2,
2
],
"text": [
"Most cameras are designed to capture an image of what people can see. Hence a good camera would only detect EM radiation in the visible light spectrum (between 400nm and 700nm).\n\nYet the charged couple devices used within cameras are typically manufactured to pick up EM radiation between 350nm and 1000nm. This means they are capable of detecting infrared light too (between 700nm and 1,000nm is infrared).\n\nTo improve image quality, camera manufacturers typically add films and filters to block out infrared light and ensure only visible light reaches the CCD. If the infrared radiation was recorded by the camera and appeared in our photos, the photos would not be an accurate representation of what we can see – i.e. what we want to photograph!\n\nMobile phone cameras tend to be produced a lot cheaper than proper digital cameras and hence the vast majority of mobile phone cameras have a much thinner film/filter to block out infrared light. The lack of infrared filter is one reason photographs taken on mobile phones don’t look as good as those taken on proper digital cameras but it also provides us with an opportunity to use our mobiles to “see” in infrared.\n\n[LINK](_URL_0_)",
"Yeah, /u/masticatetherapist is correct. Most more expensive cameras have an IR filter, the iPhone got it I think with the iPhone 4s, before that, you could see the light from remotes. What camera did you use?"
]
} | []
| [
"http://i.imgur.com/WDOTK0d.jpg"
]
| [
[
"http://kenstechtips.com/index.php/how-to-see-the-invisible-infrared-world-using-your-mobile-phone-camera"
],
[]
]
|
|
2lwbih | what one see when they are red/green color blind vs black/white color blind. | I have never really understood how it works. If you are bw color blind do you only see grays? Or is it in context to another color. Would love to hear some color blind Redditors take on it. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2lwbih/eli5_what_one_see_when_they_are_redgreen_color/ | {
"a_id": [
"clyr7df"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"Normal vision: _URL_0_\n\nDeuteranopia (Red–green): _URL_2_\n\nProtaniopia (Red–green): _URL_3_\n\nTritanopia (blue-yellow): _URL_1_\n\nYou have 3 types of cones - color sensing photoreceptive cells - in your eyes usually. In colorblind people they may have a shortage of cone cells that detect a color. Rod cell deficiency would lead to black-white colorblindness."
]
} | []
| []
| [
[
"http://www.colourblindawareness.org/wp-content/themes/outreach/images/slider/whatIs/pencils.jpg",
"http://www.colourblindawareness.org/wp-content/themes/outreach/images/slider/whatIs/pencils_t.jpg",
"http://www.colourblindawareness.org/wp-content/themes/outreach/images/slider/whatIs/pencils_d.jpg",
"http://www.colourblindawareness.org/wp-content/themes/outreach/images/slider/whatIs/pencils_p.jpg"
]
]
|
|
9xdw6j | how does carbonation stay in beverages that are liquid? it's a gas, wouldn't it be one big bubble? | Obviously it wouldn't be a big bubble I'm just perplexed. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9xdw6j/eli5_how_does_carbonation_stay_in_beverages_that/ | {
"a_id": [
"e9rh3wh",
"e9rh4ui"
],
"score": [
6,
2
],
"text": [
"Carbonation gets dissolved in water in the form of carbonic acid. When it heats up or the pressure drops it decomposes into CO2 and H2O",
"The same way salt dissolves on liquid. When you pour salt in water and go stirry stirry stirry all the salt dissappears until youve maxed out the ampunt of salt it can hold. Temperature and pressure affect this value. The salt (NaCl) dissociates into Na and Cl and is flosting in there independantly of one another. The same thing basically happens with the air molecules as well! When you open it up, the pressure drops and the soda can no longet hold all that air. So it releases it and since its less dense than the soda it floats to the top."
]
} | []
| []
| [
[],
[]
]
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30gxe4 | why is possession 9/10ths of the law? | I am 31 but apparently I am 5 when it comes to Legalese. Pls explain. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/30gxe4/eli5_why_is_possession_910ths_of_the_law/ | {
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"It's actually not. It's an expression based on something like... \n\n5 year old you has a cookie. 5 year old me does not. You possess the cookie. 5 year old you puts the cookie down to have a drink of milk. 5 year old me picks up the cookie. I possess the cookie now. It's mine. Prove otherwise. \n\nHowever, the expression is not entirely accurate. In fact, this is partly what started the hatfield mccoy feud, as I've just discovered.\n\n\n_URL_0_",
"The possessor states they own it. Without proof to the contrary this settles it.\nContrary proof involves model and serial numbers. A record of these made in the past is sufficient to establish ownership since generally the sales receipt is kept also.\n\nNo one argues this with automobile ownership. Titles and liens are well established. Proof of ownership with title and registration means ability to possess.\n\nThis saying probably goes back to colonial times when records were not kept as well. Many homesteads were established by squatters. A site, often in territory reserved by treaty to indians, would be occupied, a cabin built, crops planted. Colonial courts would side with the occupant against the indians. The land would have been stolen from the indians despite the treaty."
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8a502y | why are barely-legible signatures so common? why aren't legible signatures more common? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8a502y/eli5_why_are_barelylegible_signatures_so_common/ | {
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"It usually takes longer to spell out a signature than to just scratch it down. There are also many people out there who don't know how to write cursive and therefore don't know how to sign their name. Theoretically it would also be more difficult to forge.",
"the more legible it is, the easier it is to forge. i learned to make mine a scrawl because of my mothers irrational fear of check forgeries. it is mostly pointless today, but in the past, it prevented other people from forging your signature, as people who knew you knew you didn't clearly write out your name."
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5645zk | reparations | I don't quite understand what it is, the google definition used a lot of big words I don't feel like understanding at 12am. My brain's just a little too dead inside. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5645zk/eli5reparations/ | {
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"there are social and wartime reparations\n\nsocial reparations are for when a state does something horrendous to a group of people like slavery in america or holocaust in germany or internment of japanese in america during ww2. the state can formally apologize and then pay money to people who fit the category that the atrocities were committed against. america paid out large sums in reparations in the 80s to japanese families that were affected by the internment situation. \n\nwartime reparations are simply money paid by the loser to the winner. it's also basically a form of apology. \"now that you've won, i guess we'll cede and say you were right, so here's some money for the trouble.\" germany was forced to pay huge reparations to the allied powers after ww1, and it was a major part of what put them in such an economic mess that hitler was able to rise to power.",
"It is the philosophy that an entity or descendants of any entity which *enslaved* another entity, and *profited from the labor of that enslaved entity*, owes the descendants of the enslaved a fair share of the profits originally denied to the enslaved.\n\nLet's say my great great grandparents were enormously wealthy plantation owners with 100 slaves. We paid our slaves nothing. We kept them captive and ruined their opportunities to get paid jobs, save money, get their children education, etc. We made millions primarily from the hard work of those 100 slaves. \n\nFast forward to now; my family is still fat off generational wealth. Great grandpa stuck his family fortune in mutual funds and let it grow and grow. My parents didn't have to do a damn thing and wanted for nothing. Using profits derived from slave labor, multiple generations of my family were able to hire private tutors, go to Harvard, and pursue any creative or intellectual venture we wanted, witout ever having to break our backs 60 hours a week to make ends meet. All of the descendants of my great great grandparents enjoy unrivaled freedoms and opportunities, *precisely because we denied these same opportunities and freedoms to 100 slaves generations ago and used their enslavement to enrich ourselves*.\n\nMeanwhile, the descendants of those 100 slaves may be growing up in poverty. Their parents had nothing, because they've been struggling their whole lives against discrimination and a lack of family stability. They had nothing handed to them or passed down, even though the labor of their ancestors was exclusively responsible for my family's wealth. \n \n\nReparations is the concept that **part of my generational wealth is owed to the descendants of the slaves who helped build that wealth and were never properly compensated for their efforts; and more than that, whose lives and legacies were stolen from them in order to force them to build that generational wealth**. \n\nThis principle is extrapolated beyond the direct ancestral lineages of slave owner / slave; it is attributed to town, city, state, and federal governments and agencies who also profited and benefited from slave labor without just compensation. In some cases, entire nations were built off the profits from slave labor and slave trade; the descendants of these slaves are rightfully owed their share of these profits that were denied to the slaves themselves.\n\nWhat it *doesn't* mean is that \"all white people owe all black people money\". Not all black people are descendants of slaves (though they do share in the burden of stigma resultant from people of their skin color having been slaves), and in a legal sense, someone would have to make a logic and legally coherent case that they were, in fact, descendants of a slave that *my* family owned. \n\nIn many cases it is much more symbolic than for monetary gain. It is a symbol of recognition by the wealthy and powerful that *they owe much of their current wealth and power to people they enslaved long ago*. Whole generations and communities of people are much worse off, while they are much better off, and that isn't fair, or just, or right. Reparations are a way of symbolically making things right; about properly and lawfully compensating the descendants of slaves not just *for all the wages their enslaved ancestors were denied*, but also *for all the future earnings that were denied from this as well*. \n\nTL;DR - its a partially monetary, partially symbolic acknowledgement that a lot of white people are rich as fuck because a lot of black people worked very hard for them because we forced them to. "
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70ncrv | what's the difference between caustic and corrosive? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/70ncrv/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_caustic_and/ | {
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"A caustic will damage organic tissue, but not necessarily damage inorganic materials such as metal or glass.\n\nA corrosive can damage inorganic and organic materials."
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85l2on | how does grass survive the winter with months of snow cover, but it can't survive a cooler placed on it for a week in the summer? | Every spring, my grass comes in full and thick. I live in the north where a month of snow cover is common.
But after throwing a party, the grass will die if I leave a cooler on it for a week. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/85l2on/eli5_how_does_grass_survive_the_winter_with/ | {
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"Some grasses go dormant as the weather changes. That's not the same thing as dying during the growing season due to excessive heat or drying our.",
"Grass goes into a dormant state as the weather changes, similar to how trees shed their leaves and go dormant. With the lowered state of metabolism, among other augmented processes, these plants can survive a winter. Imagine a car operating with 2 of its 4 cylinders disabled. It will still run, although at a low performance, and will consume FAR less gas. When the grass is back in full on summer mode it needs a consistent supply of energy and nutrients to stay alive. Nutrients and water it can retrieve from the ground, but the light from the sun needed for photosynthesis (making plant food) has been blocked by your cooler. At this point your grass, which is running with all 4 cylinders, has no gas. The grass will die.",
"The grass that comes back in, thick and full, is new growth, not the grass from last year. The brown stuff that you rake up in the spring. That's last year's grass.",
"think of grass as an underground tree. the grass are the 'leaves' and the massive amount of intertwining roots underground are the 'trunk'. cutting the grass doesnt kill the leaves...unless you cut too close, then you kill it. same thing with a cooler or some other heavy weight. but like any actual tree, give it some time and new 'leaves' (the grass you see)will come back",
"This is a really cool question (no pun intended), and the answer is pretty amazing.\n\nEditing in a tl;dr:\n\nPlants are really good at surviving the cold but only if it gets cold gradually. Gradual change gives them time to prepare for cold damage. Sudden cold can kill unprepared plants, through direct damage and by making them press a self destruct button. They survive snow because it insulates them from cold air and they've usually had time to prepare. Water coolers kill them because they're crushed, chilled and can't make food from sunlight. It's usually only the leaves that die though, and dead plants can regrow from their roots. Roots act as a kind of food bank, giving plants everything they need to make new leaves when the weather is good, or when water coolers are removed.\n\nIn depth:\n\nI'm going to being with a brief crash course in plant biology, then move into answering the question.\n\nAll plants are sessile, which means they aren't capable of moving. This means that if they are going to survive constantly changing environmental conditions, they need to make major changes to their basic makeup. As a human, if you are exposed to cold temperatures then you can either generate heat or seek more favourable conditions. With the exception of exothermic plants which generate their own heat and are relatively uncommon, most plant species are the same temperature as their surroundings. This means they have evolved other mechanisms to survive the damaging effects of cold.\n\nIn general, cold temperatures don't occur suddenly. In the transition from summer to autumn and through into winter, day and night temperatures fall gradually. It's the gradual nature of the temperature decrease that allows a plant to acclimate (also known as hardening). When a plant acclimates, it changes its cellular composition to better cope with the cold. To really understand what changes are made, we need to look at some of the key damaging effects of cold.\n\nCold temperatures destabilise cell membranes. Each leaf is composed of thousands of cells. Imagine these cells as water balloons. When they are exposed to cold, their skin/membrane is weakened and the water begins to leak out. However, when a plant senses the temperature is getting colder, it invests a lot of the energy it gets from photosynthesis into strengthening its cell membrane. It does this by producing more robust membrane components. A rough analogy might be thickening the skin of the water balloon. Other components of the cell are strengthened too, but for starters we will only consider the membrane.\n\nAnother impact of cold is a decrease in metabolic rate, which makes sense. The cell is a mixing pot of hundreds of different chemical compounds. When the temperature drops, the free energy available for these chemicals to react with each other is decreased too. A poor analogy for this would be making a grilled cheese sandwich. If you heat the cheese at 60 degrees Celsius it might melt over the bread eventually, but if you heat it at 150 degrees it will melt a lot faster. When it's cold, the plant can't \"melt it's cheese\" or \"metabolise\" as quickly. This might sound fine, but not all chemical reactions produce good things and some chemical reactions can take place with very little heat availability, instead being triggered by light. Plants have evolved to utilise light energy very effectively in photosynthesis. The chloroplasts of a plant cell are very adept at harvesting light energy and converting it into chemical energy, i.e. sugars. The first step in the process is electron excitation. The problem is, when the temperature drops, the ability of plants to convert excited electrons into chemical energy is diminished. These electrons are very reactive and the result of reducing the efficiency of the system that processes them is damage through random reactions with cellular components. This usually occurs via things called reactive oxygen species, which are combated by antioxidants. When it gets cold, plants will increase the abundance of antioxidants in their cells, allowing them to scavenge potentially destructive reactive oxygen species produced by unprocessed \"excited\" electrons.\n\nThe final result of cold that I'm going to mention is decreased water uptake. Cold exposure decreases a plants ability to move water through its body, mainly through effects on leaf stomata. When it's cold, leaves can't open and close their stomata as effectively so the plant often opts to shut down and enter a period of reduced metabolic activity or dormancy. This means it doesn't grow when it's cold, but it does invest a lot of energy into surviving.\n\nThese changes are all made in response to cold and will help a plant to survive freezing temperatures, cold temperatures and snow cover. In fact, snow cover is often good for plants as the snow forms a protective, insulating blanket that traps warmth and shields plants from wind chill.\n\nThis brings us to the question of why grass can't survive a cold water cooler being placed on it during the summer. The answer is, the grass hasn't been given time to acclimate. When the water cooler is placed on it, two distinct stresses are introduced. The first is the mechanical stress of the water cooler, which will break up some of the leaf tissue. The second is the cold, which if the plant hasn't been given time to acclimate, will be very destructive, often resulting in yellowing of the leaves which is called chlorosis. When leaves go yellow, it is because the plant is recycling all of the nutrients in the leaf so they can be reinvested into the growth of new leaves when conditions are more favourable.\n\nAdd to this the fact the water cooler may have been left for a week and you have a plant that hasn't been given sufficient sunlight to grow, on top of the other stresses. The net result is death.\n\nHowever, like others say, the leaves of a plant are only half of the story and plants are very resilient. Once the water cooler is moved, they are able to regrow from their roots, using nutrients they have accumulated over their life time.\n\nI hope this helps!",
"Grass did not die from the cold. It died from being in the dark for a week straight during spring break.",
"I know I’m a little late to the game here but I have 3 years of hydroseeding experience in Canada just north of the Seattle area. Depending on the type of turf grass Rye or rescue. They will stop creating new growth at around 7c for rye and 10c for fescues. A few degrees colder than that they will stay dormant. One major caveat on those numbers is the fact that it’s the soil temp rather than the ambient air. \n\nWe typically apply a slurry of grass seed & a wood fibre mulch which helps to increase the germination rates of the applied seed. Sometimes if the slurry is applied to late in the year and gets covered in snow the seeds will remain dormant until the soil rises to these temperatures again. \n\nYour established lawn reacts the same way. If you want to help increase vigorous growth in the spring you can apply a 23-3-23 fertilizer along with core airating your lawn. One thing we also recommend is for the first few cuts of the year to mulch your grass clippings on your lawn with your lawnmower rather than removing them. "
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2n5mhl | how can my eyes stay fixed looking at an object when my head moves? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2n5mhl/eli5_how_can_my_eyes_stay_fixed_looking_at_an/ | {
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"You have muscles attached to your eyes that move them around, and through the years you've been alive, you've learnt to automatically move your eyes the other way to which your moving your head so your eyes stay facing the same way. "
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7sambu | how did "southern gentlemen" of the 19th and 18th centuries procure and keep ice for their iced tea? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7sambu/eli5_how_did_southern_gentlemen_of_the_19th_and/ | {
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"Cut a big block of ice out of a lake in the north of the country, and have it carried to you in the south before it melts. If you get enough big blocks and stick them in a cellar there will be some ice all year. ",
"They would cut up blocks of ice in the norther in winter and kept in special \"ice houses\": double-walled buildings that had an insulating layer of sawdust between the walls, with vents to let out hot air at the top, and channels to let melted water flow out at the bottom.\n\nEven so, roughly 90% of harvested ice would melt before it could be sold.",
"They harvested ice and floated it down river or by sea and stored them in ice chests generally made of ceramic and metal.\n\n[No really](_URL_0_). ",
"There was once a huge industry in the north that would cut tremendous blocks of lake ice, and store it packed in hay or straw in an *icehouse*. [Read more about it](_URL_0_).\n\nIt was shipped wherever there was demand.",
"My grandfather was an ice man. They used to cut giant blocks from the lake I grew up near, store them and ship them. Had underground storage dug near the lake. "
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2jw2bz | what part of the brain interprets humor? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2jw2bz/eli5_what_part_of_the_brain_interprets_humor/ | {
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"According to a quick google, '2 cm x 2 cm was identified on the left superior frontal gyrus' .... so a bit of the front left lobe of your brain :)"
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15iif8 | why should i uninstall a program when i could just delete it directly from the hard drive? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/15iif8/why_should_i_uninstall_a_program_when_i_could/ | {
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"Because what's in the program folder on your hard drive isn't everything. There are many other places on the computer where the program may have made changes when it was first installed, or when it was being used. For example, many programs make changes in the registry, possibly for telling the operating system what files should be associated with the program. Uninstalling should take care of those changes too. ",
"As I understand, uninstalling a program removes all of its files. There may be files (save files for example) which are stored in a different part of the hard drive, uninstalling the program will remove them.\n\nOf course you could find these files yourself and delete them directly from the hard drive as well, but I guess uninstalling is supposed to make it easier on your average Mom and Pop computer user.",
"It's the difference between uprooting a tree (uninstalling) and simply chopping it down (deleting). There are things under the surface you might not be aware of. (drivers, registry hives, etc) ",
"Even on a Mac, there are a lot of files associated with the program that get strewn around, especially in the Library folder. Preferences files, dynamic libraries, helper programs, etc. Removing the application itself leaves all of those supporting files in, and it's very difficult to actually find them all manually.",
"/u/Aorian did a great job, but to go into what's actually happening a bit more - when you install something, it puts little pieces all throughout your computer. you could go find and delete all of them yourself, or you could run the built in uninstaller that (should) get rid of them all.\n\non a related note, everyone should use [revo](_URL_0_) to really get rid of junk."
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7zx8eu | population decline | I read this statement on Wikipedia (_URL_0_)
That the global population will stabilize at around 9 billion and will start to rapidly decline afterwards.
How do we study such projections in population? and what makes the study credible? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7zx8eu/eli5_population_decline/ | {
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"Well - there are several factors. One is physical limitations of the earth to provide enough food, land, water, shelter necessary and since we are not very efficient in our production, delivery, and consumption of resources it speeds up the problem. Another is the economic burden of raising children. The expense associated with it varies by country but children become less appealing when they are more expensive propositions. Also as the globe becomes more educated the culture around having children changes and people decide to either wait to have children, to have less children, or to not have any children at all which slows the birth rate. \n\n",
"I wouldn’t call it “rapid decline,” but it will reach a peak, go down a little, then stabilize.\n\nThe general trend seems to be that as more of the world’s population joins the ranks of “civilized society,” the less children people tend to have. Essentially wealthier nations have less kids, poorer ones have far more. This used to be offset by the fact that lots of kids died early on, but now with advances of medicine this causes a population rise.\n\nWhy does this happen? Well, seems to be mainly that people have more choices in life than “to raise children,” particularly women. As a result, less children. \n\nAs more of humanity acquires prosperity and life choices, we believe this trend will extend to them. This will end with humanity reproducing at slightly less than replacement rate for a while.\n\nTechnically the carrying capacity of the planet is more than 9 billion, but it seems societal factors will stabilize population before food shortage will. ",
"It's mostly guess work and looking at the numbers of people at each generation.\n\nThe earth's population was under 2 billion people for thousands of years, nobody could have predicted it would have sky rocketed like it did in recent times. We don't know what inventions or discoveries (or diseases) might shape the future either but we do know how many people are alive now and we can do some math.\n\nWe know baby boomers are a huge chunk of the population and will start to die off. They tended to have large families, but their kids are a bit smarter and are not having quite such large families. \n\nWe know that as people become more educated they have smaller families. \n\nThe planet cannot sustain an ever growing human population so we know that if the population gets too high there will be starvation controlling the numbers as well as diseases and other factors too (war).",
"To keep population growth at zero, every woman has to have 2.1 children on average. Right now, the world fertility rate is 2.5. Fifty years ago, it was greater than 4.0.\n\nIf it continues dropping at that rate, we will eventually reach replacement level.",
"You can never know for sure, but there are trends that you can observe that hold true most of the time. As countries become more richer, more urban, more educated, and less religious, birth rates almost always decline. That’s what we’ve observed globally over the last few decades. The average birth rate worldwide has steadily declined and now is only 2.5. If it continues to decline below 2.1, you would eventually see population decline even without a massive war or famine or disease outbreak (which are the things that historically reduced population by large amounts - like the Black Plague or Spanish Flu or World War II).\n\nMost of the countries that still have high birth rates are in Africa, which is the poorest region of the world, and the big question for future global population is whether their birth rates will also decline as rapidly as birth rates in Asia and Latin America have."
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30ol8m | the jobs situation in the usa | I've been Redditing a few months and I see a lot of posts painting a gloomy picture for America, especially with jobs, no vacation, shit pay, no benefits, etc.
Is that true? A lot of my friends seem to have decent jobs that didn't take too much effort. Some things I see:
* Anyone can go to community college and become a nurse... that's guaranteed 70k. Pretty much anything semi advanced in medical is good money.
* A lot of technology jobs pay.
* Damn near anything in sales pays well if you're good. A lot of "corporate sales gigs" hawking anything is a Damn near guaranteed 60k. You don't need or can easily lie about a degree for these jobs. My richest friends work these jobs.
* Accounting pays.
* Skilled trades after a few years.
* "Random jobs" such as working cranes pays.
* Even being a server in a busy restaurant is around 50k de facto tax free.... which is really like 65k. Many servers and bartenders make more than "real jobs"
So why do I see all these not to difficult paths to decent money but reddit makes it look otherwise? Do I just live in a lucky part of the US? (I live in a city) | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/30ol8m/eli5_the_jobs_situation_in_the_usa/ | {
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"I think you're seeing an example of survivorship bias. You're seeing the successes. There is competition for the jobs you've mentioned. Not everybody gets those. There is an age bias in hiring for the \"good\" jobs like programmers or sales. \n\nIt's true nurses and computer science grads can get jobs way easier than a laid-off 50 year old engineer.\n\nedit: I do believe that if you bust ass and try you can accomplish amazing things."
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3nst2q | why don't we put "windmills" under water to use the endless currents of the ocean to generate power | I saw a post recently saying that its still only a concept but why exactly hasn't it been implemented? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3nst2q/eli5why_dont_we_put_windmills_under_water_to_use/ | {
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"They do. Its called Hydroelectric. We mostly use dams for it. A significant portion of the world is powered this way.\n\nedit: typo",
"A few reasons, the ocean is really hard on equipment, for one, especially in the tidally active locations that would be optimal for that sort of power station, and that same tidal activity would make installation, repair and monitoring very difficult and potentially quite dangerous. Another problem is that water is a great transmitter of vibrations. Have you ever been near a really big wind turbine? They often make a loud basso thrumming noise as the blades cut through the air. There's been concern raised that large scale implementation of tidal power turbines could interfere with the migrations of whales and fish. ",
"[Here's a link](_URL_0_) to an article about just such a system in the Netherlands and [the wikipedia](_URL_1_) article for tidal power. Thereare systems being built in S. Korea, Japan, China, England & Holland.",
"[There is one tidal power plant in nova scotia](_URL_0_)\n\nIt pretty much acts like a hydro electric dam. Very few places in the world have the tides or current to really power a power plant. the bay of fundy being one example.",
"It IS a concept, but there's a problem:\n\n* In dams, these \"windmills\" (which are called turbines FYI) aren't powered all the time; instead, they wait until enough water builds up on one side of the dam, before letting the water go through a small gate, which channels the energy into one small place, where it can be \"collected\" by the turbines.\n* However, although the ocean altogether has a lot of energy, there's a problem: The ocean's energy is spread out over a lot of area! As a result, the turbines would have to be HUGE, which is what they did when they invented tidal power.\n\nAs collecting energy through dams is easier and quicker than collecting energy through the sea, people would tend to choose the former.",
"Not directly related but very cool none the less is pumped hydro. It's here you have two storage tanks one on a hill one at the bottom, connected by pipes.\n\nYou use renewable energy to push water to the top and then let gravity pull the water down this turning turbines.\n\nAs its a closed loop it requires no dams, minimal infrastructure and it can store lots of energy.\n\n_URL_0_",
"We do. They're called Tidal Power Stations. Here's the [Wiki list of tidal power stations](_URL_0_)\n\nThere are only a few because they cost a lot. Tidal construction costs around $2/W; but only produces about 4-5h per day. Nuclear, for comparison, costs about $5/W; but produces 24h per day; about 1/3 the cost of Tidal."
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[],
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1yqvvn | what chemically happens that causes us to "go crazy" around someone we have a romantic interest in? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1yqvvn/eli5_what_chemically_happens_that_causes_us_to_go/ | {
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"It would be nice if there was someway to block these signals.",
"When you have a romantic interest in someone, that not only takes in their personality, but their scent always plays a part. You see the person as a possible mate; therefore, neurologically you are alert for anyone trying to take them away and you are reading signs for interest. This is why you feel your heart beat faster and you get sweaty. Your body is going into overtime",
"Not sure if you're referring to love or lust, but I will answer you both for your edification:\n\nLust:\nWhile it is accepted that \"beauty is in the eye of the beholder,\" science suggests a contrary view. It holds that one's perception of beauty is the result of some very complex biological cues, with little influence coming from someone's own unique preferences. When we heterosexual men see a nice ass or great tits, it usually means that, biologically, that woman's body is in peak physical condition to bear and raise a child. Her hip-to-waist ratio that gives her a great ass also means room to expand and have a healthy pregnancy. When you see those DD's bouncing around, you can't look away because your survival instinct is going crazy due to her ability to feed a newborn child. At that point, from a survival standpoint, your brain starts flooding your shit with *dopamine*, a chemical that gets your brain excited, and *adrenaline*, a chemical that gets you pumped up and ready to be physically active, telling you that those child-bearing assets on that fine female are all the information you need to get out there and **make one!** There are a great many other biological cues that play important roles in the processes of seduction and attraction, but I feel that the ones I gave are easily relatable.\n\nLove:\nChemically speaking, love and lust are related, but definitely not the same. Put simply, love is the result of an increase in levels of *oxytocin* in the brain. Oxytocin is whats needed for bonding. It doesn't just get released when you're around your lover either, and doesn't have to be a sexual thing at all. It gets released whenever we see something that we think is cute. Oxytocin is also released in females when performing essential functions of a mother, such as giving birth and breastfeeding. This strengthens the bonds between mother and child, and it's the reason why many believe that breastfeeding is important. \n\nYou:\nThe feelings of \"going crazy\" while around a love interest are probably caused by the release of dopamine and adrenaline due to sexual (or maybe just exciting) thoughts you might have pertaining to that person, possibly triggered subconsciously at the sight of them. \n\nTL;DR:\n**Dopamine** and and **adrenaline** make you want to fuck,\n**Oxytocin** makes you want to cuddle,\n**You** probably want to fuck.\n\nSource: The internets.\nAlso, if you've gotten this far, you should check out [The Science of Sex Appeal](_URL_0_). It explains in great detail what I covered briefly in the first paragraph. Much interesting. Very recommend."
]
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aq9yvl | why are micro waves dangerous when they have a lower frequency than visible light? | Why is it dangerous to put your hand in a micro wave and turn it on but not dangerous if you stand next to a light bulb all day? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aq9yvl/eli5_why_are_micro_waves_dangerous_when_they_have/ | {
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"The microwaves resonate with the water molecules which does not happen with the visible spectrum. Also, even though the visible spectrum carries more energy your 60w light bulb isn't putting out 60W of light, microwaves on the other hand are designed to put out high amounts of energy.",
"The Microwave is 1000-1200W. It's a narrow beam that's directed around the inside of the box. If you put your hand 6\" away from a 1200W painting light all day, you'll get a burn."
]
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3b4zf7 | why don't computer processors run at 100% always when under load? wouldn't it complete the job faster? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3b4zf7/eli5_why_dont_computer_processors_run_at_100/ | {
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"When they need to they do. There are some reasons it may not though:\n\n1. CPU speed isn't the bottleneck: if the program needs to pull a lot of data from its code, usually the limiting factor is the speed of the storage drive, (aka hard drive or SSD). The CPU can't do much if its waiting to receive data. \n\n2. The program isn't written to use all cores: today's processors are all multicored. Meaning they are like 2 or 4 or even 8 CPUs in one. In order to take advantage of all cores, the program you running has to be written to do so. A lot of today's programs still aren't set up to use more than 1 or 2 cores at a time (I'm looking at you Microsoft Excel). ",
"In project management, there is a fallacy called the \"pregnancy principle\". If one woman can produce a baby in nine months, then nine women can produce a baby in one month.\n\nSo, it's clear why this is a fallacy, but the point is that sometimes throwing more of a specific resource at the problem won't make it go faster.\n\nWhen a computer is using all of a specific resource, we say that it is bound. So, if it is CPU-bound, that means it's using all of the CPU. If it's I/O-bound, it means that it is using disk access as fast as the computer will let it, and it's waiting for disk; if it's memory-bound, it's used all of the memory. We could also say network bound (though that's a type of I/O) if we have used all of the bandwidth.\n\nSo, it is important to know what kind of resource is being used. If you are downloading a large game on your computer, a faster processor wouldn't make the download finish sooner.\n\nVery often, for home computers, the processor isn't the slow part -- it's more often memory or disk access."
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z6b2y | the hate towards fox news | As someone who's grown up with avid Fox News supporting parents, I'd like to know the negativity directed towards them. I want more than just "Fox News are full of a bunch of -expletive-". I don't watch the news that often, mostly getting what I need online or on the Philip deFranco show (honestly).
Thanks in advance for this.
Edit: Guys, no need to downvote. I'm really curious about this and want someone to explain. I'll be open minded about it. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/z6b2y/eli5_the_hate_towards_fox_news/ | {
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"There is a story and there are ways to tell the story. Imagine if a neighbourhood kid broke a window.\n\n1. You can tell the story simp: \"Joe broke the window!\"\n\n2. Or you can tell the story with a bit added: \"Joe, who Suzy said pulled her hair once, was seen snooping around. He was behaving when it was clear, but I bet he was just waiting for no one to be around so he could do something bad. A few minutes ago, he broke the window and I bet he really enjoyed being bad.\"\n\nNumber 2 is telling the same thing, but the way it's told matters. Number 1 is considered to be the best way to give news. Fox News is typically seen to do a lot of Number 2.",
"There are all sorts of reasons. Many of which can be levied against other news organizations (MSNBC) as well.\n\nThe most apparent reason would be that Fox news' slogan is \"fair and balanced,\" yet moreso than ANY news organization they are not. \n\nAlso FOX news fought and won a court case around 2005 that stipulates they are legally allowed to lie on television. That was pretty landmark as well."
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1o6zqc | why would people sell high value collectables to a place like on pawn stars rather than on ebay or an auction? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1o6zqc/eli5_why_would_people_sell_high_value/ | {
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"In an auction you could end up having to sell the item for far less than you wanted.",
"They want the money on the spot. So much so that their willing to give a deep discount to get it. And its not that their ripping you off. It's that they know you are motivated to sell because you brought it to a pawn shop.",
"Why pay someone to change your oil when you can do it yourself for less $? Some people don't know how or can't or don't want to. ",
"Pawn Stars is faked from top to bottom."
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67ruhf | why do they say you aren't contagious if you don't have a fever? don't you still have germs? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/67ruhf/eli5_why_do_they_say_you_arent_contagious_if_you/ | {
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"Because \"they\" are often wrong about things. People can certainly pass along illness without a fever. ",
"Contrary to what some people say, you can absolutely spread a contagious illness without a fever. For instance, many people can have the common cold without a fever, yet they still have a runny nose, aches, and coughs.\n\nThe general rule of thumb, however, is that you are contagious when you start showing symptoms. Your body will do some crazy things to get rid of the germs, and you experience these crazy things through symptoms. Sneezing, coughing, vomiting, etc. are all the body's ways to fight the germs in the body. A fever makes the germs weaker by raising your body temperature and is one of the first symptoms to appear if you have a contagious illness. More symptoms will generally follow a fever, and this is why it can be said that if you have a fever, you can put others at risk with symptoms that will soon develop.\n"
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76qr41 | why are cities going crazy over amazon's new hq location? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/76qr41/eli5_why_are_cities_going_crazy_over_amazons_new/ | {
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"Landing the Amazon HQ would mean up to $5 billion in construction spending to build the HQ, and then potentially 50k jobs paying about $100k on average. \n\nThat means a lot of new money pumped into the local economy, creating a lot of construction jobs for a time and permanently providing lots programmer, marketing, etc. jobs. And those workers buy homes, eat out at restaurants, take transit, pay taxes, etc. pumping lots of money into the economy and creating even more jobs."
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2n3xwn | how exactly could 100 lashes kill you, aside from severe blood loss? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2n3xwn/eli5_how_exactly_could_100_lashes_kill_you_aside/ | {
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"if you don't die from blood loss you'd probably die from some type of infection.",
"Shock from the pain could cause your heart to stop. Torture is quite stressful. "
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25b6gw | what does "strictly enforced" actually mean on speed limit signs? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/25b6gw/eli5_what_does_strictly_enforced_actually_mean_on/ | {
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"A uk policeman once told me that a ticket is at the discretion of the officer at the time. Generally they would allow a certain amount over the limit without giving you a ticket. In strictly enforced areas, anything over the limit gets a ticket no questions asked."
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psvcp | why do they have to replace some songs in tv shows when they go on netflix. | I was watching one of my favorite TV shows, and I noticed that some of the music in the background was different. Why do they change the music in some of the TV shows that get played on Netflix? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/psvcp/why_do_they_have_to_replace_some_songs_in_tv/ | {
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"text": [
"The tv shows have to pay for the rights for songs to be used. When they release those shows on DVD years later they have to pay for the rights again, which is expensive and a hassle, so they often opt to replace the music instead."
]
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6l82hr | how can scotland yard function without guns, while police in the u.s. rely solely guns? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6l82hr/eli5_how_can_scotland_yard_function_without_guns/ | {
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"I'm getting conflicted responses from Google to the incidence of gun crime and the amount of non-gun and gun-related violence, so I will say this: a huge amount of people in the US own and can own guns legally and illegally. It's a matter of gun prevalence in the population.",
"Because gun ownership is extremely high in the US -- 112.6 guns per 100 people -- and very low in the UK -- 6.6 guns per 100 people. [[source](_URL_0_)]\n\nAlso, because of much more strict gun control regulation in the UK compared to the US, it's likely a greater proportion of those guns that *are* owned by UK citizens are less-easily-concealed hunting rifles, not handguns. \n\nIn short, cops don't need to be able to shoot people when people aren't able to shoot cops. ",
"Scotland Yard is the HQ of the Metropolitan police, the force responsible for policing most of London.\n\nThe metropolitan police do have guns. Not every officer, but they do have armed units which can be called out when necessary, or when needed to patrol high risk areas.\n\nThe average officer doing routine patrols is unlikely to need a gun. Guns are heavily restricted in Great Britain, so it's unlikely they will be facing a criminal with one. And if they do, they can call for backup and get armed units sent in.\n\nOf course you might say that criminals don't follow the law, therefore might have a gun despite them being illegal.\n\nThat's true to some extent, but it's generally hard to get hold of a gun and simply having one is a serious crime. So usually only the most hardened career criminals will have one. And the police are unlikely to run into a situation with them on a routine patrol. If they're doing a planned raid they will bring guns if they think they might need them.\n\nAlso the more petty criminals might not feel the need to have a gun anyway, since they're not expecting police or random civilians to start shooting at them.\n\nBy the way, I've been saying \"guns are illegal\", but that's not strictly true. Handguns are illegal, but some other types of guns such as rifles and shotguns are allowed in some cases, but heavily licenced.",
"Scotland Yard do have guns - specialist armed response units made up of offices with advanced tactical and firearms training. They also have a UK version of SWAT called SFO, Specialist Firearms Officers.\n\nArmed officers in the UK are very, very skilled and have often undergone extremely high level training with special forced units like the SAS. In counter terrorism roles they'll have contact with the security services too.\n\nIf you're in the middle of an armed heist and you face armed cops in the UK it's not going to be beat cops with pistols. It'll be more like taking on a special forces team. Usually that doesn't last very long.",
"Police in the UK *do* have armed units, but mainly they don't need as many guns because the populace is largely unarmed. Furthermore, the populace has been unarmed for a pretty long time, even before the majority of the gun bans, and what few guns they are allowed to have are essentially restricted to rural areas. Finally, given that they're an island nation, it's easy to keep the amount of guns within the population very low, unlike the rest of Europe which has a massive black market for surplus military weapons from the former Yugoslavia and USSR.\n\nMeanwhile in the US, the population is heavily armed, and has essentially always been heavily armed due to a mix of cultural momentum and a genuine need to remain armed. Thus, the police need to be armed in order to do their jobs and protect themselves.",
"Partly it is because things like murder are just that much more rare in the UK compared to the US.\n\nThe countrywide murder rate in the US is 5 times higher than in the UK. ( 4.8 per 100,000 people in the US and only 0.9 in the UK)\n\nLondon itself has a homicide rate of about 1 per 100,000 which is pretty low for a big city. Cities in the US with high crime rates can have a rate as high as 44.6 (Detroit), 45.2 (New Orleans), 51.1 (Baltimore) and 60 (St. Louis). Even relatively peaceful large cities in the US still have a far higher murder rate than London.\n\nSo generally weapons to exert lethal force with are far less needed when the average person you meet on the street is much less likely to be a killer.\n\nThe fact that guns are much less common in the UK even among career criminals, means that as a cop walking or driving the beat the fear of getting shot at is far more diminished.\n\n[Wikipedia](_URL_0_) has a list of British cops who died while on duty and actively trying to prevent a crime or pursue a criminal (excluding those who suffered regular workplace accidents and also during war or in paramilitary situations). It is a surprisingly short list and being shot appears about as often as collapsing dead while trying to run down a suspect on foot. Stabbings are a more serious risk and reportedly stab-prood west are more sought after than bullet proof vests.\n\nIt probably helps that the geography of England makes calling for backup to get professional help an easier thing than in a large and thinly settled country like the US. If shooting needs to be done they can call in those who are actually trained to handle guns rather than do it themselves.\n\nAll those however could be argue are just symptoms. The root cause is perhaps found in the cultural difference. You can broadly separate societies along a spectrum of cultures of honour vs cultures of law. In cultures of law the authorities have a much more firm grip on the monopoly of violence while the societies that focus more on honour over law will have people seeking redress in case of being wronged personally.\n\nCultures of Honour tend to be more violent as a result. This goes on large scales like Europe vs the Americas and inside countries like North vs south in the US, but also in subcultures inside of societies like the inner cities with their gang violence in the US or insufficiently integrated immigrants almost everywhere.\n\nIf you don't trust the police to protect and help you and deal with you fairly, you will seek out you other means of keeping yourself safe.\n\nIn the US people will regularly own guns for the sake of protection while such a thing is mostly illegal in the UK. Gangs don't shoot at each other much in Britain and despite reports of no-go zones there generally are no place where the police won't go at all.\n\nThe people trust the police more in England and thus the police can trust the people more to not be out to violently murder them. Even criminals usually don't see the need to escalate things to levels of violence that would require guns to solve.\n\nWith the average person on the street far less likely to be armed with a gun and in a mood to kill a cop. Cops in Britain are far less concerned with being armed with guns themselves.\n\nIt is a crazy situation from an American perspective but it works.\n\nAlso to the guy who wondered if a five year old would know what Scotland yard is:\n\nWhen I was a kid many, many years ago I knew Scotland Yard as sort of the place where all the inspectors were from in all those crime and mystery stories set in Britain.\n\n\"Inspector X of the Yard\" used to be a very common trope in all sorts of murder mystery stories, so the whole idea of Scotland Yard being where all inspectors are from was something embedded in public consciousness. Most people especially kids probably had misconceptions about what agency and jurisdiction are associated with the building, but it was and to a degree is still very famous.\n\nI even remember a board game named after Scotland Yard that involved hunting a criminal throughout London in cooperative play across a map of public transportation of they city.\n\nI guess the whole thing may have become too much of a cliche and not bee as familiar for modern youths, but it should still be well enough known today especially as the 5 year old of this subreddit is not supposed to be literal one.",
"Solely? US police officers have batons, pepper spray, tasers and rubber bullets.",
"Guns are controlled, but the police do have access to guns for when they are most needed.\n\nTruth be told, America scares me, the thought of everyone packing would just make me mad paranoid.",
"ban guns = less gun crime = no need for regular coppers to carry guns\n\nWe have special armed units in the police should they be required but they are reserved for extreme situations.\n\n\nedit: All these down votes for simply answering the Eli5 question? This is how the UK police force operate. But the US could never pull it off. ",
" > while police in the U.S. rely solely guns?\n\nIt's a common misconception among the public, that US Police *regularly* use their weapon. Only about 27% of police EVER fire their weapon. And among a survey with a small sample, almost 40% reported they were not shooting at a person when they discharged their weapon.",
"U.S. guy here. I don't think U.S. police rely \"solely\" on guns. In the few interactions I have had with U.S. police they didn't shoot me or anybody else.\n",
"I work in an company that advises / sells software to U.K. police forces, a large number of the other staff (not myself) are ex police of some kind.\nA few weeks ago I had a very similar discussion with one of our guys who had been a firearms trained officer (which in it's self is quite a big deal) before leaving the force and joining us, but when policing the street always preferred to be unarmed, especially in situations involving volatile drunk crowds.\n\nThe example he gave was to imagine you are 2 on 1 or 2 on 2 with a couple of drunk blokes who need a stay in the drunk tank. You are going to end up on the floor with these guys to cuff and arrest them, but if you are armed you simply cant. The risk of you firearm being taken off you is too high, so you have to draw your gun instead to try and get them to comply... but they are drunk so they don't. How do you escalate now?\nWhen the run either at you or away from you, does that justify lethal force? No.\n\nWhere as with a baton or even spray, it's non lethal and you can still muck in and risk approaching without the risk of arming the target with your own gun. \nIt's what he described as 'real' policing. ",
"Ok. So I don't understand what type of political rhetoric bullshit you're trying to pull. So I think you need AN eli5 on how US police work. And how guns for them are supposed to be a last resort. \n\nUS cops don't rely solely on guns. \n\nPolice are equipped with the following items. \n\nPepper spray (stingy stuff for eyes) \n\nTasers (sleepy electricity shooters) \n\nBatons (sticks) \n\nAnd handcuffs. (Tight bracelets with locks) \n\nAll of these things are to be used BEFORE you get your gun out. What you see in the movies is false. What you see on the news are bad cops. \n\nThe order of escalation is very important, and a good police force will be firing those that don't follow it and escalate too quickly. \n\n1.) threat identified. Orders given for suspect to get down on the ground and become less threatening. Hands behind hear or back. \n\n2.) suspect doesn't listen. Hand at the ready to indicate more force will be used. \n\n3a) suspect has weapon. A shooty one. Equal force needs to be shown if that weapon is aimed in threatening way and not put down. \n\n3b) suspect has weapon. Non shooty one. Taser at ready to drop suspect fast. \n\n3c) no weapon. But aggressive. Officer can use either pepper spray or taser. \n\n4) situation diffused. Not by death. \n\nCaveat: when entering a threat where the level is not known guns may be drawn so that they are ready for the maximum threat level. \n\nHope that helps understand that TV is make BELIEVE. ",
"Because Scotland Yard gets the concept of protect and serve, unlike the mafia dressed in blue over here"
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bl1uip | how to maneuver a horse? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bl1uip/eli5_how_to_maneuver_a_horse/ | {
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"Horse rope connected to thing in horse mouth. Pull one side of rope, horse go towards pull, pull back, horse stop. Don’t pull too much or horse kick you off."
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5zs75o | can people with only one functioning eye ever suffer from diplopia - (double vision)? | I mean if single-eyed people get drunk, or a head injury, infection or any condition which would normally cause double vision, are they always immune? And if they *aren't* immune, how does that work? Does one eye generate two images? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5zs75o/eli5_can_people_with_only_one_functioning_eye/ | {
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"It is possible to get double vision in a single eye (or in both eyes, separately), but the mechanism is different from the drunk/concussed/floating finger hot dog type.\n\nThe familiar type happens when, for some reason, the view sent to the brain from each eye fails to be combined into a single image. (Caused by intoxication, cranial trauma, crossing your eyes, etc)\n\n\nWhen a double image is seen in a single eye, it's caused by an effect similar to lens flare. Part of the light passing through the eye is reflected forward by a surface of the lens, then back again by the cornea or another part of the lens at a slightly different angle. Generally this is caused by disease or trauma."
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445p0x | how do sound engineers create high quality sounds for use in games? | I mean, like you don't record yourself shooting a gun and call it a day, right? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/445p0x/eli5_how_do_sound_engineers_create_high_quality/ | {
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"You do record real sounds. Or you pay to use a library of recorded sounds. There's a lot of money in constructing those libraries, because naturally not everyone can afford to go out and shoot a bunch of guns. \n\nWhere sound design comes into play is when you design menu and interface sounds, or create things for which there's no real world equivalent like in a Sci fi game. In that case, sound designers use combinations of samples, synthesizers, and effects to get weird noises they think sound good. It's an art, just like creating the graphics. \n\nThe real crazy part comes in when you put the sound in the game to react with the fake world. Walking in and out of rooms or areas changes how the sound will react, as will where the player is in the space. In those cases engineers spend a lot of time doing math to construct models of those spaces and how the player moves to replicate it. It's a bigger deal in VR right now because it's actually more taxing to compute than the graphics. ",
"A lot of professionally used sounds (though very far from all) are just recordings of exactly what they sound like.\n\nOther sounds are recordings of other things, that kind of sound like the thing you want. People who do this are generally referred to as foley artists, after Jack Donovan Foley, who was one of the pioneers in the field. \n\nThe third common way to work is layering sounds. You can often create great sounds by combining several sounds.\n\nThe following video shows Gary Hecker, one of the great modern foley artists, doing sounds for Robin Hood (2012).\n_URL_0_ \n\nSurprisingly little of modern sound effects are digitally created, though digital audio workstations are very useful in many ways, because digital audio manipulation is usually quite easy to detect. \n\nGood sound design is in many ways like good table service. If you do it right, the end user shouldn't even notice it.\n",
"It depends heavily on the type of game being made, and the preferences of the lead design team. \nGames like Battlefield, ARMA etc which strive for \"close-realism\" in a lot of aspects actually exaggerate almost all of the sounds they use. All of the gun shots, explosions and tank rounds have a low-frequency 'boom' added about 25ms after the initial attack, and a very high frequency noise (in the regions of 10-15kHz; usually something like a snapshot of a balloon popping or a speaker clicking) around 5ms prior to the initial attack, which add a grandiose Hollywood-esque quality to the overall sound. \nMuch more engaging and exciting than the dull 'pops' and 'crackles' of actual gunfire. \nThe sound effects (specifially gore-related) used in the Dead Space games were often layers upon layers of things like carrots and celery sticks snapping to mimic bone breaks, and watermelons or tomatoes being thrown at walls or stomped on to mimic flesh being torn/squished. Much more dramatic and \"atmosphere faithful\" than what actual bone breaks sound like. \nAfter all of that comes weeks of post-processing and layering. Copious amounts of EQ to enhance characteristic frequencies or remove anything undesirable. \nIf you compare most modern AAA titles for their sounds the overarching quality in each sound is \"bass-heavy and bright\", which gives both impact and clarity without \"dullness\". \n\nEDIT: Everyone else posted links, so here's another interesting watch for big budget sound design.\n_URL_0_"
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49tdtl | why does pain "pulse"? what causes an injury or headache (for example) to throb? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/49tdtl/eli5_why_does_pain_pulse_what_causes_an_injury_or/ | {
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"I don't know if there's been any further scientific findings, but I read an article recently about scientists discovering that it isn't your blood pumping, which was the previously thought cause of pulsing. It never said what caused the problem, just that this new information opened up the possibility of new studies.",
"Not a biologist, but a mathematician here, I have modeled neurons in the past. Neurons are coupled to their neighbors, so they tend to slip into synchrony, like two pendula (see below video). When many of these are coupled, the system doesn't totally synchronize (there are always a few pendula that are oddballs, out of sync), it slips into and out of synchrony in waves. I am guessing the throbs of pain are due to your nervous system slipping in and out of high states of synchrony.\n\nFunny enough, mathematical models of neurons are just fancy nonlinear pendula models anyway...\n\n_URL_0_",
"We don't know. Perception is a tricky thing to study, and while neuroscience has made a lot of progress, particularly in the visual system, there's a ton we don't know about why we perceive things the way we do. Pain is a hot field of research.\n\nUnfortunately, almost every other answer is taking real scientific ideas and musing about them past the point of the point of science\n\n > There have been recent studies that link the \"pulsing\" of pain to brain wave activity, more specifically, to alpha waves. Alpha waves are broadcast at between 8 and 13Hz, or between 8 and 13 cycles per second\n\nApart from the point already mentioned that alpha waves are much too fast for the slow pulsing of pain (a < 1 Hz rhythm), the meaning of brain waves are poorly understood. Sure, alpha waves correlate with pain, but all brain waves are large scale measurements which may or may not have anything to actually do with information processing and may just be a side effect of the underlying dynamics. There's no reason to believe we should \"feel\" any sort of oscillatory activity in the brain.\n\n > I have modeled neurons in the past. Neurons are coupled to their neighbors, so they tend to slip into synchrony, like two pendula (see below video). When many of these are coupled, the system doesn't totally synchronize (there are always a few pendula that are oddballs, out of sync), it slips into and out of synchrony in waves. I am guessing the throbs of pain are due to your nervous system slipping in and out of high states of synchrony.\n\nThis could be a mechanism by which a low frequency oscillation similar to the frequency of throbbing pain could be generated, but I don't know of biological evidence that this occurs in pain.\n\n > Pain is caused by your nervous system. Your nervous system works on electrical energy, all energy moves in waves, you experiences these waves as pulses.\n\nNerves do fire pulses, but they're extremely short. An action potential - the pulse you're referring to - is akin to switching a light on for a milisecond and then turning it back off for a lot longer. These are impulses, not the slowly ebbing and flowing waves of pain.\n\n > Your heart beating.... You'll notice the throbbing in your head or a wound coincides with the beating of your heart\n\nOld theory which seems mostly discredited. (edit: [source](_URL_0_))\n\nSource: I study neural oscillations. It's good to always be skeptical of your own field!\n\nEDIT: Just realized this was in ELI5, not askscience, so my frustration at the speculations in all the other answers has subsided a bit. But it's still worth recognizing when we simply don't have a concrete answer, and not to over-interpret science!\n\nANOTHER EDIT: Thanks for the gold, stranger! And now that this is the top post, I should probably actually, y'know, explain like one is 5.\n\n*shurgs* It's probably not your heartbeat. No one knows if it's brain waves. Perception is a very hard thing to study and pain is a surprisingly complicated sensation. But there's probably a neat answer that will give us insight into how pain perception works, which will probably help us create better treatments for chronic pain, one of the biggest causes of suffering in developed countries. So become a neuroscientist and do some awesome research!",
"Medical student here. Mostly it's because of swelling and then you feel the pain that correlates with your pulse. If you break a bone in your hand or arm, it starts to swell and you will feel a pulsating pain. If you raise up your hand for a while so that the blood rushes down to the body, the pulsating mostly subsides. True story. ",
"There are different types of fibres that comprise the axons of nociceptors (pain sensory neurons). Axons can be wrapped with myelin - a fatty white substance - that insulates the neuron and increases the speed of a nerve impulse to the spinal cord. The radius of the axon also determines the speed of the nerve impulse; smaller axons have a slower conduction velocity. A-delta fibres are large and myelinated, and the faster conduction velocity (20 m/s) produces a sharp, intense and fast pain sensation. C fibres, however, are small and unmyelinated, and their conduction velocity is much slower (2 m/s), producing dull, slow, throbbing pain. ",
"Quick and short, you have two types of nerve fibers that transmit pain: A-delta fibers, which are myelinated and send quick pulses in acute pain incidents. And the others are C fibers, which are unmyelinated and send slow impulses to the brain, therefore the feeling of pulsation.",
"Injury to your body or an increase in exercise causes an increase in heart rate and blood pressure. Your body is attempting to supply nutrients and oxygen to the body tissues that require it most at the time. The throbbing sensation is most likely caused by this increase in blood pressure and heart rate. ",
"Because you have a pulse.... Literally.\n\nIf the pain is anywhere that has blood flowing through it, and there's inflamed tissue nearby, then the already swollen tissue that is putting pressure on the nerves, is going to be pulsating as well. \nThe majority of my headaches are either vascular (swollen sinuses) or tension (swollen muscles), so I have to deal with this often...",
"not too sure about all of the pain \"pulsing\" but in the headache its mainly due to vasodilation where the vessels are actually larger. I'm pretty sure this means you get more blood flow through them so things like pulse might be more noticeable or something. You can usually treat it with vasoconstictors (like caffeine) so this has to be at least part of it ",
"I thought the pulsing is due to heart beats. Inflamed areas will have blood pulsing through it. ",
"Probably will get buried but the McGill Pain Questionaire has been developed for quite some time and uses descriptors to help give a clinician an indication of the type of injury that has occurred. Throbbing, pounding, pulsing pain is usually indicative of a vascular origin.\n_URL_0_"
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7g4wf3 | economic and monetary union of the european union. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7g4wf3/eli5_economic_and_monetary_union_of_the_european/ | {
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"For economic purposes, the EU acts like a single country. All of its member states, prior to joining the union, used to issue their own currency and have their own import/export tariffs and trade regulations. Now they almost all use the same currency, the Euro, which is described as a monetary union; Britain never agreed to the monetary union and therefore it has continued to use its own currency, the pound sterling (and it is also expected to soon be leaving the EU). The member states of the EU also have no trade barriers between each other, and have just one set of rules regarding imports into and exports out of the EU, which is economic union.\n\nEssentially, the EU adopted the successful model of the US. Even though the US consists of 50 states, they all use the same currency, the US dollar, and they do not create any trade barriers between one state and another. This is one of the reasons for the economic success that the US has enjoyed for the past two and a half centuries. Complicated currency exchanges and tariffs would have clogged inter-state commerce quite severely.",
"You are misusing the term Economic Union, which is alright because it is complicated and the real way to describe it takes several times longer. Second the reality isn't neat so even if you were using the right terms it would still be convoluted.\n\nThe EU has 3 main areas where member nations agree on economic policy:\n\n1. Freedom of Movement: An EU member passport is all you need to go to any member nation so workers can freely flow across national boarders if they wish.\n2. Customs union: This enables the free trade by standardizing regulations so you don't have to worry that your car is okay in Germany but not the UK. The regulations are the same so if it is good in one you can be sure it is good in the other.\n3. Currency Union: Better known as the Eurozone it standardizes the currency across participating regions so you can take the same bill and spend it in Lisbon, Berlin, Athens or Riga.\n\nThe EU doesn't have a unified fiscal policy so this cause problems (Greece) as do some other weird quirks to it."
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abm92q | do electric vehicles have alternators? | I know on a gas powered vehicle, it has an alternator to keep the battery charged. Do electric vehicles have any type of alternator that makes the charge last longer? If not, would it be possible to increase the distance an electric vehicle can travel with some type of alternator? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/abm92q/eli5_do_electric_vehicles_have_alternators/ | {
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"Many electric cars have what is called regenerative breaking where when the wheels spin without having power sent to them it directs the power to the battery and recharges it (if you take a DC motor and hook up a crank to it and start to spin the crank you will induce a current in the wire)\n\n\nEdit: phone autocorrected from regenerative braking to regressive breaking (when attempting to correct it it kept trying to correct it back)... So fixed the mistake. ",
"Alternators put a load on the engine to charge the battery, turning the mechanical energy into electrical energy. \n\nIn an electric car electrical energy is used to make mechanical energy, the electricity is already right where you want it. It would be a waste of power to put an extra load on the motor to charge the battery less than it takes to power an alternator.",
"Not exactly, and no. An electric vehicle can have something which acts briefly like an alternator when it uses regenerative braking, using the momentum of the vehicle to turn a generator and make electricity while slowing the vehicle as desired. But there isn't any reason to have such a device for normal operation of the vehicle's electrical needs when you have a battery driving it anyway.\n\nThe idea of using an alternator to make the charge last longer is fundamentally flawed because the car would need to drive the alternator itself. Think about if you are running and trying to pull yourself along faster by grabbing your own shirt and pulling forward. It doesn't work that way.",
"Instead of an alternator, they'll typically have a converter. A lot of the subsystems of a given car (radio, cabin lights, in-cabin indicators) are manufactured to run on 12V DC power, whereas the actual drive train on an EV will run on very high voltage DC or AC power. Generally, once the electrical energy is 12V, it will remain in the 12V system and never really be converted back to the higher voltage range of the pack, with any excess being stored in a 12V battery in the same way as ICE vehicles.\n\n > If not, would it be possible to increase the distance an electric vehicle can travel with some type of alternator?\n\nNot really. The only real \"regenerative\" range extension available on electric vehicles is through brake regeneration, whereby the brakes convert the kinetic energy of the vehicle into electrical energy to store in the main battery pack.",
"Power is not free. An electric motor to turn a generator to create more electricity would be a net loss of power. A gas motor powering an alternator(generator) would be a hybrid vehicle. This works because of the efficiency of generating electricity over gasoline. Gas to electric to electric motor to tire is more efficient than gas to tire.\n\nSystems like regenerative braking do add more drive time, but as you can see by the resulting slow down, that energy comes at a cost, a lot of drag on the vehicle. They are very good at slowing a vehicle down, harnessing electricity from the energy of forward momentum that would usually be lost in the form of heat in the brakes. ",
"My Chevy volt, though it has a gasoline range extender, does not have an alternator, instead it used a DC-DC buck converter to step the battery 360v down to a usable 12v (for locks and windows and what not)"
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ct2csy | what tricks are used to get the sense of scale and vastness in open world games. | I have played my share of open world games and recently started Assassins creed Odyssey which got me thinking.
How can they make a world so vast when travelling on foot and yet, in comparison, so “small“ when travelling on horse or ship. While standing in the middle a village it feels huge but standing on a overlooking mountaintop its only a football field in size.
Overlooking the highest point, the whole world is within eyesight but also seems extremely vast. That city in on the horizon looks miles away yet travelling as the crow flies its “only” 500meters away.
What trickery are they using to get this sense of perspective and scaling. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ct2csy/eli5_what_tricks_are_used_to_get_the_sense_of/ | {
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"I think mostly with detail and mobility.\n\nLike as a person we don't get a nice 3rd person view which is much higher than a normal view. In a city you get to see more at once. Also we can't exactly climb buildings in an instant for a better vantage point. And your character can run everywhere he wants at unreasonable human endurance levels.\n\nWith long distances your character can also cover large amounts of territory at unreasonable speeds. And you usually don't get to ride a horse or a boat instantly without prepwork or getting stuck in traffic. So technically everything is probably to a real life scale, but by ignoring all the mundane stuff like vehicle maintenance and endurance you get to cover a lot more to scale distance than you normally would.",
"Atmospheric perspective plays a big part in this. As you move further away from an object, light is diffused by the air, making the colour of objects appear less saturated and lighter. [Like this](_URL_0_). \n\nOpen world games tend to crank up the atmospheric perspective to amounts higher than you'd see in the real world. This makes distant landmarks like mountains appear to be much further away than they really are.\n\nLevel design is also important. Open world games typically restrict you from walking in a straight line for too long. You have to navigate around obstacles which makes the distance seem greater than it really is.",
"Video games very often employ non-Euclidean geometry (geometry that does not follow what we would consider \"normal\" rules about distance and volume). When you transition from outside a building to inside of it, very often the game will actually remove the \"outside world\" and insert the \"inside world\". So a house that is only a few cubic meters on the outside can house hundreds of cubic meters on the inside, because it is not bound by the laws of real space.\n\nEspecially in open world games, the game is constantly swapping out bits of the world, so while various modeling tricks can make that castle look miles off in the distance, it can easily be swapped out to a much closer distance without the player ever noticing.",
"I made a few popular Garry's Mod sandbox maps, which usually stretch out the limits of the Source Engine when it comes to size.\n\nWe use a few tricks to making the map feel bigger and optimizing the details too.\nTo make the map feel bigger, we use what is called a 3d skybox, which is a miniature model of the distant geometey you see (think of it like a movie set, only looking good in certain angles, like inside the playing area), that the engine tells it to amplify it 16x to the exact coordenates.\nFor models we use LOD (Level of Detail), where high poly models will be replaced by lower poly models the further you are from it. \n\nHope it was useful!"
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1ri7jy | why are most organizations that are considered to be terrorists islamic? | I was looking at the [list of designated terrorist organizations](_URL_0_) on Wikipedia today and found myself wondering why so many are based around Islam. Please try to be as objective as possible. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ri7jy/eli5why_are_most_organizations_that_are/ | {
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"The list is incomplete and looking at the contributors it is pretty easy to see why it skews so heavily Islamic post 9/11. [Here](_URL_1_) is a blogpost that talks to some of the reasons behind how the list become so skewed. [This article](_URL_2_) should give some picture of groups not listed in the article. Note the source and that the number is likely exaggerated, but also remember [the guy that flew a plane into the IRS](_URL_0_)? If he was Islamic do you think it would have been labeled a terror attack? I cannot say this guy was influenced by one of those right wing groups, but chances are their rhetoric was something he heard.\n\nI'm not saying there is no problem. I am saying there were lots of people with an agenda to push to create the right PR to enable the Iraq War. A lot of those people do believe that Islamists are a threat and their views are the mainstream ones. They are not the only views."
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"http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/us/19crash.html?_r=0",
"http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/05/muslims-only-carried-out-2-5-percent-of-terrorist-attacks-on-u-s-soil-between-1970-and-2012.html",
"http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/mar/04/us-surge-rightwing-extremist-groups"
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64c9ia | why does it hurt when you bite your nail too close too the pink part? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/64c9ia/eli5_why_does_it_hurt_when_you_bite_your_nail_too/ | {
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"There are nerve endings in the pink part.",
"Underneath the nail is living tissue, the *nail bed*. This tissue exists to support & hold the nail to the finger, and there's blood vessels, nerves, and collagen in there that doesn't want to be damaged. Deeper down at the base of the nail is the *nail matrix* which is the part that grows the nail itself, and deeper injuries can damage this as well."
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dd2o02 | why does hitting the remote control when it doesn't work suddenly make it work? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dd2o02/eli5_why_does_hitting_the_remote_control_when_it/ | {
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"A lot of times the remote doesn't work because a speck of dirt, dust, or corrosion gets between the battery and the connector, robbing the remote of power. Hitting the remote, or popping open the battery compartment and spinning the batteries within the compartment, often jars the dirt loose, restoring power to the remote's electronics."
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691h14 | why are dumas' three musketeers almost always depicted not carrying any musket? | I never understood that. Almost every single piece of art I see depicting them shows them as three fencers, not three musketeers. I've never gotten around to reading the novel, so I have no plot context if that explains it any. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/691h14/eli5why_are_dumas_three_musketeers_almost_always/ | {
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"During the time the story is set, muskets were really only used as weapons against other people on the battlefield. They were heavy, took a long time to load, and wouldn't have been very practical to carry around in a non-war context.\n\nDuring most of the story, the Three Musketeers aren't fighting in a pitched battle as part of war. As a result, most of the time they would be armed with swords and maybe a pistol. When they do fight in a battle as part of a larger war at the siege of La Rochelle they do use muskets. Sword fights are also seen as more romantic and exciting, so that probably also plays into it.",
"They did, at least at first. Originally Musketeers were a lower rank of soldier, armed with muskets (hence the name). At some point, a new group of royal bodyguards was drafted and named \"Musketeers\" as not to conflict with the existing royal bodyguards at the time.\n\nAs soldiers they would still be trained and equipped with a variety of weapons but, as body guards (rather than front-line soldiers) they would value their skill with a rapier: not as clumsy as a musket; an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.",
"THE French word mousquetaire originally referred to an infantryman with a musket. Over time, the word changed its meaning, lost the connection with the weapon, and referred to a much grander person. A mousquetaire was a gentleman in one of the two companies of the royal household cavalry in pre-revolutionary France. The companies were distinguished by the colour of the horses they rode - either grey or black. Thus there were mousquetaires gris and mousquetaires noirs. Cavalry have no use for clumsy muskets, which are difficult to reload at the best of times. The problem we have is an over-literal translation of the French which loses the context.\n\n-*Derek Roberts, Mitcham, Surrey.*",
"I've read the novel and its sequels. Very good, if you don't mind the rambly 19th century style they're written in. If you liked the Count of Monte Cristo, you'll like them.\n\nAt any rate, as others have said, muskets were at the time weapons of war. In the book, while they are soldiers and would be expected to use muskets on the battlefield, they're Musketeers of the Guard, which is a very prestigious unit. This, along with varying degrees of noble blood, makes them gentlemen. The books aren't about their battlefield exploits, but about their adventures and intrigues in civilian life, and in civilian life the weapon of choice was the sword and not the gun. So, in the books they almost never use muskets. Thus, in art they also almost never use muskets."
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583jom | why does the fire effects in games always seem to look so fake and out of place even though the graphics of a game might be stunning? | Is the process of making fire in a game graphics too difficult and power demanding? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/583jom/eli5why_does_the_fire_effects_in_games_always/ | {
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"Yea, you need too much power to dynamically generate fire. Same deal for volumetric clouds.\n\nTo make fire that looks good to the human eye you'd need to simulate the flow and temperature of hot gas around the burning object in real time. To make things worse, fire generates its own light and you have to figure out how that light shines through other flames and interacts with the environment. That light also depends on what it is that's burning. Different fuels will result in different flames.\n\nYou could probably do all that at a low resolution for a small fire. (See [here](_URL_0_) for a paper with a fire rendering method) but it would suck up so much resources that the game would be nearly unplayable when there are multiple/big fires. So most devs just create a few animations of fire and then loop them. Or they just do it with particles. It looks really fake, but it's the only way to realistically do things if you want fire in your game.",
"Former game developer here,\n\nHonestly it's not worth the effort, it won't look good anyway. We're just going to use something close enough, something representative of fire. And that's OK, because video games, as stunning as they are, look absolutely nothing like reality - that's not the point and isn't even all that desirable. Also, rendering something as fast as a flame comes with some problems...\n\nLet's talk about pool for a moment. It's actually a very hard game to make. Not only because of the physics involved, but because of the rendering. When two balls collide, you *have to render* that moment of impact, even though the physics and the timestep says the collision happened and the balls have already moved some distance *between* two frames. Time is a crucial component of rendering - people are sensitive to inconsistencies in time. So either you render the scene as it is in step with time, and people miss that visual cue that the balls collided, or you render that moment and now time moves weird.\n\nFire has the same problem, it's fast, too fast. It changes faster than the refresh rate of your screen, and your brain can tell. The most realistic pre-renders of fire still have a lot of fakeness to it just so it can be correctly perceived without triggering the Uncanny Valley. A lot of effort goes into opacity and color of the flame, but the flicker, forget it for now."
]
} | []
| []
| [
[
"http://www.cs.utah.edu/~vpegorar/research/2006_EGWNP/paper.pdf"
],
[]
]
|
|
2iwntx | is there a reason why it seems as though police departments don't fire but rather just suspend officers for bad conduct? | Is is just to protect their image? It doesn't seem like keeping officers that abuse their roles would in anyway help their image.
| explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2iwntx/eli5_is_there_a_reason_why_it_seems_as_though/ | {
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"* serious punishment can be seen as an admission of wrongdoing, which can open the police department up to liability\n* public sector unions make it notoriously difficult for anyone to get fired for anything",
"It's pretty common that, if an officer has been accused of misconduct, they'll either be reassigned or suspended with pay. The justification I've heard for this is that, similar to a defendant in a criminal case, officers are presumed innocent until proven guilty. To suspend them without pay or fire them before the investigation is complete shows a presumption of guilt. On the other hand, if no action is taken against them at all, you knowingly have someone who might be a dangerous criminal walking around with a government-issued badge and gun.",
"The officer is first suspended with pay while an investigation is conducted. If the officer is found to have committed whatever he/she was suspended for, then the money they were paid during their time of suspension must be paid back, and they will be fired."
]
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5mdfbo | how is it possible that steel has a scent? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5mdfbo/eli5_how_is_it_possible_that_steel_has_a_scent/ | {
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"Some metals produce volatile compounds when binding with oils from the human body, such as when they are handled. These can produce a taste or smell (the familiar taste of pennies for instance) even if the metal itself does not have much of either on its own.",
"If I'm not mistaken, the smell of most metals is caused by things on its surface reacting with it. For instance, oils on skin + copper gives the \"penny smell\" (and taste, too!)."
]
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| []
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[],
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||
3v37k2 | if mark zuckerberg is giving away 99% of his shares, how can he still be the controlling stockholder of facebook? | Mark Zuckerberg announced that he and his wife are giving away their shares in Facebook (totalling 99%) of it but Facebook Facebook said he is expected to be the controlling stockholder of the company. How is that possible? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3v37k2/eli5if_mark_zuckerberg_is_giving_away_99_of_his/ | {
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"He is transferring the shares to a charitable organization called the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative that he will control. Although he will probably sell off some shares to fund the charity, he's still going to keep most of them for the time being to maintain control of Facebook.",
"He stipulated over time. That means that he can give some out every now and then or he can do a big dump when he goes to retire. \n\n\nEdit for clarity because I can't English that late. ",
"In addition to what others voted it's probably possible for him to turn them into non voting stock when he donates them. That way the charity would still be getting dividends and own the value of the stock but could not use it to influence the company."
]
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| []
| [
[],
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|
19qkts | why people dislike hugo chavez and the impact his death will have on venezuela. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/19qkts/eli5_why_people_dislike_hugo_chavez_and_the/ | {
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"He is an avowed Socialist, with an intense dislike for America. His close ties to Cuba, especially Fidel Castro, make him very problematic to the Cuban lobby and the Republican Party. Also, his nationalization of the many sectors of the economy, i.e. the oil industry, caused losses to many International countries.",
"I gave a bit of an explanation regarding possible consequences in [another thread](_URL_0_)."
]
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[],
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"http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/19qkxn/eli5_what_does_hugo_chavezs_mean_for_venezuela/"
]
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|
||
3pbbyc | what is mental illness? | What is the line between excentric and a clinical diagnosis of mental illness? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3pbbyc/eli5what_is_mental_illness/ | {
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"text": [
"A mental illness, at least in the US, has to meet a set of very specific criteria set forth in the [Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders](_URL_0_). It must be diagnosed by a licensed professional.\n\nThe difference between someone who has a mental illness and someone who is \"eccentric\", is that the eccentric has not been professionally diagnosed based on DSM V criteria. They may well be suffering from a mental illness, but until they seek professional diagnosis they will be unable to start treatment for one. ",
"In order for something to be classified as a mental disorder in the DSM (the diagnostic manual used by Psychologists and Psychiatrists in North America and some other regions), there basically has to be a significant impairment with respect to the individual's ability to function in everyday life or there must be some level of chronic psychological distress/suffering.\n\nFor example, under the latest DSM it is not considered a mental disorder to identify with the opposite gender (e.g. if you identify as a woman but genetically and anatomically you are a male). What is considered a disorder is Gender Dysphoria -- that's basically when you suffer mentally because you are very unhappy with the fact that your body's appearance / anatomical sex does not fit with your gender identity and as a result you experience significant distress and impairments in social, occupational, and other areas of functioning.\n\nSo to answer you question, any sort of behavioral (or thought) pattern that is maladaptive and causes some level of psychological distress or suffering and/or in some way impairs basic functioning in life (e.g. makes it difficult to form social relationships), will normally result in a diagnostic classification been created to categorize that type of behavior/throught pattern as a Mental Disorder. \n\nDrug companies develop drugs that alter brain chemistry in various different ways (e.g. by manipulating level/concentration of certain neurochemicals) and physicians/psychiatrists know the function of each of these neurochemicals and how the drugs affect them, so they can then prescribe appropriate medication in response to different types of mental disorders based on the symptoms."
]
} | []
| []
| [
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSM-5"
],
[]
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|
|
2wnyrx | why did light skin pigment humans evolve and live in the colder climates, while the humans with darker pigments were in the warmer? | I've always wondered this, or if it even matters, due to the whole "don't wear dark colors in the summer it's hotter" thing with clothes.
But if it does matter, why did this happen? Wouldn't it be more beneficial to have lighter skin in places like the Sahara, while it would be better to have darker skin in the frozen tundra of say, Russia?
Or am I just thinking too hard about this? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2wnyrx/eli5_why_did_light_skin_pigment_humans_evolve_and/ | {
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"text": [
"Cold northern lands get less sunlight.\n\nHumans need sunlight to make vitamin D.\n\nPale skin is better at producing Vitamin D than dark skin.",
"Light skin burns but is better at absorbing vitamins. Dark skin doesn't burn but is not as efficient, though it doesn't need to be due to excess supply.",
"It's now thought by many paleoanthropologists that the first northerners were, in fact, dark skinned. They were hunters and got all the Vitamin D they needed from the meat they ate. \n\nIt was the second wave, the farmers, that made paler skin advantageous. ",
"No, you have things backwards as to skin color. Skin is the color it is not to retain heat but to absorb like to make vitamin D, and to protect the body from the suns rays. The closer to the equator you get the easier it is to absorb enough sunlight to make vitamin D and the more you have to protect the body. Thus you get darker skin that is better at blocking the sun's rays. For those farther away from the equator you have to let more of the sun's rays in to make vitamin D so they developed less protection, aka lighter skin. \n\n",
"The chemical which gives skin its colouration in humans is melanin.\n\nMelanin absorbs UV light.\n\nThis means that darker skinned peoples' skin absorbs more UV light, rather than letting it pass into their bodies.\n\nUV light is responsible for the genetic damage which triggers skin cancer.\n\nThus, more melanin in the skin means you can be exposed to more sunlight before you get skin cancer, which is why it's advantageous for people in areas with more sunlight - near the equator - to have dark skin.\n\nNow, humans also rely on UV light to spur production of vitamin D. Vitamin D cannot be produced without sunlight.\n\nSince melanin absorbs the UV radiation, it also reduces the efficiency of vitamin D production. In areas with less sunlight - northern climates away from the equator - it's advantageous to have light skin as this promotes greater vitamin D production.\n\nSkin colour is a balancing act between these two forces pulling in the opposite direction; skin cancer vs. production of essential vitamin D."
]
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abm4n2 | why would anyone do a cash advance if they have a credit card? | I understand that there's payday loans, and I get that it's for when you need money right now, but with a credit card I fail to see why anyone would want to do a cash advance when they could just pay for stuff with the credit card, even the utilities and rent in most cases. Why would I take out a cash advance if you can get better rates on the credit card should you not be able to pay the full balance immediately, and when you don't get fees with cash advances? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/abm4n2/eli5_why_would_anyone_do_a_cash_advance_if_they/ | {
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"Cash Advance targets (helps) people with poor credit. You are correct the middle class and up don't use it.",
"Well presumably you'd do it because you need money somewhere that doesn't accept credit, and you're willing to pay the fees to do so. I can definitely see it being useful for some people in emergencies, 3am on a sunday and you need your car fixed in some remote town by someone who won't do credit. Better rates isn't exactly something you care about, you need $1k cash in 5 minutes to sleep tonight. You pay the fees and hopefully pay the card off later that week. This is reasonable if you decided to put much of your emergency account funds into stocks and such, it takes a full week to access which is generally ok, but if you need cash in minutes you have to rely on credit, and if they don't take credit it's going to have to be cash advance. I think that situation is rare that it happens, and it really shouldn't if you manage your money well, but I won't say it's something that never happens. Banks of course want the fees so it's available even if it's never a good idea for you.\n\nAnd second, when banks do a 0% balance transfer promo, what they really do is give you 0% cash advance, if you're good with handling your money, you can do what those in /r/churning do and cash advance into a high rate CD, you'll make money that way.",
"Can’t buy drugs with credit cards, well I’m sure nowadays there’s a few out there who figured out how but generally speaking if someone is looking for specifically cash it’s drug related. ",
" > Rent\n > Most cases\n\nNot anywhere outside a large city you can't. It's cash check or money order then. Plus this makes no sense but there are actually businesses out there who still don't do CC transactions, sometimes it's from just not investing in the infrastructure needed and other times it's a beef against processing fees. So someone might opt to cash advance if they don't have the funds.",
"It's because they don't have credit cards. Never heard of anyone with good credit using payday loans.\n\nMy mom used to take out loans all the time. We were dead broke growing up and she had poor credit and no credit cards."
]
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4eac6s | why can the us not just create a system in which everyone gets their vote heard, and the we skip the delegate part? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4eac6s/eli5_why_can_the_us_not_just_create_a_system_in/ | {
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"It's for political parties, to stop some wacky situation where people try and hijack a party. Like to keep some dumb thing where a bunch of conservatives secretly register as democrats then all vote to get some anti-abortion guy or whatever. It makes the people who people already voted in get a chance to say \"come on now, that isn't right\" and vote for stuff in line with party policy. ",
"primary elections are a party decision. candidate selection used to be closed off decisions decided by party insiders, they've opened up the process and have given the public a voice in the selection process, but still want to maintain some control of who's going to run on their ticket. \n\nas far as the electoral college is concerned, there is less of a need for that, but its written into the constitution, and changing the constitution is kind of a bitch. ",
"\nThe political parties are private groups that can make their own rules. The candidates participating in the primaries willingly chose to be bound by those rules. \n\nSo to answer your question, no, the US (meaning the government) can't create a different system, because the system you're talking about isn't a public one, but rather two private systems. \n ",
"The simple reason is that it would take power away from the less populated states. The system is setup to reduce the power of the larger states and increase the power of the smaller states.\n\nIt's debatable whether or not this is appropriate anymore. Regardless, the smaller state politicians will never relinquish their state's power without a fight.",
"If you are referring to the Electoral College, they created it for a reason: It's a last check against the people electing a dictator or a monarchist. The Founding Fathers were not convinced in the merits of direct democracy, which is why the only federal positions directly elected by the people in the original constitution were members of the House of Representatives."
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