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12eqqm | Can all of chemistry be explained/modeled by physics? | So since chemistry is the study of how different substances react to each other, and since a chemical reaction is just the making and breaking of chemical bonds, it seems like chemistry could ultimately be modeled by simple physical reactions. But is that true? And if it is, are we at the point where we can make physics-based models of chemical reactions? | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/12eqqm/can_all_of_chemistry_be_explainedmodeled_by/ | {
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"sort of yes, you can solve the [Schrödinger equation](_URL_0_)\n\nbut of more relevance is the XKCD article on [purity](_URL_1_) ",
"Yes, that's true. All theoretical chemistry is based off physics, and has been since around the 1920's. Virtually all the models and descriptions and 'rules' you learn in chemistry have rigorous physical justifications, even if chemists themselves don't necessarily know about them. \n\nThe first description of chemical bonding in terms of quantum mechanics (the first description that can be considered reasonably correct, physically) was Heitler and London's 1927 paper _\"Wechselwirkung neutraler Atome und homöopolare Bindung nach der Quantenmechanik\"_, which is quite early considering that the Schrödinger equation of quantum mechanics had only been 'invented' in the previous year. By the late 1930's, Pauling, Slater, Mulliken and Hund had finished up the broad strokes of Valence-Bond theory and Molecular-Orbital theory, the two main qualitative models of chemical bonding that chemists use. \n\nBy 1929, Paul Dirac wrote that \"The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known\", which has pretty much been generally-agreed-upon since.\n\nBut since the equations of quantum mechanics are quite difficult to solve (even with a computer), it's been slow progress to actually calculate _quantitatively_ accurate results from quantum mechanics. We're limited in the size of the things we can calculate, and the accuracy. \n\nBut essentially all chemical modeling is based on physics.\n"
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"http://xkcd.com/435/"
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344uqr | In Ancient Rome, did Gladiators pick on Scholars and call them a Roman equivalent of 'nerds'? | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/344uqr/in_ancient_rome_did_gladiators_pick_on_scholars/ | {
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"No, for most of the empire the nerds held the political power.\n\nSuccess in Roman politics depended upon education and connections. You had to know the right people, and you met them while attending elite schools that trained you in the rhetorical skills, philosophical knowledge, and deportment necessary to move in elite circles in the Greco-Roman world. This education - *paideia*, in Greek - started with memorization of Homer (or Vergil) and, if completed, was basically a graduate degree in literature and/or philosophy. It required significant expense and years of training to complete. But without it, it was hard to be taken seriously by the ruling elites.\n\nBy the third century, the army was playing a central role in selecting the emperor (in many cases, by deposing the sitting emperor), and it was possible for an uneducated military general to make his way to the top. But these new men struggled to win acceptance from the established senatorial aristocracy, and usually didn't live long before being assassinated and replaced. Education gave you connections and taught you how to get along with the rich and powerful; without it, it was difficult to maintain a powerful position in the heartland of the empire.\n\nOver time, this created something of a cultural divide between educated urban elites and the military families which rose to prominence on the empire's frontiers. Philip von Rummel has argued that many of the fifth-century texts complaining about 'barbarians' are actually talking about these Roman military men who gained power in the army on the frontiers, and whose lack of education earned them harsh criticism from the old, wealthy elites in Rome and other urban centers of power.\n\nIt was only with the division of the western empire into smaller kingdoms ruled by these military generals (in the fifth century) that the 'nerds' finally lost power to the less educated military strongmen.\n\nIf you want to read more, I'd recommend P. Brown, *Power and Persuasion* - a short and well-written book on the importance of education in Roman politics and power."
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2bcnna | Do dogs know our faces or do they use our scent to differentiate between us? | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2bcnna/do_dogs_know_our_faces_or_do_they_use_our_scent/ | {
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"They know our faces. An easy way to check this is go outside with your windows closed and when your dog goes to the windows, look to see if he notices you.\n\nIf you want a more science-y answer, my *guess*: dogs were able to be domesticated since they were able to succesfully socialize (in their own way) with humans. A big part of socialization is facial recognition (which is why kids with autism--wherein they lack facial recognition--tend to lack social skills because they cannot pick up on many facial cues) and so I'm guessing it was more advantageous that the dogs that could respond better to their human handlers were the ones most likely to thrive.\n\nOr it could be most animals notice faces, I don't know, get a zoologist in here.",
"Disclaimer: My research is at the undergraduate level, and has to do with materials science and crystallography, and I had like, two biology and two biochem classes, so this is very, very, very much not my field at all.\n\n[Discrimination of human and dog faces and inversion responses in domestic dogs (Canis familiaris).](_URL_0_)\n\n\n[Reading Faces: Differential Lateral Gaze Bias in Processing Canine and Human Facial Expressions in Dogs and 4-Year-Old Children](_URL_1_)\n\n\n[Dogs’ attention towards humans depends on their relationship, not only on social familiarity](_URL_2_)\n\n\n\nYou should be able to take a look at the abstracts from those links without institutional affiliation/log in, but in sum; dogs not only recognize human's faces, but they use this information to learn about the emotions and situation responses of humans, and the importance they give to that depends on their relationship to the human in question. \n\nThey know who were are (or can learn that), what our deal is, and know whether they should care or not and how much.\n\n\n\nAgain: not an animal behavioral scientist or biologist with lots of comparative/mammalian evolutionary training, *but*; this doesn't sound unreasonable or unexpected to me. \n\n\n\nDogs are variously thought to have originated as a clearly domesticated species somewhere between 15 to 30 thousand years in our past. \n\nFor comparison, the genes for blue eyed individuals probably came about in the Neolithic revolution - - - *six* to *ten* thousand years ago.\n\n[There's a reasonably large body of evidence](_URL_3_) elucidating how our genomes evolved together as well.\n\nSo, that they would as domesticated social animals evolving along side humans be capable of being part of our society insofar as they can recognize faces and look where we're pointing and know when we're feeling sad or very angry or happy, etc. seems about right! \n\n\n",
"Two tests, easy to do: \n\n1.) (As /u/Ghost_Ghoul_Guy said) close them into the house. Have a stranger walk up. They'll lose their minds. Then you walk up. They'll wag their tail. They'll be recognizing you by your face. \n\n2.) But what if it's just body posture/gait they recognize? Buy a scary halloween mask. Put it on. (In the case of my dogs, they can even watch me put it on and apparently I simply disappear and am replaced by the alien). Watch your dogs literally pee themselves. In this case they have all the visual clues (body shape/gait/smell) but they'll still lose their recognition of you. I have a video of us doing this... \"experiment\" with our dogs. You've never seen a dog so sure it was going to die so quickly. She just gave up and started screaming. No barking, no growling, just screaming.",
"The NOVA television episode [Dogs Decoded](_URL_0_) explores this issue partially and shows that dogs read human faces in much the same manner that humans do. (not available to stream on the pbs site but it is on on netflix)"
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l6787 | the difference between a url, urn, and uri | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/l6787/eli5_the_difference_between_a_url_urn_and_uri/ | {
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"The simplest explanation starts by categorizing: The first thing you should know is that an URL or a URN are **both** URIs.\n\nAn [**URI** (Uniform Resource Identifier)](_URL_3_), is a way to identify some type of resource on the Internet, they are handled by browsers and other network capable applications.\n\nSo the two types are the [**URL** (Uniform Resource Locator)](_URL_2_) which is the one you come across everywhere on the Internet.\nIt's divided into:\n\n scheme://domain:port/path?query_string#fragment_id\n\nYou can see these parts explanation on the wikipedia link above. But you should recognize the format already...\n\nAnd the [**URN** (Uniform Resource Name)](_URL_0_) which is a way to link to a particular item in a category. The examples seen on wikipedia you might recognize are the [ISBN](_URL_4_) (books) and [ISAN](_URL_1_) (audiovisuals).\n\nI actually haven't seen these being used, which is a damn shame because they intended to be location independent. But what we usually see are the same ISBNs or ISANs identifier keys used as parts of the query string in URLs to some online retailer...\n\nHope that's clear enough kid :)",
"The simplest explanation starts by categorizing: The first thing you should know is that an URL or a URN are **both** URIs.\n\nAn [**URI** (Uniform Resource Identifier)](_URL_3_), is a way to identify some type of resource on the Internet, they are handled by browsers and other network capable applications.\n\nSo the two types are the [**URL** (Uniform Resource Locator)](_URL_2_) which is the one you come across everywhere on the Internet.\nIt's divided into:\n\n scheme://domain:port/path?query_string#fragment_id\n\nYou can see these parts explanation on the wikipedia link above. But you should recognize the format already...\n\nAnd the [**URN** (Uniform Resource Name)](_URL_0_) which is a way to link to a particular item in a category. The examples seen on wikipedia you might recognize are the [ISBN](_URL_4_) (books) and [ISAN](_URL_1_) (audiovisuals).\n\nI actually haven't seen these being used, which is a damn shame because they intended to be location independent. But what we usually see are the same ISBNs or ISANs identifier keys used as parts of the query string in URLs to some online retailer...\n\nHope that's clear enough kid :)"
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"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISAN",
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3ocn90 | What DID "Game of Thrones" get right? | AskHistorians | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ocn90/what_did_game_of_thrones_get_right/ | {
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"Game of Thrones is a work of fiction and should be treated as such. If you have a question about the historical accuracy of *historical fiction* (e.g. 'How accurate is the Sharpe series of books?' 'How accurate is Stanley Kubrick's portrayal of 18th century Ireland in 'Barry Lyndon'?') you are more than welcome to ask. :)"
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mpmh1 | credit default swaps | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/mpmh1/eli5_credit_default_swaps/ | {
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"So ShittyBank offers loans to people buying homes (mortgages.) The bank writes you a mortgage, buys your home for you and lets you live there as long as you make monthly payments to pay off the loan. ShittyBank does this hundreds of thousands of times all over the country.\n\nNow ShittyBank turns around and says \"hey, we've got all these mortgages providing a stream of income. Anyone wanna buy a piece of them? If you buy a piece of them, you'll get a portion of all the payments made on them for the next 30-45 years.\" The bank is selling \"collateralized debt obligations\" or CDOs--huge bundles of active mortgages, organized into tiers according to the creditworthiness of the person paying off the mortgage. You buy a CDO, and you get a piece of the payments for every mortgage contained in that CDO.\n\nThe problem is, ShittyBank now has to pay anyone who purchased its CDOs, even if the people holding the original mortgages fail to pay. The bank doesn't want to be left holding the bag if a bunch of people decide to stop paying their mortgages.\n\nSo the bank decides to get some insurance. It goes to an insurance company--let's say, AIG. AIG says \"pay us a little fee, and if your mortgage borrowers default on their loans, we'll step in and keep paying out to those who bought CDOs with those loans in them.\" This is a *credit default swap.* \n\nMake sense?",
"This American Life has a couple of fantastic programs on this very topic. I highly suggest you seek them out if you're interested in learning more about the financial meltdown.",
"So ShittyBank offers loans to people buying homes (mortgages.) The bank writes you a mortgage, buys your home for you and lets you live there as long as you make monthly payments to pay off the loan. ShittyBank does this hundreds of thousands of times all over the country.\n\nNow ShittyBank turns around and says \"hey, we've got all these mortgages providing a stream of income. Anyone wanna buy a piece of them? If you buy a piece of them, you'll get a portion of all the payments made on them for the next 30-45 years.\" The bank is selling \"collateralized debt obligations\" or CDOs--huge bundles of active mortgages, organized into tiers according to the creditworthiness of the person paying off the mortgage. You buy a CDO, and you get a piece of the payments for every mortgage contained in that CDO.\n\nThe problem is, ShittyBank now has to pay anyone who purchased its CDOs, even if the people holding the original mortgages fail to pay. The bank doesn't want to be left holding the bag if a bunch of people decide to stop paying their mortgages.\n\nSo the bank decides to get some insurance. It goes to an insurance company--let's say, AIG. AIG says \"pay us a little fee, and if your mortgage borrowers default on their loans, we'll step in and keep paying out to those who bought CDOs with those loans in them.\" This is a *credit default swap.* \n\nMake sense?",
"This American Life has a couple of fantastic programs on this very topic. I highly suggest you seek them out if you're interested in learning more about the financial meltdown."
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1r0prc | Were there major tensions between the different Jewish groups that came to Israel? | After the state of Israel was formed, and Jews came in from the Middle East, Europe, & elsewhere, how well did these groups come together to create the nation-state?
Were there tensions between groups like Persian jews, Syrian Jews, German Jews, Russian Jews, etc.?
Did any group feel outright discriminated against, exploited, or otherwise lacking a seat at the table? | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1r0prc/were_there_major_tensions_between_the_different/ | {
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"Yes, from what I gather after talking to my Hebrew teacher and my Grandfather there was a lot of tension (and there still is) between European Jews how see Israel as a European State in the Mid-east and the Jews from the Levant, North Africa and Persia who see Israel as a modern Middle Eastern state. It comes out in little petty ways like the European Jew would use Arabic curse words because it was a \"dirty\" language and because Hebrew has Curse words (for the record it does) and for the longest time the Israeli currency was named after the old Italian currency. In addition there were groups in Israel who were not happy about the Ethiopian Jews moving to Israel and some groups did not see them as real Jews. ",
"Yes, and there still are such tensions today, very much so.\n\nThe European Ashkenazi Jews are generally the dominant group, somewhat sharing this with European Sephardi Jews. Indeed the sound of modern spoken Hebrew is mostly based on the Yiddish of the Ashkenazi of Eastern and Central Europe.\n\nThe Jews who came from the former Soviet Union since the 90's have formed their own community. I've heard a \"western\" Israeli tell that they are perceived not to be Jews at all, only saying they were to get citizenship. No doubt many Middle Eastern Jews are accused of the same thing.\n\nEducation is a prime battleground of this culture war. Many top schools are Ashkenazi, and in some cases flat out refuse to admit Middle-Eastern students. Rabbi Yosef, the leader of the main Sephardi party, Shas, said some years ago that Sephardi should not go to Ashkenazi schools, which would only turn them Ashkenazi!\n\n_URL_0_"
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5j2iot | what factors contribute to cultures advancing at different rates? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5j2iot/eli5_what_factors_contribute_to_cultures/ | {
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"Cultures advance for two reasons, because they have to and because they can.\n\nCultures have to advance when they are facing a threat. Common threats include another nation attacking you, a new disease, or localized climate change.\n\nCultures can advance when they can spend time doing thing other than just surviving. This is usually caused by access to food that allows for less farmers to feed more people.\n\nSome cultures advance faster than others because they have the right combination of outside threats, and the ability to not be destroyed by those outside threats.\n\nIf you are interested in digging a little deeper, check out [CGP Gray's Americapox](_URL_0_). If you want to go even deeper than that, check out [Jared Diamond's *Guns, Germs, and Steel](_URL_1_)",
"If we are talking about culture in the sense of human civilizations, I highly recommend that you check out *Guns, Germs and Steel* by Jared Diamond. \n\nBy and large the most important factor contributing to differing rates of advancement is geography. For example, although agrarian societies arose in both Eurasia and the Americas, Eurasian civilizations have an early advantage because crops native to Eurasia (barley, wheat, etc) are easier to cultivate and provide more nutrition than their American counterparts (bananas, maize, etc). Consequently, Eurasian societies required less manpower to feed a given population, which allowed for increased specialization (where people took up professions other than farming due to surplus food).\n\nAnother example of geography affecting the development of civilizations is the Western hegemony on the world stage during the last 500 years. The Asian societies (particularly China) enjoyed geographical features that are conducive to the formation of large, stable empires more or less immune to external influence. On the other hand, Europe's natural barriers led to the formation of competing nation states. This forced European countries to innovate while causing technological stagnation among among Asian states. \n\nObviously this is a very big topic so not everything can be answered at once. But give the book a read, it's worth it!"
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"http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1842.Guns_Germs_and_Steel"
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3i0rt4 | How come the Iberia in the caucuses and the Iberian peninsula share the same name in spite of being thousands of miles apart at opposite ends of the Roman empire? | I never took Latin and Google is being uncharacteristicly unhelpful. Does ibera mean something to the efect of limit or furthest point? | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3i0rt4/how_come_the_iberia_in_the_caucuses_and_the/ | {
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"I submitted [this question](_URL_1_) awhile ago and only got one reply. You can check it out while you are waiting for a better reply, as I would like one as well. \n\nAs a summary it was said it is unclear if there is a link between them, but the [etymology site](_URL_0_) linked in the reply gives some origins of the word.",
"Follow up question: I often see other names refer to different areas, such as Albania (modern Albania, and Caucasian Albania) and Galicia (Easter Europe and Iberian), Is there a reason to name those areas with similar names?",
"The Iberian peninsula was named by the Greeks for the Ebro river (Iberos): confusingly they also named the other Iberia, but that is thought to derive from its name in local Georgian-related languages. (And what about the two Georgias?) \n\nAlbania in the Balkans is named in the west for the Albanoi people who inhabited the region in Roman times: locals today call it Shqiperia, so they can't be blamed. The other Albania appears a total mystery, presumably another Greek rendition of a local name, now no longer known. \n\nGalicia in Spain is named for the ancient Gallaeci, cousins to the Gauls (who I'd thought were the source of the name); Galicia in Ukraine/Poland is named after the city of Halich, which may be named after Gauls. "
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dm23vn | why do scientists think hubble constant (a characteristic of the universe expansion rate) is actually a constant? | There is already a [partial answer](_URL_0_) to this question; it explains that the expansion rate can be considered a constant at this time (the time human civilization exists). But why do scientists think the acceleration is the same across the universe? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dm23vn/eli5_why_do_scientists_think_hubble_constant_a/ | {
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"When you look farther away you also look back in time, so when you detect light that has been travelling for 10 billion years from a distant quasar you're also detecting the results of whatever happened to it during that time.\n\nThe amount of redshift (energy loss due to the expansion of space while it was in flight) we see in these ancient photons suggests that the rate of local expansion was the same at all times and at all places while the light was traveling.\n\nIf the expansion *wasn't* constant over time or location, you would see light unexpectedly under/over shifted compared to its age and point of origin.",
"The simple answer to this is that scientists do not think the Hubble constant is actually a constant. Even Hubble himself did not think it was a constant value but for the sake of his argumentation he simplified it to a constant factor for his calculations to make them fit at a moment in time. The previous theory was that the universe was constant and did not expand or contract. However Hubble were able to chart the movement of distant galaxies on a chart which gave him a constant rate of expansion. This is the constant he observed at this point in time and in this part of the universe. However we now know that the Hubble parameter changes but for most cases it is close to the Hubble constant."
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3skm9d | how was nyc able to build and afford their entire subway system over the past 100+ years, but the 2nd ave line keeps running into budget issues and delays? | I've tried to do research on the subject, but I can't figure out the financing and the timing of it all. There have been hundreds of miles of tracks and tunnels and hundreds of stations built over the past 100+ years, but the Second Ave. line has been moving at a snail's pace. Why? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3skm9d/eli5_how_was_nyc_able_to_build_and_afford_their/ | {
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"I would say the construction costs have soared. Wages are high for construction workers compared to the past. An immigrant was willing to work for low wages. Now there are unions, OSHA, overtime rules, etc. "
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4nae14 | Fiction makes such a big deal of British, US and Soviet spies. In the end, how important were they really in ending (or surviving) the Cold War? | Were secret agents and espionage in any way the decisive margin for who won the Cold War? | AskHistorians | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4nae14/fiction_makes_such_a_big_deal_of_british_us_and/ | {
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"No replies yet so I'll try to offer something.\n\nThere is a lot of uncertainty when exploring what-if scenarios. You can't be sure what may have happened without the efforts of the spies involved. The best example I can give of spies potentially contributing to the peaceful resolution of the Cold War might be the Soviet spies in the Manhattan Project. This may seem counter intuitive, but I'll try to make the case.\n\nCombined, Klaus Fuchs, Theodore Hall, and David Greenglass provided Soviet intelligence with a wealth of valuable information from the Manhattan Project, which likely sped up the Soviet development of nuclear weapons significantly (although by how long is hard to say).\n\nThe foundations of the cold war were in place even before WWII had ended, but it was the period from 1946-1949 that really cemented the standoff and lead American policy makers to give up on cooperative engagement. Also during this time the US had a monopoly on nuclear weapons. Despite this, the US did not yet have a large enough nuclear arsenal to be confident that it would be decisive in a war with the Soviet Union. It would not be long though before the US had amassed a huge arsenal. However, when the Soviet Union successfully tested its first atomic bomb in 1949, the US nuclear monopoly ended, as did any real risk of the US using its nuclear weapons to push the Soviets back.\n\nAlthough the two great powers came very close to the brink of Armageddon a few times, mutually assured destruction effectively made nukes useless in practice, and the stability of mutually assured destruction lasted throughout the remainder of the Cold War. The success of the Soviet spy efforts around the Manhattan Project brought that stability about faster, and there is no telling what could have happened in an alternative history where the US nuclear monopoly lasted another year or two.\n\nOf course, while the Soviet Union's shiny new nukes kept both powers at arm's length, by restraining the US nuclear threat, it also opened the door for conventional warfare. It wasn't long after that North Korea, with the blessing of Stalin, invaded the South."
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22vlna | how do marketers get so much data on me? | I recently bought a house, and not even a month later, I've been getting all this junk mail marketed toward people who are moving (I haven't moved yet). For example, yesterday I got a mailer for setting up Comcast at my new place, and I don't even currently have Comcast. How does this system work so quickly? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22vlna/eli5_how_do_marketers_get_so_much_data_on_me/ | {
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"They check the listings in the county tax assessors office, which lists dates of sales, as well as amounts and names. It's also more than possible that the realtor sold your data.",
"It's a result of \"big data\" analytics and marketers' increasing ability to gather and process information about you based on a variety of inputs, public info about real estate transactions being only one of them. Other inputs include your web browsing history, your shopping patterns, etc. Here's a decent overview of how marketers use big data and the debates surrounding it: _URL_0_\n\n(Sorry for not just embedding link - am posting this from my phone and not sure how to do that in Alien Blue yet.)"
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3q5r5v | how do mom porcupines and hedgehogs give birth without the babies' spines causing any harm to the mother's insides? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3q5r5v/eli5how_do_mom_porcupines_and_hedgehogs_give/ | {
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"I'm not a porcupine expert, but my guess, is they the baby's quills are still soft/not fully hardened, and the babies are probably pushed out head-first, so that the quills lay down. ",
"A porcupine's quills are hair, not stiff rods. When they give birth, the quills are soft and wet. That is also why the quills can be replaced constantly.",
"The real question is how do they have sex? I'm guessing missionary "
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alqf14 | How excentric is the solar system's orbit around the gravitational center of the milky way? | askscience | https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/alqf14/how_excentric_is_the_solar_systems_orbit_around/ | {
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"The words you are looking for are apogalacticon and perigalaticon.\n\n \n\n\nThe eccentricity of the sun's orbit about Sagittarius A\\\\\\*, (the center of the Milky Way galaxy) is 1.07, which leads to a difference of about 15% between apo- and peri- galacticon. This leads to the two points being about 27,0000 and 31,0000 light years away from the center point."
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z0l8l | the oil business | Why are people who are involved with oil usually so filthy rich? Often I hear about these magnates in the Middle-East who make more money in a week than in the entire life of the average Joe. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/z0l8l/eli5_the_oil_business/ | {
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"Let's say you have a lemonade stand. You charge a thousand dollars per lemonade, and since it's really hot, you make a million dollars a day.\n\nWell, obviously, that can't last. Someone else will open up a lemonade stand and try to take your business away by only charging $750. Pretty soon there are so many lemonade stands that lemonade is selling for $1 and nobody makes crazy money anymore.\n\nBut that's because anyone can make lemonade.\n\nIf lemonade were only found in certain spots in the ground, and you owned a lemonade well and nobody else did, you could keep selling lemonade at $1000 per cup and nobody could undercut you because they wouldn't have access to the well.\n\nThat's how oil works; once you've found it, it's no work at all to pump and sell it (as BP showed us in the gulf, the stuff pumps itself). And you can sell it for a high price because, while other people might be happy to sell oil much cheaper, they can't because they don't own the wells. ",
"Oil costs very little to find, produce, and refine per barrel. The profit from a single barrel of oil is about 8%. The catch is that people consume very many billions of barrels per year. \n\nLI5: You buy lemonade for $.10 per cup and sell it at $.11 per cup. It's nice that you now make $.01 per cup right? Now imagine that you sell to 6 billion people and you can make 100 billion cups every year. You're filthy rich! You now make $10,000 per year. Oil is the same. When you find it, you find millions of barrels all at once and you can sell each one for $10 more than it cost to get it out of the ground. ",
"Those magnates you speak of are, in the main, royalty. \n\nThey are paid vast sums of money by companies who drill for oil on their land. Those countries sell oil taken from underneath their land to the very big companies (the companies must be big because there is only so much oil and the cost of getting to it and making it right for cars and shipping it to where we **need** to buy it etc. are so big that it only makes sense for a few companies to be in the business and they can make money from it by being very big) who can only buy oil from a few places. \n\nNot only that but these magnates have formed a 'cartel' called The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries or 'OPEC' that contains the world's biggest oil producing countries that they are the kings (often 'sheikhs' in Arabic) or leaders of. That means that they have grouped together and decided to tell the rest of the world how much they want to charge them to buy their oil. That way, the group makes a healthy amount of profit and doesn't have to fight within itself to sell oil cheaply and win business- they win big bucks this way if they work together.\n\nAnother thing is that we need oil. Our cars run on it, we use plastic a lot and that's made from oil, our food is driven to us from factories and farms using oil-consuming vehicles and so on and so forth. \nThat means that pretty much no matter how much we are charged for oil, we must pay because we use it so much and there aren't that many alternatives that are so widely available and used.",
"I'm liking the lemonade stand analogy, but there's another step that has led to the explosion and price movement of oil:\n\nYou've got a lemonade powder company, let's name it \"Saudi Arabia\". You call up all of your friends who also have lemonade powder companies, and form a club. In this club, you all determine how much you're going to sell. You can choose the number based on the temperature outside, how many people are in line for lemonade right now, or a number that you think will allow you to charge a lot of money for your powder. There are a bunch of other lemonade powder companies who aren't part of your club, but your club is large enough that you can have a major effect on the amount of lemonade people can buy. Still, you have almost no control over price, which is set by a bunch of people in New York. They buy and sell cups of lemonade based on what they think lemonade will cost in the future, frequently leading to large swings in the price of lemonade. They may blame the swings on a neighborhood bully's threat to close all the lemonade stands on his block, but in the end they are mainly changing the price in the hope that they can buy your lemonade powder for a low price and sell it for a high one. You may not always like their prices, but there isn't much you can do because your lemonade powder needs to be sent to someone else to be turned into actual lemonade to be sold."
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a5tamj | why is it that bands/singers can have wildly successful careers sometimes spanning decades, dozens of albums, and countless recorded tracks, yet only have those 3 or 4 songs that really get any airplay/recognition? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a5tamj/eli5_why_is_it_that_bandssingers_can_have_wildly/ | {
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"Short answer, program managers are lazy. It's easy to stick with the 'classics'. It's safe. \n\nAlso if a band is around long enough they may not fit the style of the station with their new/old stuff. Classic rock stations are going to play the hell out of 60/70 era Rolling Stones, but wont touch anything they have released in the last 2 decades as it diesnt fit their format. "
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4b8yzm | how does bracing yourself for an impact actually make the impact worse? | You know, like if you dont see something coming like that car about to slam into you, you'll be generally less harmed than if you see it coming and you brace yourself. Why is this?
Edit: thank you all for the replies! I think I can say this had been answered :) you guys rock | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4b8yzm/eli5_how_does_bracing_yourself_for_an_impact/ | {
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"Because your muscles tense up and become rigid and have no \"give\" at that point. If you don't know it's coming, you will be loose and more flexible which would help with NOT further jarring the flexed muscle.",
"It's all about pressure. My favorite example for this is explosions. Explosions send out a shockwave in several different levels: air being forced outward, sound being forced outward, and of course the thermal release itself. If a being is rigid like, say, a dry board of wood, the force of the blast will usually shatter the board. But compare that to a live tree which has give and bend from the liquids flowing through it will sway through the hit and take it better. \n\n\nSimilarly a human eardrum is a tense piece of flesh; it has to be to work as intended. But hit it with enough force...pop. They don't show the bleeding eardrums in the action movies. \n\nAnyway, muscles are designed to tense up when struck to protect your internal organs. It hurts less to be punched when they are tensed as opposed to slack. However something like a car hits with so much kinetic energy your tense muscles work against you, putting all the strain on your skeleton, which is hard but is rather brittle. Your organs will fare better, but the bones guarding them will be damaged.",
"If you jump off of a high place ans brace yourself- aka tense certain muscles (leg muscles in this instance)- when you land the impact will be taken harder by that certain part of your body (legs). The part that was 'braced' will take the most damage and will likely shatter as a result of the impact.\n\nThe correct thing to do, jumping from a high place, is land on your feet and immediately relax those muscles, to the point of falling. You'll still get hurt, but you're less likely to break anything or cause serious damage.",
"It's all about time of impact and force. If you allow for more time of impact, it reduces the force because of physics. Jump off a table. If you bend your knees a lot, it reduces the force a lot and it won't hurt a bit. Now jump off the same table but keep your knees locked. It will hurt you quite a bit, depending on the height of the table."
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4kg52l | Is there a speed a cell phone can go to not receive wifi or cell signal anymore? | If I am moving at near the speed of will I still get lte? | askscience | https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4kg52l/is_there_a_speed_a_cell_phone_can_go_to_not/ | {
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"The frequency bands for both Wi-Fi and LTE are both reasonably narrow, so you will hit a point where the waves for the node you are trying to connect to are red or blue shifted to the point where your device will not be able to communicate on them\n\nA long time before you get to that point, you will not be in range of the access point long enough for your device to negotiate a network connection",
"I can't speak for other technologies, but LTE was designed to support mobility at speeds up to 500 km/h, depending on the frequency band. It was also designed to accommodate cells as large as 100 km radius, meaning at 500 km/h you'd hop to a new site at least every 24 minutes (200 km). This is, of course, assuming perfect conditions (flat terrain, minimal trees, very tall sites, etc).",
"Cellphone signals are time multiplexed as well, you share the frequency with hundreds and as you move and shift time delay, the reciever has to move you in the 'rota', not sure on the limits of that, older phones used to have a half bit rate switch deep in the menus that allowed the phone to double its maxdistance from the tower because too long adelay dropped you off the cycle.",
"This might be a bit too anecdotal for this sub but I heard a lecture by one of the inventors of Bluetooth regarding this issue. He said that the gsm network handled something like 250 km/h. Just after it rolled out Swedish (his home country) high speed trains were cleared for 260 km/h leading to constant dropped calls until 3G was adopted that apparently handled high speed better.",
"Not really an answear but handling moving phones is one of the most important parts in gsm, 3g and lte. Its actual more about the level of change of the multipath fading (that is the amount of change of all the echos you get from your transmission from and to the basestation). I believe that wifi probably sucks at this, because its not designed for fast moving (relative to the wifi-router) clients.",
"Disclaimer: All information in this comment is in regard to older technologies and may not apply to how it is handled *today*.\n\nAbout radio communication in general: Definitely.\n\nPlanes used AM for communication rather FM because the flight speed causes the frequencies to shift due to the Doppler effect. For AM it doesn't matter much, but for FM it would completely distort the signal and make it unusable.\n\nAs for cellular communications, you also have the idea of cell handovers, i.e moving from one cell to another. In the cities, you can have cells every couple hundred meters compared to up to 40km in rural areas. Each one of these handovers requires a non-trivial procedure of cell selection and transfer. If you move very quickly, the network will need to transfer you several times which might eventually cause a disconnection. Luckily, there are algorithms for reduction of transfers in these areas.",
"To answer the physics part of the question: you can never \"out-run\" the signal, because light always travels at the speed of light regardless of reference frame (and radio waves are still light). However, if you're traveling fast enough, you will red shift or blue shift the signal to a different frequency, which your cell phone antenna will no longer be able to pick up, and so you will lose signal.\n\nHowever, more practical engineering constraints (such as being able to lock to a given tower) will likely kick in long before you attain sufficient (relativistic) speeds for this more physics-based relativistic doppler shift effect would drop your call.",
"There's an interesting related story involving the Cassini space mission which almost caused the Huygens probe (the one that landed on Titan) to lose its radio connection and all its data.\n\n[Here's the fully story](_URL_0_), but to summarize engineers forgot to install code to handle the fact the Huygens probe and Cassini mothership would be moving very fast relative to each other, which would change the radio frequency enough to prevent communication.\n\nThey almost didn't catch this mistake, except an engineer insisted on running a full Doppler test, which revealed the flaw.\n\nThey weren't able to fix the probes to handle Doppler shift, so instead they had to change Cassini's orbit so when the probe Huygens probe reached Titan it would be traveling sideways (relatively), which would change the Doppler shift to something the probes could still manage.",
"Just to add to this, say if I have a local LTE access point or even WiFi access point on my space ship and my spaceship is travelling at the speed of light my cell phone still won't work ? Am i correct in this ? And that i'd had a infinite ping time too ?"
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1jotbw | Is there any point during Operation Barbarossa that Axis victory over the USSR was obtainable? | I have read arguments that say due to vast manpower/industrial gap between Germany and Russia, their invasion was doomed to fail from the start. This seems to contradict the commonly held idea that Stalingrad was a miracle/saving grace for the Soviet Union. | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1jotbw/is_there_any_point_during_operation_barbarossa/ | {
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"Not really, no. The only way the Germans could have scored a victory was to have Russia negotiate for peace after taking Moscow, which the Soviet regime had little intention of doing as it was a fight for the very survival of the Russian nation and Stalin did not want to appear so weak abroad. There was still a massive heavily populated country after Moscow, and the Germans would have had to move further and further East and taken cities like Omsk, Yekaterinburg, Ulfa, Kazan, Novosibirsk, and so on. Given that their supply lines were already at the breaking point before they reached Moscow, this was not an achievable objective, especially with American involvement in the war right around the corner. The entire thing was a fools errand.",
"It isn't really about any one point but rather the German/Nazi attitude regarding the Soviet Union. Specifically, Hitler along with many senior officials and officers believed that the USSR was fundamentally weak, both militarily and politically. They they believed the USSR could be defeated in a short campaign, after which all resistance would crumble (not unlike what happened in France). The second part of that was the Nazi reluctance to ask the German people for necessary sacrifices. Women weren't really pressed into the labor force to the same extent that they were in the USSR and other countries. Factories often remained idle for a large chunk of the day. In short, Germany didn't mobilize the full resources of the state because they didn't believe that a \"total war\" was necessary. It was almost as if they started a war with one hand behind their back. \n\nThe Soviets, on the other hand, had the complete opposite approach. They mobilized every resource they had, both manpower and industry, and made a \"total war\" pretty much their goal. Thus, as the casualties of war took their toll, German units were often starved of reinforcements, equipment, fuel and so on. The Soviets, on the other hand, formed hundreds of new divisions to replace those they lost. Eventually the German attitude changed, but by then it was already too late. \n\nTL:DR, I think the biggest mistake that the Germans made wasn't a military one but one of their attitude - their underestimation of the USSR, its potential, and its determination to win. "
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3az64q | Do animals actually understand each other's calls like humans understand speech? | I know they can understand each other, but do animals interpret each other's calls as intricately as humans can with our speech using words and such? | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3az64q/do_animals_actually_understand_each_others_calls/ | {
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"Like humans? Yes, maybe. We think dolphins actually have a complex language with syntax. There is evidence that they even each have individual names that they get from their mother's name. But we haven't made much headway in learning their language if it's there. \n \nOther animals certainly recognize conspecific calls. Song birds find mates using their songs, so wouldn't be very successful at reproducing if they didn't recognize each other. Other animals have other forms of complex communication. Vervet monkeys have predator calls that identify the type of predator they see. There is a call for 'eagle' that will tell all of the other monkeys to look up and maybe duck, a call for 'leopard' will let the group know that they should run into a tree, and the call for 'snake' tells everyone to look down. Other monkeys have similarly different calls for different predators. Most animal mothers will also recognize their own offspring calls and distinguish them from the other young in the group. \n \nWhales will recognize each other's calls from far off. Because whale songs travel in water they can be heard up to 3,000 kms. from the source. One whale, called the 52 Hz whale, has for decades been singing in a vocal range that's too high-pitched and is undetectable by other whales, so this lonesome whale cannot elicit a response from other whales. \n \n"
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tcviz | Is there any credence to the marketing claim that a better
bed provides a "better night's sleep"? | If I improve my bed, am I likely to sleep better? What is 'better'?
Obviously, forget outliers like upgrading from a bed whose springs wake me up every hour. | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/tcviz/is_there_any_credence_to_the_marketing_claim_that/ | {
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"I think you partly answered your own question with the \"springs\" comment. Better just means that you are able to experience enough deep sleep at night. Things that are uncomfortable, painful, noisy, etc rouse you from this deep sleep. Since there are distinct stages of sleep, you spend more time getting back into deep sleep and less actually experiencing it."
]
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5m1gf6 | how does the u.s. government owe money to itself? | I can't quite grasp this based on stuff I am finding through Google. I am not savvy with economics. Thanks in advance.
Edit: Thanks to everyone for your responses. I need to study up on bond markets apparently. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5m1gf6/eli5_how_does_the_us_government_owe_money_to/ | {
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"Governments borrow money by issuing bonds, which are simply agreements to pay back the money, along with a modest amount of interest, by a particular date (the bond's maturity date). Try googling \"How do government issued bonds work?\" or similar.",
"The Federal Government \"borrows\" money from the people by issuing Federal Bonds and printing more cash, which devalues whatever money you have in your pocket.\n\n\nHypothetical situation. 2017 budget rolls around, we have a $1 trillion deficit. The Fed issues $1 trillion in bonds and prints that much in cash. If there's $100 trillion dollars in circulation, printing that $1T just devalued your dollar by 1%. \n\nThis is a result of the official abolishment of the gold standard in 1971\n\n",
"The US government may have a fund set up to hold money and disburse it later for a specific purpose (for example, the social security fund). \n\nNow, the government could just keep that money in a bank, earning no interest. But that would be stupid because inflation would cause the fund to lose its value (the price of everything else will go up to keep up with inflation but your dollar figure in the bank stays the same, so when you draw on fund years later, you will end up buying less of the goods than you could have years before). \n\nSo the government has a choice on how to invest that money. With the financial world considering US government bonds to be essentially risk-free, and the interest on those bonds can in general keep up with inflation, the people running that specific fund will invest the money in US government bonds. Now the US government owes money (through its bonds) to itself (its own fund).\n\nThe government is likely avoiding other investment strategies (stocks, corporate bonds, etc) because they could be perceived as too risky. For example, imagine if the social security fund was invested in large bank stocks or even real estate in 2008 when the market tumbled. The person who made that investment decision, and his overseers (ultimately Congress/President) would face lots of political scrutiny, to put it mildly, for the losses incurred. Granted the stock market rebounded, but at the time, people would be very angry at the losses mounting in the social security fund. They would see it as the government taxing them and then just losing the money. It's too politically risky.\n\nIn the end, the government doesn't \"raid\" the social security fund. The fund managers are making a choice to buy government bonds.",
"I'll try to make it more simple than the other correct answer. \n\nThe US government is a set of different departments, each with their revenues and expenses. \n\nSome departments, like the Social Security Administration have more revenues than expenses today, but anticipate the trend to reverse itself soon, so they save their surpluses. They often do this by buying US Treasuries through the bond market.\n\nThink of government debt as any other asset, be it a gold coin or a stock in Apple."
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u8abm | the sufi sect of islam. | I understand they're sort of similar to Christian/Catholic monks, and have a history of nomadism, but that's about it. What caused the Nomadism? What key points do they differ on from the Sunni and Shiite? Have they ever been on the wrong end of a religious purge, similar to the other branches? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/u8abm/eli5_the_sufi_sect_of_islam/ | {
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"I won't be able to go into much detail on account of illiteracy, but just for starters:\n\nSufiism is not as much a 'sect' of Islam as a way of thinking. It is kind of an 'approach' to how to treat the philosophies of your sect (be it sunni or shia or whatever). That said, it is very distinct and 'almost' a sect because it differs in some basic aspects and is very prominent in those differences.\n\nThe main point of Sunniism is the idea that nearness to Allah is not restricted to the traditional activity-reward cycle of other sects. Sunniism attaches a very philosophical and non-physical domension, wherein sufis can be closer to Allah and can be 'at one' with Allah's universe and his creations by relishing the spiritual world and shunning the physical world.\n\nThe primary realization of a sufi is of the Oneness of Allah, which causes him to understand the falseness or temporary-ness of everything else, including himself. Thus, as a result, there is no one and nothing, except the Divine.\n\nThey are not like monks, as in they don't live in secluded groups, but instead it is a lonely journey for whcih they might or might not be physically aloof, but mentally should be.\n\nI'm not aware of any Nomadic rituals or religious requirements of sufis. There was a mass exodus of such people from Turkey, Egypt and Iran in the first half of the 20th century due to these countries banning Sufiism outright (Turkey formally, Iran & Egypt informally). The sufis then, naturally, gravitated towards the Arabian peninsula and Middle East, but were ostracized by the strict 2+2=4 ideas of Wahabism and further moved on. They largely reside now in Africa and the Indian subcontinent.\n\n"
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1s0kal | Is the common cold or flu transmissible through contact with the infected person's blood? | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1s0kal/is_the_common_cold_or_flu_transmissible_through/ | {
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"Think this came up in one of my lectures the other week; I believe it would be *possible* but unlikely since the virus only replicates in certain cells (in the case of influenza in the cells of the upper respiratory tract, particularly the nose), and is therefore only present in large quantities at those locations. It is possible that virus particle(s) could end up in the circulatory system, but the chances of enough of them coming into contact with another person's blood, and then that blood reaching their nose without the viruses being mopped up somewhere along the line is pretty low. "
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6zdvpc | how/why does our brain mishear lyrics? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6zdvpc/eli5_howwhy_does_our_brain_mishear_lyrics/ | {
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"Because rappers need to demonstrate better diction!\n\nDammnit, i love hip hop but if i hear another rapper garble nonsense into my headphones im gonna lose it.",
"Being a plastic organ, the brain is adaptative and predictive, as proven [here](_URL_0_).\n\nAs such, when information is scarce and/or not complete, the brain will try to complete it using past experience. Regarding music and mishearing, those two factors contribute (1. Brain completes incomplete info + 2. Uses past experience).\n\nThe first time you hear a song, if the lyrics are unclear (which can be the case quite often) your brain will try to replace misunderstood words with a known word of similar pronouciation. From then on, this will be the word you will most often hear. Knowing the correct words corrects that problem."
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a2c6dx | what is *first run syndication*, how does it work, and how is it different from standard *broadcast syndication* | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a2c6dx/eli5_what_is_first_run_syndication_how_does_it/ | {
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"A first-run syndication show is one that is sold to individual local TV stations instead of to a national network. The show won't be available in all regions and will play at different times in different cities.\n\nA TV station has certain hours of the day when they decide locally what programs to air, and certain hours in which they have to carry the programs of the national network. In the US an NBC affiliate will have to air the Today Show in the morning, a couple of midday soap operas, NBC Nightly News, and then NBC's primetime shows in the evening. (I'm sure I'm overlooking some programs, but you get the idea.) In between those slots, the local station decides for themselves what goes out, and it'll be different from one city to the next.\n\nShows like Judge Judy and Ellen aren't acquired through the national network. The local TV station buys the rights to those shows directly from the producers of the show. I don't think people are making fiction syndicated shows like they used to now that there are a bazillion cable networks and five national broadcast networks to distribute TV shows, but some of the iconic TV shows of the 80's and 90's were first-run syndicated shows, like Baywatch and Star Trek: The Next Generation. No national network carried them. They were spread around the country by hundreds of individual contracts with local stations instead of one big contract with a national network.\n\nWhen I was a kid in the early 80's, my city had five TV stations, but there were only three national networks: NBC, ABC, and CBS. (Oh, and PBS.) Two stations weren't affiliated with a network, and they aired exclusively syndicated programming. Some of it was new, some of it was reruns from a generation ago.\n\nThat brings us to rerun syndication, where a network will sell rights to previous seasons of a show to local stations that may or may not be affiliated with the original network that aired them. I think this may be what you mean by broadcast syndication, and it's why as an adult I was able to watch old episodes of Friends in the early afternoon on our Fox station even though it was an NBC show."
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2dpex6 | how those little baby doll toy bottles work where you hold it upside down and the liquid seems to appear like he drank it, but when you hold it right side up, it refills...? | I've always wondered how those work lol | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2dpex6/eli5_how_those_little_baby_doll_toy_bottles_work/ | {
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"The bottle is actually two containers (one inside the other). There is a thin gap between the two which is filled with liquid.\n\nThis allows a very small amount of liquid to appear to fill the entire bottle. When you tip it, the liquid flows through the gap and down into a resevoir in the top, making it appear empty."
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29rwd6 | why is it considered immoral to outsource labor to workers in countries willing to work for very little money? | A common criticism I hear of Nike and other corporations is that they outsource their labor to certain factories in the developing world where the poverty rates are so high that people there are willing to work for very low wages, relative to the minimum wages in North America. In my view if these companies didn't hire these poor workers, then these workers wouldn't have a job so they can at least provide something for their families. So why is this considered bad practice? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/29rwd6/eli5_why_is_it_considered_immoral_to_outsource/ | {
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"The problem is many of these companies fired people just to have the work done elsewhere for people. The companies took away the ability for people to provide for their families and sent their jobs elsewhere just so the company could save a little bit of money.\n\nEdit: Also, these outsourced jobs were often very low-paying and borderline illegal in some places. Imagine if you were fired from your job just so a small child could do it for a few cents a day in horrible conditions. That's why it's immoral and unethical.",
"Usually it's the working conditions that people are protesting. Factories in developing countries with little regulation and workers' rights can be downright abysmal to work in. They're not called \"sweatshops\" for nothing.\n\nIn addition to poor working conditions is also worker safety. A man might lose an arm operating a press or similar machinery because the safety regulations aren't written into law or enforced. So a man without the factory might not have gotten that pay, but they might still have both arms and have been able to farm or some other small-time employment, whereas the man in the factory might have earned a year or two's worth of wages before becoming a cripple.\n\nIt's a value judgement, nothing more.",
"If you employ people in North America or Europe, you are subject to a stunning number of regulations. On the whole these regulations ensure that you do not overwork, poison, maim, or kill your workforce, that your building will not collapse on their heads, that they will not be gassed or electrocuted, and that they will not be too grossly underpaid. \n\nNaturally these luxuries cost money, which is why they have to be regulated to bring them about. In an unregulated environment of extreme poverty, where people will do almost anything to scratch an existence, one can produce things more cheaply. If you can then sell at prices which do not relate to the cost of production, this is what capitalism is all about; immense profits for the 1%, perpetual poverty for the workers. If a few hundred are killed in a building collapse, don't fret; there are plenty of others to take their place.\n\nMuch of the difference in working standards between developed and undeveloped nations can be ascribed to the efforts of unions. Unions are now under attack, and offshoring is one way to weaken them. Your support for Nike and their ilk may soon present you or your children with the opportunity to work under the same conditions as the poverty-ridden workers who are currently providing your running shoes.",
"In my opinion, it's mostly people who are upset that their jobs have been shipped overseas, but who dress it up as concern for foreign workers so that they won't look like racist assholes. Now, I'm not saying sweatshops in Bangladesh are awesome places to work or that nothing should be done about it, but I do think that many people protesting this are more concerned with lost jobs in their country than exploitation of workers in another.",
"what i wonder is why outsourcing is considered immoral, but its moral equivalent, wholesale amnesty for unskilled workers in the us along with far more lax immigration standards is considered a noble, just, and compassionate cause\n\n\"we have a bunch of unskilled americans without jobs! we need to get our people back to work! theres only one solution! we must allow more non americans into the job market! do we want immigrants with college degrees! no! our healthcare system sucks and our infrastructure is literally crumbling! but do we want more doctors? no! do we want more engineers? no! give us unskilled labor by the millions! whats more, we need a higher minimum wage! a glut of labor plus price floors are *guaranteed* to spur our economy back into boom! that will right this ship!\" ::uproarious applause::"
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fhk1uc | how does standard bar soap clean your hands if it does not have any antibacterial additives? especially when the soap uses animal fat as a base component. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fhk1uc/eli5_how_does_standard_bar_soap_clean_your_hands/ | {
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"It emulsifies the dirt and oil on your skin letting it be washed away.\n\nTo be fair all the antibacterial this and that really only makes us feel safer as it and people not taking tgeir antibiotics properly is leading to drug resistant bacteria.\n\nThis pandemic however is a virus so antibacterial soap doesn't really do a whole lot",
"The reason regular non-antibacterial soap still works at _removing_ - not killing - bacteria and virus carrying stuff, is because thats what soap does: soap molecules have a water loving (philic) end and a carbon chain (oils etc.) end. When you wash your hands with soap, oil and other gunk is on your hands. The soap molecules surround the gunk molecules in little bubbles with their water loving ends sticking out and thus all of these little water loving pockets of gunk, oil, grease, bacteria etc. are easily washed away. With enough scrubbing and water, you can do the same, but soap just makes it easier. \n\nYour body naturally has a rather robust barrier (your skin, mucous membranes) and it will do most of the work at containing things like the corona virus, hanging out in blobs of saliva, or mucous or whatever that might have come from another person. But when you rub that stuff on your hand in your eyes or put it in your mouth, well, you essentially just opened the door in that barrier to the bad stuff. \n\nYes, if you ARE infected, you stand a really good chance of surviving with nothing more than really strong \"regular flu\" symptoms; the ones who will die from coronavirus are those who would be susceptible to any flu like thing (elderly, those with already compromised immune systems), its just that this one is so much more contagious than regular flu....\n\nSo if you take one thing away here its WASH YOUR HANDS A LOT and don't go licking things.",
"There is a good thread on twitter from an Icelandic chemistry professor about why soap works so well with viruses:\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)",
"Everyone answered this question very well, I'll just add this. Stop using soap with antibiotics, we will create a world we can't live in.",
"The animal fats are treated with strongly basic (opposite of acidic) chemicals. These cause the fat to undergo a chemical reaction called \"saponification\" that turns the fat into soap. Yes, that's literally what happens. Fat into soap using caustic lye. (This is something of a plot point in Fight Club but if you're actually 5 years old, you should wait a decade or two before watching that movie.)\n\nSoap works because it's made of molecules that have a water-loving end and a water-hating end. The water-hating end sticks to things like blobs of grease or oil, germs, and such. The water-loving end just sort of flaps in the breeze until you get enough soap particles surrounding an something.\n\nOnce an item is completely surrounded with a blob of these soap molecules, they stick to water better than your hand (because the water-loving end is pointing outwards). The final rinse with water washes the soap and the soap-encased dirt, oil, germs, and other stuff away.\n\nThe catch is that you have to scrub vigorously enough and for long enough time. The dirt and germs are all stuck to your skin (often inside microscopic pits and valleys). The vigorous rubbing or scrubbing action dislodges the dirt and germs. Without the soap, a lot of them would just stick back onto your skin. However, if your hands are all soapy, everything gets surrounded by the soap molecules and can't reattach. The water washes them down the drain. But, if you don't dislodge the germs, they don't get surrounded by soap and stay stuck to your skin.\n\nNow, soap does have some limited ability to kill some bacteria. Those water-hating ends of the soap molecules wiggle into the cell walls of the bacteria and make them fall apart. But, it doesn't work on all bacteria and it's just an added bonus. The primary function of soap is to prevent the germs from re-attaching to your skin and letting the water wash them down the drain.\n\nOf course, for marketing purposes, many soap manufacturers add extra antibacterial agents to their soap. However, those additives haven't been proven to help in normal hand-washing situations. As such, in the USA, the FDA has told soap companies to stop using them unless they can prove that they actually help out. This is actually a difficult thing to do because washing your hands with regular soap is already very effective.\n\nThis is also why soap and water are better than hand sanitizer. Hand sanitizer does kill a lot of germs but not all of them. Hand sanitizer just evaporates away instead of being washed away like soap and water. So, all the germs that aren't killed by the sanitizer will be left on your skin.\n\nAlcohol hand santizers should only be used if there isn't soap and running water near by."
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1vfrow | why is the vatican and the pope in italy? wouldn't it be more logical for the head of the church to be in the country jesus was active in? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1vfrow/why_is_the_vatican_and_the_pope_in_italy_wouldnt/ | {
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"It's because that's where Simon Peter (\"Saint Peter\") founded the Christian Church. \n\nPeter is seen by Christians as Jesus' primary disciple. When Jesus met Simon, he said [\"Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven. And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.\"](_URL_0_) \"Peter\" comes from \"Petrus\", which is from the Greek word for \"rock\".\n\nSimon Peter later went to Rome, where he founded a church which followed Christ. \n\nBecause the \"rock\" on which Jesus would \"build his church\" was in Rome... the church was in Rome. Simon Peter, later Saint Peter, was acknowledged during his lifetime as the most important disciple of Christianity. After his death in Rome, the Bishopric of Rome was seen as the most important office in the growing Christian sect. His successors as Bishop of Rome eventually became the modern-day Pope.\n\n"
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mj4u0 | A solid argument against the earth being billions of years old? | Hello everyone.
I've been in and out of discussions concerning religion and evolution vs creationism with my brother for quite some time, and earlier today he linked me this site: _URL_0_
Now, I am just curious about what the rest of you thought about those points being made. Are those points a valid argument against the earth being millions of years old? If those claims are false, what are some definite facts that directly support the earth being billions of years old? Thanks for your time!
| askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/mj4u0/a_solid_argument_against_the_earth_being_billions/ | {
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"I think taken one at a time, these arguments could likely all be defeated by logic and science. Why not start here?\n\n51-52 _URL_0_ According to this, trace amounts of carbon 14 could be found in coal and oil due to contamination of bio matter \n\nArticle citation: _URL_1_",
"I'll disprove all of the geology ones here:\n\n > 12: Scarcity of plant fossils in many formations containing abundant animal / herbivore fossils. : \n\nIt is incredibly hard to preserve plant fossils, and it only happens under the most favorable circumstances, which don't happen very often. If you wonder where all of the plant material goes: See oil. \n\n > 13: Thick, tightly bent strata without sign of melting or fracturing. \n\nYou don't have to break or melt rocks in order to have them bend in very tight fractures, you just need to warm them up to a certain temperature, and bend them over a long time. You can play with this at home with brittle plastic. Try to bend it with no heat: it breaks, try to heat it slowly and bend it fast, it breaks, but if you bend it slowly and heat it slowly, you can get it to bend in a very tight fold.\n\n > 14: Polystrate fossils—tree trunks in coal\n\nYes, they are right that you can get these types of things from rapid burial. But they just nit pick on the areas that have it. If there was a world-wide flood, this would be the norm, and it's certainly not.\n\n16-19: No. These have been disproven many many many times over. \n\nYou know what, I read through the rest of them, and they are mostly proven false by common sense and all it's doing is frustrating me. If there is one you have a question about specifically, let me know and I will explain it out for you.\n\n*edit: I just read, in detail, all of the geologic ones, and there are some flat out lies sprinkled in there as well, so be careful. Also, they are picking just the examples that fit their 'theory' and leave out the 95% of the rest of the world. It's a common tactic. ",
"Just a few examples of where this goes wrong.\n\n4. \"The data for “mitochondrial Eve” are consistent with a common origin of all humans several thousand years ago.\" Mitochondrial Eve has actually been estimated to have happened around 200,000 years ago.\n\n11. \"The ages of the world’s oldest living organisms, trees, are consistent with an age of the earth of thousands of years.\" It is true that some of the oldest trees are several thousand years old but rocks have been dated millions of years back. You can't take the scientific evidence for the age of trees but disregard scientific evidence for the 'age' of rock formations.\n\n101. \"Origin of agriculture. Secular dating puts it at about 10,000 years and yet that same chronology says that modern man has supposedly been around for at least 200,000 years. Surely someone would have worked out much sooner how to sow seeds of plants to produce food. See: Evidence for a young world.\" That is like saying that Earth must only be a few hundred years old because we have only been using electricity for around 200 years.\n\nSo, in summary, no this is not accurate evidence and many of these points are based on guesswork.",
"96, Where are all the people? People used to die from basically anything. It's not surprising the population explosion happened recently, that's the only time in our history where we've had the technology to somewhat sustain large amounts of population. Newly high numbers of people doesn't mean there haven't been people for a long time, just that we haven't been able to feed a lot of people for a long time.\nSome of these arguments, like 101 don't even attempt logic. Not that I am in any way a great scientist, but it seems these were written by someone with only a surface level understanding of natural history, science, and especially the scientific process. ",
"I can at least hit two of the points in the intro section:\n\n1. You can't PROVE the Earth is old. They are technically right, in a stupid way. I can also tell you that we can't PROVE that gravity exists, which is why we call it the theory of gravity. But the vast body of evidence and anyone with proper training all agree that gravity is a real thing. Science hates to grab absolute anything, as science (in general) is always open to the idea that something new might come along and change the thinking. This is more of a philosophy of science argument (there is a subreddit for that if you look around) but the point is that absolute proof is hard to come by, but good enough proof is very common.\n\n2. Uniformitarianism (or whatever they call it). I have some experience in radiometric dating, so I interpret that for me as saying \"radioactive decay has happened at the same rate over time.\" And every bit of evidence (except for some very small nit-picky effects a few physicists might mention) says that this is true. But people can always throw out the silly argument of \"Yeah, but what if it changed? And you just don't know it??? Huh?\" Well, then maybe science is off for now. But there is nothing to suggest that, so science doesn't take that concept seriously.",
"That site, it hurts. Going over all 101 of those points would take too long, but just to take the first one. The age of the earth isn't determined by Fossil DNA but instead by radiometric dating on rocks [see Jack Hills](_URL_1_)\nIf your brother truly wants to learn you can start him with the Wikipedia page on the age of the earth[here](_URL_0_)",
"If one God created the world, why are there so many religions? Dead belife systems as practiced by the Roman/Greek/Egyptian/Norse/Aboriginal/Aztecan (and many many more) all have creation myths in them so how can the earth have been created by \"one\" god when there are so many of them?\n\n",
"wow - lots of work went into this steaming pile of shit - instead of doing a point by point refutetation, perhaps it would be more practical to identify the types of logical fallacies listed here.",
"I appreciate all the comments! Excellent posts. I will read through all of them and i'll show them to my brother. ",
"Although most of these are nonsense but Ill take some from the astronomy section (as it is my expertise) to talk about.\n > 65 Evidence of recent volcanic activity on Earth’s moon is inconsistent with its supposed vast age because it should have long since cooled if it were billions of years old.\n\nThe latest eruptions were still over 1 billion years ago, with the majority 3-3.5 billion years ago. This is entirely realistic the moon has radioactive elements and tidal forces from the earth to help keep it warm.\n\n > 66 Recession of the moon from the earth. Tidal friction causes the moon to recede from the earth at 4 cm per year. It would have been greater in the past when the moon and earth were closer together.The moon and earth would have been in catastrophic proximity (Roche limit) at less than a quarter of their supposed age. \n\nThe so called Roche limit of the earth is ~7000 km the moon orbits at 400,000km the moon was not 7000km away 1 billion years ago.\n\n > 67 Slowing down of the earth. Tidal dissipation rate of Earth’s angular momentum: increasing length of day, currently by 0.002 seconds/day every century (thus an impossibly short day billions of years ago and a very slow day shortly after accretion and before the postulated giant impact to form the Moon). \n\nJust not true the difference is in seconds and minutes over billions of years.\n\n > 68 Ghost craters on the moon’s maria (singular mare: dark “seas” formed from massive lava flows) are a problem for long ages. \n\nThe only mention of these craters I can find are on creationism websites, even if they did exist then based on their description I see no reason why they would show anything wrong with current theories.\n\n > 69 The presence of a significant magnetic field around Mercury is not consistent with its supposed age of billions of years. A planet so small should have cooled down enough so any liquid core would solidify\n\nKeep in mind mercury's magnetic field is much weaker than earth's (1%~) although with the interiors of other planets its hard to be sure it is believed that, due to mercury's very high eccentricity it is under a fair amount of stress during its orbit, enough to keep the core liquid.\n\n > 70 The outer planets Uranus and Neptune have magnetic fields, but they should be long “dead” if they are as old as claimed according to evolutionary long-age beliefs.\n\nIs just nonsense, complete fabrication, these planets have a different process to generate their magnetic fields than the rocky planets but generate them they do.\n\n\nI would go on one by one but instead I'll choose some more interesting ones to finish.\n > 89 The faint young sun paradox.\n \nThey state the sun was dimmer in the past so the earth should have been frozen. The sun part is correct, luckily C02 levels were much much higher back then and the greenhouse effect kept the earth very toasty.\n\n > 91 The giant gas planets Jupiter and Saturn radiate more energy than they receive from the sun.\n\nA lot of people describe Jupiter as a failed star. The initial heat for igniting fusion in the sun was from gravitational contraction, the gravity pulls the gas in and when you squeeze stuff in like that you heat it up (easily testable with a bicycle pump which gets hot when pumped). Jupiter does this; to generate the extra heat Jupiter shrinks by a few cm each year creating large amounts of internal heat which it radiates away. We can tell the difference between this and reflected heat because it is mainly infra red.\n\nA lot of their points are just plain lies, the stuff about volcanoes, about certain planets moons etc. They just make up stuff.\n\nIn general it is obvious that these are lies if you just pay attention. Their references are just links to stories on their own site where if you compare their stories to the news article they are based on they deliberately misinterpret and misquote real results/science.\n\n\nEdit: happy to discredit any individual one if you ask (from all sections should be easy enough)",
"I think taken one at a time, these arguments could likely all be defeated by logic and science. Why not start here?\n\n51-52 _URL_0_ According to this, trace amounts of carbon 14 could be found in coal and oil due to contamination of bio matter \n\nArticle citation: _URL_1_",
"I'll disprove all of the geology ones here:\n\n > 12: Scarcity of plant fossils in many formations containing abundant animal / herbivore fossils. : \n\nIt is incredibly hard to preserve plant fossils, and it only happens under the most favorable circumstances, which don't happen very often. If you wonder where all of the plant material goes: See oil. \n\n > 13: Thick, tightly bent strata without sign of melting or fracturing. \n\nYou don't have to break or melt rocks in order to have them bend in very tight fractures, you just need to warm them up to a certain temperature, and bend them over a long time. You can play with this at home with brittle plastic. Try to bend it with no heat: it breaks, try to heat it slowly and bend it fast, it breaks, but if you bend it slowly and heat it slowly, you can get it to bend in a very tight fold.\n\n > 14: Polystrate fossils—tree trunks in coal\n\nYes, they are right that you can get these types of things from rapid burial. But they just nit pick on the areas that have it. If there was a world-wide flood, this would be the norm, and it's certainly not.\n\n16-19: No. These have been disproven many many many times over. \n\nYou know what, I read through the rest of them, and they are mostly proven false by common sense and all it's doing is frustrating me. If there is one you have a question about specifically, let me know and I will explain it out for you.\n\n*edit: I just read, in detail, all of the geologic ones, and there are some flat out lies sprinkled in there as well, so be careful. Also, they are picking just the examples that fit their 'theory' and leave out the 95% of the rest of the world. It's a common tactic. ",
"Just a few examples of where this goes wrong.\n\n4. \"The data for “mitochondrial Eve” are consistent with a common origin of all humans several thousand years ago.\" Mitochondrial Eve has actually been estimated to have happened around 200,000 years ago.\n\n11. \"The ages of the world’s oldest living organisms, trees, are consistent with an age of the earth of thousands of years.\" It is true that some of the oldest trees are several thousand years old but rocks have been dated millions of years back. You can't take the scientific evidence for the age of trees but disregard scientific evidence for the 'age' of rock formations.\n\n101. \"Origin of agriculture. Secular dating puts it at about 10,000 years and yet that same chronology says that modern man has supposedly been around for at least 200,000 years. Surely someone would have worked out much sooner how to sow seeds of plants to produce food. See: Evidence for a young world.\" That is like saying that Earth must only be a few hundred years old because we have only been using electricity for around 200 years.\n\nSo, in summary, no this is not accurate evidence and many of these points are based on guesswork.",
"96, Where are all the people? People used to die from basically anything. It's not surprising the population explosion happened recently, that's the only time in our history where we've had the technology to somewhat sustain large amounts of population. Newly high numbers of people doesn't mean there haven't been people for a long time, just that we haven't been able to feed a lot of people for a long time.\nSome of these arguments, like 101 don't even attempt logic. Not that I am in any way a great scientist, but it seems these were written by someone with only a surface level understanding of natural history, science, and especially the scientific process. ",
"I can at least hit two of the points in the intro section:\n\n1. You can't PROVE the Earth is old. They are technically right, in a stupid way. I can also tell you that we can't PROVE that gravity exists, which is why we call it the theory of gravity. But the vast body of evidence and anyone with proper training all agree that gravity is a real thing. Science hates to grab absolute anything, as science (in general) is always open to the idea that something new might come along and change the thinking. This is more of a philosophy of science argument (there is a subreddit for that if you look around) but the point is that absolute proof is hard to come by, but good enough proof is very common.\n\n2. Uniformitarianism (or whatever they call it). I have some experience in radiometric dating, so I interpret that for me as saying \"radioactive decay has happened at the same rate over time.\" And every bit of evidence (except for some very small nit-picky effects a few physicists might mention) says that this is true. But people can always throw out the silly argument of \"Yeah, but what if it changed? And you just don't know it??? Huh?\" Well, then maybe science is off for now. But there is nothing to suggest that, so science doesn't take that concept seriously.",
"That site, it hurts. Going over all 101 of those points would take too long, but just to take the first one. The age of the earth isn't determined by Fossil DNA but instead by radiometric dating on rocks [see Jack Hills](_URL_1_)\nIf your brother truly wants to learn you can start him with the Wikipedia page on the age of the earth[here](_URL_0_)",
"If one God created the world, why are there so many religions? Dead belife systems as practiced by the Roman/Greek/Egyptian/Norse/Aboriginal/Aztecan (and many many more) all have creation myths in them so how can the earth have been created by \"one\" god when there are so many of them?\n\n",
"wow - lots of work went into this steaming pile of shit - instead of doing a point by point refutetation, perhaps it would be more practical to identify the types of logical fallacies listed here.",
"I appreciate all the comments! Excellent posts. I will read through all of them and i'll show them to my brother. ",
"Although most of these are nonsense but Ill take some from the astronomy section (as it is my expertise) to talk about.\n > 65 Evidence of recent volcanic activity on Earth’s moon is inconsistent with its supposed vast age because it should have long since cooled if it were billions of years old.\n\nThe latest eruptions were still over 1 billion years ago, with the majority 3-3.5 billion years ago. This is entirely realistic the moon has radioactive elements and tidal forces from the earth to help keep it warm.\n\n > 66 Recession of the moon from the earth. Tidal friction causes the moon to recede from the earth at 4 cm per year. It would have been greater in the past when the moon and earth were closer together.The moon and earth would have been in catastrophic proximity (Roche limit) at less than a quarter of their supposed age. \n\nThe so called Roche limit of the earth is ~7000 km the moon orbits at 400,000km the moon was not 7000km away 1 billion years ago.\n\n > 67 Slowing down of the earth. Tidal dissipation rate of Earth’s angular momentum: increasing length of day, currently by 0.002 seconds/day every century (thus an impossibly short day billions of years ago and a very slow day shortly after accretion and before the postulated giant impact to form the Moon). \n\nJust not true the difference is in seconds and minutes over billions of years.\n\n > 68 Ghost craters on the moon’s maria (singular mare: dark “seas” formed from massive lava flows) are a problem for long ages. \n\nThe only mention of these craters I can find are on creationism websites, even if they did exist then based on their description I see no reason why they would show anything wrong with current theories.\n\n > 69 The presence of a significant magnetic field around Mercury is not consistent with its supposed age of billions of years. A planet so small should have cooled down enough so any liquid core would solidify\n\nKeep in mind mercury's magnetic field is much weaker than earth's (1%~) although with the interiors of other planets its hard to be sure it is believed that, due to mercury's very high eccentricity it is under a fair amount of stress during its orbit, enough to keep the core liquid.\n\n > 70 The outer planets Uranus and Neptune have magnetic fields, but they should be long “dead” if they are as old as claimed according to evolutionary long-age beliefs.\n\nIs just nonsense, complete fabrication, these planets have a different process to generate their magnetic fields than the rocky planets but generate them they do.\n\n\nI would go on one by one but instead I'll choose some more interesting ones to finish.\n > 89 The faint young sun paradox.\n \nThey state the sun was dimmer in the past so the earth should have been frozen. The sun part is correct, luckily C02 levels were much much higher back then and the greenhouse effect kept the earth very toasty.\n\n > 91 The giant gas planets Jupiter and Saturn radiate more energy than they receive from the sun.\n\nA lot of people describe Jupiter as a failed star. The initial heat for igniting fusion in the sun was from gravitational contraction, the gravity pulls the gas in and when you squeeze stuff in like that you heat it up (easily testable with a bicycle pump which gets hot when pumped). Jupiter does this; to generate the extra heat Jupiter shrinks by a few cm each year creating large amounts of internal heat which it radiates away. We can tell the difference between this and reflected heat because it is mainly infra red.\n\nA lot of their points are just plain lies, the stuff about volcanoes, about certain planets moons etc. They just make up stuff.\n\nIn general it is obvious that these are lies if you just pay attention. Their references are just links to stories on their own site where if you compare their stories to the news article they are based on they deliberately misinterpret and misquote real results/science.\n\n\nEdit: happy to discredit any individual one if you ask (from all sections should be easy enough)"
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"http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1985Metic..20..676J"
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zb2pn | So I was told today by a professor (not a science professor) that the Theory of Gravity is not actually proven and that we don't actually know how it works. Is this true? | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/zb2pn/so_i_was_told_today_by_a_professor_not_a_science/ | {
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"Nothing is proven. If he was trying to enlighten you with regard to empiricism, then great. If he was trying to sow seeds of doubt with regard to scientific endeavour, then hey! draw your own conclusions.",
"Unless you are using a rather weak definition of 'prove', you cannot in principle prove *anything* through science. The best you can do is have a theory that is consistent with the evidence.\n\nScience uses a standard of falsification. This means that we test theories by looking for evidence that might contradict them. This is distinct from the idea of 'verification' in which something is proven. It is philosophically difficult to verify something using only empirical evidence due to the problem of inductions.\n\nScience deals with finding \"best explainations\". The problem with trying to prove a theory is that conflicting evidence could be hiding under the next rock. In a sense, this is a good thing. A theory serves as a constraint on our expectations of reality. A stronger theory provides stricter constraints. The stronger the constraints, the simpler it would be to violate them.\n\nTo give an example, consider evolution. There is a massive body of evidence supporting evolution. However, something as simple as rabbit fossils in Cambrian strata would potentially disprove it, at least in the historical sense.",
"It is true in the sense that nothing in science is proven, only supported by evidence. However he's wrong in saying that we don't have how it works. We have a very good idea of how it works.",
"See [Tests of General Relativity](_URL_0_) for an overview. Rlee89 is right -- we can only *disprove* theories. See *[The Logic of Scientific Discovery](_URL_1_)* by Karl Popper.\n\nSummary: Newton's theory of gravitation put a man on the moon, and that ain't bad. As you know, Einstein's general theory superseded Newton's. The three classical tests were 1) the correct explanation of the precession of Mercury's orbit by Einstein, 2) observation that the sun deflects starlight, made by Arthur Eddington during an eclipse in 1919 , 3) observation of gravitational redshift by Pound and Rebka in 1959.\n\nIn addition, the Hubble telescope has taken pictures of gravitational lensing effects. The Hafele-Keating experiment tested general and special relativity by putting atomic clocks in circumnavigating aircraft. GPS satellites must account for general relativistic effects in their timing systems. The orbits of binary pulsars cannot be accounted for with Newtonian gravitation, but can be explained with GR. Gravity Probe B detected frame-dragging and the geodesic effect. GR also explains the observed expansion and acceleration of the Universe, although cosmological tests aren't as conclusive as solar-system tests. Currently, scientists are trying to directly measure gravitational waves with large interferometers.\n\nI believe the modern interpretation of gravity is that it is not really a force. This is what happens instead: Mass-energy causes spacetime in its vicinity to curve. Free-falling objects move in straight-lines (geodesics) in the curved spacetime. Because of our limited perspective, we interpret this as an acceleration caused by a \"force\".\n\nI think most would agree that GR will eventually be superseded by a Theory of Everything, which will reduce to GR in the appropriate limit. For now, though, GR has stood up to experiment quite well, especially considering that there was absolutely no experimental basis for it when Einstein and Grossman were working on it. Einstein was driven by his sense of aesthetics. Pretty fucking incredible."
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n5l33 | Do Brita filters need to be replaced as often as suggested? Or is Brita just capitalizing on replacement filters? | In other words, do the filters really lose effectiveness as quickly as Brita suggests? Why do they lose effectiveness? Why don't permanent filters on sinks lose effectiveness so quickly? | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/n5l33/do_brita_filters_need_to_be_replaced_as_often_as/ | {
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"The activated carbon does get saturated at some point, but don't buy a whole new filter: _URL_0_",
"The activated carbon does get saturated at some point, but don't buy a whole new filter: _URL_0_"
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| []
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"http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-refill-a-disposable-Brita-brand-water-pit/"
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"http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-refill-a-disposable-Brita-brand-water-pit/"
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8wf7sj | why do raised areas of the body (collarbone/cheekbone etc) get more severely affected by sunburn than the surrounding area? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8wf7sj/eli5_why_do_raised_areas_of_the_body/ | {
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"Because natural shadows occurs when these raised areas “intercept” sun rays thereby blocking the lower lying areas from absorbing light. Inversely there is nothing shadowing your most protruding body bits hence why they are likelier to burn. But rest assured if you lay perfectly still at a perpendicular angle to the suns rays you will burn quite evenly. "
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3wy97g | Why did bread never become a big part of the Chinese diet? | AskHistorians | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3wy97g/why_did_bread_never_become_a_big_part_of_the/ | {
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"It did! It's just more traditionally confined to the North.\n\nThere's not just one Chinese cuisine. Rice cultivation wasn't actually a part of the early Chinese diet at all. There's no word in Sinotibetan languages for rice that isn't a loan. In Tibetoburman they borrowed the vocabulary from Tai languages much later (e.g. \\**na*^1 for wet rice field), and in Chinese the common word for rice 米 is actually originally meaning \"millet\", not \"rice\", and was only later shifted in meaning to \"rice\". This was made easier by the fact that millets had largely been replaced in major parts of the Sinotibetan language family by wheats due to their heartiness in cold climates.^2,3\n\nHave a look at [this map](_URL_0_) showing where wheat is grown most. The areas of East Asia that are dark green are places where you're going to find breads. The Shandong Peninsula, all of Jiangsu province north of the Yangtze and a good chunk of Hebei. There's a folk etymology for 饅頭^4 * màntóu*, a popular steamed bread, that it's actually *Man[chu] tóu*, with *tóu* meaning \"head\", because it entered Chinese cuisine through non-Chinese Northern groups. Actually more people will tell you it was invented by Zhūgě Liàng.\n\nThis and other similar breads such as *bāozi* 包子, the stuffed version of *màntóu*, are popular throughout the region including Korea.\n\nThere's also *ròu jiā mó* 肉夾饃, which is another incredibly popular food in China and pretty much the best thing ever. These are roud breads which are not steamed but instead grilled on a hot plate, and then stuffed with spicy meat and cilantro. They're a notable food from Shǎnxī (Shaanxi) and have become quite popular throughout the Northwest as well as being readily available throughout the country.\n\nThere's also [spicy and non-spicy onion pancakes](_URL_1_) which are again cooked on a hot plate and regularly consumed as a snack. There are other similar pancake-like treats as well but some, such as the Shandong wrap (山東雜糧餅) are getting further away from what we might call bread.\n\nFinally in Taiwan there's a sort of steamed bread sandwich called *koah pau* 刈包. They're awesome but almost certainly a more recent thing in Taiwanese cuisine.\n\nAll of these are made with wheat flour, but grilling in a large oven wasn't always a possibility, and steaming/frying was always more common in Chinese cuisine anyway, so the breads that we have in the region tend to be more reliant on these ways of cooking.\n\nIn the end, the relative scarcity of wheat in the south and the ease of growing multiple rice varieties has lead to rice being seen as a more typical Chinese food, but in reality it was imported from cuisines of other, non-Chinese, groups.\n\n- - - \n\n1. Matisoff, James A (2003) *Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman System and Philosophy of Sino-Tibetan Reconstruction. Univ of California Press.*\n\n2. Guedesa, Jade A d’Alpoim; Lub, Hongliang; Heinc, Anke M; Schmidt, Amanda H (2015) *Early Evidence for the Use of Wheat and Barley As Staple Crops on the Margins of the Tibetan Plateau.*\n\n3. Sagart, Laurent (2011) How Many Independent Rice Vocabularies in Asia. Rice, vol. 4, pp. 121–133.\n\n4. Note that food vocabulary varies considerably throughout Mandarin dialect areas. Mantou isn't always called mantou, and the word mantou doesn't always mean what I'm talking about here.\n\n(edited to expand a little bit more)",
"As a lot of the commenters have pointed out, there's plenty of bread in the Chinese diet. \n\nPiggybacking on the subject of bread, modern loaves of bread require a lot of things. You need an oven which is pretty labor intensive to make. You also need fuel, a lot of it to achieve baking temperatures. For an average person across most of history, baking bread was a pretty laborious task. \n\nPorridge has always been a popular alternative across most cultures and time periods, as have dumplings and noodles because boiling requires a lot less energy (wood, coal, ect). In Mesoamerica, tamales were an easy way to bake bread wrapped up and placed over coals. Most cultures had some variant of a flatbread cooked over a griddle or a tandoor-style cooking device. \n\nOne commonly used solution to the baking problem was to centralize baking in a specific location, giving rise to the professional baker. The Roman dole initially came in the form of measured grain, but eventually a network of state-run bakeries began to churn out bread (stamped with a brand no less). \n\nSpeaking to China specifically, one major issue in Chinese cooking has always been access to cooking fuel. This can be seen in the tendency to cook things at a very high heat for a very short time in order to conserve fuel. Because of that, heating up an oven which requires lots of wood to burn, isn't a common feature in the Chinese cook's repertoire. \n\n",
"So, up until about the 1930's there wasnt just one \"Chinese\" culture. (There still isn't, I know, you don't need to lecture me.) China is a huge and diverse area. Parts are tropical, parts are arctic, some wet, some arid, etc. Etc. The majority of the Chinese population has always lived in the south or east, in the wet areas and/or coast. \n\nRice grows very well in wet areas that get a lot of rain, and as a result, rice became a staple in Chinese and much of southern Asian culture. Wheat on the other hand, does not grow well in wet places. So it did not grow well in the more densely populated areas. However if you went north and/or west, avoiding the mountains and desert, there are great grasslands. Reasonable temperatures, but little rain. Ideal conditions for wheat. \n\nThese areas were less densly populated, but wheat was used in place of rice in these areas. However with the nationalist movement, and the idea of \"one china\" taking hold almost a century ago, what was \"Chinese\" was practically set in stone, which is why we think of rice as the Chinese staple, partially because it is, partially because of a unification effort."
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4afhe3 | What is the importance of irrational numbers? | While I know that irrational numbers such as pi or e are important, is there anything particularly important about them being irrational? | askscience | https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4afhe3/what_is_the_importance_of_irrational_numbers/ | {
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"even the square roots of certain numbers (like 2) are irrational. pi and e are in a sense even more.. let's say you need to put in more work to describe them. \nthe roots are zeros of polynomials with rational coefficients. pi and e aren't. \n\nwhen you start out with rational numbers (ie fractions of integers ) and consider sequences of fractions, and then consider the limits of those sequences, you get more than just the rational number / fractions. you also get irrational numbers. they **cannot be represented as fractions** but they can be represented as limits of a sequence of fractions. (ie you can approximate them to arbitrary precision by fractions. the fractions are dense in the real numbers, therefore you will always find a fraction at least as close as you wish to a given irrational number) \n\nthe part in bold is probably the most important thing about them, ie why you even bother giving them a name "
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spu4w | how do forex brokers work? | What do they actually do and how do they get their money? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/spu4w/eli5_how_do_forex_brokers_work/ | {
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"Brokers in general provide access to markets, and clearing and settlement facilities. So when you buy some euros, they handle all the details of actually getting those euros into your account (including routing your order to the proper market and getting it executed). \n\nI am not sure what you mean by \"their\" money. They charge a fee per trade for these services, and you can get leverage from them by borrowing money from the brokerage. They get this money from other people's accounts. Similar to a bank giving out mortgages, they take money from accounts, and lend it out at an interest rate."
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2pnsgj | Was Shay's Rebellion Really a Result of a Weak Central Government? | Shay's Rebellion was a local government issue that did not involve the national government and it was easily crushed not by federal troops, but the local government. The effect that it has on the nation is the concerns about "mobocracy" not central government. This is what my A.P. US History teacher says and I somewhat agree. | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2pnsgj/was_shays_rebellion_really_a_result_of_a_weak/ | {
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"A Shays' Rebellion question! My favorite!\n\nThe primary weakness of the existing governmental structure that the rebellion exposed was the inability for the Massachusetts Governor to quickly raise the troops necessary to fight off the rebels.\n\nYou mention that the rebels were fairly easily dispersed once a formidable fighting force was created to opposed them. However, what you're missing is how long it took and the difficulty in creating that force. \n\nGovernor Bowdoin attempted to raise the state's militia after the rebels had begun shutting down courthouses across the state in August/September of 1786, but because the militia was made up of the same kinds of people rebelling, the local units refused to act. I did a fair amount of work on a transcript of a trial in Worcester that took place after the rebellion. There were many leaders of the local militias who were tried for aiding the rebels or participating in the rebellion themselves.\n\nIt is also important to conceive of the rebels as less akin to a dumb \"mob\" and rather think of the event as the rise of an entire oppressed socio-economic class. The latest work on the rebellion tells the story of a deeply shattered economic structure for the Western Massachusetts farmers that was inflamed by a strong power base in Boston. We have a merchant class in charge, and they were simply unwilling to govern for their whole state. This is the framework we should be using the understand the local militias and their reluctance to take up arms against their neighbors.\n\nAfter his own militia failed to act, Governor Bowdoin asked his neighboring states to help by using their militias, but he received no such help. So, lacking a federal army to ask for assistance (remember, we're still in the Articles of Confederation here), Bowdoin has to use the Bostonian merchant's deep pockets to cull together a last-minute force of mercenaries. This group is by General Benjamin Lincoln and eventually marches out in late January 1787. The rebellion is dispersed in early February.\n\nRebels are shutting down courts in August, and it's only until the following year that the state government is able to pull together a force to fight them.\n\nThe reason this reverberated across the nation was a result of this inability for Massachusetts to quickly put an end to the problem themselves (although they eventually did). The concern was that this kind of action could happen in any of the states, and the powerlessness of the states in the face of such an uprising was a troubling thought. The rebels got very close to raiding the federal arsenal in Springfield and had a control over much of the state's courthouses, effectively preventing the state government from functioning in the western 2/3 of the state.\n\nFederalists saw a strong, centralized national government as a way to prevent these kinds of flare ups in the future.\n\nIf you're interested in the macro-level economics of the time period and a even-keeled take on the rebellion, then David Szatmary's [\"Shays' Rebellion: The Making of an Agrarian Insurrection\"](_URL_0_) is the seminal work on the real underlying issues of the day. If you are looking for more narratives and individually-based description, then Leo Richards's [\"Shays's Rebellion: The American Revolution's Final Battle\"](_URL_1_) is for you.\n\nThis topic is definitely one of my specialities, so I'm happy to answer any other questions you might have or clarify anything I've written above."
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bpm77q | how do car horns project so well? | I don’t see any speakers on the car, so how does it work? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bpm77q/eli5_how_do_car_horns_project_so_well/ | {
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"So usually cars have two horns in the front of the car, a high pitch and a low pitch. So a standard electric car horn does have a diaphragm just like a speaker. Inside there’s basically a plunger connected to the center of the diaphragm and on the other side of the plunger is an electromagnet. When you hit the horn button. The electromagnet forces the plunger to bounce off of it so fast the diaphragm produces a frequency, a loud one. The combination of the high and low frequency together makes the sound travel farther and through more surfaces."
]
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1mpkbe | How did Fascists deal with healthcare? | do fascists (not just nazi Germany) provide healthcare? | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1mpkbe/how_did_fascists_deal_with_healthcare/ | {
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"Both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were concerned with healthcare and promoting health in general, for a couple reasons. Firstly, for reasons of natalism. Militarist-expansionist states need a growing population to make up for deaths in war and settle conquered territory, so both the Nazis and the Fascists were keen to promote population growth. \n\n > In 1925 the Italin Fascist regime created the Opera Nazionale Maternita ed Infanzia (ONMI), one of the many fascist organizations that survived into the post-war era. The ONMI combined social welfare with the realization of the regime's demographic aims. It sought to block abortion, to provide medical care and, if possible, involve the fathers of illegitimate children.\n\n > ... the fascists understood that the high infant death rate was a major and preventable depressant on population growth. The rate of infant mortality did decline, this being in part attributable to the policies of the regime but also the long-term rise in the standard of living and health care that had been initiated before fascism.\n\n-Alexander J. DeGrande, [*Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: The Fascist Style of Rule*](_URL_0_), p. 79\n\nApart from natalism, the fascist powers also had an ideological interest in health, especially Nazi Germany. This was part of a larger fascist idealization of youth, athleticism, and action. In \"Germany Speaks\", a collection of essays attempting to improve Germany's image and explain fascist thought to the foreign public, the head of the National Socialist Welfare Organization says of health:\n\n > We have faith in the ancient saying that a sound mind and a healthy body are mutually inter-dependent. Our work, therefore, not only teaches our nation the importance of health, both morally and physically, but also enables every individual to obtain a proper idea of his responsibilities towards the nation and towards his family. \n\n > By developing all our intrinsic abilities we make up for our country's lack of valuable raw materials and for our inferior degree of economic and political power as compared with other countries. The more we contribute towards the establishment of fundamentally healthy conditions at home, the stronger and healthier will be the influence exercised by all our national manifestations, be it in the realms of economy or science, in our domestic and our foreign policy.\n\nThis hints at the way some Nazis considered health to be an almost metaphysical concept which could pervade every aspect of life. This was manifested in a variety of government policies and campaigns, from promoting physical education and athletics to anti-smoking campaigns and maternal/infant care campaigns.\n\nOf course, this glorification of health had its dark side in the demonization of disease and disability, which contributed greatly to the eugenics and euthanasia intiatives carried out in the name of public health. And we must not forget the racial dichotomies in Nazi thought which associated the Aryan with health and the Jew with disease, a common theme in antisemitic propaganda. \n\nEDIT: Removed some unnecessary verbiage from the second quote"
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1y79ad | What types of plants played the role grasses before grass evolved? | What kind of ground cover were parties and fields filled with before grass evolved. I assume it wasn't just huge stretches of unused soil. | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1y79ad/what_types_of_plants_played_the_role_grasses/ | {
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"The short answer is [pretty weird](_URL_0_) with a lot of [seriously alien-looking wtf plants](_URL_1_).\n\nMost plants you see today are vascular plants; they have xylem and phloem (picture little pipes running from roots to leaves) to carry water up to the leaves and sugar down to the roots respectively. They also contain lignin, the polymer that gives wood most of its hardness.\n\nAncestral green algae did not need all that because they lived in the oceans, where sunlight and water are abundant and you don't need to be particularly strong. Bryophytes (mosses and liverworts) are basically land-based algae that evolved ~450 million years ago. Like today, you never find them far from water and most of Earth's surface simply didn't have plants on it.\n\nThen came the early vascular plants equipped with the necessary plumbing to conquer dry land. The horsetails in the first image once grew like grass and are still with us today, as are the ferns and a couple of others. [Lycopods](_URL_2_) developed, and eventually flourished into forests of giant 30-meter vaguely phallic [trees](_URL_3_) in the Carboniferous. If you were transported to this time you would wonder why all the plantlife was designed by Dr. Seuss, although late in the Carboniferous you start to get vaguely familiar-looking conifers (pine trees).\n\nOne disappointing feature of this world would be the total lack of flowers. All of these primitive vascular plants reproduced by spores like modern ferns do. If you want flowers or true grass you need to go forward a couple hundred million years to at least the Cretaceous.\n"
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"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lepidodendron"
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1e40ib | how the gunslingers in western films shoot so perfectly from the hip? | I thought of this while watching The Good, the Bad and the Ugly - but then it occurred to me that people do this in real life, too, shooting from the hip with perfect accuracy, and not just with revolvers. How on earth do they do it? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1e40ib/eli5_how_the_gunslingers_in_western_films_shoot/ | {
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"text": [
"Because it's fiction. \n\nIn real life, no one actually fought like that. Gun slinger fights in the wild west were messy, and usually involved many combatants, not 2 doing a stand off. It was no different than modern gang shoot outs, except their guns were far less accurate, and shooters would typically ambush opponents from rooftops and stuff. "
]
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[]
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|
ckttjw | what exactly makes the popping sounds when popping/cracking your muscles? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ckttjw/eli5_what_exactly_makes_the_popping_sounds_when/ | {
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"Air pockets between your joints. When your joints are moving, it can occasionally cause a gas bubble of CO2 between the joints. When you \"crack\" said joints, the sound is the air bubble collapsing. This is my most knuckle cracking only happen once after using your fingers for a while and you can't make the cracking sound on demand.... when you can make the sound repeatedly, that might be two bones making contact with each other, but that is exceedingly rare.",
"Could be wrong here, but I've heard that gas bubbles form throughout your body. When you pop a joint, the bubble that formed in there collapses and is re-absorbed into the blood?"
]
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[],
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||
2dosl6 | does the earth travel the exact same orbit every year or does it change slightly? | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2dosl6/does_the_earth_travel_the_exact_same_orbit_every/ | {
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"The orbit definitely changes, but by how much? With Newton's law of universal gravitation (F=GmM/d^2 ), the force of gravity is dependent on the square of the distance between two objects. The force between two objects can literally never be 0, but it will get really small. That means every object in the universe pulls on the earth in some way, but it won't significantly affect the orbit unless it is either really really big, or really really close (usually both). The only things big enough to do that are other planets and stars. There aren't really any stars close enough, but we can look at planets.\n\nLooking at the second biggest relatively nearby body, Jupiter, we can see roughly how much it affects the earth. The minimum distance between earth and jupiter, according to NASA, is 588.5 \\*10^6 km, or 5.885 \\* 10^11 m.\n\nThe mass of Jupiter is 1.89813\\*10^27 kg, and earth 5.97219\\*10^24 kg. Thus making the force of gravity between the two be 2.186\\*10^18 newtons. That's a lot of force, but how much does it affect the earth? \n\nF=ma, so 2.186\\10^18 / 5.97219\\*10^24 = acceleration by the force of gravity, = 3.66\\*10^-7 m/s^2\n\nThat's really small. Actually, its one one-hundred-millionths of the acceleration of gravity on earth.\n\nSo the answer is definitely no, the orbit is not the same from year to year. It varies, but by how much? Not a lot, at least because of gravity. There is probably something I overlooked in all of this that is much more significant. ",
"It does change slightly because of the influence of the other planets' gravity. This is what has caused the natural climate changes in the past. Over periods of hundreds of thousands of years the Earth's orbit changes pretty noticeably. These are part of the Milankovitch cycles.\n\n_URL_0_",
"If by orbit you mean circling along a ring in the same positions in space as the year prior, then the Earth never travels to the same point. This is because the entire solar system is orbiting around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, which itself is moving towards the Andromeda Galaxy.",
"The same orbit with respect to what? /u/norelevantcomments has addressed how jupiter affects the earth's orbit, but the earth is orbiting the sun, which is orbiting the galactic core. The path the earth orbits is not the same every year with respect to the core because the sun is moving about 230 km/s relative to the core."
]
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"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles"
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60pdvr | how many days of fasting does it take for your metabolism to slow down? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/60pdvr/eli5_how_many_days_of_fasting_does_it_take_for/ | {
"a_id": [
"df8a6og"
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"score": [
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"text": [
"This isn't as simple as how many days. A person's metabolism is based on multiple factors, such as age, gender, genetics, etc. As far as fasting if you mean eating smaller meals then it won't have much of an effect. If you mean more a person that doesn't eat for a day and is barely eating then they are dealing with bigger issues with their body than their metabolism.\n\nIf you are curious here are a few fasting myths debunked. Seems like your question might be answered with the first myth._URL_0_"
]
} | []
| []
| [
[
"http://www.leangains.com/2010/10/top-ten-fasting-myths-debunked.html"
]
]
|
||
4iillq | why does rubbing a coin on a metal surface make a vending machine accept it? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4iillq/eli5_why_does_rubbing_a_coin_on_a_metal_surface/ | {
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"text": [
"I wasent aware this was a thing, Have you tried it? Because this sounds ridiculous considering how vending machines work",
"Vending machines indentify coins by several criteria, commonly size, weight and electric conductivity, as well as a magnet trap for magnetic counterfeits. In order to have an effect, the rubbing needs to change one or more of these criteria to within the accepted parameters of the machine.\n\nWARNING, SPECULATION FROM HERE ON:\n\n**Why it could work:**\n\nGrime or oxide covering the coin can affect the electrical conductivity of the coin. Rubbing it would remove oxides and grime, and so restore the conductivity to a level the machine will accept. If you're using visibly dirty coins the dirt could be enough to affect size and weight as well.\n\n**Why it probably doesn't:**\n\nThis sounds a bit far fetched for me, I don't think vending machines are sensitive enough to detect a thin layer of oxide, and so should accept \"un-rubbed\" coins. Also, the conductivity is indirectly identified through use of the Hall-effect, so a surface layers should have very little effect on the measurement. I speculate that it has to do with superstition and confirmation bias. That is, if you use real coins, a well-functioning vending machine should eventually accept your coins, but it's not guaranteed to do so on the first try. So you put in some coins, some are not accepted, you rub them and try again and now, \"magically\", the rubbing fixed the problem and made the machine accept the coin. Except, the machine would have accepted the coins the second time anyways, but you chose to rub them in between, and thus falsely identified the rubbing as the important part, rather than the persistent re-trying.",
"I'm pretty sure we just think it's us rubbing the coin that makes it work when in reality if we just kept trying it would work anyway.\n\nBut I might be wrong.",
"There are finite ways how a vending machine checks the coin, and none of them can be affected by rubbing it beforehand.\n\nSo why does it work then? It doesn't. It seems to work because confirmation bias.\n\nSee: _URL_0_"
]
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| [
[],
[],
[],
[
"http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/23151/does-rubbing-a-rejected-coin-against-the-ticket-machine-make-it-likelier-to-be-a"
]
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|
||
3z32y4 | just watched "the big short" someone please explain exactly how the main characters made money. | Hey guys, so I have basic understanding of the concepts of a CDS and CDO as well as what shorting is. My confusion comes from how these concepts apply to the actual movie. When Bale first proposes his idea to the banks, my understanding is that since there was no real way to bet against the housing market, he basically "shorted" subprime loans by asking to buy CDS on those loans. What exactly was bought and sold here?
Why did Carrell's character hold off on selling (what exactly was he selling?)
And lastly I understand that they were betting against the American Economy, but did their shorting of the housing market directly affect the American public?
thanks. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3z32y4/eli5_just_watched_the_big_short_someone_please/ | {
"a_id": [
"cyixsjz"
],
"score": [
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"text": [
"To address your questions;\n\nBonds (groups of mortgages, with bad mortgages mixed in) were bought and sold. They had variable rates and terms that made it very easy to obtain a mortgage regardless if someone was qualified or not. \n\nTheir \"bets\" did not really effect the economy. They had caught onto a snowball sequence of events that would happen regardless of if they bet on it or not and choose to use it as an opportunity to profit. "
]
} | []
| []
| [
[]
]
|
|
1x2gcr | how does electrical grounding work for ships? why is it so complicated? | I have heard that electrical grounding on ships can get very complicated. Is this true? If so, why? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1x2gcr/eli5_how_does_electrical_grounding_work_for_ships/ | {
"a_id": [
"cf7kubx",
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"score": [
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3
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"text": [
"It's not about electrical safety directly. If you use a metal hull as ground, especially in salt water, electrolysis can cause corrosion.",
"I'm not sure about civilian ships, but in the Navy we used an ungrounded 3 phase system for reliability."
]
} | []
| []
| [
[],
[]
]
|
|
8g8106 | why after months of making no noise does my fan catch something in it to start making a rattling noise. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8g8106/eli5_why_after_months_of_making_no_noise_does_my/ | {
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"text": [
"Spinning and vibrations can loosen screws. Loose screws cause pieces to knock against eachother. It should be an easy fix unless something is actually broken.",
"Fans are balanced to eliminate as much vibration while the blades are rotating. If something heavy enough puts the balance out, all the components will being to vibrate and wobble. This could also lead to screws loosening and wear of the drive shaft, bearings and motor components."
]
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| []
| [
[],
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|
||
1hktc0 | how nyc is able to implement "stop and frisk". | I know that *technically* they're only supposed to question someone whom they have reasonable suspicion of committing or about to commit a crime. Then if they still believe that to be true, they're supposed to frisk them. However I've seen few videos posted of NYPD just walking up and searching people. Why isn't the city facing a massive lawsuit for violating citizens rights? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1hktc0/eli5_how_nyc_is_able_to_implement_stop_and_frisk/ | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Bloomberg prefers asking forgiveness rather than permission. The city will be sued at some point, but by that time Bloomberg hopes to have something to show for this very questionable policy. He did it with the park smoking ban, too. Make bold laws, let someone else work to get rid of it.\n\nThat being said, I've seen it happen multiple times. Enrages me.",
"A few major reason is that the people they are stopping are largely ignorant of their rights, less orgnized, have less political power, fewer rights (ex fellons), and broke.\n\nThat's not a group of people set up and educated enought to fight NY."
]
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| []
| [
[],
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1ahfm0 | What are some causes of the tank in WWI? | Besides the stalemate of the war and the invention of the internal combustion engine, what factors made the tank necessary and practical? | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ahfm0/what_are_some_causes_of_the_tank_in_wwi/ | {
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"You pretty much hit it on the head already. The tank was developed to overcome the stalemate of trench warfare, nothing morehere and t was certainly no desire to replace cavalry. In fact, on the Western Front, offensives were planned with cavalry to be used in conjunction with tanks. And they had to be, the tanks of the First World War were for the most part, slow and cumbersome and couldn't be relied upon to exploit a breakthrough should one occur. At Cambrai in 1917, cavalry was supposed to exploit the breakthrough made by the British tanks. The tanks successfully overcame the German defenses but poor planning meant the breakthrough was never realised and the Germans retook the ground. A better example is Amiens in 1918. Tanks, in conjunction with infantry successfully drove a hole through the German lines and achieved a breakthrough. With the mud and tortured landscape left behind and open country ahead, cavalry could actually play a the role it was always meant to play.\n\nMy point is that the tank was developed for no other reason than to overcome the hell of trench warfare. For evidence of this, look at the Eastern Front. Warfare was much more fluid and the front line moved often, with the absence of a stalemate, the development of weapons to overcome the types of problems seen in the west was also absent.",
"Designs for tanks actually predate WW1. There were various designs floating around before the war. An Australian (Mole?) had submitted a design for a tank (obviously not called a tank) before WW1 to the British War Department. They told him there was no use for it. Some of these designers were paid royalties after WW1.\n\nHowever, as said, it took the stalemate of WW1 trench warfare for people to start looking around for something that would break it. \n\nOther things were tried first. Not official things, but things done by soldiers. Some took wheelbarrows and stuck, not sure how, steel plates on them and then would try and advance with it. Didn't work out so much. Some took steel plates and tried it with other already existing vehicles. None of these turned out to be very practical. "
]
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34f9q8 | statutory rape? | Why are laws like this in place? Are there historical reasons for it?
I understand that in places like Saudi Arabia, the age of consent comes from when a woman gets married. But how did that age get defined in places like the U.S.? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/34f9q8/eli5_statutory_rape/ | {
"a_id": [
"cqu276l"
],
"score": [
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"text": [
"The idea behind statutory rape laws is that young people are much easier to manipulate, are frequently placed in situations where adults have considerable power over them, and haven't developed enough judgement to make potentially large decisions. \n\nThose factors combine to make any potential actual consent very hard to determine, so there's a cut off that says, nothing is sufficient to show consent in cases where the younger person was under a certain age. \n\nNote that we also don't generally let those under age participate in commercial contracts for the similar reasons. "
]
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| []
| [
[]
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|
|
objra | Seriously: What came first, the egg or the chicken? | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/objra/seriously_what_came_first_the_egg_or_the_chicken/ | {
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"text": [
"In terms of timeline, the dinosaurs were laying eggs before birds had even become a separate biological class, so the very first animal that could even possibly have been designated as a type of fowl would have come *long* after the first egg."
]
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2hw3s7 | why is push-back from power utilities against solar power such a big deal? | It seems to me that most of the strategies that utility companies are using to "push back" against the rise of solar energy is in the form of changing the way that they "buy" excess production from the solar panel owners.
Why do we have to sell it back to the utilities in the first place? Why not just use solar when you can, and use electricity when you can't? How is this a problem? What am I missing here? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2hw3s7/eli5_why_is_pushback_from_power_utilities_against/ | {
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"There are some laws in place which require utilities to purchase excess generation. These laws didn't really have as much of an impact on the utilities back when there weren't many cases of this, but as it's become more common they are more concerned about it.\n\nFor utilities it'd be in their interest to not be required to buy back extra power, but that's part of the draw of purchasing solar in the first place, to save money for when you have to pay for electricity when the solar doesn't provide enough so naturally there is a conflict there.",
"First, it's a benefit to the consumer to sell back to the utility. They DO use solar when they can, and buy from the utility when they cannot. But they also get a credit if they generate too much solar at any given point. The buy-back rules were put in place to incentivize people to add more solar panels. \n\nHonestly, it's not a big deal. As solar becomes cheaper, more efficient, and more prolific, the rules about buy-back will be cut back or removed, because they won't serve a purpose. Regulatory bodies won't allow utilities to die, because they do need the infrastructure in place. ",
"Interestingly, current power prices have a low fixed rate plus the variable rate based on usage. If you generate more power than you use, it credits back.\n\nThat fixed rate is *supposed* to account for grid maintenance and such, but the pricing used by most American utility systems doesn't charge enough in the fixed rate to cover those costs, and the balance is made up through usage.\n\nCustomers which use very little grid power thanks to on-site generation are therefore gaining the benefits of grid connection (more or less steady power at all times) without, necessarily, paying into the maintenance of said grid.\n\nIt's similar in some respects to the ways that electrical adoption in other fields is causing the breakdown of existing price structures. There's talk of switching the gas tax to a per-mile road tax, for example; the gas tax is a primary funding source for road maintenance, but high-efficiency vehicles pay a fraction of it and all-electric vehicles are effectively driving on roads that they're not helping to pay into.\n\nIt just means that the cost structure and pricing models associated need to adjust, and haven't done so yet.",
"Selling back is commented on well here. So I won't say more about it.\n\nOther tactics used are that the energy companies are making implementation so impossibly expensive that no one is willing to invest. Around my area, solar panels are taxed, which *GOES TO THE ENERGY COMPANY*, and they require expensive permits, on the same order of magnitude as an independent sub-station, and the company charges fees because you have solar. Any service work comes with an additional fee. And we're taxed annually. They're trying to make solar illegal as some sort of safety hazard because if you cut the power to the house, the house electric is still energized. That's their excuse. And our energy company has a legal monopoly. Our ability to choose is to get the town as a whole to choose the energy provider, and no matter who we choose, they get the legal monopoly and can basically game the system to charge whatever the fuck they want.\n\nI've read here that in parts of Arizona, where there's so much sun people disconnect from their electric utilities, the utilities are trying to make service compulsory, or they're taxing people for not having a service.\n\nEnergy companies hate privately owned solar because energy is their business, and if we're consuming less of it, or they don't control the means of production, then why do we need them? And how do they continue making money?",
"It isn't in the interest of the utility companies for you to be selling excess power to the grid because you are effectively competing with them.\n\nThis is complicated by the fact that grid maintenance costs must be paid by someone. The costs of maintenance are traditionally paid to the generator by the consumer. This causes issues if the consumer and the generator can be the same entity while remaining uninvolved in the maintenance.",
"The real problem I see has nothing to do with buy back of power. Yes, that's a huge issue, but I own land where power has not been brought to yet. I've heard notions of making self-installation illegal, and anything remotely like this gets my blood boiling. The reason I bought remote property was to get away from these scumbag monopolists. In that part of the country, power can be $2-300 per month in the winter. I want nothing to do with that. These utility companies are just abusing humanity, and it's disgusting.",
"With the best will in the world, solar power is a big and expensive technical problem for utility companies.\n\nAn electricity grid needs to be carefully balanced between inputs and outputs. An imbalance in either direction can lead to failures that result in blackouts.\n\nUtility companies need to carefully manage generation to match demand; The most extreme example of this is in the UK, where electric kettles [cause huge spikes in demand](_URL_0_) during commercial breaks in popular TV programmes. The British electricity grid needs specialist hydroelectric storage facilities to cope with these spikes, and often imports electricity from France.\n\nSolar panels obviously only generate energy during the day; Their output is unreliable due to changing weather. Storing that energy is expensive and difficult and solar panels would be uneconomical if they were only used as needed, so the usual solution is to [sell the electricity](_URL_2_) back to the utility company. Large numbers of extra solar panels mean that utility companies need to make a huge investment in energy storage facilities and the associated generation control equipment to manage this unpredictable source of energy.\n\nOne possible solution to this problem is [smart metering](_URL_1_), which would allow the cost of electricity to vary on a minute-by-minute basis depending on supply and demand. Energy-intensive industries could plan their consumption to take advantage of cheap electricity, and intelligent appliances could automatically optimise their energy use. This would be particularly useful if electric cars become popular, as their batteries could be used as an energy reservoir. Variable pricing is a controversial issue amongst consumers, and would impose substantial costs upon utility companies if the cost of upgrading meters was not subsidised by government. Only a few states have even started to install smart meters, and a national rollout will take many years and cost billions."
]
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[],
[],
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[],
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"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed-in_tariff"
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|
1r8gcg | why in the usa do black people typically vote for the democratic party when the gop is the party of emancipation and used to have the so-called "black" vote? when did it change? | The title says it all. I've looked around the internet and Googled it plenty, but I could not get a clear answer. I'm not form America and was wondering about this. Thank you. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1r8gcg/eli5_why_in_the_usa_do_black_people_typically/ | {
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"The New Deal (1930s) started the change in voting patterns, and Truman's desegregation of the military (1948) also shifted the partisan identification of blacks in the US towards Democrats, but the overwhelming margins today stem from the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1964 and 1965, which were two landmark race-related bills spearheaded by Democrats.",
"The Republican and Democratic positions more or less switched in the time period between the Civil War and World War II. It happened gradually, but was basically the sum of the two Roosevelt Presidencies and their policies, as well as the Great Depression and Reconstruction. After WWII, the modern Republican party was more or less solidified into their current role by Reagan's presidency.",
"Thank you for the answers very helpful. "
]
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[],
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|
1nh7uf | why do we like listening to sad music and watching scary movies when sadness and fear are negative emotions? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1nh7uf/why_do_we_like_listening_to_sad_music_and/ | {
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"text": [
"It's not the feelings of being sad and scared that are so enjoyable, its the psychological notion that you are in control of those experiences and that you are actually safe and sound. There is also the release of adrenaline with the fear response."
]
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| []
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[]
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|
||
4dntl3 | facebook bought whatsapp for $22 billion a while back. they just updated their app and claim that nobody, not even themselves can read the messages and calls now. whatsapp has close to zero revenue. what's in it for facebook? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4dntl3/eli5_facebook_bought_whatsapp_for_22_billion_a/ | {
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"The user base. Facebook cares about time spent on Facebook. Whatsapp has 1 billion users. Suppose whatsapp adds a feature that causes people to spend more time on whatsapp, eg a newsfeed. Now 1 billion people have less time to spend on Facebook. Facebook makes less money.\n\nSource: know whatsapp employees",
"First, and this may sound weird, but 22 billion isn't a lot for Facebook. They actually got a pretty good deal on it imo. I suspect that the Facebook call feature was using whatsapp technology, so they aren't completely shelving it. I think they benefited mainly in two ways:\n\n1.) Eliminated competition\n\n2.) Future technology to help them expand. I think are trying to branch out into a more broad communication business.",
"One of the things that particularly american audiences don't understand is that for chat services like Whatsapp, chat is just one of many things that the service could offer. \n\nDownload WeChat or Line or Cacao. These are chat services that operate in China, South Korea and Japan. \n\nThese places act as MARKETPLACES! People can buy and sell services and goods, pay people over these services, upload photos to a \"Profile\" similar to instagram, find random people in your area or around the world to talk to (think Tinder) etc..\n\nThe chat feature is a basis for all these add on services. This is why Facebook bought Whatsapp. To get these type of services to users before one of these Asian companies make moves into areas where Whatsapp is bigger than facebook (Africa, South America, other parts of Asia) etc. \n\nIts about the potential of the service, while keeping competitors away. If you can't beat them, join them basically"
]
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||
aa0spm | why does toothpaste with the colours of red white and blue never mix up | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aa0spm/eli5_why_does_toothpaste_with_the_colours_of_red/ | {
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"The gel compartments are near the nozzle of the toothpaste tube. Most of the tube has white toothpaste. As the toothpaste is squeezed through the nozzle, it passes the gel compartments and gains the characteristic stripes. They are not mixed until the very end of the tube.\n\nEdit: [Here is a youtube video showing it](_URL_0_)\n\nEdit Edit: Well, I just cut open a tube of crest and the toothpaste was striped all the way through in a single compartment, different than the video above. And if you mix it all together, you get amorphous blended mush."
]
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| []
| [
[
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qt69VHgtT_U"
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|
||
761i4b | if i'm driving at a constant speed of 60mph and get rear-ended by a vehicle which is moving at a constant 80mph, would the force of impact be the same as if i were sitting at 0mph and got rear ended by someone driving 20mph? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/761i4b/eli5_if_im_driving_at_a_constant_speed_of_60mph/ | {
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"text": [
"yes, the impact would have the same amount of force. \n\nThe big difference would be the whole spinning out of control at 60 mph would be much more dangerous than at 0 mph.",
"Yes, you would experience the same force, but this doesn't mean the same thing would happen in the two cases. \n\nThe first thing we're concerned with is the momentum of the cars: momentum is a measure of the mass and velocity of an object. A higher momentum basically means that an object will resist slowing down.\n\nNext, the velocity of the impact. In both cases, the velocity of the faster car is basically 20mph. Basically, as long as you're moving at a constant speed, you can say that you aren't moving at all, and everything around you is instead moving based on your actual speed; this is the underlying premise of relativity. So in both cases, the rear car will have the same relative momentum at the moment of impact, leading to the same force being applied. This is where the differences start.\n\nIf you're travelling at 60mph, the bits of your car that need to move are already moving, so you absorb more of the momentum and could potentially lose control of your vehicle. If you're stopped, then what will happen depends on conditions inside your vehicle: is your car in gear with the engine off, in neutral with the brakes on, or in neutral with the brakes off?\n\nIf your car is in gear, then in order for it to move, the force needs to be strong enough to cause your wheels to move the engine block - the opposite of what normally happens. This isn't a great scenario, as the force your car receives won't be transferred to forward motion as easily, and could feel quite nasty.\n\nIf your car is in neutral with the brakes off, you will find yourself rolling forwards, which is probably the best situation unless this pushes you into another vehicle. Have you ever seen a Newton's Cradle? This situation is kind of like one of those - your car will absorb some of the motion and start rolling. You'll still get a nasty jolt, but it won't be as bad as the other two cases; this is the closest to the situation where you're travelling at 60mph.\n\nFinally, if you're in neutral with the brakes on, you'll have quite a nasty experience. Your car will do everything it can to resist moving, so more of the momentum will be absorbed. This is because in order for your wheels to turn, they need to overcome the friction from the brakes and also move your engine block; alternatively, your car will slide forwards because the wheels won't turn.\n\nI hope this answer was helpful for you."
]
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d9hnt7 | In Medievel Europe, Were Jewish People More Literate than Average? | Obviously there weren't any kinds of census on reading ability, but Jewish religion and culture places a great deal of emphasis on the importance of the written word and the exact transmission and interpretation of the text as received. Is there evidence that this was reflected in a greater-than-average level of literacy among Jewish people compared to Christians, who were often not expected to read the Bible, in Latin or the vernacular? Were there socio-economic factors (i.e. lack of schools, increased level of tradesman with limited ability to read and write, etc.)? | AskHistorians | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d9hnt7/in_medievel_europe_were_jewish_people_more/ | {
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"It is pretty much impossible to know for sure, because, like you said, they didn't have comprehensive population surveys, and we have no records about most people's lives. In particular, we have almost no records of people who couldn't write, because they didn't write anything. So even if we have loads of records of people who *did* write, it's very hard to tell how many *other* people there were who we don't know about it. It's a sampling bias problem that's very hard to deal with. \n\nBut we do have some indications from both Jews and Christians that it was at least popularly perceived that Jews were much more likely to be literate. For example, one twelfth-century Christian writer said: \n\n\"When Christians send their sons to school, they do not send them for the love of God but for lucrative reasons [...] But a Jew, even if he is poor, even if he has 10 sons, will send them all to school, not in order to obtain any benefit, as Christians do, but for the study of the law of God, and not only the sons but also his daughters.\"\n\nIt's hard to tell how literally to take this text. Did he really know that many poor Jews with educated daughters? Maybe. Did he know that Jews care about education and then try to use that to motivate his Christian readers to care more about education? Also maybe. \n\nWe also have a number of Jewish legal texts saying that everybody ought to learn to read so they can read the Torah and rabbinic texts, and that all Jewish communities should appoint someone to teach the young children how to read. But we don't know how much anyone listened to those legal texts. We have a large number of financial documents written by Jews in Hebrew, many of them in non-professional handwriting, which suggest that at least merchants and their clients could read and write and didn't need to hire scribes for everything like many Christians did. But it is very hard to tell how far down that really went in socio-economic classes, and it is very likely that very poor Jews were less likely to be able to read.",
"**Short answer:**\n\nThere are all kinds of techniques for assessing the literacy of a historical population. There is, however, no \"average medieval person\" to compare Jews -- or anyone else-- to. The Middle Ages covers a great expanse of space and time, and literacy varies from place to place and from time to time in the nearly thousand years from the end of Antiquity to the Renaissance.\n\n**Discussion:**\n\n > Obviously there weren't any kinds of census on reading ability,\n\nNever underestimate the ingenuity of scholars in finding quantitative proxies. While there were no \"censuses of reading ability\" -- we have an enormous body of legal documents and financial, which often demonstrate whether a particular individual could sign his own name, a marker for the most basic literacy. This gives us a very nice time series for historical literacy, and can be further be broken down by gender and class (since early legal documents often mention individuals' occupations. So David Cressy (writing of early modern England, but the techniques can be applied wherever you have documents) is able to tell us, for example, that:\n\n > The social structure of illiteracy in the diocese of Norwich is clearly established by the study of depositions. Table I shows the percentage in various social categories who could not sign their names, and Table 2 shows the illiteracy of men in some of the most frequently encountered trades and crafts. Only the more common ranks and occupations have been included. Where samples are particularly small, of course, the figures should be treated with due caution. We may be 95 per cent confident that the true illiteracy of yeomen in East Anglia lay in the range 35 +/- 3 per cent but the illiteracy of, say, shoemakers should be more properly estimated as 58 +/- 11 per cent and bricklayers 88 +/- 13 per cent.\n\nThere's also an entire series of scholarly works, the *Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy* which attack the problem of evaluating medieval literacy in all sort of ingenious ways. And have to mention the important study by Buringh and Van Zanden \\[2009\\] -- they run the numbers on book and manuscript production from the 6th through the 18th centuries.\n\nSome of the easily assessed proxies include the numbers of books published, and topics. Books often give you an idea of who it was intended for, no reason to produce a book for someone who couldn't read it. Its often noted that the transition from a medieval manuscript culture, where book production was small and expensive, to a printed book economy where they're plentiful and cheap implies a great deal more literacy. Care has to be taken in estimating earlier literacy- when paper and other materials were expensive, inexpensive and often overlooked media, like wax tablets, were often used. Just because we don’t have paper doesn’t mean people weren’t reading and writing - and some of these other media don’t survive well.\n\nIn terms of religious associations with literacy, Jewish males were commonly literate for religious purposes, but the more useful comparison is with Protestantism. Catholicism didn't require religious literacy for the people (it did for the clergy), and so the rise of literacy in Europe is often associated with both the printing press and Protestantism. But that's too simple as a story-- the role of the Church in education changes during the middle ages, and in later years there's very much an expectation that they'll be fostering education-- looking at England, literacy is increasing significantly even before the Reformation\n\n > As was stipulated in the canons of the fourth Lateran Council, cathedral schools were expected to extend their facilities to any youths who desired instruction in Latin. Although the cathedral clerks alone justified the maintaining of a grammar school, training in Latin was not to be restricted to them. This is frequently expressed in the appointments of the masters: when Bishop Welton appoints Master John of Burdon in 1362 to conduct a grammar school in Carlisle, he lays down no conditions for admission: instruction in Latin is open to 'boys, adults and any others' wishing to learn\n\nSo when you ask \"were X more literate than average\" -- well just where do you get your \"average\"? A slave in Wales in 900 CE? Then yes. Or a Florentine merchant in Paris in 1400? Probably not. \"The average middle ages person\" -- ain't a thing.\n\n**Sources:**\n\nMiner, John Nelson. “Schools and Literacy in Later Medieval England.” *British Journal of Educational Studies*, vol. 11, no. 1, 1962, pp. 16–27.\n\nKaeuper, Richard W. “Two Early Lists of Literates in England: 1334, 1373.” *The English Historical Review*, vol. 99, no. 391, 1984, pp. 363–369.\n\nCressy, David. “Levels of Illiteracy in England, 1530-1730.” *The Historical Journal*, vol. 20, no. 1, 1977, pp. 1–23\n\nBROWN, MICHELLE P. “THE ROLE OF THE WAX TABLET IN MEDIEVAL LITERACY: A RECONSIDERATION IN LIGHT OF A RECENT FIND FROM YORK.” *The British Library Journal*, vol. 20, no. 1, 1994, pp. 1–16.\n\nBuringh, Eltjo, and Jan Luiten Van Zanden. “Charting the ‘Rise of the West’: Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, a Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth through Eighteenth Centuries.” *The Journal of Economic History*, vol. 69, no. 2, 2009, pp. 409–445."
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79378n | What were the difference in the military physical qualifications during WW2 between the various powers? | I was considering the desperate need for manpower that many nations in WW2 ran into, and it made me wonder, what were the differences between physical standards in the different nation's armed forces? For instance, did the Soviet have lower standards for weight because their population might not have been as well fed? Moreover, how did the various nations qualifications change during the war? I know that by the end of the war, the Germans were throwing teenagers and middle aged men into the war, how about the other powers? After the German advance into Russia was repelled, were certain groups less likely to be called up? | AskHistorians | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/79378n/what_were_the_difference_in_the_military_physical/ | {
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"As a follow up, were there differences in mental or educational qualifications as well? \n\nI know from [this excellent answer](_URL_0_) by /u/the_howling_cow that the US military often rejected recruits for not meeting literacy qualifications. But I assume that the Soviets, Japanese and even Germans had lower literacy rates among their general population. Did they have looser standards about literacy, and if so, did that affect their performance or what type of tactics they could employ?"
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"https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/78motc/its_1944_im_a_young_american_man_i_just_found_out/dov2dk6/"
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88z2be | How does being born blind or deaf influence the way you think? | askscience | https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/88z2be/how_does_being_born_blind_or_deaf_influence_the/ | {
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"DeafBlind people learn tactile sign language. So they think in that language. \n\nIf you're interested in something more deeper, there have been studies that show hearing people are able to memorize 7 short bits of information (like a phone number) in only one direction, while Deaf people are able to memorize 5 more complex things (such as a family of five children, their ages and genders) forward and backward. This is due to the ability to use space to \"place\" things (such as on the fingers of the hand) in ASL.",
"Since there are areas of the brain specifically predisposed to process visual and auditory information, when someone is deaf or blind, they will often recruit these non-utilized regions of the brain for other functions. For example, when a blind person reads brail, the language regions of their brain will light up on an fMRI as expected, but in addition, their visual cortex will light up as well, even though they can't see, suggesting that their brain is utilizing this region to process the information as well. The same thing is observed with deaf people. Their auditory cortex is very active when they are communicating in sign language, even though they can't hear. It may go without saying that this extra activity is not observed in people without a sensory deficit. Interestingly though, people that can see, but are taught brail with a blindfold on, will actually recruit their visual cortex to process info in a similar manner to blind people, according to fMRI studies.\n\nEssentially being born deaf or blind results in a region of the brain, that would normally be reserved for that particular sense, available for processing other information. Because the brain wastes no processing power, unused regions are quickly recruited by other functions, such as language or complicated motor control."
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bmhvg3 | Did WW1 really have a reason? | I’m guessing this is more of a philosophical question and I’m more interested in your personal opinion. Factually, one could argue that it was the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, or that it was about colonies, stopping German mainland dominance, etc.
But for me it’s quite hard to grasp why WW1 had to happen. It’s hard to find any rational reason. It’s almost like a bunch of people with stiff hats and handlebar mustaches idolized war and in the end they let out an uncontrollable Monster that consumed human flesh by the millions. As if it was the climax of 19th century romanticism.
Like no one knew what they were going into and no one really knew what they were fighting for, only that they can’t lose.
In the end even the victors came out worse than if they had just lost 4 years earlier.
WW2 was basically the rematch of WW1. WW2 also had ideologies battling with each other. WW1 had no ideologies, just a pointless waste and suffering of millions of human lives.
What are your thoughts? | AskHistorians | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bmhvg3/did_ww1_really_have_a_reason/ | {
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"You can point to some widespread elements that contributed to the war. Social Darwinism, nationalism, militarism may have, to debatable degrees, made the leadership and population of Europe more accepting of the idea of a general conflict. There was likely also an lack of appreciation for the risk of a drawn out exhaustive conflict by some leaders and the general public. While there is some evidence (from quotes from Moltke and other military figures) for instance that the possibility for a long war wasn't totally disregarded, the more popular opinion was that a long war was impossible because no nation could afford it economically. This idea was put forward, perhaps most famously, in *The Great Illusion* by Norman Angell, and in the end I think that we'd have to agree he was largely right if only the actors in the drama had had the foresight to see.\n\nAt a lower level, though, each major player had their OWN specific reasons for accepting the war... things they wanted to get out of it.\n\nAustria-Hungary wanted to punish Serbia for a track record of supporting separatist agitation and terrorism. Austria also strongly (and correctly) suspected, and had some but not enough proof, that elements of the Serb government were actively involved with the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. Austria also saw an opportunity to strengthen their influence in the Balkan region which might have enabled them (in their own excessively optimistic minds) to build an extended economic zone.\n\nSerbian leaders knew that if they allowed a proper investigation, the Austrians would be able to justify overthrowing the Serb government and installing a puppet (because they knew they were busted). The only hope the Serb government had of retaining it's position was to fight it out and hope the Russians decided to help them and could beat the Austrians. \n\nRussia (who had no treaty with Serbia, so don't \"web of alliances\" this situation) had a desperate need to defend their last remaining proxy in the Balkans and to restore their credibility in the region. After having been seen as letting down the Serbs in 1908 by not contesting the formal annexation of Bosnia by Austria, seen (by previously preferred proxy Bulgaria) as betraying Bulgaria in 1912/1913 in favor of the Serbs during the Balkan Wars, and seen by the Serbs as not supporting them in 1913 when they tried to annex Albania, there was certainly a track record of diplomatic \"failure\" and \"weakness\" growing. The Russians also had long term goals to acquire Constantinople and the Turkish Straits, which were so important to their economy, and a general war could offer at least a restoration of their Balkan influence and possibly the possession of the straits (if the Ottomans joined the Central Powers and if Russia won, of course).\n\nGermany had this encirclement syndrome thing going on. They saw France building up for war with the new 3 year law, in theory leading to a 50% increase in peacetime army size and over time a similar increase in reserve manpower. They saw similar build ups in the Russian force, as well as vast improvements in Russia mobilization speeds that could nearly rival the Germans ability to deploy to the Polish front. Germany also knew that France had been unwilling to fight over Balkan issues in the past (1908, 1913) and that Russia had always backed down in the past. In the opinion of German leadership, if Russia didn't back down this time too then that meant France wanted a war. Germany probably overestimated the future military strength of France (there was a pretty good chance that the 3 year conscription law, which was very contentious when it was passed, wouldn't have lasted long) and definitely overestimated Russian military ability in 1914, but hindsight offers us these advantages.\n\nFrance worried that they would be at risk of losing the Russian alliance after not supporting Russia in 1908 and 1913 during those Balkan crises. France did not have to support Russia in 1914, yet they chose to do so for their own reasons. The record of diplomatic communication and activities of the French ambassador Paleologue show that French officials went so far as to encourage Russia to escalate the situation rather than attempt to calm the crisis. There were also many in France that longed to avenge the defeat of 1871 and the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, but sometimes that influence gets overplayed. That sort of thinking did exist, however, in the public and in government.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nSo all the major players had reasons that, in June/July 1914, they thought were of strategic importance either politically, militarily, or both. They all had opportunities the step away from the war, but each decided the potential gains were worth the risks that war entailed."
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1l2tsg | why do 2 minute offenses in the nfl seem to be more efficient than the normal offense? | I'm no American football expert, but I have watched enough games. It always seems like the 2 minute drill offenses seem to be fast paced, pass-oriented, and achieve enough yards to result in a TD, field goal, or good field position for a good punt. It's not like the defense is confused about the strategy to push down the field in minimal time, so why does it work more than a traditional offense? Of course you can point to the fast-paced offenses of Chip Kelley or the recent NE Patriot's offenses, but I don't understand the grind it out mentality during normal possessions that are +/-, and then the productive mentality of the 2 minute drill? I appreciate the run first, pass second scheme, but no defenses expect this in a 2 minute drill, so despite knowing this why do defenses give up so many yards (the only argument I can forsee is that defenses in the 2 minute drill want to contain losses, not prevent them, but this is a cop out IMO. If a team always ran a 2 minute offense I wouldn't expect the same kind of gains against a standard defense, so I wouldn't understand why a defensive coordinator would run a different type of defense against this scheme).
| explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1l2tsg/eli5_why_do_2_minute_offenses_in_the_nfl_seem_to/ | {
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"the 2-minute offense, also known as the \"hurry up\", seeks to play as many downs as possible in the quickest time. A defense usually puts new guys in during the game (i.e. bigger dudes on 3rd and short to stop the run). The hurry-up prevents this, by not giving the defense enough time to swap personnel before the next play is starting.\n\nAdditionally, the fast pace of the offense usually prevents any unique defensive play-calls, because there isn't enough time to relay the proper call to everyone on the field. So, the defenses usually use a standard man or zone defense, with no tricks or disguise.\n\nThose two things: preventing the defense from swapping personnel to fit each situation, and causing basic defensive formations... that's what gives the offense an easier time as they continue to execute plays. Added on... the 2-minute drill is almost always done to make a comeback from the team that is losing the game. The defense doesn't want to give up any big plays, so they play \"back\", not putting as much pressure on the short and medium passing game.",
"There is also a lot more strategy in football than just get to the endzone ASAP and score. Clock management is a huge part of the game. If you're playing against the best offense in the league, you want to keep the ball out of their hands as long as possible so you would most likely try to develop a strong running game with using every second available between plays. \n\nHowever when time starts running out and you have to score in as little time as possible, then you have to hurry. A hurry up offense comes with a lot of risk as well. There are many times a game will end because the team that is behind will get into a rush and make a mistake that will just end any chance of coming back.",
"The biggest reason it looks better is because most defenses drop into whats called \"Prevent\" coverage in a 2 minute drill situation. They don't to give the big play and have the offense score a touchdown in one shot, so they allow the short game over the middle to stay open, and this allows the offense to move down the field. This though causes the offense to use up the time they have, and as they march down the field, the area the defense has to cover gets smaller and smaller, allowing for better coverage by the defense. This is why a lot of 2 minute drives seem to fizzle out about the 45-35 yard line. "
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3gk84n | how do these websites that buy gift cards from consumers work? | There are a handful of websites that will buy your gift card at a discounted price. Say I have a $100 gift card to Best Buy and one of the websites will buy it from me for $88. What are they doing with the purchased gift card and how are they making money? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3gk84n/eli5how_do_these_websites_that_buy_gift_cards/ | {
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"They re-sell your gift card. If you browse around the site you'll usually also find gift cards for sale, those are the cards they bought. They make money by selling them for a few bucks more than they bought them, they aren't using the cards or anything like that.",
"It's quite simple. The Gift Gard is worth $100. You can go into Best Buy or whatever at any time and get the full $100 value from it. Anyone who buys it for less than $100 can potentially get more value out of it then what they paid for it.\n\nIt's worth it for others to buy it at $88 because the card can potentially be resold for higher or can be used to effectively shave off $10-12 from any $100+ purchase at Best Buy.\n"
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469v91 | Did the Confederate troops that accidentally shot Stonewall Jackson suffer any repercussions for their actions? | Hello all! I just finished the book Rebel Yell about Confederate general Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, and was fascinated by the friendly fire incident that ultimately contributed to his death. Did the troops that opened fire upon he and his fellow officers and staff members suffer any punishment or social backlash for the accident? Are there any records of one of the soldiers expressing what I assume must have been a deep remorse for the mistake? Thanks! | AskHistorians | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/469v91/did_the_confederate_troops_that_accidentally_shot/ | {
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"The commander of the 18th NC, Major then Col John Barry retained hi s command till the end of the war and was both wounded and served as acting Brigadier General in the Overland Campaign. He died soon after the war and supposedly continuously expressed remorse.\n\nThe Brigade commander General James Lane was actually one of the young stars of Lee's Army. The youngest flag officer he on multiple occasions served as acting division commander and received multiple wounds. \n\nAfter the war he was recruited as the first Commandant of the Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College, today known as Virginia Tech, and he also served a time as a professor at Auburn after being forced to leave VAMC.\n\nEDIT: Because I trusted a school to know the history of its own founders Lane was not the youngest in the entirety of the Army of Northern Virginia, but one of a handful to have been promoted before age 30, and was simply the youngest one left with Lee by the end, Ramseur having been killed and Hoke having joined Joe Johnston in the Carolinas. "
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33s5hn | gearing/leverage (finance) | What does the term gearing/leverage mean when it comes to finance and how is it applied? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/33s5hn/eli5_gearingleverage_finance/ | {
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"Gearing and leverage refer to the level of debt a company or financial venture has taken on. To see why it's called leverage, let's look at a simple example.\n\nLet's say I have a business venture that can always earn a 10% return on capital investment. That means, every time you give me $100 to buy machinery (or whatever) I can use it to make $10 a year.\n\nIf I do happen to have $100 that's great. I make $10 profit a year.\n\nBut if I can borrow money more cheaply than that 10%, I can make extra profit by borrowing money. If I borrow another $100 at 5% to add to my $100, I can make $20 a year before interest. After I pay the $5 interest I can make $15.\n\nLet's add another zero onto it. How about I borrow $1000. Add it to my $100 and now I can make $110 a year, take away my $50 interest payment and now I make $60.\n\nAll I'm doing is increasing the amount of debt I take on and yet I become more profitable. It's called leverage because with the same amount of initial money, I can earn more profit (just like a lever allows you to do more work with the same initial application of force).\n\nNow, the problem with leverage is that I cannot be sure about my profits. The future is inherently unknowable and there's a chance I might not make enough money. With my initial no debt $100 situation, all I stand to lose is my $100. But as I borrow more, the consequences of making the wrong prediction about my profits get worse and worse and I might end up owning far more than I could ever repay.\n\nIn finance specifically, this often refers to the leverage of a financial entity. A firm (like a pension fund) that exists just to buy shares in companies and other financial instruments. It could simply take money from its investors and use it to buy shares and other assets. But it could make more profit by mixing the money from its investors with some borrowed money ie, it can leverage itself. Once again, this is a game of comparing risk with rewards. If the investments pay off, the profit is all that much higher for having used debt to fund it. But if they investments go bad, you end up losing your capital AND paying off more debt."
]
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zuqwb | if the fec restricts individual contributions to a federal election to $2500, how can celebrities and the super wealthy hold $40,000 a plate fundraisers? | Jay-Z and Beyonce are holding a [$40,000 a ticket fundraiser](_URL_0_) for Obama soon, and plenty of other celebrities and wealthy people hold similar fundraisers. What makes these fundraisers which exceed federal election contributions different than regular political donations? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/zuqwb/eli5_if_the_fec_restricts_individual/ | {
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"$2500 is the limit for individual candidates, you can also give $30k to the national parties, and $5000 to PACs. So that $40k will get split up in some legal way, but in general the candidates will have direct or indirect access to those funds."
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| [
"http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/beyonce-jay-z-to-host-fundraiser-for-obama-at-swanky-new-york-nightclub/2012/09/13/3b982bf4-fde4-11e1-98c6-ec0a0a93f8eb_story.html"
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ptj22 | How long is the delay between the stimulus and response for any sensory organ in the body? | I know nerve impulses can travel pretty darn fast, but we don't feel exactly when someone touches us. | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ptj22/how_long_is_the_delay_between_the_stimulus_and/ | {
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"You are aware of a delay when someone touches you? Most people are not normally aware of anything coming between ourselves and what we see/hear/touch (we aren't aware of the various pathways the signal travels in our body or our brain interpreting the signals). Also perceptual experience is seemingly instantaneous in that we ordinarily assume that we perceive events as they happen, with absolutely no time-lag or delay. ([source](_URL_0_)).\n\nAlthough we don't experience a delay, we know it exists due to the physiology of our nervous system. The delay is more difficult to measure than might be expected. You can read more about how we measure it & a lot more about the nature of perception [here](_URL_0_), but **it's estimated that stimuli can produce basic sensations in as little as 50–80 msec.**"
]
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e87jte | What qualities did furs from North America have that made them so desirable to Europeans? Were commonly worn clothes prior to the Fur Trade really much worse, or was it primarily an aesthetic/fashion/status thing? | AskHistorians | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/e87jte/what_qualities_did_furs_from_north_america_have/ | {
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" One of the biggest qualities North American furs had was a simple one: they were there to use in the first place. One of the largest sources of supply for European furs before 1492 was in northern Russia, flowing into Western Europe primarily via Novgorodian and later Russian traders through the Baltic. This region had been massively depleted by the 1500’s due to intense cultivation over a prolonged period, with the beaver in particular practically vanishing from Europe. \n\nThis factor was paired with an environmental phenomenon known as the Little Ice Age, which was a period of generally lower temperatures across the globe from around the 15th to the 19th centuries. I’m sure an environmental historian could speak more on this but the decline in temperature was certainly significant and had a broad historical impact: one the one hand, you could enjoy a winter fair on the frozen Thames, but if you were a Chinese peasant, famines caused by the temperature drop would (arguably) lead to the overthrow of your ruling dynasty by Jurchen tribes. Colder temperatures would undoubtedly cause an increase in desire for furs due to its excellent protective properties. In essence It was a classic low supply/high demand scenario that led to a boom in the transatlantic fur trade being as profitable as it was, with a relatively untapped source of supply sitting abundantly in North America.",
"While agreeing with the above comment. There were several other factors in their favor e.g.\n\n* It a source for a number of Western European countries that had previously drawn on Eastern supplies. Which difficult and expensive including often via several intermediaries and often political complications. While the new American were just (though recognizing it often difficult) a sea voyage away and often from their own colonies. Which they were keen both to encourage and profit from.\n* 'Comparatively' numerous and little valued by the native peoples. Who also much sought European goods. They were notably easily obtained and cheaper than than Eastern furs. Giving them a usually clear undercutting commercial advantage. \n* Fashion, though difficult to grasp, not to be discounted. In this case the rise of the Beaver fur hat - for which Beaver fur made the best felt e.g. 1750 45% of British fur exports, worth £263,000 were of fur hats to Spain (these visible in Spanish paintings of the period)."
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dcb6in | Is it possible to have a non-gaseous planet with permanent storms like Jupiter? And what would the conditions have to be for that to happen? | askscience | https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/dcb6in/is_it_possible_to_have_a_nongaseous_planet_with/ | {
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"It would have to be covered in some sort of fluid atmosphere in order for the storms to have a media to propogate in. For example a liquid covered planet with oceans over the entire surface several kilometres deep at a minimum would be covered in constant ongoing chaotic weather systems which could be described as 'storms' depending on their severity. \nAssuming a broader interpretation of the question, (non-gas giants) another example might a Venus type planet. Storms on Venus propogate through its dense gaseous atmosphere but it is a 'rocky' earth like planet as opposed to a gas giant like Jupiter.",
"An Earth-Sized plant in the goldilocks zone that is tidally locked would have zones of storms at the light terminators.\n\nIt doesn't have to be in the goldilocks zone.... but it gives you the idea an idea situation could still yield undesirable results."
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5ozrvm | why do so many asian demonyms end with "ese"? (chinese, vietnamese, japanese, burmese) | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ozrvm/eli5why_do_so_many_asian_demonyms_end_with_ese/ | {
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"This is a good question, specifically why we say \"Chinese\" instead of \"Chinan\" (or why we say \"Korean\" instead of \"Korese\")",
"From [this source](_URL_0_):\n\n > The -an, -ian, and -ese suffixes all stem from the Latin adjectival naming system:\n\n > -ian or -an, from Latin, –ianus, meaning \"native of\", \"relating to\", or \"belonging to\"\n\n > -ese, from the Latin, -ensis, meaning \"originating in\" \n\nThey all save similar meanings, and the assignments seem to be arbitrary, maybe based on what sounds \"better.\"\n\nFor example, a citizen of Vienna is both Viennese and Austrian.",
"I think this has to do with word endings, more than regions. Place names ending in 'm' or 'n' get the 'ese' suffix. \n\nAnother user posted \"Viennese\" for someone who lives in the city of Vienna. However, that person is Austrian.\n\nKorea ends in a vowel, thus \"Korean\", not \"Koreaese\". Laos is the same. A good example: one is Thai, yet Siamese."
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30d740 | why are saudi arabia and iran are having a war in yemen? | It seems to be that the Americans are financially supporting the Saudi Arabia country while Iran are supporting the rebels in this fight. Why are they fighting in a different country (proxy war?) as opposed to each others country? What are their motives (religion, political, resources?)? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/30d740/eli5_why_are_saudi_arabia_and_iran_are_having_a/ | {
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"Same reason most wars were fought in the 20th century. It's about ensuring a sphere of influence.\n\nIf the Sunni side wins, it's another ally for the Saudis. If the Shia side wins, it's an ally for Iran.\n\nBoth countries have long been locked in a struggle to be the \"top dog\" in the region. Just look at the controversy over the naming of the Persian / Arabian Gulf. ",
"Yemen has only been a single country for 25 years and fought a civil war in the 1980's. The central government is weak, the economy weak, an active al-Qaeda branch causes problems, and the various tribes follow different religions. The current unrest is a new civil war supported in part by outside parties. \n\nSaudi Arabia is interested in a stable neighbor and Saudi-allied government. Iran is interested in an unstable neighbor for Saudi Arabia and a new Iranian ally. The most dangerous branch of al-Qaeda is located in Yemen and is the primary reason for US involvement. \n\nProxy wars are preferable to real wars as they are less expensive, involve few of your own people dying, and harder to be blamed for. Proxy wars are strongly preferable to the weaker party who holds little hope of victory in conventional war. Iran has no chance of defeating Saudi Arabia in direct fighting. The Saudi military is superior and supported by the US, UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and Pakistan. \n\nSaudi is leading the current intervention and is supported by nine other countries including Morocco, Egypt, Sudan, Pakistan, Kuwait, UAE, Jordan, Bahrain, and Qatar. The US is providing intelligence support but I don't believe any money. Iran is supporting an insurgent group. "
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4tpzmu | the "planet x" conspiracy | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4tpzmu/eli5_the_planet_x_conspiracy/ | {
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"This might be a bit long winded as there's a bit of background to get through.\n\nOk, before we really could see well to Pluto and beyond, we knew that funny things were influencing Neptune and Pluto's orbits. A lot of explanations were put forth, and one of them was that there was a relatively large, 10th planet, beyond Pluto, which was coined often as 'Planet X'. It actually predated Pluto's discovery, and people thought for a bit that Pluto was the one causing the disruption, but then figured that it couldn't be moving them that hard because it's just too small.\n\nThis was before we had really learned a lot about the Kupier Belt and didn't know a lot about any trans-Neptunian objects, redefined planet and coined the term dwarf planet as a spheroid object that's planet shape but not enough mass that hadn't cleared its own debris field properly, which is why up until recently people thought Planet X was a theoretical 10th planet, and not 9th. The 'X' was originally meant to just mean 'unknown' but kind of came over time to mean '10' to people.\n\nI mean at that point their explanation wasn't completely crazy; that's how people first learned about Neptune because Neptune itself was messing with Uranus's orbit. \n\nThen they figured out later, that a large part of the discrepancy was just that Neptune is just straight up more massive than previously thought. Come around to modern time and now they're finding out a lot of bodies in the Kupier belt are way off and there's possibly another theoretical actual 9th planet maybe.. and there we go again.\n\nBut that's not the conspiracy, just the background.\n\nAfter a while, in 1995 this lady named Nancy Lieder, who runs his webpage called ZetaTalk starts to stay that she's been contacted from aliens from Zeta Riticuli through implants in her brain that was chosen to warn people about a giant object that would rip through the solar system in 2003 though obviously when that didn't happen the date magically just gets postponed, that would cause basically the world to end. It would pass by and cause the earth's magnetic poles to reverse somehow and every thing would just go to crap somehow.\n\nSo pretty much any time any object larger than a muffin is discovered or even passes by like, the galactic neighborhood, she and the people who believe her jump on the wagon of \"No really this time guys it's coming\". She also has extremely detailed descriptions and measurements of objects that don't exist and were later proven to not exist. \n\nAnd conveniently they all had all kinds of things to protect yourself from magnetic rays like.. white cloth. And tried to convince people to kill their pets out of mercy before the world ended. \n\nThen when nothing happened she was like \"Oh, I totally lied about the date, because if I said the TRUE date, then the government would trap people in cities leading to their death\", never mind that even the worst government on earth's goals are pretty much never 'kill all our our tax payers'.\n\nThen all of this got moved and swept up in the \"December 2012 end of the world!\" nonsense.\n\nShe tried to claim legitimacy by trying to link her work with another guy (Zecharia Sitchin) that claims aliens from a place called Nibiru came and helped kick start civilization, rebranding the run away death planet as Nibiru. In Zecharia's works, Nibiru would pass by closer to the solar system and it's people would fly to Earth, change things, then fly back until the next pass. His version of Nibiru never endangered the Earth. For the record, Zecharia pretty much denied her claims as having any relevance to his works up until his death in 2010.\n\nA lot of scientists looked at her work and said \"It's crazy\" and all the crazy people looked at that and said \"NASA is clearly just covering up the truth\". And the world continued to not be killed by a random planet to this writing."
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ewrlw | Why do vaccines cause fever and flu-like symptoms in some people? | I've been searching all over, but I simply can't find something that says why -- only that they do. I believe it's because of the immune system response to a foreign body, but I can't find any documents supporting that.
EDIT: I'm not asking how vaccines work. Vaccines use weakened or dead viruses that pose no risk to your body, so why do some people get an adverse systemic response? I would really appreciate a reference.
EDIT2: I've found something in my human physiology book that sounds reasonable. Basically fever production is a natural response of the body after it detects infection.
So what causes the nausea and vomiting? | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ewrlw/why_do_vaccines_cause_fever_and_flulike_symptoms/ | {
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"vaccines are made with small amounts of what they are meant to treat.",
"Would it make things clearer if I pointed out that fevers are (in many cases) *not* caused by the flu? Your own body is what causes the fever when you have the flu; it's an immune response.\n\nWhen the vaccine is introduced, an immune response is triggered, and it's the immune response *itself* that makes you feel shitty.\n\n(As I understand it anyway. As you can see I'm purple, so it's not in my area of expertise)",
"**The virus is not the direct cause of your symptoms.**\n\nIt's your body's reaction to the virus that causes your symptoms (a subtle, but important (to your question), distinction). \n\nA weakened (or dead?) virus still looks like a virus to your immune system, and your body recognizes it, and acts to repel it (causing symptoms for some). The virus isn't able to reproduce, so basically your body can take time to \"prepare a response\", and later on if you are infected with live virus, it already has the ability to fight it off.\n\ntl;dr: Your body's reaction to the virus (and not the virus itself), causes symptoms. Since you are being injected with a virus (albeit weakened (or dead?)) you get symptoms."
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4m3x74 | the difference between existentialism, nihilism and absurdism | Thanks :) | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4m3x74/eli5_the_difference_between_existentialism/ | {
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"Existentialism - individual people are free and responsible to determine their own purpose and development through their actions.\n\nNihilism - extreme skepticism, belief that life is meaningless.\n\nAbsurdism - attempts of humans to determine meaning of anything is absurd due to the vast amount of information available and the vast amount of information still unknown make certainty impossible.",
"Nihilism - nothing has inherent meaning, and it never will. \n\nExistentialism - nothing has inherent meaning, but maybe you can make your own meaning. \n\nAbsurdism - nothing has inherent meaning. Haha, that's pretty weird right? Go do something that makes you happy. ",
"Nihalism: Nothing really has a point or meaning. It is different from depression but follows a similar thought process which in itself is quite depressing.\n\nExistentialism: You gain meaning and purpose though existing, though this idea falls short at the point that you muct have something to begin with to have a meaning which not everyone does. It is self justifying.\n\nAbsurdism: There is too much information with which to ever conclude anything. Since we will never have all of the information our ability to conclude anything is absurd.\n\nI find it funny that absurdism is in itself rather absurd, you never need all information available to draw conclusions. Even your instinctual reactions are based on reacting without using thought or evidence."
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69frsd | how do car key-fobs work and why do we not see machines that can mass-spoof unlock signals like computer passwords? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/69frsd/eli5_how_do_car_keyfobs_work_and_why_do_we_not/ | {
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"What you're thinking of is called brute force algorithm. Where you just try everything. Now it's been done before where people try to get the key fobs signal and replicate them to steal a car, which makes brute force unnecessary because then you might end up signaling the alarm. ",
"modern keyfobs use a rolling code with trillions of possible combinations. \n\neven if you stood in a huge parking garage and rolled through codes at light speed youd take centuries to get even 1 car to respond.\n\nand then what? congratulations, you've unlocked the door, you could have managed that with a rock...\n\nthere are easier ways anyway, sniff out a wireless key transmission and relay it outside to the owners car. with this method you can even start the car and drive it away.",
"The fob sends a very large number very slowly. It takes about 25ms to send the number, so that's only 40 per second, max. Most cars require 50ms of no signal to restart their receivers. That's about 13 guesses per second. It takes a long darn time to send a trillion numbers at 13 guesses per second."
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cpicdw | how did all(or most) countries in the world decided to bring in same laws/rules to living, eg; lights on street red+amber+green or sirens on police being red and blue and many others? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cpicdw/eli5_how_did_allor_most_countries_in_the_world/ | {
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"text": [
"Unofficial conventions to begin with, international agreements and the UN later.\n\nThis [Wikipedia article](_URL_0_) is a good start, but there is a myriad of different local, regional and national agreements and standards bodies that regulate these things.\n\nI can't speak to emergency vehicles in general worldwide, but fire trucks are regulated in North America by NFPA standards, which are referenced by local, regional and national laws."
]
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"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Convention_on_Road_Traffic"
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f8j0ld | If fusion power was as widespread as fission today, what would the worst case "meltdown" scenario be and how bad would it be compared to fission meltdowns? | If fusion power was as widespread as fission today, what would the worst case "meltdown" scenario be and how bad would it be compared to fission meltdowns? Why? | askscience | https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/f8j0ld/if_fusion_power_was_as_widespread_as_fission/ | {
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"Since fusion reactions take place only under very specific conditions (very high temperature and pressure), any disruption in the operation of the reactor would cause the necessary conditions for fusion to disappear, which would halt the reaction.\n\nUnlike nuclear fission, which in many cases can be self-sustaining and needs active intervention to be slowed down (in the form of control rods, for example), a fusion plasma takes a lot of work to be kept in the right state. Except of course when it is so large that its own gravity does the trick, like in stars. But that won't be the case for earthbound fusion.\n\nSo if there is a catastrophic incident in a hypothetical fusion reactor, the reactor and surrounding building could be destroyed and the high energy particles could irradiate some of the debris. But that's about the extent of the damage. Unlike the unmitigated meltdown of a fission reactor, the damage would be very localized.",
"As has been mentioned, the reaction itself would stop almost immediately once the containment is broken and all it could do would be release the stored energy. This could destroy the plant, but I doubt do any more than that.\n\nSome reactor designs are based around molten lithium coolant, this would create a very spectacular fire. (N.B we use lithium cooled fission reactors today, and that's not the bit you lose sleep over). \n\nThere would probably be a lot of hydrogen storage in site, this could be pretty explosive. \n\nLong term, the materials that the reactor is made of are constantly bombarded by high energy particles and this does turn them into radioactive waste. Nothing nearly as bad as nuclear fuel, so you wouldn't have a Chenoblyl on your hands, but you'd have to take precautions with the cleanup operation. I believe most biproducts are very well decayed within 100 years.",
"Another factor is that a fission reactor is loaded with fuel in solid rods to last 1 year or more. Some reactors can be refueled online (i.e. without being shut down) but fundamentally there's tonnes of uranium in the core at any one time. This is what allows reactors to runway or meltdown - the power has to be extremely tightly controlled because there's a hideous amount of potential energy in the core waiting to be released.\n\nIn fusion designs I've seen, the fuel is gaseous hydrogen isotopes and is injected into the core a few seconds before it's needed. So there's never more than a few seconds' worth of fuel available at any one time. In the worst case, all you need to do is shut off the fuel and the reaction will self-extinguish quickly.\n\nEdit: okay, perhaps not the worst case, but if the reaction starts to run away, shutting off the fuel will throw the brakes on far more effectively than a fission reactor."
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nozak | what would happen if hackers stole all the digital money from all the countries and corporations? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/nozak/eli5_what_would_happen_if_hackers_stole_all_the/ | {
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"Digital money doesn't actually exist, it is just a system that you gave the bank money, now they owe you that money and you can ask for it when you wish. You cannot steal what does exist.",
"Digital money doesn't actually exist, it is just a system that you gave the bank money, now they owe you that money and you can ask for it when you wish. You cannot steal what does exist."
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argabs | how does a car shutting down automatically at a stop light/sign help with gas consumption? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/argabs/eli5_how_does_a_car_shutting_down_automatically/ | {
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"The amount of fuel spent idling at an intersection, keeping the engine rotating are a slow speed with a light load, far exceeds the amount needed to restart the engine.\n\nModern car engines start up very quickly.",
"An idling engine burns fuel without moving the car. This is the most inefficient thing any car can do. By shutting the engine off, the car is no longer burning fuel while stopped, therefore removing the most inefficient part of a journey, and increasing the overall efficiency of the vehicle."
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3klxbi | Did the Andean countries ever get into conflict with the mayans or the aztecs? | I know they were very similar technology wise. | AskHistorians | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3klxbi/did_the_andean_countries_ever_get_into_conflict/ | {
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"No, they have absolutely no known direct contact. "
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duby1z | Which of the basic forces of nature is the strongest? | A few years ago my physics-chemistry teacher asked my class which of the 4 basic forces of nature was the strongest. I answered Gravity because of black holes. They are gravity at its maximum, and them being the most powerful things in the universe, it made sense to me that gravity would also be the strongest. However he corrected me and said it was actually the strong nuclear force the most powerful and that gravity was actually the weakest.
So my question is: if strong and weak nuclear forces are technically more powerful than gravity, how can neutron stars come to exist? How can gravity overcome nuclear forces and start fusing the atoms in the core of the stars together in ways that are not "natural"?
(I only know the very basics of what happens to create a neutron star, so if I'm saying something wrong, please feel free to correct me) | askscience | https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/duby1z/which_of_the_basic_forces_of_nature_is_the/ | {
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"Yes, your teacher is correct.\n\nThe reason why gravity seems to be the strongest over large length scales is that the strong and weak forces have very short ranges (~ 10^(-15) and 10^(-18) meters, respectively), and electrostatic forces tend to cancel each other out when you have material that is macroscopically neutrally charged.\n\nSo for material which extends over a large region of space, and has no net charge, gravity tends to dominate. That's why gravity is a very important force for astronomy/astrophysics/cosmology, but it's totally irrelevant for things like atomic/nuclear physics.",
"You need the gravitational attraction of a whole star or stellar remnant with its over 10^55 atoms to get enough pressure for nuclear reactions.\n\nIf the strong interaction would have a larger range then the force between two elementary particles would be enough to lift up a whole car.\n\nIf you could magically remove one out of 10^17 electrons on Earth the resulting tiny imbalance in electric charge would be sufficient to make Earth explode - against the gravitational attraction.\n\nGravity dominates on large scales only because its range is not limited and because there is only a single type of charge - the more stuff you accumulate the stronger gravity gets.",
"I think the question is vague and that's the source of your confusion. Yes, gravity can be quite strong if you have a bunch of atoms together because each one contributes positively (there's no negative gravity). But the asker might be asking which is stronger for a given elemental particle at short distances. And, yes, the strong force is really strong there. So strong you can't isolate them and strong enough to stick together the positive protons in a nucleus.",
"Imho, the proper answer is the questions \"at what range\"? At extremely short ranges, the strong nuclear dominates regardless of the charge/mass/etc. At the long range, gravity is the dominating force. In the middle(from our perspective) range the particulars matter, but the dominant force is typically either the magnetic or the gravitational force.",
"I think \"which force is the strongest\" is actually an ill-posed question. A better question would be: \"normalizing for the masses, charges, distances, and other properties of the particles involved, which force is the strongest?\" Once you do all those things, the relative strengths of the forces becomes a trivial comparison of scalar coefficients.",
"I can easily prove to you that gravity is a very weak force. \n\nI’m on the second floor of my house. Gravity is pulling me down. But it’s not pulling me through the floor. I can drop a pencil and it falls to the floor but it stops there. The bonds holding the floor together are stronger than the force of gravity acting against the floor.",
"A teacher once pointed out to me that if you jump off a building and gravity accelerated you for 100 stories, the ~~nuclear~~ electromagnetic force holding the concrete together would stop you in less than an inch. That helped me grasp how much stronger nuclear forces are in an analogy.",
"A little late on this so not sure if it is going to get read, but the answer to your question really depends on the distance scale that you are looking at. We have a really good understanding of the strong nuclear, weak nuclear, and electromagnetic forces. For these forces we are able to talk about their strength with a concept called coupling constants, which describes the strength of the force in quantum field theory. The reason we are able to compare the strength of these three forces is because the coupling constants are pure dimensionless numbers. For example the electromagnetic coupling constant is around (1/137) while the strong nuclear force is around (1/5). So it makes sense to say that relative to the strong force, the electromagnetic force is weak.\n\nNow comes in gravity. Gravitational force really doesn’t play like the other forces when it comes to quantum mechanics. While the strength of the other forces are described by just a single number, the strength of the gravitational force depends on the interaction distance. For any practical distance, gravity is still weaker than any of the other forces, but when you get down to REALLY tiny length scales (like the Planck length, it actually becomes stronger than all of the other forces that pretty much keep their same coupling constant. So in a sense you are right. Gravity is the strongest force, when you are looking at the smallest length scale.\n\nIt’s also relevant to talk about the strength of the weak nuclear force. Part of the reason for the name “weak” is that it can only interact over short distances (in reality it is a lot more interesting in that, but I’ll save that for another day). Some current researchers think that on small distance scales, the weak force is stronger than the strong force, because it interacts more quickly than the other forces. This is still a debated topic though.\n\nIf you are interested in learning more I really recommend checking out the Wikipedia page for some things I discussed like coupling constants and quantum gravity. Physics is a really fascinating subject, but unfortunately a lot of the answers are not really too straightforward.\n\nTLDR: conditionally, you are right.",
"But the strong force is also what is holding the neutrons together. Gravity is not overcoming the strong force as it isn’t turning the star into a mass of quarks. You won’t ever find a stray quark because the strong force will create a new quark if necessary. Sorry if that was bad or wrong, I should probably go to sleep now."
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1skyg0 | what exactly does it mean to "hedge" against something? | For example, when banks hedge against risk, currency hedging, etc. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1skyg0/eli5what_exactly_does_it_mean_to_hedge_against/ | {
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"In essence, a \"hedge\" is an investment designed to offset substantial losses (or gains) made by an individual or organization.",
"Hedge means to fence in. \n\nIn these cases they are trying to fence in potential losses. You might buy stock in an electric car company, but then also buy stock in an oil company to make sure that your losses in one sector are mitigated by your gains in another if you make the wrong bet.",
"Ok let's say I'm a railroad that buys a whole lot of diesel fuel. When I need to fill my tanks, I call up joe schmoe's oil company and have some fuel sent over. \n\nRather than be purely at the mercy of the pump price fluctuations, I can buy a futures contract for diesel fuel. If the price at the pump jumps, I'm protected because i can still sell that futures contract. Hence I've made a hedge against high fuel prices by using the commodities contract.",
"Hedging isolates and protects your investment or deal from something that you don't control. \n\nImagine that are a farmer and what you are good at is producing wheat. You can't control the price of wheat, but you can control your quality. To hedge against the price of wheat changing, you can do several things. \n\nFor example, you can buy/sell a futures contract. That is to say, if your crop will be ready in 6 months, you can sign a contract to sell your wheat at a specific price determined today in 6 months. If the price goes higher than expected, you don't benefit, but if the price goes lower, you don't lose. This contract is in theory free to sign, but can force a future gain or loss which would perfectly counterbalance the gain or loss in the value of your wheat. There are variations on this (mainly future contracts and forward contracts) and I would be happy to explain the difference if you like.\n\nYou can also buy an option. For example, you can buy a put option to sell your wheat at $2 per kilo in six months. If the price is $3, you won't use your option (it will expire worthless), but if the price is $1, you will exercise your option and force the person who sold it to you to buy your wheat at $2. This guarantees you a minimum sale price, but costs money today to purchase. Again, there are variations of this (mainly various types of put options and call options) and I would be happy to explain the difference. \n\nA farmer could also hedge against the possibility of a snow storm, crop failure, or any other risk to his business. \n\nSimilarly, a mining company might be very good at getting gold out of the ground, but might not want to bet its future on how much gold is worth in two years, so they hedge against the changes in price in gold. A construction company might be good at building houses, but not want to bet its future on changes in the housing market, so it can hedge against changes in housing prices. \n\nIt's worth noting that each hedge takes two parties to the trade. If I buy an option, somebody has to sell it to me. In theory, we can both be hedging, but in practise, there is never a perfect balance of people looking to hedge. In order for hedging to work, therefore, there has to be speculators. That is to say, when a gold company hedges against gold, they are effectively insuring themselves in case it goes down. The person on the other side of the trade is usually a speculator who thinks that it won't go down. \n\nA last interesting note is that hedge funds are precisely the opposite of what their name implies. They use hedging instruments to make speculative bets. They actively seek more risk to multiply their potential gains on the way that they think the market will go. "
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1rzhv7 | Are there organisms with more than two functional sexes? | By functional, I mean in the reproductive sense. While many different male fish fertilize multiple female fish's eggs, and flowers pollinate chaotically at one another, are there any species that require three or more sexes to successfully breed? For example, say one bird fertilized another bird's egg but needed a third sex with an organ for incubation. | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1rzhv7/are_there_organisms_with_more_than_two_functional/ | {
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"Some species have multiple morphs which have different behaviors depending on which \"gender\" they are. Where they may be multiple male genders each having a distinct behavioral pattern. But in the terms of reproduction, no species requires three genders. It doesn't make sense because of how dna works. There are two of each chromosome so there is no way of getting 1/3 of the dna. ",
"Yes, there are many examples. Specifically there are fungi that have several thousand.\n\nThe reason is that a `child' can only mate with a small fraction of siblings but with a high fraction of non-siblings, thus leading to greater genetic diversity via sexual selection (I'm a computer programmer who worked in a Biolab, so please excuse me if I am slightly off and abuse terminology).\n\nLink: _URL_0_",
"Yes, but it doesn't work the way you think. Slime molds have quite a few sexes ([13](_URL_0_) or [over 500](_URL_1_), depending on how you count), but any two can breed, as long as they're different sexes.\n\nSo yes, there are multiple sexes, but it only takes two to tango.\n\n",
"Good question, I'd like to extend it further - do \"neuter\" or \"neotenous\" organisms count as a sex? How do such species evolve an indeterminate gender if it cannot reproduce? I'm thinking of bees, which iirc require certain chemicals to morph larvae into queens that are not part of the sexual process. ",
"Symbion Pandora - a parasite that lives in the mouth parts of lobsters - has a very weird reproductive cycle. Not sure how you'd break it down sex/gender wise, they are grouped in to male/female/asexual but it's altogether too alien to really apply those labels with confidence. \n\n_URL_0_\n_URL_1_\n\n//Things start to get complicated when you consider their life cycle. Let's start with a feeding animal living on a lobster's mouthparts: this individual – it's hard to assign a sex – can then produce one of three kinds of offspring: a \"Pandora\" larva, a \"Prometheus\" larva or a female.\n\nThe Pandora larva develops into another feeding adult – a straightforward case of asexual reproduction. By contrast, the female remains inside the adult and awaits a male – but, attentive readers will be crying, what male?\n\nThe answer lies in the Prometheus larva. This attaches itself to another feeding adult, then produces two or three males from within itself. These dwarf males, which are even more internally complex than the other stages, seek out the females and fertilise them – though the details are unknown.\n\nOnce the female has been fertilised, she leaves the adult's body and hunkers down in a sheltered region of the lobster's mouthparts. Her body, no longer needed, turns into a hard cyst. Inside this, a fertilised egg develops into yet another stage: the chordoid larva.\n\nIn due course this larva hatches and swims off to colonise another lobster. Once it has attached itself to one, it develops into another adult and the cycle begins again.//\n \n\n"
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2eqv5d | Transgenic engineering: when a gene from an original organism is completely foreign to the new host organism, how do we know where to insert it in the host genotype? | Prompted by this article about inserting a gene from a hagfish into e. coli so they start producing hagfish slime (the filaments are super strong): _URL_0_ . It says the gene is so simple that if they copy it into e. coli's genome hundreds of times, the bacteria will make hundreds of times more slime. I can kind of see that a gene codes for certain proteins and these proteins are what turns into the slime. But doesn't the new organism need some sort of excretory apparatus suited to the slime? How carefully do you have to position the novel genetic material for it to work in a new organism? I do know that e. coli has only one chromosome, so that decision doesn't need to be made, and I also know its DNA is circular. But still! | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2eqv5d/transgenic_engineering_when_a_gene_from_an/ | {
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"Foreign genes inserted into a host genome need to have some type of regulatory DNA (called a \"promoter\") in order to be transcribed and translated (\"made into protein\"). There are two ways to do this, generally: 1) include a promoter region just before the foreign gene such that the inserted DNA is actually promoter+gene, not just the gene by itself; or 2) insert the foreign gene into the genome immediately after a naturally-occurring promoter in the host genome (this technique is used to make transgenic mice with the inserted gene being regulated just like whatever endogenous gene it replaced).\n\nHowever, in E. coli, the situation is much easier. Bacteria are able to host smaller loops of DNA separate from the original chromosome. These little loops are called plasmids, and they act like little chromosomes independent from the single bacterial chromosome. Placing the correct regulatory sequence inside the plasmid DNA sequence causes many dozens or hundreds of copies of that plasmid to be present in a single bacterium, in contrast to the single bacterial chromosome.\n\nAlso on the plasmid is the foreign promoter+gene, so the end result is that, \"they copy it into e. coli's genome hundreds of times, the bacteria will make hundreds of times more slime.\"\n\nAt least this is how standard prokaryotic transgenics work; I have not read the details on how this specific study developed their hagfish-slime-bacteria. I also do not know the specifics of how the slime proteins are secreted--it may be the case that no secretion is needed (they could just harvest the bacteria and chemically extract the protein of interest.)"
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126h20 | Why does language become more difficult to read as it gets tilted sideways and then upside-down? Can't our brains compensate? | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/126h20/why_does_language_become_more_difficult_to_read/ | {
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"They can, that's why it just gets more difficult but not completely impossible.\n\nMost people learn to read(and practice reading) on things that aren't tilted or upside down. As you learn to read, your brain physically reconfigures itself to handle the task of translating squiggles on a page into language more efficiently, which is why literate adults can do it unconciously.\n\nThis efficiency has a price though:our automatic reading systems aren't very good at dealing with new situations. So when we encounter text that is unusual for some reason, we have to turn on more resource-intensive processes to read the text.",
"The brain can compensate it just that the more a letterform is rotated thet longer time to rotate it in the mind. \n\nYou just stumbled on the concept of \n_URL_0_\nand the ressearch that was put into it reveals some really interesting things about how the mind seems to function."
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e73gck | the difference between being asleep, being unconscious and being put asleep with anestesia. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e73gck/eli5_the_difference_between_being_asleep_being/ | {
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"Unconsciousness is a broad term. Being conscious means reacting to outside stimuli. A sleeping person is technically conscious because they still react to light, sound, pressure, etc. Someone in a coma - medically induced or otherwise - typically will not.",
"sleep is the body doing repair work on the brain - it's very easy to wake up a sleeping person\n\nunconsciousness is an emergency shutoff, usually due to trauma - low blood pressure and brain swelling are the usual candidates. - It's (near) impossible to wake up an unconscious person (and usually it's pretty dangerous to do so)\n\nA coma is when, for whatever reason, you don't wake up from being unconscious. This is usually because whatever caused you to go unconscious doesn't go away (this is where brain damage happens, and can turn people in vegetables), and less often because the thing that's supposed to wake you up just... doesn't. - It's impossible to wake up someone in a coma (that's what separates a coma from unconsciousness), and a lot of the treatments for non-traumatic comas are basically just the same drugs you use to wake up unconscious people turned up to 11\n\nanesthesia is for you brain like what happens when you unplug a desktop computer. The drugs just turn off your brain, and it will stay off until the drugs are scrubbed from your system.",
"In simple terms, sleep is surprisingly a very active process. Your brain sends millions of signals and messages when you are asleep - dreams and the like. The brain moves between phases of activity, and during REM sleep actively prevents your limb muscles from moving. \n\nAnaesthesia conversely reduces the activity of your brain. Everything slows down and high levels of anaesthesia drugs can stop all significant electrical activity in your brain (isolelectric EEG). Comas are similar and have varying levels, but in essences yout brain activity is reduced when you are in a coma.\n\n(Am an Anaesthetist (UK))",
"Think of conscious and Anesthesia like a dimmer switch on a light. The lower the switch the dimmer the light. If the switch is broken (coma) the light still works and there still is electricity but it can’t get to the light. Anesthesia basically temporarily changes the dimmer with drugs and when the drugs go away the dimmer goes back to the original setting. To what conscious is can be difficult and becomes very philosophical as we don’t really understand how the original dimmer works we just know if we interact with specific receptors in the brain (I.e. GABA receptors) it artificially activated the dimmer and when we stops the dimmer goes back. Anesthesia providers talk about consciousness in terms of 4 stages. 1st being light sedation (sleep) where I describe to my patients as you can be asleep but might remember things around you (think of napping on the couch at a family gathering). 2nd being an excitatory stage which is the most dangerous part of anesthesia and a side effect of the drugs we have to use (think of a plane taking off or landing). 3rd general anesthesia were you don’t respond to highly stimulating things (like surgery). 4th is essentially the lowest setting on the dimmer, there is brain activity but not much (coma). The dimmer gets broken because of many things could be injury causing swelling, not enough oxygen in your blood, not enough blood in your brain (related to oxygen), or drugs. Luckily thru experiments in the past we now have drugs that can lower the dimmer to a level we want but not so much we break the dimmer. Source I am an Anesthestiology Assistant CAA (think of a physician Assistant that only does anesthesia)",
"Being unconscious generally means you are not aware of your surroundings including ambient sounds, smells, sights, touch or your own existence or the passage of time. \n\nSo being asleep, being knocked out by trauma or anesthesia or being in a coma, being clinically dead or unborn all reflect a state of unconsciousness. There are different levels based on brain activity, if any. \n\nSleep itself has different levels. During one to two hours a night most people have dreams so they are conscious of their own existence but not their surroundings though indirectly ambient noise can influence their dreams. The remainder of their sleep they do not dream and are not aware of their own existence or the passing of time. \n\nThere are reports of people being unresponsive in a coma or undergoing a heart attack or under anesthesia who are actually conscious to the point in which they can hear those around them, process what they are saying and can think about what is happening but cannot move, see or communicate back. This is similar to sleep paralysis."
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1nu8jp | How Nazis Evaluated The French Revolution? | What was "official interpretation" of the French Revolution during the III. Reich? | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1nu8jp/how_nazis_evaluated_the_french_revolution/ | {
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"Add on question: I'm currently reading a book about the history of Communism, and the author talks about how Karl Marx and many other socialists drew inspiration from the Jacobins. But in describing the Jacobins, it seems they had many qualities that Fascists would value (being against conservatives and radicals, romanticizing service to the state). I've heard Fascism was heavily grounded in 19th century Romanticism, did they too draw inspiration from the French Revolution? ",
"More supplemental questions: Did the Nazis produce a counter-history to that of the Marxists? How did they frame European history? Who were the fascist historians? What was the state of the historical profession in the Third Reich? What was their mission?",
"I have studied the German government under the Nazi party pretty extensively, and after some digging in my own notes and through some of the sources I've used in the past, I truly cannot find a single specific reference to the French Revolution. There was a statement made by Gobbels, the *Reichsminister* for information, regarding revolution in France, but it did not go in depth or even refer to it by name. \n\nIn the absence of any information regarding the party's interpretation, it is logical to believe the party never took an official stance on it. I would, however, be interested to know if it was ever taught in German schools during the time period, and how it was portrayed if it was, but I don't have the resources to look into that, (though if anyone did I would be very interested). \n\nThinking about the way the Nazi party came to power, as well as events in the same general period of time in the geographic area, it is also safe to say that the less information the party allowed the people to know about successful reorganization of the social or political structure through violent revolution the easier it was for them to maintain control. ",
"I haven't read much of it so far but \"Inhumanities: Nazi Interpretations of Western Culture\" by David B Dennis seems to be the place to go for queries of this kind. It shows how the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter reappropriated figures of Western culture such as Socrates, Da Vince, Beethoven etc and placed them in the Aryan culture.\n\nEdit: Just had a look, one of the chapters is titled: \"Intolerance Toward Enlightenment\".\n\nThere are a few sections addressing the French Revolution: \n\nPg 142\n > The Volkischer Beobachter analysed the French Revolution as primarily a racial conflict between Latin underclasses and the \"Germanic\" French nobility.\n\n > The Volkischer Beobachter's reception of Beethoven centered on the composer's reactions to the Revolution in an effort to refute assertions that he experienced a case of \"revolutionary fever.\"\n\nPg 162-163\n > According to a 1927 article on \"racism in the French Revolution,\" ancestral differences played a much greater role in social and political revolutions than indicated in historical writings that \"didn't pay attention to racial questions.\" For instance, the English Civil War that led to the \"dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell\" was strongly marked by \"racial differences between the Anglo-Saxon majority and the French-Norman aristocracy that had conquered it in 1066.\" In similar ways, the war of the Third Estate against the nobility in the French Revolution correlated with the \"conflict between the Gallo-Roman majority of the French Volk and the originally mainly German class of nobles - among them, Montesqieu.\" Right away in the first battles of the Third Estate for equality of rights, \"racial thinking was used as a weapon, especially in the writings of the Abbe Sieyes, who had such a powerful influence on the path of the French Revolution.\" For the paper, it was no coincedence that Sieyes was a French southerner, coming from Frejus - an area where \"Germanness was of significance during the early Middle Ages, the overwhelmed by the superior numbers of Gallo-Romans.\" An excellent speaker, he was a \"typical Gallo-Roman Frenchman.\" And as cuch, he use \"racial concepts\" in his political advocacy. For instance, to explain why the \"nobility of the nation was foreign\" in What is the Third Estate? Sieyes \"first discussed its laziness, then its political and civil priviedges.\" Then he argued that the \"French Volk had lived in slavery - that is, enslaved by the aristocrats.\" \n\n > Sieyes:\n*...some will say, \"but conquest has upset all relationships and hereditary nobility now descends through the line of the conquerors.\"...The Third Estate will become noble again by becoming a conqueror in its own turn.*\n\n > While Sieyes usually proceeded \"completely ahistorically and puerly rationalistically,\" the Volkischer Beobachter interjected, here he tried to \"strengthen his argument for class war with reference to the racial foreignness of the nobility.\" Moreover, he also sought to draw a portion of the nobility over to the side of the Third Estate, stipulating that since the conquering of Gaul by the Germans \"a strong mixture between them and the Gallo-Romans had taken place.\" So, although the numerically superior Third Estate had to be considered the \"Fathers of the Nation,\" some nobles could be rehabilitated into the ranks of the Third Estate. Therefore, the paper argues, Sieyes' representation of the French aristocracy as a \"racially foreign class of conquerors\" led to \"root out and dissipation of the nobility from France.\" The \"battle against everything Germanic that had commenced in the Renaissance continued in the form of hatred toward everything German.\"\n\nHopefully you find that of some use!"
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1zdc74 | space coordinates? | How do coordinates in space work? If planets are orbiting in a solar system, solar system moving in a galaxy, galaxy moving, etc. Everything is moving, how can space coordinates work?
Are they real or just something in SciFi? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1zdc74/space_coordinates/ | {
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"There are several astronomical coordinate systems: Horizontal (AltAzimuth), Equatorial, Ecliptic, and Galactic are four commonly used, and each has it's own purpose. The choice of which coordinate system you use depends on what you're looking at, what kind of instrument you're using, and who you're talking to when you try to describe an object's position.\n\nIf you're standing in your backyard, using your eyeball as an observing instrument, and you want to tell somebody standing next to you what you're looking at, the Horizontal (AltAzimuth) system works well: look 12 degrees (clockwise) in Azimuth from due North, then go up 27 degrees in Altitude from the Horizon. Pretty simple, but it doesn't mean much to somebody who is not at your location. Consider how a person in Australia might describe where something is in the night sky, compared with a person in Norway.\n\nThe Equatorial Coordinate System is typically used by scientists to describe the positions of most celestial objects in reference texts, astronomical databases, and in Google Sky. One of the benefits of this coordinate system is that it doesn't matter where on Earth you are, the reference points are out in the night sky instead of the local horizon.\n\nAs a very coarse description, you should know that Right Ascension (R.A) in the sky corresponds to Longitude here on Earth. The difference is that R.A. is measured in hours, minutes, and seconds, based on the idea that the Earth rotates one complete revolution every 24 hours. A circle is 360 degrees, so one hour of R.A. represents exactly 15 degrees of arc (360/24=15). Just like Longitude on Earth is measured from an arbitrary meridian line passing through Greenwich, England, R.A on the sky is measured (clockwise) from a point called the vernal equinox. I'm not going to try to explain what the vernal equinox is here. All R.A. numbers are positive, from 0hr 0min 0sec through 24hrs 0min 0 sec. You can't have a negative R.A.\n\nDeclination (Dec) in the sky is a little easier to understand, it corresponds to Latitude here on Earth. The Celestial Equator (the line on the night sky that you'd see if you could extend the Earth's Equator out into space) is the zero point, and declination is measured positively up to the North Celestial Pole at +90 degrees, and negatively down to the South Celestial Pole at -90 degrees.\n\nThe Ecliptic Coordinate System can be used to locate objects in the Solar System, and likewise, the Galactic Coordinate System can be used to describe objects in our galaxy. There are reasons why it may be more convenient to use one of these rather than the Equatorial Coordinate System, but remember that any given object in the night sky can be described by more than one coordinate system. \n\nTL:DR; We measure everything from were it is as compared to earth.",
"There are several ways to do it, but the key to any coordinate system is a reference point (reference points are what you are gonna compare your position to).\n\nYou can build any coordinate system as long as you have a reference point. Within that coordinate system, the reference point does not move. It doesn't matter if what that point is tied to is moving (like the center of the earth), as long as it doesn't move within the coordinate system.\n\nImagine a satellite that would trail behind the Earth as it rotates the sun. If we compare it's position to the center of the Earth, it is not moving. If we compare it's position to the center of the Sun, it is moving as fast as the Earth.\n\nIn space, you typically set your reference point to where you are going to be travelling, but technically you can use any reference point (but the math gets tricky if you have weird things as reference points).\n\nSatellites that orbit the Earth use the center of the Earth as their reference point.\n\nSatellites that travel to other planets use the center of the Sun as their reference point.\n\nWe haven't dabbled much beyond that, but we can use anything we want as our reference point.\n\nThere is more to it, but I am trying to keep it as simple as possible.",
"When orienting a spacecraft, we use two types of coordinates: inertial (fixed) and noninertial (moving/on the craft). For this purpose, we consider the galaxy as inertial since the stars don't move much relative to each other. The system of space-fixed coordinates is determined by star tracking instruments on the craft. We then define any noninertial coordinates based off these inertial ones. Hope that made sense!\n\nSource: I'm an aerospace engineer!",
"Coordinates in space work rather easily. It's just a build up of various reference frames.\n\nFor instance, plotting the moon's trajectory around the sun is rather hard. It's a fairly complex motion. However, instead of having the sun as my frame of reference, why don't I shift my frame of reference to the Earth? If my frame of reference is the Earth... well the problem becomes much easier! The moon revolves around the earth! \n\nThe Earth's motion around the sun is also very simple. So instead of plotting how the moon revolves around the sun directly... we plot how the Earth revolves around the sun, and then on top of that we plot how the moon revolves around the Earth.\n\nThat's the beauty of reference frames, a simple shift of reference frame makes a very complex problem a very easy one. "
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33vmsq | Is there any single cell in my body that would have any effect if it suddenly ceased to be? | So we aren't talking about getting in and ripping it out.
Could I lose some memory through losing a single cell of my brain? Or feeling if lost a single cell from a nerve or anything?
Any effect, permanent or not. | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/33vmsq/is_there_any_single_cell_in_my_body_that_would/ | {
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"The human body has a lot of redundancy as a protective mechanism...at least off the top of my head I can't think of a situation where functional loss would occur from the loss of a single cell.\n\nAwesome question though.",
"There is a theory in neuroscience that distinct faces activate single subsets of neurons, or even a single neuron. This is referred to as the grandmother neuron, Halle berry neuron, or Marilyn Monroe neuron hypothesis. As few as one neuron lights up when shown a picture of a famous celebrity. Presumably, removal of that neuron removes the memory of that celebrity's face. Not terribly consequential in the grand scheme of things, but pretty cool.\n\n_URL_1_ - this is the Nature paper on the topic\n\n_URL_0_ - review of topic for those that can't access or don't want to read the scientific paper\n\n\n"
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2jaba7 | Were Oktoberfest celebrations held in the German Democratic Republic? | Sorry if this has been asked before. I looked and could not find the question.
Aside from kitsch nut-crackers apparently made in the GDR sold on Ebay, I have not been able to find any information on whether or not Oktoberfest celebrations were held in East Germany during Communist rule. | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2jaba7/were_oktoberfest_celebrations_held_in_the_german/ | {
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"The short answer is no, but that would be a bit untruthful since I think what you mean is something else (if not, I apologize):\n\nOktoberfest is not a pan-German phenomenon, it isn't even a pan-Bavarian (whose culture seems to be often associated with Germany in General abroad) one. Oktoberfest is a Munich tradition, it originated in Munich as a celebration of the marriage between King (then crown-prince) Ludwig I. of Bavaria and princess Therese of Sachsen-Hildburghausen (a minor Ernestine duchy). The Theresienwiese, where Oktoberfest takes place, is named after her. \n\nSo you'd be hard pressed to find Oktoberfest celebrations held anywhere outside Munich in the FRG as well, especially in the North. There are copycat 'Oktoberfest' celebrations throughout Germany nowadays, but those piggyback on the popularity of the Munich event.\n\nNow, with that in mind, there are a lot of Volksfeste (literally 'people's festivals', usually a combination of beer or wine festivals, depending on local customs, and carnival) throughout Germany (more than 10.000 a year), and they have a long history going back to the Middle Ages. I'm not a mediaevist, so I'm not going to embarass myself talking about that stuff, but I'll point out that there is a current initiative to have the German Volksfeste accepted into the UNESCO world cultural heritage for the importance they hold in German culture, which tells you a lot about how important they are for many Germans and the communities where they are held. [Here](_URL_0_) is an English language article on the topic. There are many famous other 'Fests', like the Cannstadter Wasen in Stuttgart, the Hamburger Dom and so on. You'll find them even in small cities and villages, accordingly smaller in scale.\n\nThis means, of course, that they were also important for people in the GDR. The leaders of party and state also recognized the role they could play in pacifying and appeasing the population, by providing pleasures and distractions (often by also providing music or products that were not commonly available), while also recognizing the danger that masses of people under alcohol could pose should the mood turn against the system. Thus members of the security organs were usually present, even if attempts to ideologically take over these festivals to instrumentalize them for propaganda were not really successful on a grand scale. \n\nI don't know if there are any English language sources on this topic, but 'Die heile Welt der Diktatur: Alltag und Herrschaft in der DDR 1971-1989' by Stefan Wolle is a good source for everyday culture in the GDR.\n\nThis page has some pictures of Volksfeste/Jahrmärkte in the GDR and some of the attractions you might find there:\n\n_URL_2_\n\nHere's also a map (from 2010) showing the locations of copycat Oktoberfests throughout Germany:\n\n_URL_1_\n\nThere you'll also see that, apart from the one in Berlin(West) 1949, this trend as a mass-phenomenon is a pretty new one, taking off really only after the fall of the GDR and in time-periods of which we do not speak here."
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[
"http://www.welt.de/english-news/article2881232/Folk-Festivals-are-as-German-as-Goethe.html",
"http://images.zeit.de/lebensart/2010-09/d-karte-37/d-karte-37-thickbox.jpg",
"http://walzerbahn.de/volksfest-ddr.html"
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|
19lgwd | How did Spanish theologians try to legitimise Spanish overseas expansion in the 16th century, and the treatment of the native people that they 'acquired?' | So, I decided to stretch myself, and take a university module that was out of my comfort zone, and boy, now I'm regretting it. I'm doing a paper on the above topic, and am finding myself at a loss.
I'm really struggling to digest the reading, it's in a completely different style to what I'm used to, and nowhere can I find a simple starting point from which to leap from.
For example, I've spent the last hour reading about Vitoria's thoughts, but, (i hope because of the style and not that I'm just being stupid) I still cannot grasp whether he trying to legitimise, or illegitimise the Spanish expansion. I'm not asking anyone to do this paper for me or anything, just someone who understands it give me a little nudge in the right direction, and maybe a very basic overview.
I would seriously appreciate any help anyone could offer. I'm desperate. Thank you!
Edit: spelling | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/19lgwd/how_did_spanish_theologians_try_to_legitimise/ | {
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"Who is this Vitaria of which you speak? I studied a bit about the period you're talking about but I can't recall the name and Google searches give me nothing.\n\nIn any case, have you heard about the Valladolid debate? It was a debate by two Spanish theologians about the treatment of the native subjects of New Spain. One of those, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, basically claimed that the Indians were \"natural-born slaves\" incapable of self governance, and we were doing them a favor by bringing them Christianity. The same argument was used multiple times to justify colonial expansion at that time, like in the case of the Portuguese exploration of Africa and India. His opponent, Bartolomé de las Casas, is a very staunch protector of native rights, and you should look into both of these men's history for some illuminating facets of the treatment debate.",
"They're not specifically Spanish theologians, but Spain and Portugal for a time did value authority from canon law developed by medieval and early modern ecclesiastical scholars. This was more relevant to the very earliest period of conquest, when Spain and Portugal were first establishing territories off the coast of Africa and in the Americas, and this kind of legitimization had roots in previous conflicts like the Crusades. A big influence in the medieval period was Pope Innocent IV who asserted that there existed papal authority over infidels and a responsibility for the spiritual welfare of all men. James Muldoon's *Popes, Lawyers, and Infidels* is a pretty detailed work on this if you're interested in that kind of background info. \n\nBy the late 15th century, which is a bit closer temporally to what you're talking about, there was some anxiety among Castilians about the legitimacy of the conquest and there was a pretty big difference in how the crown saw the process of conquest versus how it often ended up taking place. The crown was interested in control, which made spiritual responsibility a useful concept. An important development to know include the Requerimiento of 1512 which was what people like Las Casas were reacting to. \n",
"I'm not sure about Spanish theologians, but I know the pope was none too amused. The church hierarchy, going all the way too the top was largely opposed to the abuses perpetrated in the new world. This is probably best exemplified by the 1537 papal encyclical [*Sublimus Dei,*](_URL_0_) \n\n > they [the natives] may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and the possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen, it shall be null and have no effect.",
"People in this thread are kind of dancing around it, but the Carlos I of Spain appealed to the pope for religious justification of conquests in the New World. The previous wars Spain had fought against the Muslims were justified by the Catholic faith because the Muslims were \"heretics\" who had heard the \"Word of God\" and rejected it. There was a considerable moral ambiguity as to whether violence could be brought against people who had never before heard of Christianity. \n\nPope Paul III responded by issuing a papal bull called *Intra Arcana* which ruled that yes, violence could be used against pagans if the goal was to convert them to Christianity. This, combined with the earlier [Treaty of Tordesillas](_URL_0_) effectively gave the Spanish and Portuguese free reign to conquer any native people they encountered with the full backing of the church, so long as the \"official\" goal was to convert them to Christianity.\n\nOriginally they used this as an excuse to enslave the native peoples, (see whitesock's post on the Valladolid debate). But the pope eventually ruled in 1531 (Sublimus Dei) that the American Indians were indeed human and could not be enslaved. The Spanish found ways to get around it by *virtually* enslaving them through the encomienda and later hacienda systems.",
"The entire last chapter of [The Age of Reconnaissance](_URL_0_) deals with this subject. Its a classic, you should be able to find it in a larger/academic library. \n",
"Francisco de Vitoria was, like many of his contemporaries, very disturbed about the treatment of the natives. His *De Indis* is his attempt to determine whether or not the massacres and plundering were right or wrong. It's important to note here that his works were published based on lecture notes by his students ten years after his death.\n\nThe reason why it was OK in the first place was because the Indians fell into a loophole where they were not protected by any formal or informal law: 1) they were not Spanish subjects, therefore not protected by Spanish civil law, and 2) they were heretics, and so not protected by Christian laws for the protection of innocents.\n\n*De Indis* analyzes arguments that were being made to justify the confiscation of land and horrendous treatment. They all boiled down to that they were heretical, guilty of mortal sin, unsound of mind, not rightful owners to begin with, and that they'd be better off conquered (from Aristotle) and Vitoria showed that each were groundless. He concludes in section II, 16, that \"the aboriginies undoubtedly had true dominion over public and private matters, just like Christians.\" Over in section II, 1, 2, and 6, he insists that Spain had no right to wage war against the Indians and that neither the Emperor (Charles V, both Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and King of Spain at the time) nor the Pope could authorize the war.\n\nHe goes on to label some protected classes of innocents that must not be attacked in war: women, children, farmers, foreign travelers, clerics and religious persons, and the whole rest of the peaceable population. And this includes foreigners. He says in *De Indis* Section III, 13, \"A prince has no greater authority over foreigners than his owb subjects. But he may not draw his sword against his own subjects unless they have done some wrong. Therefore, not against foreign citizens.\"\n\nHere are some keywords you can search for for looking for: *jus in bello* (\"justice in war,\" as in how to conduct fighting a war), *jus ad bellum* (just war, or when it is just to go into a war). Some sources from which Vitoria expanded on: Gratian of Bologna, St. Augustine, St. Aquinas, and St. Ambrose. Also, Francisco Suarez picked up writing about just war immediately after Vitoria died. There are a lot of histories out there about the history of the laws of war. I would especially recommend seeking out books by Michael Howard.\n\nSources: Paul Christopher's *The Ethics of War & Peace* and \"Just and Unjust Wars\" by Telford Taylor."
]
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[],
[],
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"http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Paul03/p3subli.htm"
],
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[
"http://www.amazon.com/The-Age-Reconnaissance-Exploration-Settlement/dp/0520042352/ref=sr_1_sc_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1362359683&sr=8-1-spell&keywords=the+age+of+reconissance"
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1xtik1 | what exactly does oil have to do with the wars in afghanistan and iraq? | I always hear talk about oil having something to do with these conflicts, but no one ever seems to elaborate on it. Didn't the US invade Afghanistan because of the cooperation between Al-Qaeda and the Taliban? And Iraq because they believed Saddam Hussein was creating weapons of mass destruction?
What does oil have to do with these wars? Please, explain like I'm five.
Also, sorry if I misspelled anything. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1xtik1/eli5_what_exactly_does_oil_have_to_do_with_the/ | {
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"oil doesnt have really anything to do with either conflict. iraq does have the worlds 4 largest reserves, but the us doesnt even have access to them. they let the iraqi's bid them out and now china's gas company, BP, Total Sa, and Sidanco are the owners of the oil extraction. theres no oil in afghanistan.",
"The wars were not about oil. They were about fear. The last war in recent memory that could be attributed to oil was the 1st Persian Gulf War when George the First was President and Saddam invaded Kuwait. Saudi Arabia asked us for help to kick Iraq out of Kuwait who was burning up oil fields left and right - though there were other factors involved, oil was a big factor. However this is not the case in Afghanistan or Iraq. ",
"The official reason for invading Iraq was the weapons. However there was quite a lot of doubt as to whether these weapons existed at the time, and the doubters have been proved correct as no weapons of mass destruction were found. Some people find it very suspicious that we would go to the trouble of invading a country over a hunch, so they say the weapons were actually just an excuse to invade for the oil.\n\nWhy would a country like the USA invade Iraq for oil? Because if the countries which produce oil are friendly (which Saddam's Iraq was not) they will sell it for us for a reasonable price and won't threaten us by saying they will increase prices or withhold supply. If this were to happen it would make everything more expensive for us because oil is involved in the production and transportation of just about everything. Although oil is really important to us we could never just admit that we invaded for oil, because Iraq's oil isn't ours and that would just be a confession of armed robbery.\n\nIt gets worse, if you believe all this. The other advantage of stealing Iraq's oil instead of buying it is that we would set up our own companies to extract it and sell it on. The contracts for this would be decided by politicians and would be worth a great deal of money. A lot of members of the Bush government at the time had links to the oil industry in America. This makes things doubly suspicious. Some people therefore believe that the Bush government started a war, not even for America's gain at all, but for their own personal gain at the expense of America and Iraq.\n\nNow even if you don't believe that it was all about oil, you might believe that it was one the many parts of the decision to invade. Put it this way: there are a lot of countries with nasty dictators, and several that might be developing weapons of mass destruction, so if you are going to invade one and not the others, why not invade the one that has oil too?\n\nOil doesn't come into the invasion of Afghanistan, which happened shortly after 9/11 and was a reaction to that. However Afghanistan is very central in the Asian continent and in the 90s there were negotiations with the Taliban by certain companies about building gas pipelines across the country. I'm not sure what became of all that after the invasion."
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2cz4ce | why don't device manufacturers provide higher rate chargers with the device? | I own a nexus 5 which comes with a 1.2A wall charger. It takes say about 1hour for the battery to get fully charged. Now if I use an external battery charger available in the market, like the Anker6000, it has a max output of 2A and the phone charges up quickly in 30mins. Does it have anything to do with the max. output amperage of the charger? From what I have read, current is drawn from the charger by the device, not pushed out of the charger into the device. So what specification of the Anker6000 makes the charging faster? If its the max. Output amperage of the charger, then can I use a charger like Astro2 which has a max. 3A output to get faster charging for my 1.2A device, does it have any long term affect on my device or damage it? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2cz4ce/eli5_why_dont_device_manufacturers_provide_higher/ | {
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"I think it can shorten the battery life.",
"My understanding was always that it could shorten the life of the battery as well as cause the charging circuit to think the battery is fully charged and stop charging (or start trickle charging), even though the battery is not really fully charged.",
"I'm a radio control hobbiest. I have learned quite a bit about batteries and one thing I have learned is that the faster you charge these batteries the less time the charge will last. So in a cellphone situation where a big selling point is battery run time and life they are gonna want you to charge it as slow as possible To get the longest run time out of the battery. \n\nCellphone batteries are not designed to charge faster then the output. These are known as 1 C batteries. If the batter in your phone is only 1800mah it can only be charged at 1.8a anything more and it will over heat, cause damage to the battery including puffing and blowing up. \n\nSo cellphone makers are not gonna make a new charger for every different size battery in every different phone they have on the market. They are gonna make a general charger that will charge all or most of their devices.\n\nOn the other side I could be mistaken but I recall reading usb 2.0 is limited in how fast it can charge things."
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644sw5 | Why are energy levels of electrons quantized? | So I've been wondering about the question posed above for a bit. I don't want a trivial answer "because it's quantum mechanics," but more a physical answer. That is, what is naturally occurring that requires the electrons of an atom to lead this conformation. It makes more sense for me, since these energy levels are from angular momenta for them to have a distribution of different energy levels as with say the kinetic energy of a gas.
I've read on Yahoo answers that these quantized energy levels are harmonic solutions to Schrödinger's equation and that just like there are some harmonic frequencies that a bell rings at, there are certain harmonic solutions to the equation. In which case my question would be that is this due to the fact that there's a LaPlacian in the equation that needs spherical harmonics to be solved?
A lot of my professors always waved their hand and said "Quantum Mechanics" and the more I learn about it, the more I understand that it's really simple to grasp theoretically (must be terrible math though). My E & M professor told us last semester that most times a professor answers with that, it's mostly because they don't wanna answer the question and the more I learn, the more that seems to be apparent. | askscience | https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/644sw5/why_are_energy_levels_of_electrons_quantized/ | {
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" > I've read on Yahoo answers that these quantized energy levels are harmonic solutions to Schrödinger's equation and that just like there are some harmonic frequencies that a bell rings at, there are certain harmonic solutions to the equation. In which case my question would be that is this due to the fact that there's a LaPlacian in the equation that needs spherical harmonics to be solved?\n\nThe first part is correct. Although it's nothing specifically to do with the Laplacian or the spherical harmonics. You have a PDE and some boundary conditions. The boundary conditions enforce the condition that only certain solutions to the PDE are allowed.\n\nIt's the boundary conditions which lead to quantization. For example in an infinite square well, it's the boundary conditions which enforce the fact that bound energy eigenstates have discrete wavenumbers, because the wavefunction must go to zero at the boundaries.",
"Too put it simply, Schrodinger's equation resembles wave-like nature very similarly, and a property of waves is that they can only have certain modes or harmonics when you use boundary conditions. In quantum mechanics these modes take the form of energy modes or in other words energy states or more technically speaking energy eigenvalues. If you look up pictures of a particle in an infinite well, you'll clearly see the modes in position space."
]
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dj5pqs | custom feeds. how are they, how do they work, how do you edit them? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dj5pqs/elif_custom_feeds_how_are_they_how_do_they_work/ | {
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"A multireddit, now renamed to “custom feed”, is a group of two or more subreddits. Think of it as a folder in your bookmarks. Instead of seeing everything in your home feed, you will see just the ones in that folder. This is the main way I use Reddit. I have all of my subs grouped into topics look at one topic at a time."
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60ljgk | if our field of vision is limited, why can we not see or imagine "nothing" on the outer edges of our vision, or "black" like the top/bottom edges of movies | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/60ljgk/eli5_if_our_field_of_vision_is_limited_why_can_we/ | {
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"Your brain already \"erases\" information you see but you don't need, as well as \"fills in the blanks\" for information that's missing or assumed.\n\nyou have a blindspot in each eye but if you look at a wall, you don't see two black circles, your visual center just automatically paints in the blindspots, because you don't need to see two blank spots. Your brain also ignores stuff like your nose, you don't need to pay attention to your nose poking into your field if view\n\nSeeing the end of your vision, or seeing a big black region around your visio would serve no purpose and have no advantage, and there's no point for the visual system to evolve such a feature.\n\n"
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1vselb | why does yellow highlighter not show up when you copy it? and why can't you copy red pages? | I work in the production office of a TV show, and so I am intimately familiar with the functions of a copy machine. But there's some things that have always confused me--
If you write in yellow hilighter on white paper, it won't be visible when you copy it.
Conversely, for security, we sometimes print scripts on red (cherry) paper. If you tried to copy this pages, they would be illegible.
Why is that? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1vselb/eli5_why_does_yellow_highlighter_not_show_up_when/ | {
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"It's just a matter of contrast. Most copy machines only print black and white; they can't even produce gray except with [dithering](_URL_0_). So every color on the page has to be converted to either black or white. Yellow is very close to white, so it disappears. Red is sort of a half-dark color, so in some areas it turns to black and in some areas it turns to white, and you get huge blotches all over your copy, obscuring the text.\n\nIf you have a more modern scanner/copier with a grayscale option (it can produce 256 different shades of gray), then the problem isn't quite as bad. Yellow will still probably be invisible, because it's still very close to white. But your red might actually show up as a nice gray, and leave the document readable.\n\nAnd, of course, if you have a full color copier, everything will come through perfectly. I scan color stuff all the time at work.\n\nYou can play with this effect a bit if you have a photo editing program like Photoshop, GIMP, or _URL_1_. Pull in an image with a lot of red or bright yellow, and experiment with the desaturate/grayscale and the black and white options, and see what different colors turn into."
]
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[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dithering",
"Paint.NET"
]
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