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5rpmf5 | How do planets generate sound in Space if sound cannot travel in space? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If you mean things like the sound of Saturn's rings, it's actually radio waves, which can travel in space, which scientists translate into sound for us to hear.",
"They don't. They can give off various forms of electromagnetic radiation we can choose to interpret as sound."
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5rpthh | do hairs and dust ever get into our lungs? And if so what does our body do about it? | Thought randomly because I'm sick and sniffled. When I coughed I coughed up some nose hairs but was wondering if they could get into our lungs. Legitimately curious. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Most natural dust particles are caught in the nose hairs and cilia that mucus that lines your nose and trachea. Most living creatures have evolved ways to filter that from reaching the lungs in first place, and that that does, gets filtered out by the body. Dust particles 2.5 - 10 microns wide, often made from industrial activity can get into the lungs, and might not always get removed. Typical examples are crushed gravel dust that gets stirred into the air from roads, construction and farming. Less that 2.5 microns is often soot from industrial, vehicles, and wildfires. This stuff can cause all kinds of respiratory problems, heart attacks and cancer. Some of the new materials, such as carbon nanotubes are extremely small, and like asbestos fibers, deeply enter the lungs. It's currently not fully known what the long term effects are.",
"You have extremely sensitive nerve endings surrounding the entrance to the trachea which trigger you to cough if they feel foreign matter. For items that get through you have cilia, cells with tiny hairs that can move to transport dust that gets caught in mucus, yet another way the lungs clean themselves.",
"Yes dust will get into your respiratory tract all the time. Luckily, in the lining of your trachea (the tube that links from your throat to your lungs) the cells there produce a lot of mucus. The cells also have a bunch of little motorized hairs called **cilia** that push that layer of mucus upwards. Much of the dust that gets into your respiratory tract gets stuck on the mucus, and the cells' cilia will push that mucus upward, and upon swallowing that dust-clogged mucus goes into your tummy where it's digested. This is called the **mucociliary escalator.** Some of the dust will get deeper into your lungs past the mucociliary escalator, but there are white blood cells deep down in there that will gobble up and destroy much of that foreign material.",
"I'm a dog groomer and get thousands or millions of tiny hairs and dander floating around my face for like 7 hours a day will I die?"
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5rpup7 | Why hasn't commercial supersonic flight been attempted on a wide-scale since concorde? | Surely in 14 years since the last commercial Concorde flight the technology would have advanced to the point we could think about this again? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The main issue is it just isn't worth it. It cost about as much to fly the Concorde across the Atlantic as it does 747, which has three times as many seats. Not many people are willing to pay that kind of money. 3.5 vs. 7 hours might sound good, but super sonic speed doesn't get you through the security line any faster. Door to door is more like 7 hours vs. 10.5, and that point you are blowing a whole day no matter what.",
"Because it really was never cost-effective. The Concorde would have never even been built if not for government subsidies. The fact is that the increased fuel costs involved in moving people across the Atlantic Ocean in two hours instead of seven just wasn't worth it.",
"We, as passengers, have told the airlines (by the way we purchase tickets) that price is our number one concern. We will switch airlines for $5, and take a flight at midnight to save $20. We'll happily double our trip time through another airport to save $100. So everything the airlines and plane manufacturers have done is to save cost. A plane that is expensive to run, even if it halves trip times? The customers have spoken: we don't want it.",
"In addition to the factors people have already mentioned, the whole sonic-boom thing is a major problem. City and state authorities (not to mention populations) do NOT like it when a new source of window-breaking, ear-blasting, annoying noises starts up and wants to kinda continue blasting noise pollution every however many times they fly per day. This is why the Concorde was just a trans-oceanic thing. If it had gone over land, people would have thrown a fit until they stopped. For that matter, it would have been breaking existing regulations and laws, and would never have been allowed to start.",
"> Surely in 14 years since the last commercial Concorde flight the technology would have advanced to the point we could think about this again? It has! Multiple companies are in late-stage development of commercial supersonic flight. [Boom]( URL_0 ) plans on flying later this year.",
"Crash of Air France Concorde Flight 4590 with only 11,989 hours of service, and the Soviet Tupolev Tu-144S CCCP-77102 at the Paris Air Show, had a great impact on supersonic travel.",
"Also British Airways holds the patent for the stretchy paint on the tail. When the plane breaks the sound barrier then paint stretches. Without the stretchy paint it just smears. You would have to reprint the plane each time it landed. Virgin tried to start Concorde back up a few years back but BA were pricks and wouldn't give them the paint. Watched a documentary on it a bit back",
"my first guess was the fuel usage. did some lurking on the web \"I seem to recall that the average fuel burn on Concorde was 1 ton per passenger (so 100 tons of fuel) across the pond. Additionally, I can't remember where I heard it now (could have been on here, I joined just around the time the retirement was announced) but Concorde burned more fuel taxiing from Terminal 4 to the north runway than an A320 did on a flight to Paris.\"",
"It's not profitable and nobody builds supersonic passenger aircraft anymore. Flying has a similar effect on your fuel economy as driving does. The faster you go, the more fuel it takes to get to your destination. And the more people you can pack into a plane, the lower the operational cost per passenger. To be profitable they need large, fully loaded planes travelling at regular intervals. Large aircraft are the aviation equivalent of a Greyhound bus. Great for carrying lots of passengers, but not exactly speed racer. The wear and tear on a supersonic aircraft and the maintenance costs, downtime, and operational costs are much higher than on a commercial airliner. They cost more to fly, they carry less people, and so nobody has stepped up to the plate since Concorde flights ended. If passenger space flight catches on, we may well be treated to not only a flight into space, but a journey of thousands of miles in dozens of minutes instead of hours."
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5rpxva | Why do movies shot for TV look so different to a movie created for cinema? I'm not talking production budgets, just the sharpness or polish to it you notice while you're watching. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Part of the reason is mastering. Movies shot for TV have a lot more time in the editing room, and part of that is based on the production budget. You've got people with more skill, better techniques, and possibly much more time. Another difference is lighting, which is often performed by more talented individuals in film production. Perhaps one of the biggest differences is frame rate. Film and TV have different frame rates, with a lower frame rate being standard for film. The higher frame rate for TV makes things appear a little faster because you're seeing more nuances in movement, and the lower frame rate has a bit of a smoothing effect.",
"Lack of production design. Quicker setups, lighting in particular. Less rehearsal (actors and cinematographers), fewer retakes. There was a time, when movie professionalism was at its peak, that a day's work might typically yield two minutes of film. A TV movie can be shot in a week-10 days."
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5rpzku | why do people sometimes get cravings for random or specific foods? | Why do people suddenly get cravings for a random food item? If someone wakes up wanting potatos and fries, is their body telling them something? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"people crave the type of food their body craves, like craving potato chips when your body needs more sodium. your body is regulating fluids with salt, thus may need more than it's been given. we also get cravings out of the pure blissful satisfaction expected from eating, for example, ice cream when you're sad. who can be sad when they're full of sugar?"
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5rq6pa | Why are some people "mouth breathers" and other people "nose breathers"? | Is there something in the body that makes people breathe the way they do? Are there benefits of one over the other? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's more natural for people to breathe through their noses when they are at rest. In about 85% of cases, mouth breathing is caused by blockage in the nasal cavities that prevents people from getting enough air through their noses."
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5rqe2c | What is the detail of the Australian deal to resettle refugees in the USA? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The Australian government has a policy that states that no refugees ariving by boat will be settled in Australia. The adoption of this policy has stopped new boat arrivals but there are about 1,250 prospective refugees sitting in offshore detention centres that are currently faced with the choice of \"go back to where you were fleeing from\" or \"remain indefinitely in a prison camp\". To rectify this Australia made two seperate deals with the US. One of these involved the US taking these prospective refugees, vetting them and settling them in the US. The other involved Australia agreeing to take in Central American refugees from camps in Costa Rica and settle them in Australia. Both governments claimed that these deals are not linked but due to their timing they almost certainly are. The government also made it very clear that this was a one-off deal and so it likely won't inspire too many others to try to reach Australia by boat. **TL:DR - Abdul for Juan refugee swap.** Edit: Changed my joke."
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5rqoie | Why is it when you watch a DVD or stream a movie on your tv, it isn't completely full screen? | If I watch a movie on Netflix the movies take up my entire TV. But if I watch a DVD or stream a movie there are black bars on the top and bottom of my tv. Why? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because that movie was formatted for a resolution different from your TV. For example, if it was more widescreen than your TV then it would either have the sides cut off (which means you miss seeing anything happening at the sides of the screen) or they fit the width to your TV width and thus leave bars along the top and bottom.",
"It's due to a difference in aspect ratio. That is, the ratio of the width of the display to the height of the display. If they don't match the source (such as using a television to watch something filmed for a theater screen), you'll have to do one of three things. 1) Scale the output to the display and put black bars on the difference. 2) Cut off parts of the output so you can match the ratio of the display. 3) Stretch one dimension more than the other, making everything look stretched out and horrible. 1 and 2 are the difference between DVDs labeled as widescreen and fullscreen. Nobody does 3 because it's horrible. However, if a television show or a movie designed for watching on a television and not a movie theater, they can film it to fit nicely on a television."
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5rqt3k | Why do food/drink companies only sell certain flavours of their in some countries/areas? | For example: Here in south UK, Coca Cola sell Original, Diet, Zero and Life versions of their product. I see images from countries such as Turkey, where there are Coca Cola cans flavoured grape and orange. In Japan, they sell a GREEN TEA flavoured Kit-Kat. Why aren't these varieties readily available in the U.K.? Is there a financial or logistical reason, or is it simply because there are different departments of the company at work in different countries? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When new food/drink products are created, they're released in a test market. Basically, they release the product in a single city and see how it sells. If it sells well, they're release it in several cities in the area, then the state, then the neighboring states, then the country. That way, if it doesn't sell, they didn't product millions of bags of unsold candy that people hate. They might only produce hundreds of bags of unsold candy. If stuff's not in your area, it might be because a small town in central Ohio didn't like it. But a small town in central Japan did."
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5rr1yo | What is the numbing sensation that washes over ones body when confronted with a negative and emotional situation? | I'd noticed this feeling today because I've felt it for the fourth time in my life. I can recall it because it's very distinct. I primarily source it to depression but, for an example, I saw my ex of two years with another man today and immediately my heart seemed to slow down and thump harder and my entire body had what felt like a wave that still has my fingers tingling and as if I feel extremely numb The other, more recent time I can recall this is when a very close friend passed away. What is this feeling called and why does it happen? Is this shock? Sorry if my explanation is lacking. I'm unsure of how else to describe it. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"it's the fight or flight response. Blood vessels contracting as your body redirects blood flow to vital organs, an increase of adrenaline, that changes the emotional and physiological makeup of our bodies. Feeling threatened or under stress brings it out."
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5rr2oo | In many books, why does the first word or two at the beginning of each chapter have a different font (or bold/italics) added to the text that is unlike the rest? | I would post a picture to explain, but I'm currently reading Dune. I've noticed this for a number of other books, as well. I can make an example, here, actually. Each chapter begins and the first few words have a different font or is bold that is not like the rest of the text. On this book, the font is flatter, thinner, but a bit larger. Page 434 of Dune starts another chapter: > "**Will you** look at that thing!" Stilgar whispered. Another beginning of a chapter, page 397: > **The smuggler's** spice factory with its parent carrier and ring of drone ornithopters came over a lifting of dunes like a swarm of insects following its queen. _____________________ Is there any reason for this or is it simply aesthetics? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Dates back to ancient Rome. In a lot of old languages, they hadn't invented the space or the period yet. Like just long unbroken strings of letters. So they started making the first letter of a word huge to indicate new paragraph. The tradition kept, and in the middle ages, they'd hand write/paint a huge fancy letter at the start of a book or chapter to be fancy and as tradition. Some people do it with the first couple words, or just the first word, or just the first letter of the first word. They do variations, but it hearkens back to a time when big ass letters meant new paragraph.",
"As /u/TurtleBurgler says, it's a matter of tradition. I'd like to add on to that answer by pointing out that there is an *incredible* amount of traditionalism in typography and book design. Typographers are working in a tradition going back hundreds of years and many of the principles and design choices made all those centuries ago still remain. Many typefaces used today are digitized versions of those designed hundreds of years ago, like those created by Claude Garamond in the 1500s. The ideal choice of margins and page size goes back even farther to how handwritten manuscripts were designed."
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5rr54i | the controversy surrounding Betsy DeVos' nomination as Education Secretary | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In addition to being unqualified, she supports the abolishing of all public education and believes that private, for profit charter schools, especially religious ones, should be the way that America educates its students. She's also an heir to the Amway fortune, which you might recognize as a notorious pyramid scheme. The implications of her being nominated after her family made huge donations to Trump's campaign are just your garden variety American political corruption.",
"Simply put: Betsy DeVos has absolutely no professional experience that would qualify her for the role of Secretary of Education.",
"She is quite frankly the most unqualified person to ever be nominated to a cabinet post in modern history. She has never been a teacher or an administrator in any school, public or private. She has never been on a school board. She hasn't even volunteered in a school. She did not go to public school herself, and she sends her kids to private schools. She has no knowledge of major issues in education, such as proficiency grading. She has never run a large organization. She has no experience with college financial aid, which is a big part of the Secretary of Education's job. But most of all, she actively, passionately HATES public education. Her number one issue, by far, that she has been working for relentlessly for years, is to funnel tax money to private and religious schools through school \"vouchers\". As another author put it, it would be like hiring a soccer coach who has never played football, who doesn't know the rules, and who actually hates football, as the new head coach of the Dallas Cowboys.",
"She's a billionaire, creationist, charter school advocate, she's anti-gay marriage, daughter of Amway founder, sister of Blacwater CEO, she is the largest donor to the worst Religious Right hate groups.",
"She has said some pretty negative things about teachers unions. Since teachers are a big part of implementation for any education program, that's not going to be an easy relationship for Ms. DeVos to manage."
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5rrayz | Why are there so many rectangles all around us? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Generally speaking they're easier to design, and, especially in buildings- they are much easier to construct for several reasons: the math is easier (you don't have to mess with pi); the measuring is easier; standard boards and construction materials themselves are usually straight and flat (making it harder to build curved things with them); rectangles are an efficient use of space, and they are strong enough to suit most purposes effectively.",
"Rectangles are one of very few shapes that let you easily cut material into smaller pieces with no waste. If you cut a circle out of a large sheet of material, you're guaranteed to have odd bits left over that can't be made into circles. But if you cut a rectangle, the remainders are all rectangles too. Rectangles combine beautifully. A rectangular room is easily filled with multiple pieces of rectangular furniture, rectangular tile, rectangular wallpaper, etc. Rectangular objects can fill a shelf nicely with no plan or coordination, even if the rectangles aren't equal. Rectangles have the useful property called *orthogonality:* that the dimensions don't interfere with each other. If you make a a rectangle taller, that doesn't need to affect its width at all. Circles and hexagons and trapezoids, for example, don't have this property. Bear in mind that circles (and their 3-D cousins, spheres) are also special and common, but for completely different reasons."
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5rrbuq | Fibonacci sequence | What is it/what does it do/why | Mathematics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You want to build a sequence (list) of numbers. Start by writing down the number one twice: 1, 1 Look at the last two numbers in your list so far (1 and 1). Take their sum (2), and write it at the end of the list. 1, 1, 2 Repeat that process (now it ends with 1 and 2; their sum is 3): 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, ... In math, the notation for this is F(n) = F(n-2) + F(n-1), which can be read as \"the n^(th) Fibonacci number is the sum of the two Fibonacci numbers before it\" You can prove that ratio between two numbers next to each other in the sequence is approximately \"the golden ratio,\" which is about 1.618. For example, 8/5 is 1.6; 34/21 is 1.619. > Aside: it so happens that the number of kilometers in a mile is 1.61..., so you can use the Fibonacci sequence to approximate miles to kilometers. For example, 8km ≈ 5mi, 34km ≈ 21mi Fibonacci numbers \"count\" a lot of different things: * Take a checkerboard that is two rows tall and N columns wide. Try to cover the checkerboard with dominos (a 2x1 block or a 1x2 block). There are F(N+1) ways to do that * there is 1 way to cover a 2x1 checkerboard with dominos * there are 2 ways to cover a 2x2 checkerboard with dominos * there are 3 ways to cover a 2x3 checkerboard with dominos * there are 5 ways to cover a 2x4 checkerboard with dominos * Write down the numbers (1, 2, 3, ..., N). Pick a group of numbers so that you don't pick any numbers that are next to each other. There are F(N+2) such groups. * there are three ways (), (1), (2) to pick such groups from 1, 2 * there are five ways (), (1), (2), (3), (1, 3) to pick such groups from 1, 2, 3 * there are eight ways (), (1), (2), (3), (4), (1, 3), (1, 4), (2, 4) to pick such groups from 1, 2, 3, 4 * there are thirtween ways to pick such groups from 1, 2, 3, 4, 5",
"1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21... is the sequence. On to infinity. You get the next number by adding the previous two numbers. Consecutive Fibonacci numbers approximate the golden ratio. It's an interesting pattern that is useful for some math things."
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5rrlew | -How do plants move to face the sun? | 1) How do they know where the sun is? 2) By what mechanism do they actually move? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Plants produce a hormone called auxin. It is produced in the top of the stem and moves downwards. Auxin has the ability to promote elongation of cells (stretching). The area that sunlight hits on a plant blocks the flow of auxin, causing an imbalance that results in one side having elongating cells whilst the others remain the same. As one side elongates, it causes the stem to bend, pointing towards the light. [This image gives a great visual depiction.]( URL_0 :) IAA is the auxin",
"Plants move by elongating the cells on the opposite side of where the light is, which bends them towards the light source. As for how they know where the light is, that's a bit more complicated. They have various molecules that can sense light and thus prompt a response to make them move around.",
"Plants move all of the time even if it's not to face the sun. I put a web cam on my indoor hydroponic garden for a few months to take a time lapse. It was scary how much plants like mint explode outwards and wrap around everything around it. The plants also move to a rhythm like a beating heart, rising up, and relaxing down at regular intervals in time with day and night cycles of the lamps. The way that plants move is actually kind of cool. They use hydraulics! An increase in pressure forces movement over time much like squeezing a tube of toothpaste causes it to move. Not all plants follow the sun exactly but some do orient themselves east or west in order to maximize their exposure throughout the day. Other plants are shade loving and avoid direct sunlight."
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5rrnta | HTTP vs. HTTPS | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The \"s\" means secure. Think about talking to your BFF in a room full of people at a party. Everyone can hear you and hear what you're talking about. Now lets change that up, now you and your BFF are speaking a secret language that just the two of you guys know. Only you. Everyone else can still hear you talking, but no one can make any sense of that. Thats what moving from http to https does. It keeps your conversation with the website in your own secret language.",
"HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) was something invented by Tim Berners Lee in 1989 at CERN when he created the WWW (he didn't do it from scratch and built on the ideas of others before him, but he created the version we now all use). It is a protocol (hence the **P** in the name) originally designed to transfer (the **T**) a certain sort of file called a HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) file (which is where we get the **HT** from). This means it was meant as a protocol (a set of rules) to transfer websites from one computer to another. There were other protocols with more generic applications before that like FTP (File Transfer Protocol) but HTTP was especially designed for websites. The was we use it today is to have a webbrowser (like the one you are using right now to view this website) communicate with a webserver and transfer files (like the website you are viewing right now) from the server to the browser so you can view it on your computer/phone/whatever. The HTTP is used to send the website from the server to your computer. It can also be used to transfer other types of files but websites is what it was built for and is mostly used for. The original HTTP had a big problem though. Everything that was transferred with it was transferred openly over the net in plain text. Think of it as writing something on the back of a post card. the mailman and everyone else who handles the postcard as it is send to you can see exactly who is sending what message to who. If you value your privacy you might prefer sending a letter in an envelope instead of a postcard. This is basically what HTTPS is to HTTP. Once the web got started people realized that it might not be a smart idea to send things like credit card numbers, passwords or sexual propositions openly around the net in ways everyone could see. So a variation of the HTTP was born called HTTPS (the S stands for secure) it basically does exactly the same thing as HTTP does, but the rules were amended to include a bit about encrypting the messages being send back and forth first. HTTPS has the advantage of giving you privacy on the web. One other advantage is authentication. Because of the way encryption works, websites using https have to have something called a certificate. This certificate that they get from trusted authorities can be used like a badge or a personal ID to prove that the website is exactly who they claim to be. So https does not just give you privacy it also makes sure that nobody is impersonating the website you are trying to view. The combination of privacy and making sure you got the right website is important for such things as online banking and basically everything else you do online where you don't want to give anything away.",
"Lets say I'm not a very nice person and I want to take advantage of a person or business. Lets take a person, and say that I've parked outside their house a few nights in order to log wifi packets until I crack their weak encryption key. I can now join their network and use a technique called arp poisoning. I basically trick the persons computers into thinking I'm the fastest path to the internet so all of their traffic gets routed to me, then out to the web. I could use any number of tools like winpcap and wireshark to sniff the packets being sent back and forth between that user and any website they visit including their bank, their email, what username and passwords they typed in. I would basically know everything about what they are doing. How do you prevent that? You connect using an encrypted session which establishes 2 way communication with an internet server, but nobody but the server and the user can understand the conversation. So the bad guy sniffing their packets will get pages of garbage, instead of useful and illicit passwords and account numbers. HTTP is a non encrypted connection which is fine for googling things or visiting a public website that doesn't require you send any login information to it. HTTPS is an encrypted connection which not only encrypts the conversation, it also encrypts the username and password that are sent, and it prevents people from eavesdropping. It's not fool proof. If I was a savvy bad guy I might use my new found wifi connection to your house in order to serve you malware which infects your computer and logs all your keystrokes. Since the information is only encrypted on the wire, and once it reaches your web browser it's not encrypted anymore, if I can see whats on your screen and log your keystrokes, I can still do a lot of damage."
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5rrr2e | Why are movie theaters dying? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They're expensive, you have to put up things like a strict schedule, expensive snacks, crowds, some asshat on his cellphone, etc. Contrast that with watching a movie in the comfort of your own home. As home video/streaming media releases are coming sooner and sooner after a theatrical run, and more desirable movies *premiering* on steaming media instead of theaters, and the main draw of a theater (seeing it ASAP) is less appealing.",
"Theater manager here. Small theaters: Since they couldn't afford to convert from traditional 35mm film to digital so they sold off to large chains or closed. Digital conversion really expensive, for just 1 auditorium we paid $500,000 US including new projector, media block, sound system (processor, amps, speakers, HI-VI system). This is also why cheap shows are a thing of the past. Bigger Theaters: They keep jacking up their prices as wages are forced up and Hollywood always want a big cut (sometimes all of the box office), and running 10+ screens with 2000w+ xenon bulbs is really expensive and that doesn't take into account normal electrical costs and other utilities. That right there is why concessions are so damn expensive. Convenience: Apple recently announced they are in talk with major studios to have their features to have new releases just 2 weeks after theatrical release dates. This is the big one; this makes theaters a gimmick. You will only have to pay for the feature rental not per person. A family of 5 can easily as others mentioned spend upwards of $100 between tickets and snacks. Example at my place an evening show for 3 adults (anyone over 11) and 2 kids is $44. Add in a large popcorn, 3 Icees and 2 large drinks that's about $37. Do the same thing at home minus the Icee you could be looking at $30 and you're saving gas and wear on the car and the hassle of getting your kids in the car ect... Safety: Colorado changed things, and the string of rampage style attacks in 2015 definitely had an impact. Stay in your home or put yourself and family in a potentially dangerous situation. All of that combined with the huge quality leap in home theater systems in the last 10 years and pirating is pretty much it. (So everyone says that pirating is a victim less crime is wrong, It hurts the theaters and more importantly the people who work at the lowest levels myself included) If you have any other questions I'm more than willing to answer (fair warning if you get me going on projectors I may not stop)",
"Because it cost so much. If you want to take the family out and buy snacks you're looking at spending $100. Seems people wait until they can stream it."
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5rrrmi | What causes our spine to "shiver" in uncomfortable, fearful, or embarassing experiences/situations? | What in our body causes this sensation and why does it happen? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"there are many theories why this happens, but they all share one single point. to be very simplistic, it's all about your brain (many parts of it not just the hypothalamus) reacting to a profound emotion (Good or bad). It could be during a scary part of a videogame or after listening to a great song that you have not heard in years. the brain releases different hormones depending on the situation and (adrenaline, dopamine etc.) during fearful events like you asked, your brain might release adrenaline to shunt blood to non-needed tissue ( stomach-intestines, skin) and re-distribute them to needed tissue (muscles, heart, brain). you might feel cold because of this. This also causes your tiny hairs to stand up(goosebumps caused by the pilomotor reflex)."
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5rrv9a | Why is Oman such a 'quiet' nation despite being right in the middle of chaos? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I should begin with the disclaimer that I'm not an expert in the subject. That being said, I do have a very strong interest in geopolitics and can hopefully provide a half-decent answer until someone better educated comes along. Of the top of my head, I can think of three potential reasons for why Oman is relatively stable compared to other Middle Eastern countries. First, most Muslim states (in the Middle East and elsewhere) are either predominately Shia or Sunni. Oman is the one exception to this, as it is primarily Ibadi. As such, it has largely stayed out of Shia-Sunni conflicts. Second, it has a relatively diverse economy, which means that it is more stable than if it was solely based on oil. You can also see this is the UAE (particularly in Dubai) and other areas of MENA with a diversified economy. Third, I think that your original premise is based on a flawed assumption. You said that it's in the middle of chaos, but it isn't. Oman borders 3 other states: KSA, Yemen, and the UAE. Of these, Yemen is the only one that is currently undergoing significant strife. Compared to other parts of the Arab world (Somalia, Palestine, Iraq), the Gulf States (with the exception of Iraq) are relatively stable and prosperous.",
"They are not in the middle of anything. They are a coastal country bordering two stable countries, and one semi stable country.",
"Figured I'd read up on Oman after I saw your post cause yea realized I knew nothing about it really. Seems like a pretty stable place with a steady stream of social reforms within a traditional monarchy. Wikipedia mentioned they've worked to diversify their exports away from just oil. I'm sure there's a lot more to it than that and there's probably some good and bad there like anywhere.",
"The rulers seem to actually care about the population (here's looking at you Iraq and Syria) and don't meddle with other regional countries (here's looking at you KSA, Qatar and Iran).",
"Also not an Oman expert, but I have a reasonable grasp of Middle Eastern geopolitics. /u/entropydecreaser has made some good points: Oman's economy is relatively stable and its geographic position is advantageous- away from major lines of conflict in the region. It is a long way from one end of the Arabian Peninsula to the other, and Oman have no reason to get themselves too closely involved with what is happening over a thousand miles northwest. Oman is also tucked away behind the 'empty quarter', the largest sand desert in the world, which makes external interference, particularly military action, extremely difficult. I would say that the major factor, though (in my opinion) is the fact that Oman has existed as an entity for centuries. Almost no ME states preexist the 20th century and even those which can claim to, such as Egypt or arguably Iran, have been shaped by colonialism and revolution over the past hundred years or so. It is in stark contrast, therefore, that Oman have not only been free of colonial domination for over 250 years, but at one point had a sizeable empire of their own. This is not to say that Oman has been entirely free of conflict or upheaval (it has not), but it is a far more 'natural' state than those created by colonial powers in the Levant, and they have a degree of institutional continuity through the monarchy that is unmatched in the Middle East. This is in stark contrast to those states created by treaty in the early 20th century, which have been highly unstable since, and because of, their drawing on the map. Obviously I may be corrected my someone with more expertise, but that would be my take on the question.",
"Mainly because its bordered by countries that are pretty stable with the exception of Yemen. When i lived in Dubai my family and I drove to Oman and had a vacation there for a short while, this was around 2010, nothing unsafe, really cool country.",
"Although i'm not an expert on Oman, it's a 'special' Middle-Eastern country in the sense that it follows Ibadi islam, which is distinct from both Sunni and Shia Islam. It is the only country in the world where this form of Islam is the predominant form."
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5rrw8b | Why is it when you allow water to sit and reach room temperature it feels warm but coffee left to reach room temperature feels ice cold? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"your mind expects coffee to be hot so when it's room temperature, it feels much colder because it's colder than you expect it to me. one day, brew coffee in a mug and let it get to room temperature. also put water in a mug and have someone mix up the mugs and blindly feel them. you won't feel a difference.",
"As others have said this is only in your mind. The coffee does not get substantially cooler than water in the same ambient temperature.",
"If you really want to experiment with how the body interprets temperature fill a bowl with a mix of hot and cold water from separate taps. Whilst filling the bowl put one hand in the hot water stream and the other in the cold water then at the end put your hands into the bowl. The water is at the same temperature but feels cold to one hand and hot to the other. The nerves that respond to temperature function on difference - hotter or colder than the starting temperature - and can be fooled in the experiment described above."
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5rrwor | Why are "brownie points" so important to people? | What I mostly mean by "brownie points" is things like Xbox Lives Gamerscore system. People love getting a high Gamerscore for no other reason then to say they have it. Is there a psychological reasoning behind it? Reddit itself also has a bit of a brownie point system and people attempt to exploit for no reason other than they want to. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"These trigger a slight release of serotonin, a neurotransmitter chemical in the brain that makes us feel like we just got a reward. This happens because we are social creatures, so our brains are wired to make us feel good when we impressed those around us or when we achieved something."
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5rrzms | What is a Riemann Surface and why is it significant? | I came across [this]( URL_0 ) article and assumed Riemann Surfaces must have serious implications if she won the Fields Medal for her work on them. I tried to read about them but it was like a foreign language. I literally couldn't understand anything about them or why they are significant. | Mathematics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I'm currently just being introduced to the topic of complex variables, but I think I may know what Riemann surfaces are. Since I don't know your math background, I'll start off by saying that complex variables are just numbers involving both a real component and an imaginary component (represented by a number followed by the letter i). An example would be 3+2i where 3 is the real part and 2i is the imaginary part. You can do some pretty cool stuff with them, including take derivatives, invent new functional traits, but one cool thing you can do is graph them. As it turns out, graphing complex numbers is a little different than real numbers. For instance and to digress, real numbers lie on a 'real number line'. That's a pretty straightforward concept, with negative numbers lying to the left side of the line in decreasing order, positive numbers to the right side of the line in increasing order, and 0 in the center. Complex numbers on the other hand lie on a 'complex number plane'. What essentially happens is you take your real number line from earlier, and that now becomes your 'x-axis' for this new plane. You then add a 'y-axis' perpendicular to the x-axis, and this axis is your imaginary component axis, with positive i values lying upwards, and negative i values lying downwards. You can then proceed to graph stuff like 3+2i on the complex number plane by proceeding 3 positive units in the x direction, and two positive units in the y direction. You essentially just added a imaginary number line to your real number line to make a complex number plane. (Cool note here, if you happen to know the relationship i^2=-1, then think about taking a real number 3 which lies on the x-axis, multiply it by i, giving you 3i, which now lies on the y-axis (rotates 90 degrees), then multiply by i again, giving 3i^2=-3 which lies on the x-axis but in the negative x direction (180 degree rotation). So is 'i' just something you multiply numbers by to perform a rotational transformation? Neat thought!) Pretty awesome stuff, but that is only useful in graphing points. To graph functions of complex variables requires a function of 4 dimensions, which humans are incapable of doing. But I've introduced all necessary topics, and now I will finally address your question by presenting a few more. How do you rank the magnitude of these complex numbers? In other words, how do you tell if one complex number is bigger or smaller than another? Is 3+2i larger than 1+387i? Or is 543-4i bigger than either of those? How do you define infinity? As it turns out there are no good answers to those questions. And that's where Riemann surfaces come in. Riemann surfaces are a number of possibly infinitely many sheets that cover the entirety of the complex plane. The simplest Riemann surface that I know of is a sphere, so that's what I'll use to attempt to explain this. What Riemann proposed, is that you take a sphere, assign values to all the points along the sphere, and cut it through the equator with the complex number plane. From here, you draw an arrow, which always begins with its tail originating at the North Pole of the sphere, to the coordinate on the complex number plane of the point you wish to know. I should give you note, that the complex number plane stretches infinitely far beyond the radius of the sphere, i.e. the plane is much bigger than our sphere. Where the arrow makes contact with the sphere is the value of whatever you are looking for. There are actually two possible scenarios, 1. If the point on the complex number plane lies outside of the sphere then the arrow will make contact with the sphere before making contact with the plane, and will be a positive value. Or 2. The point on the complex number plane lies within the sphere, and the arrow must be extended beyond the complex number plane to strike the sphere on the negative value side. That may not make very much sense, but drawing may help. It's also good to note, that infinity lies at the North Pole. This means, that as our point on the complex number plane increases in either it's real or imaginary value (i.e. Extends farther outward in ANY direction along the complex number plane) then our function increases closer to infinity. It's also interesting to note, that zero lies along the 'rotationary axis' of our sphere (I.e. If our arrow was to be drawn from the North Pole to the point (0,0i) (which is the South Pole) that would be considered a value of zero.) Also interesting to note is that negative infinity no longer exists, we simply only care for infinity at this point. There is a lot of mathematical terminology associated with this, and I may have butchered explaining it, or explained it totally wrong, so take this all with a grain of salt. But other conditions include stuff involving e-hoods and differentiability of complex functions which step up the difficulty by quite a bit. Complex variables is also really quite fascinating, as well as Riemann's work and his life, so I hope this didn't totally dissuade you from any future math potential/ careers. Best of luck!"
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5rrznp | What is a Jewellers tool more like, a 'Magnifying glass' or a 'mini telescope'? Please Help. | To settle a petty argument. A stubborn friend just ignores any logical answer I give. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's called a [Jeweler's Loupe]( URL_0 ), and it does NOT telescope, so it is a magnifying glass.",
"Microscopes (and by extension, magnifying glasses which are more primitive microscopes) are used to magnify small objects that are at a short distance from the viewer whereas telescopes are used to magnify large objects that are at a large distance from the viewer. A jeweller doesn't look at distant larger objects. So they aren't using telescopes. A jeweller looks at nearby small objects. Thus they are using microscopes or magnifying glasses.",
"A Jewelry tool, mostly known as a loupe, is closer to a magnifying glass, as it is used to see things that are close. Telescopes are for seeing things far away."
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5rs3k9 | American Politics | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"This isn't really a question and is really vague. Can you elaborate on what you specifically want to know about?",
"The US uses a voting system called \"first-past-the-post.\" This is a very simple form of democracy that works by giving everyone one vote, then making the person with the most votes the winner. An unintentional consequence of this system is that politics always trends towards two major political parties. This is because, if you try to start a third party, you'll \"split the vote\" of the political parties similar to you, and so the political parties most different from you are more likely to win. So American politics has divided itself into two major political parties: the Republicans and the Democrats. The republicans are right-wing and conservative, while the democrats are left-wing, liberal, and progressive. The conservatives want the winners of history to keep on winning, while the liberals tend to fight for the historic underdogs. Lately, the underdogs are racial minorities (like black people, Hispanic people, muslim people, etc.) as well as women, the poor, the queer, etc. In the simplest terms, you can predict Republican policy vs Democratic policy by asking \"Did this person used to have more of an advantage over other people?\" If the answer is \"yes,\" Republicans will try to fight for them. If the answer is \"no,\" the Democrats will try to fight for them. But those are just the ultra-broad strokes. More specifically, the Republican party is formed from three major groups: The Religious, the Libertarians, and the American Imperialists. The religious people want the government to legislate traditional Christian values like a ban on abortion. The libertarians want to minimize government spending and services. The American Imperialists want the United States to be powerful in terms of the military, and project our strength abroad. The Democrats are a chaotic alliance of everyone else. This can make for a weird, strained party, with scientists working along side blue-collar laborers and edgy artists and every kind of ethnic minority. Based on polling data, there are more self-described \"liberals\" in the United States verse \"conservatives,\" but the conservatives vote more reliably than the liberals, making it generally pretty even. Recently, the republican party experienced a string of humiliating defeats to the democrats, with the black democrat Barack Obama being elected president twice. Many commentators believed that the republicans would have to soften their opposition to non-white races if they wanted to keep winning elections, since the non-white populations are growing in the United States at a faster rate than the white population. In this latest election, the republican voters roundly rejected this strategy, and embraced Donald Trump after he promised to build a wall between the US and Mexico, and kick out all Muslims. The democrats, meanwhile, fragmented over their own candidate who was a female. As a result, the Republicans control all branches of the US government except the supreme court, although they have the power to appoint a new justice after delaying the last appoint for a year."
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5rs5g8 | Why are people allowed to reupload YouTube videos onto Facebook without it being considered copyright infringement? | Many content creators make their livings on YouTube. But I see thousands of videos taken and reuploaded onto Facebook. Sometimes these are just small clips but sometimes they are the full videos, and almost never is the original creator mentioned. Is there a copyright strike system YouTube content creators can use on Facebook, and if so why is it rarely used? Secondly, why are videos stolen and put on facebook with crappy compression? Wouldn't it be easier to share a YouTube link via Facebook than go through all that work? I know this is what SoFloAntonio was accused of doing by H3H3Productions. Why even go through all this trouble, do they get ad revenue or is it just a popularity contest? Edit: If anything, I would have thought that at least Google would have put a stop to this by now. They are losing thousands of dollars daily/weekly from potential ad revenue. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If the content creators found their videos on Facebook, they could file a DMCA claim that would force Facebook to take the videos down. Google/YouTube legally can't do anything because they don't own the copyright to the videos, and it's near impossible to do anything technically because at some point, there has to be a video feed that gets displayed in your browser and there's no way to stop you from recording that. The YouTube creators don't have the money to hire an army of lawyers to scour Facebook for infringement, so they'll call it if they see it, but they won't find videos that don't go viral. Facebook doesn't have to pro-actively search for copyright infringement as long as they take down videos when they're notified of infringement because of the DMCA's safe harbor provision. As much as people hate on the DMCA, it is literally the only reason why you can have a video-sharing site with fewer resources than Google exist and not get sued to oblivion the first time someone uploaded a clip of a Hollywood movie. As for why people do it, I couldn't tell you for sure. It may be to get around region restrictions on YouTube, it may be to avoid YouTube's ads, it may be because people just don't like YouTube.",
"> Is there a copyright strike system YouTube content creators can use on Facebook Facebook is subject to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which means that if the copyright owner files a complaint, Facebook must remove the video pending the outcome of the dispute or else be held liable for all copyright-infringing activities by its members. But first you have to find the copyright-infringing video, and as far as I know Facebook doesn't have an automated system that helps content creators find the infringing material. It's led some people to accuse Facebook of deliberately fixing things so that videos uploaded to Facebook are seen by more people, generating advertising revenue for Facebook, so they don't have much incentive to help out here. > why are videos stolen and put on facebook with crappy compression? In some cases, it may be a cynical ploy to generate interest in the page, attracting likes, shares and so forth. Since the Facebook algorithm appears to favour Facebook videos over embedded videos from other platforms, there's an incentive right there to re-upload them. But I also think that there are a lot of people out there who simply don't understand that there could be something wrong with what they're doing. They're not deliberately trying to deprive a content creator of revenue, and genuinely believe that if it's on the internet, they can do whatever they want with it. A lot of people really don't get the point that making videos costs money, and often assume that people who make videos do it in their spare time as a sort of hobby; or that video creators magically make obscene amounts of cash and won't miss a few bucks just because somebody re-uploaded it elsewhere; and very often people assume that they're \"promoting\" the video for the creator and giving them \"exposure\". It's very difficult to get people to understand that this simply isn't the case. As a content creator myself, this presents a bit of an ethical dilemma. I'm a living, breathing human being who needs to buy food to stay alive; on the other hand, it's unreasonable to expect 13-year-olds to understand the same copyright law that, say, network TV has entire legal teams on staff to help them with."
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5rs5mt | Why does a suspect for a crime receive a lesser sentence if they accept a plea deal? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"As others have noted, it could be a variety of reasons. In Civil cases, meaning when one party sues another party for damages, then abruptly you hear that both sides settled \"for an undisclosed amount, for an undisclosed reason...\", usually that means both sides looked at their chances to win if it went to trial, then both lawyers sat down at the bargaining table and hashed out at deal. In Criminal cases, this usually means the defendant is bargaining with the prosecutor with the old adage \"one in the hand is better than two in the bush\". The reason both sides in any case usually are willing to settle or plea bargain (and this is actually encouraged by the courts for reasons already described), is because if the case goes to court, it's actually a gamble, but for *both* sides. Each side can have a good idea if they will win, but neither knows 100%, and once the judgement is announced, that's it-unless one side or the other decides to pursue an appeal (which is a wholly different topic). Prosecutors like making a plea deal for a lesser sentence because they know that they've guaranteed a conviction and won't risk a humiliating and potentially career-ending defeat in trial, and defendants like making a deal for a lesser sentence because it usually means less time served for the crime that they're accused of.",
"It can save time and money, avoiding a trial. Also, it guarantees an outcome, there's always a chance the jury finds the defendant not guilty, so it's basically a compromise to avoid that possibility.",
"Because trials are very costly and plea deals give an incentive for people with weak cases to just admit that they have no case in order to avoid all the resources a trial would require. Another way to think of it is that the penalty you would get for a plea deal is the base penalty and the penalty you would get if you went to trial and were found guilty is more severe to punish you for wasting everyone's time and money."
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5rs6k3 | Why are One Bedroom/One Bathroom Town Houses not built more in cities? | A small one-car garage, front door, and small foyer on the first floor, second floor would be a small kitchen, living area, and dining area, and then a bathroom and bedroom on the third floor (Example - Added this in my Edit). It seems ideal for young people, singles, and people without kids. Instead of spending money monthly on a one bedroom/bathroom apartment, why are One Bedroom, one Bathroom town houses not a popular thing in cities? I should note, I have only been looking in cities near me, so this may be wildly popular in other cities. If so, what cities can I look at for this? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Basically because a one bedroom house can only be sold to a single person or a couple with no kids. This limits the market because the vast majority of home shoppers are families with multiple children. Some municipalities wont let you construct a house to sell with less than 2 bedrooms for this reason.",
"You lose a ton of square footage to stairs and can't go taller than a few stories. Much more efficient to have higher rise units and larger parking decks. I live in an urban townhouse with a 2 car garage, 3 bedrooms and still it seems like our house is half stairs."
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5rs9wb | How do cable companies still charge for HD, even after the switch to digital? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They never really charged you for HD, nor do they still. They just tack it onto your bill as an extra fee so they can say their \"base\" package is a certain rate, which is often low, then make it up with a variety of \"fees\". Very normal business practices to price products like this. Be it cable TV or elsewhere. The initial price of a product you see is generally wildly important to how consumer's perceive it, so if you can show them a low price first, then tack on fees at the end, thats better, they got dragged in with the low price, yeah it went up a little, but you already got them. Most Airlines, but particularly low cost carriers use a very similar tactic. Now of course if for some reason you don't want to pay that fee, they may waive it, and not give you HD, but basically just getting SD is a service that no one wants anymore, so its quite easy to squeeze out and extra $5 or so for \"HD Fee\". Some of the fee is simply a legacy charge back in the days where they had a lot of customers with SD only, and less with HD, as now its transitioned to nearly every customer can get HD, its just free money. As a note though, specifically calling out the \"HD Fee\" is kinda going away, its being integrated in your set top box monthly cost instead, which of course if you want service, you have to have."
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5rsa4t | If you were a billion years away from earth, but could somehow watch earth through a very powerful telescope, and you raced twords earth would you watch history unfold before your eyes ? | Could you watch from a billion years ago, the current distance you were, to the current date and time of earth, as you closed the gap between you and earth? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Yep, that is spot on as to how relativity and light work in general. Granted, you would also need a special telescope to account for the blueshift of zooming towards the light, but ye."
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5rsbze | why do geese have teeth on their tounges? | Why do geese need mouths that look like a the blender from hell? I know they have a bad temper, but why do they need death machines for a mouth? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Canadian geese don't technically have teeth, since they are made of cartilage, but for the sake of this explanation, I will call them teeth. The teeth help to catch roots and vegetation from the bottom of lakes and ponds, as well as pull up grass. The second use is to mash up the vegetation seeing as they don't chew their food. As a side note, if you think goose mouths are horrifying, leatherback turtle mouths are essentially a one-way portal to hell."
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5rscca | - What's happening when you can see the emotion in someone's eyes? | When someone dies, it has been said you can see the "light leave their eyes." In this case, I assume it's some biological explanation like the reflectivity of their eye jelly or something. What about when someone is very sad or hurt or shocked and you can see the physical reaction in their eyes. I have a friend who was very sad yesterday and when I looked in his eyes, they just looked void and empty. I don't mean facial expressions, I mean you can see the eyes' reaction. Is this just perception, empathy or a real thing? And if it real, what's going on? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Part of it is that our eyes are pretty constantly moving even in very tiny ways. When you're dead, they stop. Also, for some people, when they're thinking heavily, or lost in thought, their eyes unfocus and they're not actively looking at anything. So when someone has their eyes open, but not actively using them (which we are the vast majority of the time), it can look disconcerting."
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5rsec2 | Can a physical effort cause a nosebleed? And if so, How does that happen? | I often have nosebleeds, family trait, and there has been a notion of a correlation between physical effort and nosebleeds, and I have no idea of where that idea came from. Today I had to go to the loo, because I was a bit bloated and gassy, so I went there, farted, and instantly got a very strong nosebleed, which left me wondering if they could be related or if it was just a coincidence. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Yes it can. When you do physical excessive the heart beats faster and harder. That increases the blood pressure and makes vessels more likely to burst. On top of that, blood vessels become a little thinner and leakier to allow more oxygen to pass through faster (so they are easier to burst)."
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5rsl98 | Why do photographers not just take video in HD or 4K then take screenshots afterwards from the footage? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"So a couple things. First of all, most cameras already support a burst mode, which is basically what you want- it takes a whole bunch of pictures in a row and then you can choose from that. Second, full HD video is only 2 megapixels. It's not exactly a high resolution image, although you usually can't tell because it's changing fast enough and your eyes are only focused on the movement. 4k video is better, it's about 8.3 megapixels, but it's still not fantastic. Third, taking a video actually gives you less control over the images. Photographers choose how long to take an exposure for each image to ensure that the sensors get enough light for a clear image, but the image doesn't get blurred from movement. Photographs taken at night use a longer exposure time than photographs taken at a daytime sporting event, for example. By shooting a video, you lose that control since each frame is at most 1/24th of a second, and more likely less than that.",
"4K is only equal to 9MP, far from the 20+ most DSLRs shoot at... Now, Megapixels aren't everything; videos will be much more compressed than normal photos, leading a much lower quality. Photos on my 13MP phone can take up to 3MB each. Now think of how big video files are; yes they're large, but each frame in a video isn't 3MB. The video would be huge. Theres a lot less data per frame in video than a single still shot. This doesn't factor in the ability to shoot in RAW files which generally makes them even larger and therefore higher quality. TL;DR Videos are lower resolution and the frames much more compressed than still shots.",
"Video is a series of photographs taken X times per second, and always X times per second. This means the sensor or film is only exposed to whatever is in front of the camera a fixed amount of time (1/30 of a second for instance). Well in photography being able to control how long the sensor or film is exposed to the light via the shutter is one of the most important choices one can make in order to get whatever photograph they are after. Fast shutter speed freezes action like in sports. Slow shutter speed blurs moving parts of the image. Fast shutter allows less light to the film or sensor. Slow shutter allows more light to the film or sensor. It's a very important control for a photographer and the image they wish to convey. As well as a tool for dealing with the amount of light on hand or even being able to capture something moving quickly at all.",
"Good question. The long and short of it is that movies encode visual information as a series of key frames, which are perfect, followed by a series of frames that only record changes in the key frame. This keeps movie sizes small but it results in image degradation. Because the images are updated 30 times a second it's okay if each individual frame isn't perfect, because our eyes will fill in the missing detail because it happens so fast. But taking a screenshot of the movie results in an image that is noisier, and contains less detail and visual information than even a .jpg. Consider the difference between a digital photograph, and a digital movie. They can both be the same resolution but they are not the same size. The movie is larger, but lets say you compared 30 pictures, to 1 second of video of the same resolution, you will find the video takes up far less space using 30 frames of motion, than 30 pictures would. The reason for this is that unless a video is recorded in RAW format, it discards much of the information it records in order to keep the file sizes small. Instead it uses perceptual techniques that divide the movie up into small sections, and simply looks for changes in each little block of the movie. Since not everything on screen is changing at the same time we don't tend to notice that only parts of the image are updating while others don't. It also happens very fast."
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5rsuz4 | Are Movie Theaters Dying Due to Changing Culture or Economic Reasons? | I guess my last topic was too narrow, so I made it less narrow. URL_0 | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's because it's $13.13 per ticket and $1 more for 3D and $2 more for RPX. And $5.50 for small coke and $6 for small popcorn. Or I can pay red box $2",
"I think they are dying because the entire experience is unpleasant. People talking and looking at phones during the movie... Why bother going out and paying for that crap.",
"Movie theaters in Charlotte are doing great: - reserved seating - electric reclining fake leather chairs - alcohol - real food, not just movie theater concessions - $6 movies all day Tuesday (at my personal favorite theater) - ticket purchases online",
"It's because the value isn't there anymore. The only reason I still go to cinemas is because they hold the movies I want hostage for a few months before I can view it from the comfort of my home. I will only go if it's a movie I want to see ASAP and am to impatient to wait. That's the only thing that gives cinemas value in my eyes. The big screen and sound system are a poor trade off for all the negatives when my modest home theater is more than sufficient to deliver the movie quality I want. If movies released straight to streaming and stores at the same time as theaters I think we would see the death of movie theaters in a very short amount of time.",
"Movie theaters here in Austin are booming. Particularly those that have models similar to Alamo Drafthouse where you get better seats, and have a full meal.",
"Between Economics and Culture, I would argue Economics, Used to be, if you wanted to see a movie you had two options: 1. Drive to Blockbuster, drop four bucks, and watch the movie on your 24-inch cathode-ray television. 1. Drive to a movie theater, drop ten bucks, and watch in on a screen the size of a football field. Nowadays, if you want to see a movie you have two options: 1. Literally not get up off your couch, use Netflix at zero marginal cost (the subscription does not change), and see it on your 55-inch high-definition widescreen. 1. Drive to a movie theater, drop ten bucks, and watch it on a screen the size of a football field. In economic terms, watching a movie at home is a *substitute good* for going to a theater. Over time, technology has both increased the *value* (in-home theater systems) and decreased the *cost* (Netflix) of this substitute good. This impacts the demand curve for going to a movie theater, decreasing aggregate demand.",
"It's so freaking expensive and you have around 15 minutes of adverts and 10 minutes of trailers before the film starts. Why am I paying £10 for that?",
"I live in Canada and from what I can tell movie theaters are doing great. I live in a medium size city and we have two very large theaters that are busy every night. For those saying people are using their phones and talking during movies, I've rarely seen that, and if people do do that others will ask them to stop.",
"In the Netherlands movie theaters are not dying, they are doing great. But there is a trend that small theaters in the centre of a city are replaced by one big theater just outside the centre of the city. For example this on: [Cinemec]( URL_0 )"
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5rsw8w | What is the difference between the roles of a Director, Producer, and Studio, in the making of a movie? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Director makes the artistic decisions; who plays who, how shots get taken, what the edit looks like. Producers do the heavy lifting on the organisational side; contracts, locations, etc Studios put up the money. Producers may well be involved in negotiating other income streams as well.",
"Using a restaurant as a loose metaphor, the studio would be the bank or rich friend that finances the restaurant. The producer would be the restaurant manager who was helpful in finding a suitable loan from the bank or is buddies with the rich investor. May also be a personal investor themselves. Runs the numbers, has financial ties to the project, and usually has control of minutiae. The director is the chef hired to create the menu that will be what defines the restaurant. Sometimes a chef can also be the restaurant manager, which is why they also get producer credits.",
"Follow-up: what is the difference between a Producer and an Executive-producer?",
"It's actually a lot less strictly defined that one might imagine. Every team is different, but the general breakdowns are: Studios provide resources (locations, gear, access to people) and financing. The waters are muddied substantially when they insist on creative control to go with said financing and additional resources. Producers handle the logistics of actually getting the thing off the ground. They will (with outsourcing where necessary) generally get everything going. Hire the right people, set up the meetings. They're like the manager of the shoot. Their job is to make sure everything is ready to go for everyone ELSE to do their jobs. Kinda like how a music producer might get two or more musicians, some writers and a really great recording studio to all collaborate on a track... they produce it. They got everyone together. Directors are the person at the helm of the creative ship. They work within constraints set by the producer and the big money people, but they are there to make sure a cohesive vision and style get stuck to. Sometimes directors also produce and visa versa. Sometimes they exec-produce their own produce their own projects too. It's a pretty hazily defined job spec and literally can change on every project.",
"Are there any good documentaries that shows how tbis all works?",
"Normally when making a movie, the Studio has the money. They're paying for everything, own and/or rent the equipment. They lose the money or make the money. This is not to be confused with a distributor, who makes sure that the movie gets to places where people can see it. The Director is in charge of the \"artistic vision\" of the movie by determining what goes into the film. They pick the shots that the DP or cameraperson uses. They coax the right performance from the actors. They interpret the screenplay. They have the \"glamorous\" job. There are different types of directors who handle other responsibilities, but that isn't important now. The Producer, that's the fun job. And by fun, I mean aggravating, stressful, insane, frantic, and psychotic. The producer's job is to make sure that the Director can do their job with the least amount of stress possible while balancing the needs of the Studio. They are in charge of every aspect of the film, from location scouting to catering to hiring the staff and actors. A large movie will have multiple producers, and department heads that report to these producers. It's a similar breakdown for TV shows and other media, but in those fields, the Director is less important for artistic vision. That's where the Show Runner comes in. They're usually a Producer/Director hybrid who is in charge of the overall story, while a different Director is brought in for each episode. There is a lot of work that goes in to all of these jobs for a movie, but the Director has a harder job week to week than the Producers or Studio. Think of it like this: For a TV show like Doctor Who, the Producers put together a budget per show for the season, and a budget for the whole season. Some sets and locations are going to be used several times throughout the year to save time. The Producers and Show Runners put together the story arcs, and pick Directors for each episode, while they give the Studio the budget. The Studio gives the Producers the money, equipment, and access they need while the Production Staff gets to work making things work for the whole season. The Writers will write the episodes, about 1 per week, and the first few Directors will get started on the setup. They'll work with and fight with the Producers on what can and can't be done per episode, then the Director will spend a month working on their pre-production, and about a week shooting the episode. The next Director follows along a week later, and so on and so on, until the end of the season. After each episode is shot, it goes to Post-Production for editing, effects, and other stuff. I've done some limited work with all three of these spots, and my favorite of them was where the action was. It's a flippant answer, but I enjoyed the stress and panic of doing it all. I enjoyed having to crunch the numbers to see if we could afford to shoot in the abandoned bank, or if we'd need to rewrite the script to omit an overly expensive scene. I loved making the production schedule, breaking down everything into logical blocks. If we had a house for a day and needed to shoot five scenes at different times of the year, how do we do it? What differences in the characters and location need to be tracked? Do we REALLY need the Bentley for this shot, or will the Caddy work? For directing, I loved the fact that I was making people give me the reactions I want for the shot, and that anything goes. They're like puppets with pulses."
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5rsyrn | Why is it important to know the millionth decimal place of Pi? Aren't we accurate enough at some point? | Mathematics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If you know pi to 40 decimal places you can calculate the circumference of the visible universe to an accuracy of 1 atom. NASA would typically use around 15 digits unless they need to be extremely precise. URL_0",
"For practical purposes, you're never gonna encounter situation where you need accuracy beyond pi = 3.14. NASA got people to moon with that accuracy. However, mathematically, pi is not 3.14. It's irrational number with infinite number of digits in its decimal expression. So people kinda got curious, is there a piattern to it? Why those digits? For example, we could start from random position in pi's digits, and digits that follow it would be like random number generator... but would you get 1 and 9 with equal probability? We don't know. It sure looks like that, after billions of digits have been calculated, but no one knows for sure. There are surprisingly many things we don't know about pi, which is a bit annoying given how widely that number is used. Number crunching its decimals probably won't help, but it won't hurt either. Also, efficiently computing those digits is a math problem of its own",
"Wanting to know more about π than the first couple of decimals has nothing to do with accuracy. It's about understanding the relationships between different mathematical constructs (like numbers) and how they behave under different operations. And what we want to know isn't really the specific decimals, but more things like whether there is any kind of system or regularity in the decimals. For example, it is currently not known whether π is a [normal number]( URL_0 ).",
"It's not particularly important, and those digits aren't actually used for any calculations. It's just done to do it, like building the world's biggest ball of twine or whatever."
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5rt5vv | Could there have been a massacre in Bowling Green that was covered up for geopolitical reasons? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"no. We live a world security cameras, smart phone cameras and 24 hours news from CNN, Fox, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc. If there were a shooting there would be evidence of it on some platform. Also, if it did happen, do you think the news channels would give up the chance to get the viewers from such a massacre? Absolutely not. 'Iraqi refugees shoot Americans in Kentucky' is the kind of news that Fox and CNN would cover non-stop for days. No it's not possible to cover up.",
"OK so, the internet has made doing cover-ups for something like a massacre near impossible because all it takes is one photo or even tweet to start circulating. The reporter that brought up the \"non existent\" massacre is also friendly towards our current President. It was much more likely the whole thing was made up to build sympathy for new rules that the president put in place because the new rules have caused a lot of uproar.",
"Okay. Lets say people died. What about their families, friends, the police, the police dispatchers, bystanders, survivors. Theres a saying that that 3 people can keep a secret if two of them are dead."
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5rtfsy | How does the Sublimator cooling system work in a Liquid cooling Garment used in the Apollo missions | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If you want to change phase from liquid to gaseous you need to give the system some energy. 100*C water wont boil unless you give it some heat energy. The ice sublimator works in this way. Water, circulated by the body gets warmer and is put in a sublimator - hollow plates with little pores in them. Normally water in the sublimator is frozen. When warmer water gets into the plates - the ice melts and the outer surface of the metal plates gets covered in a thin layer of water that is getting frozen. Due to very low pressure in space, the ice changes phase to gas without going through liquid phase which draws energy from the plates, making them colder. That is why you sweat - water gets on the surface of your skin through tiny pores and then evaporates while cooling your body."
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5rtft6 | How do nutrients "survive" gastric acid and how are they spread in the body? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They don't survive really, that's mostly the point. When we eat things our stomach acid and other chemicals break it down into their constituent components. E.g. protein gets broken down into amino acids, carbohydrates (e.g. starch from pasta) gets broken down into simple sugars (e.g. glucose). These simple components of the more complicated chemicals that we eat are then taken up into the blood in the intestines. The intestines have a very intricate blood supply and allows all these products of digestion to be travel through the wall of the intestines and into the blood. Once into the blood, our body can 'build up' these simple compounds into the more complicated ones that we need. Things that do 'survive' the process of digestion are probably things that we don't want in our bodies anyway, and they end up in the toilet.",
"If you're asking about micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) and not the big stuff like protein, carbohydrates, and fat (they don't survive, they get fully broken down), then we need to talk about bio-availability. That means, there are organic processes that make minerals and vitamins able to be absorbed. Sometimes this happens because of stomach acids, but most often, this happens in the food you eat before you eat it. So - we rely on other living things to make some organic chemicals that our bodies can't. Let's talk about the different types of vitamins and minerals. Minerals are things like metals (like iron, copper, magnesium, zinc) and inorganic compounds (like calcium and sodium) that get absorbed by the small intestine, but they have to be processed first - either by the stomach or by the food. The acid in your stomach can react with some elemental metals and can make them water soluble (zinc chloride, magnesium chloride, calcium chloride), and they're absorbed from the small intestine into the blood. In general we don't eat raw elemental minerals though. Most of the inorganic compounds are already in a water-soluble form, like sodium chloride (table salt), or an organically processed form, like magnesium citrate (in fruit). Some metals (like elemental copper) don't react with stomach acids, so they can't be directly absorbed - you have to consume foods with copper pre-processed into an available kind, that is, contained within other macro-nutrients like a certain amino acid (protein). When you digest the protein, you get the copper along with it. Vitamins are organic chemicals. Sometimes the human body can make these (like Vitamin D), and sometimes the body can't make them (like Vitamin C) so we have to eat them. Some are soluble in fat (A, E, D, and K), and some are soluble in water. Eating food with fat or water with the vitamin dissolved in it means that when you digest the fat or water, your body absorbs the organic chemical (vitamin) as well. So in summary, vitamins and minerals are tiny amounts of metals, inorganic compounds, and organic chemicals that the body needs... but luckily for us, they're generally made bio-available by the foods we eat, before we eat them. Digesting the protein, water, and fat in fruits, vegetables, and animals makes the vitamins and minerals available for the stomach and small intestine to absorb."
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5rtgat | What does 'cdn' in a url mean? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. If a web site have a lot of images and videos they might go to a provider that have better infrastructure to deliver the content to the client. As they often have some dynamic elements and some static elements they need a separate domain so the clients know where to get the different content from. It is common to name these domains something with cdn, the name of the cdn provider or just static."
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5rtlci | How did people make maps before we could actually see what the shapes of countries etc. were? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"they would draw what they see, others would draw what they see and eventually combine them. if everyone in your state drew a map of their suburb and eventually you all meet, you could fit the each map together where 1 starts and 1 finishes and eventually you have a map of the whole state.People would exchange or copy maps eventually the maps grew bigger and bigger until the whole world was mapped."
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5rtnp9 | How do different resolutions work? | Like, say you have a 1920x1080 pixels monitor. You play a 1920x1080p youtube video. All is well. Now you want to set it to a lower resolution. The way I can think of to do that, is to take four pixels in a square and take the average colour and brightness of that pixel and make that the same for all four. Now you've devided the amount of pixels in each dimention by two, so you have 960x540, unless im making a mistake here. So ELI5 how do you get 720p resolutions and other ones, and how do they translate to physical pixels in your screen, a number that doesnt change. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Imagine a grid of ~2M cells, going 1920 across and 1080 down. Now, make a grid of ~1M cells, going 1280 across and 720 down. Then, stretch the second grid uniformly until it's the same size as the first grid. For whatever cells overlap, you take the average color.",
"The key term you're looking for is \"Bilinear Interpolation\". Your 1080p video is broken into the pixels for x1...x1920 and y1...y1080. Your screen is broken into pixels coordinates a1...a1280 (though maybe other values) and b1...b720 [In this picture]( URL_1 ), each pixel (a,b) is coloured the sum of: * The colour value of the red dot (x2,y1) * (Area of red rectangle/area of the pixel) * The colour value of the green dot (x1,y1) * (Area of green rectangle/area of the pixel) * The colour value of the blue dot (x2,y2) * (Area of blue rectangle/area of the pixel) * The colour value of the yello dot (x1,y2) * (Area of yellow rectangle/area of the pixel) This way, the result colour is proportional to the closeness of the neighbours. You can do this process when scaling up, (low resolution to high resolution) and get blurry approximations of what we hope is in between based on our limited data. You can also scale down if you include the averages of entire pixels encompassed in the square. It may be noted that older CRT monitors not operating in their Native Resolution would just [not draw certain lines every once in a while]( URL_0 ) as a form of scaling."
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5rttb1 | When you're asleep, what part of the brain filters the noises you hear, determining whether to wake up or not? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When we sleep, we are inhibiting loads of different parts of the brain, so a stronger stimulus is required to activate them. Think of it like this - when we are awake there is a copper wire between the auditory centre of the brain and the higher centres of our brain that process and understand this auditory information and then respond to it. Copper is a very conductive metal, so even a very small voltage will mean that electricity passes through this circuit. When we go to sleep, this copper wire is switched out with a lead wire. Now lead can still conduct electricity, but it is much less conductive than copper. This means that a much higher voltage is required to get any activity in the circuit. Standard, background sounds of the night are unlikely to provide a big enough voltage to get a current to run though the wire. A really loud sound, however, will provide enough voltage and will wake us up. Other sounds that have very strong associations in our memory, e.g. our ringtone, alarm tone or a doorbell, may also provide enough voltage in the circuit even if they're a bit quieter.",
"ELI13: The Thalamus is the brains stimulus filter. it decides what stimuli are important enough to be processed. The humming of electricity, the feeling of your underwear against your butt, and the smell of wet dog in your house are ignored. Your thalamus has determined that these things are not dangerous and you can ignore them. A siren passing in the distance, a bomb going off, or a bright flashing light will attract your attention because it is different and considered important. When you are asleep, your thalamus works the same way but on a more lenient system. Some stimuli might wake you up but if it isnt important enough you will fall back asleep without even remembering (a light turning on in the hallway or a dog barking). Others might keep you up for hours (a door slam, gun shot or the smell of smoke). It all depends on the type of stimulation and how important your thalamus decides it is for you to be awake.",
"You might be after the Reticular Formation nuclei within the brainstem. Wiki briefly explains their role during sleep, acting as a filter to external stimuli. Repeated and expected noise such as ambient traffic noise or the distant chatter of people at a library for instance, will not be a hindrance to sleep. Sudden unexpected noises will be passaged to the cerebrum for conscious attention. URL_0 This may be an interesting article, discussing the neurodegeneration of the ReticForm in Parkison's Disease and the effects on sleep: URL_1",
"The RAS (reticular activating system) which is actually a diffuse network. It responds to all the senses except for smell. One time I had a college student ask me if the RAS didnt respond to smell how someone would wake up when they were given ammonia to smell (a common way of trying to wake an unconscious person) - the answer is they arent waking due to the smell but because ammonia irritates the mucosa of the nasal passages. The RAS distinguishes between things important to good survival and things not. So if you move to a lake and there are ducks quacking all night, they may keep you up a few nights but soon you will learn to filter and tune them out and sleep right through the quacking. it is also why if you suddenly start dating someone who drives a specific car you will suddenly see that make of car EVERYWHERE. Because you are interested in breeding with them, passing on DNA and its important to survival - you will notice things related to your sexual partner. What is important to me is that we filter things related to success. I wrote a small self-published book of true stories designed to help condition a persons RAS to filter in things for success, and filter out things for failure. There are always opportunities to succeed or fail around us and some people notice the opportunities and some notice the opportunities to fail. The stories are designed to change the filter a person has to success.",
"at about 900 comments, i figure there's a halfway decent answer already. To supplement, it should be noted that even if you don't wake up, the quality of your sleep is thought to be affected if you're exposed to high intensity and irregular noises. Living near an airport, for instance, is thought to increase your risk of a cardiovascular disease even if you say that you don't mind it or enjoy it or whatever. URL_1 URL_0 URL_2 so while you might not literally wake up when you hear an airplane overhead, the evidence does seem to indicate that you do, \"wake up,\" in the sense that there is a physiological response.",
"There's a part of your brain called the reticular activating system. It is located in the midbrain. It filters out sensory information during sleep and if enough of a stimulus provokes it, it will send electrical and chemical signals via neurotransmitters to the higher functioning areas of your brain. Interestingly, damage to this area results in a coma and an inability to be aroused.",
"And follow-up question, how can I rip it out?",
"The way neural networks function is after repeated signals the pathway becomes less inhibited. So if you hear for example - \"your name\" - the neural pathways for that signal processing are well tuned. Extremely well tuned. Ever realize at a party it draws your attention like a magnet when someone says your name, even if you were not paying attention? That means you \"hear\" every word being said in every conversation, but only when its your name does the neural processing, after you heard it, make it seem much louder and more attention grabbing.",
"For me? None of them. I could sleep through an earthquake. When i was in college, i used to have to plug my iphone into speakers, set that air raid siren alarm tone, and put the speakers right next to me head in order to wake up. Half the time i didnt even wake up. No idea why im like this."
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5rtu8i | How does a gravity boost work? | I have heard that many missions which take satellites beyond earth have used a gravity boost from Jupiter to speed up. But how would that work? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When you get a gravity assist, you leave the planet/moon you're getting the gravity assist from at the same speed you approached it, but not in the same direction(your trajectory would be hyperbolic or parabolic). Think of Jupiter like a truck moving down the highway, flying your spacecraft behind it as it orbits around the sun is like bouncing a ball off the front of the truck as it approaches, flying your spacecraft in front of Jupiter is like bouncing your ball off the back of the truck as its moving away from you. Basically, if you leave Jupiter going more in the direction Jupiter is moving than when you approached it, it will transfer some of it's energy to you. If you leave Jupiter going in the opposite direction jupiter is moving, it will take some energy away from you. Edit: Here are a couple of examples from KSP. The first is an example of a gravity assist that sends the ship out into solar orbit, the second is an example of a free return trajectory, where the gravity assist sends you back home. URL_0",
"The speed you gain from the gravity of the planet as you approach is basically zero sum, that is, you will lose that extra speed when you try to escape the gravity of the planet, but what you do get to keep is the speed from the planet orbiting the sun... Try to imagine a planet orbiting the sun like a handle on the edge of spinning merry-go-round... a gravity assist is like grabbing hold of the handle and getting some of that orbital speed before letting go...",
"Great explanations by others, but keep in mind the manoeuvre can also be used to decelerate. Just depends whether you're passing in front of the body (relative to the direction of orbit) or behind. Go in front to slow down, go behind to speed up. I hope that makes more sense, you can't just fly by a planet and expect greater speeds."
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5rtwd3 | Why does hosting a server require changing firewall & router settings, but connecting to a server doesn't? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When you host a server you're allowing people to make requests to your computer and have access to your network, firewall and routers block some ports so malicious people can't access your network or connected devices, by hosting a server you must willingly give access that's why you have to change a lot of things. When connecting to a server you only will get incoming traffic based on the requests that you make, that's why it's considered safe and will (mostly) work right out of the box.",
"Computers are like people, and a firewall is like the front door. The point of the lock on a front door is that the people inside are allowed out, and are allowed to come back in. Random people on the outside, however, are not allowed in. When you connect to a server, you \"leave your own house\" and \"go into\" the server. There you get your precious cat videos and leave and go back to your own house. When you want to set up a server, you have to allow people from the internet into your own house in order to give them their cat videos. This means setting the lock on the front door to let them in (aka, setting the firewall rules). In general, firewall rules are set up to allow all connections from inside a computer to reach the outside, but only allow a few connections to come back in."
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5rtwjv | In his latest video, YouTuber Boogie2988 talked about getting surgery done because of his weight. But the doctor isn't willing to do it before he's down to 410 pounds. Why is it a problem performaing surgery on a 520 pound man? Why the limit at 410? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Anesthesia becomes more dangerous the more a person weighs both due to their physical weight as well as the problems associated with that weight: Airways are restricted due to the weight pressing down on the chest and neck. Airway management is particularly difficult. Extremely obese usually have hypertension and other heart issues. Insulin resistance changes the effectiveness of anesthetics. General anesthesia on a large person takes more anesthetic, but a morbidly obese person has smaller organs in proportion to their body since so much mass is made out of fat. 410 lbs. isn't a one-size-fits-all limit, but Boogie2988's doctor set this limit based on Boogie's current weight and health issues.",
"Surgery is more difficult and dangerous on fat people. This means that even if a surgery is going to be performed to help a fat person lose weight, they may need to lose weight to make the surgery viable to start with. Morbidly obese people are nearly twice as likely to die after surgery and experience a significantly higher rate of complications such as wound infection, heart attack, urinary tract infection, etc. The refusal of the surgeon to perform the surgery is almost certainly based on the calculated risk of problems and may even be tied to their malpractice insurance - \"No elective surgery on patients over 410 pounds\" might be the rule because statistically it is too dangerous and by extension costly.",
"I'm not sure if it's so much a limit, as much as it's: * Easier to do surgery on a thinner person. * If this is a lap band or gastric bypass, maybe the doctor wants some assurance the patient will do some work instead of expecting the surgery to fix everything.",
"Had gastric bypass when I was 18. I was 565~ lbs. The surgeon said the same thing, but I only had to lose 20 lbs. It was because of a few reasons. 1. To demonstrate I was serious about losing weight and knew how to eat correctly 2. Make anesthesia less dangerous, in general. (read up about anesthesia...it's not as... exact as you'd expect) 3. This was 10~ years ago but I believe the surgeon mentioned that even losing that little (relative) weight would shrink a few of my organs and make the operation a lot easier for him. 4. I think it's also just a personal decision by the surgeon. It really has to do with risk/reward. The bariatric surgeon who did mine performed almost exclusively bariatric surgery and they want to keep their wins/losses (so to speak) as high as possible. I sympathize with Boogie, though. It was a really jarring experience, but worth it if he can keep the weight off.",
"Yes to everyone who said that surgery is dangerous on morbidly obese patients, that is clearly a big risk factor in terms of anesthesia and in increased post-op complications. Another factor is mechanical safety during surgery. Properly positioning and maintaining safety during the positional changes during bariatric surgery plays a factor, we don't want you to shift or become injured because the operating table can't properly accommodate your body habitus. Additionally, while there is instrumentation specifically made for the morbidly obese population, there are limitations to how big/long those instruments are and the amount of torque they can withstand to perform surgery. Specific example, the biggest patient I had was a jaundiced 6+ foot, +600lb patient who was transferred to have his gallbladder removed. Obviously, due to being jaundiced, it had to come out and the facility he was at couldn't accommodate his size. Being a bariatric facility, we could. But, transferring and positioning safely took a lot of work before, during and after the surgery. Additionally, even though we used bariatric instruments, the amount of torque from his immense abdomen bent several of them and rendered them useless, they had to be disposed of after the case. There are a lot of factors that go into taking care of this population safely and surgeons (as well as anesthesia and nursing) have to be mindful not only of the patients mental status and commitment to weight loss but all of the other risks as well.",
"Just went through this in October. It is for the safety of the patient. Liver reduction is part of it. It makes a huge difference."
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5rtxgr | If the universe is already infinite.. how can it keep expanding? | Doesn't infinite mean forever? How can something go.. more forever? Lol. It's hard to ask this without sounding dumb. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The analogy used is a balloon being blown up. The \"universe\" is the surface of that balloon. If you cover the balloon in dots, then blow up the balloon, you see the space in between the dots expanding. This is what is happening to the universe. It's space itself that is expanding. The universe isn't expanding \"out\" into something beyond it's edge. There is no edge. It's the \"surface\" of the universe itself expanding. Basically the gap between us and the stuff out there in the universe is getting bigger. As for \"how can something infinitely large keep getting bigger\", well imagine this: Let's imagine every even number. We have an infinite number of numbers, but since we don't have all the odd numbers we don't have every number. If we start adding odd numbers to our collection, then our infinitely larger group of numbers is getting larger."
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5ru07g | What are those white stone looking things that come out of you mouth that smell horrible? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Tonsilloliths, sometimes called tonsillar concretions. A buildup of calcium, mucus, and bacteria.",
"Tonsil stones? Not everyone gets them. They are also called tonsilloliths. They are basically made out of bone material."
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5ru3n4 | For every nutrition/exercise tip there seems to be an exact opposite tip. Why is this and how can we tell what's true? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The mainstream 24/7 ad driven media needs a new headline to click on daily.....so today coffee is healthy and chocolate is bad.....wait till tomorrow and it will probably reverse. But whatever....they get the shock value and clicks. The whole \"eat in moderation, mostly real foods and move more\" just doesn't get the clicks. Solution? Stop reading health and fitness sites that rely on a new headline daily to pay their bills.",
"Because most exercise tips are bogus. For 99% of people, losing weight means eating less. It's not about exercise, it's about eating less. If you want to be stronger and have healthier cardiovascular system, then exercise. Falsely tying those two things together allows them to sell you products or services that won't work and allows them to claim that what you're doing now doesn't work and the thing they are selling does work. It's all bullshit. Of course exercising will help you lose some weight. However, it's very very small compared to the amount of benefit eating less will do for you. Run for an hour, you lose about 100 calories. Great! That's the same as like 1.5 Oreos. Just don't eat the Oreos in the first place. Before anyone goes off on me. There are huge benefits to exercising. I'm not trying to imply otherwise."
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5ru48t | How do astrophysicists know that the Big Bang happened 13.8 billion years ago? | I hear stuff about how the universe had an inflation period and the actual diameter of the observable universe is much larger. I've also heard that we are yet to see the light from the most distant stars because we do not have a powerful enough telescope yet. But in all the discussions people say the statement "the universe is 13.8 billion years old" like it requires no proof or backing. So my question is, how did we find out the true age of the universe? Was it a calculation, some observation or something else? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Observation and calculation. Astrophysicists noticed that space is expanding, and that the expansion is accelerating. They did a bunch of math and figured out how much it's accelerating and how different things would effect this acceleration. They did more math and were reasonably sure that it was correct. So they extrapolated backwards and found that, assuming they didn't make any huge mistakes with the calculations, all of space would've been a single point ~13.8 billion years ago, which then started expanding because of quantum stuff that is hard to ELI5."
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5rukfk | If I run an internet speed test and it tells me I have a download speed of ~60mb/s but when I actually download something, it's around 5mb/s | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I think you're confusing different units. Your download speed is almost definitely 60Mbps (MegaBITS per second). This translates to 7.5MBps (MegaBYTES per second). This makes for much less of a difference. In addition, whatever you're downloading from doesn't have infinite upload bandwidth, and likely caps the maximum download speed per user as to guarantee service to all their users.",
"The download speed given by the test is 60 Mega**bits** per second (60 Mbps). 1 byte = 8 bits. 60 Mega**bits** per second (60 Mbps) ≈ 7.5 Mega**bytes** per second (7.5 MBps). During a test the best server (closest to your place distance wise) is chosen, while the same is not necessarily true for actual downloads, which explains your download speed of \"around 5 Mbps\".",
"In any download there are two servers (computers) involved. The download speed depends on the distance between the two servers. Speedtest and other internet speed testing apps have servers across the globe and connect you to the closest servers. So you get to see a theoretical max of your internet speed. Depending on website you are downloading from and the server where they have the file for you to download determines your actual download speed.",
"You're being limited by the companies upload speed. You're downloading as fast as they're uploading, but they're not uploading as fast as you can download. For the test, the reverse is true. They're uploading faster than you can download. So you're showing your max speed, but not theirs."
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5ruopg | Why do people jump into water from high bridges to commit suicide, but when someone jumps from the highest springboard in a swimming pool, they dont take damage | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I think the speed you're traveling is much higher and your body can't move the water out of the way fast enough to absorb that energy. From a high dive, you're falling at less than Vmax, and as you enter the water your body displaces that water at a quick rate, but that's why you slow down. If you fall from too high, you are moving much faster, and the water doesn't move out of the way in time. That's why people say a high fall into water feels like concrete. Remember, you can't compress a liquid. It's like cars that crumple vs cars that don't. If a car was made of solid metal, if you hit a wall, everything in the car would keep moving at the same rate of before. Crumpling slows the car, and the passengers. When you jump off a bridge and hit the water that fast, the water can't move out of your way (crumple) and so you and your organs and bones absorb the energy.",
"Divers go vertical for maximum resistance and minimum impact. Suiciders go flat to absorb all the impact. Imagine a person belly flopping and a person diving both from 2 metres. Now increase the pain ratio each would suffer by 100 from 200 metres. Diver would get some pain but the other guy as intended dead.",
"Because the sorts of bridges people jump off of to kill themselves are *much* higher than a diving board. A swimming pool diving board is about 10 feet from the pool, with a good bounce, you might get 15 feet from the water. Competitive diving platforms top out at around 30 feet, which is what most people can safely jump from. Men's competitive high diving goes up to 90 feet, which is about what cliff jumping performers dive at. This would be unsafe for untrained people. The world record is a little under 200 feet. Experienced dives sometime die trying to set those kinds of records. It is not unusual for a large bridge to be over 200 feet from the water."
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5rur4k | Why cant we take good pictures of lunar landing sites from earth or from satellites? | We can "see" really far in space with terrestrial telescopes, and with technologies like the Hubble space telescope we can see even further but a few good pictures of landing sites would put to rest a few conspiracy theories. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"[You can]( URL_0 ). But of course if you don't believe that it happened, it's pretty easy to shut your brain off regarding proof. The best question I've found is - When the US went to the moon, we did so racing against the USSR for the \"first\". If there was ANY doubt that we didn't do it. If there was ANY proof that the US lied... why didn't the greatest opponent the US has ever faced **call us out on it**? They lost, they knew they lost and accepted it.",
"The things you can see from terra firma are very bright and VERY VERY big. There have however been pictures taken of the landing site from satellites in orbit around the moon: URL_0"
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5rurqd | The Obama administration created a rule that retirement advisors must act in the best interest of their client. Republicans claim this hurts the customer and they want to repeal it. How could this rule hurt the customer? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"That's how the \"Fiduciary Standard\" is billed but that's not what it does. Just to differentiate - the Obama \"Fiduciary Standard\" has nothing to do with what is known as the \"Fiduciary Rule\" - which the Fiduciary Standard is frequently confused for. If your money is in an IRA account (or any managed account), whoever is managing it has a fiduciary duty to you to act only in your best interest. This duty precedes the \"Fiduciary Standard\" in question and again has nothing to do with it. In fact the \"Fiduciary Standard\" hasn't even come into force yet. The \"Fiduciary Standard\" only affects IRA accounts. IRAs are a \"self\" managed retirement account. In essence they are little more than a normal investment account that gets preferential tax treatment in exchange for having some restrictions placed on how you can take the money out. Now I put \"self\" in quotations because most people just use a stock broker or other financial adviser to actually invest their money rather than picking their investments themselves. As a self managed investment portfolio, IRA brokers use a commission model where they make a commission on every investment that the IRA makes. But these commissions aren't the same across different investment types. The example cited by the Obama administration is that commissions on bonds are usually much lower than commissions on stocks. What the Fiduciary Standard does is to prevent IRA brokers from investing money into a security solely on the basis of the commission paid. That sounds great in principle, but in reality it creates a presumption that if an IRA broker invests money into anything other than the lowest commission security that they have done so in violation of the rule. An IRA broker can rebut that presumption, but nobody wants to take on the risk for doing so. The workaround that most companies have come up with for this is client disclosure and approval - every time your IRA broker wants to make an investment, they will have to send you something detailing the investment they want to make along with an explanation of the lowest commission alternative and then get your approval. This creates a tremendous amount of extra work for your IRA broker, and so most of the big IRA investment companies are switching small to mid sized clients onto generic, unmanaged flat fee based accounts. Since the rule was designed to help small to medium sized IRA clients obtain access to higher quality financial advice, moving those clients onto unmanaged accounts is counterproductive at best. The rule doesn't really impact large managed accounts where most brokers are going to be giving their clients a call every couple of weeks anyways, and it doesn't impact unmanaged accounts at all.",
"Lot of good debate in this thread, but I will add: Right wing politics likes to portray every single issue as something every single voter should take total responsibility for. Sounds great! Right? It's.. not. Are you a heart surgeon? Are you an accountant? Are you a veterinarian? Are you an auto mechanic? Are you chef? Odds are you can't answer yes to all of these. What you can do, is express your *intentions* and let *their expertise* -- that you are paying for -- guide your actions. That's why we take our cars to mechanics and we go to the doctor. They spend years learning something so that we don't have to. Now, what happens if your mechanic says you need to do X beacuse it costs 10,000 whereas Y would cost 1,000 and give you the same or better result. You'd be pretty pissed off. The mechanic has now acted *against* your best interests because it is *in their best interest* to do so. Why the regulation? Because you as a consumer may not be equipped to know the difference. Capitalism works great when the solution is what works best for everyone. However, often times it is better for the capitalist to work against their customer, and do so by lying, tricking, or concealing data to do so. Or, in the case of financial planners, by doing things obscure and hard to track so that they do better for themselves at the expense of their client. Regulations help this quandary, by providing guidance and legal remedy if you pay someone to do something and they work against you for their own benefit. Right wingers want to make you responsible, because you should know better or something. But how can anyone know everything about every job? You can't. It's not possible. A well regulated economy protects the consumer and allows honest business to thrive.",
"This particular rule it is not actively bad for customers. However, the theory is that too many rules will lead investment companies to be timid and inflexible, and *that* could ultimately be bad for customers. Frankly the argument is paper-thin. The *real* concern is that it will lead to excess lawsuits, and to the elimination of some crummy investment products that are hugely profitable."
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5ruugg | Why is it that teaching sex education that is potentially against someone's religion such a problem? | I understand that there are some religious beliefs that are, for example, against certain forms of contraception, but why is there such controversy over teaching kids about various sex education topics? Couldn't the parents tell their kids, "yes, these things do exist, but they are against our beliefs, and this is why..."? It seems likely they'll find out about those things one way or another, and wouldn't it be better if it came from a more structured, well-informed source? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"People are against sex ed because: * they don't feel that is the role of schools * they want moral (i.e., religious) lessons to be included * they feel teaching kids about sex will lead them to having sex * it often includes lessons about contraception, which they don't want * it often condones, or fails to condemn homosexuality I do not want to suggest these are good or compelling reasons, just commonly held ones.",
"Because religious people are opposed to their children being exposed to deviant ideas. If they understand that something exists in the world, they might be tempted to think critically and make their own decisions."
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5ruxwv | Why have some suns already gone supernova? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Stars are fueled by nuclear fusion - hydrogen forced together into helium, then helium forced into lithium, beryllium, and so on. As you may know from humanity's continued attempts to create fusion power plants, fusion gives off a ton of energy, but it *takes* a ton of energy to make it go. In a star, fusion is caused by the intense gravity of the star crushing down on the elements in the core, squeezing them together until they fuse (and also quantum tunneling, but that's another ELI5). If a star is more massive, the fusion at its core goes faster. More mass means more pressure forcing the atoms together, and more atoms to force together. Big stars burn much hotter than small stars, but they can't burn forever. Fusing light elements together gives you more energy *out* than it took going *in* to fuse them. But fusing heavier elements gives you less energy and takes more energy, [shown in this graph]( URL_0 ). The opposite is true of fission - bigger elements release more energy when they're split than smaller elements, and that makes a kind of intuitive sense. When you fuse elements, you're investing the energy into the atom that it took to fuse the two smaller elements. With bigger elements, it takes way more energy to fuse them, so you're investing more in than you get out with fusion. When you split them, you release that invested energy so you get more out of fission than fusion (with heavier elements; you get less energy from splitting lighter elements). The point where the two meet is iron. Up until iron, the star gets more energy out of fusion than went into fusing the atoms. That extra energy is what balances the star against the gravity crushing the elements down. The star is kind of self-limiting - if gravity overpowers the fusion energy, more atoms are crushed into the core and fuse, which creates more energy pushing out against gravity. If the fusion energy overpowers gravity, the atoms move away from each other and fewer fuse, so there's less energy to fight gravity. When the star reaches iron, that balance stops. Fusing iron *absorbs* energy instead of releasing more of it, so for every iron atom fused there's less energy pushing against gravity. More atoms are pulled downward into the core, crushing the core harder, so more iron fuses, so there's less energy, so gravity pulls more atoms into the core... There are still lighter elements fusing outside of the core, so it's not immediate, but once a star starts fusing iron, its life is almost over (\"almost\" being a relative term - the star will still live for thousands or millions of years). The iron fuses into heavier elements that absorb even *more* energy, so there's even less pushing against gravity, and that reaction accelerates faster and faster as heavier elements are created. Each stage of fusing heavier elements takes less time, from thousands of years for iron to hundreds, to a decade, a day, then a few hours, until the last stage of fusion, in which every single atom in the core of the star gets fused within *fractions of a second* and the mass outside of the core collapses at significant fractions of the speed of light, crashing into the super dense core of the star, creating one last massive explosion of fusion, fission, and the reflection of the mass bouncing off the core. That explosion is a supernova. As XKCD pointed out, if you replaced our Sun with a supernova, and also detonated a hydrogen bomb that was *literally touching your eyeball*, the supernova in place of the Sun would deliver more energy to your retina than the hydrogen bomb. Even though big stars have much more fuel to go through, they burn through it *much faster* than small stars and reach the stage when they fuse iron much sooner. Smaller stars may not have enough mass to fuse iron at all, and will never go supernova, they'll just stop fusing their mass and slowly cool off over trillions of years. Our Sun is one of those - it doesn't have enough to mass to go supernova, it'll just slow down until it stops. Some of the largest stars will only last for a few millions or hundreds of millions of years, but will burn incredibly brightly until they explode. The smallest stars will burn through their fuel slowly, and stay super dim, but last for billions, if not trillions of years. And some stars are just older. They formed from the very first dust clouds after the big bang and were big and exploded. Remember, matter doesn't *go* anywhere, so after those stars explode their matter is flung out into space where it can collect and form new stars. Some stars are big *and* old and had enough time to reach the end of their fusion and explode, and some are still forming from the remnants of the old stars that already exploded. EDIT: Some typos and clarifications. Also worth mentioning: some stars can go nova (not *super*) and explode a \"little bit\" (again, \"little bit\" being a relative term - it's still a big boom). If the mass of the star is high enough, when it goes supernova the remnants of the star are so dense, and there's so much energy in one place, that it collapses into a black hole. But not all stars go supernova, and not all supernovas end in black holes! Some end in neutron stars, which are very weird.",
"Additionally, some are much older. Our Sun is only a fraction of the age of the universe and many of the stars in it."
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5rvbtp | How does repealing Dodd-Frank help consumers | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It doesn't. Repealing Dodd-Frank will simply allow banks to overleverage their assets and deal in unregulated products once more, which will destabilise and crash the economy, *once more*. It will allow people with a great deal of financial and political power to manipulate the markets to their advantage, allowing them to loot more capital no matter the cost to others, *once more*. Which is what Steve Bannon and the GOP leadership have said they want, *in writing*.",
"What caused the mortgage crisis? At the most basis, systemic, simple, level it was the over-availability of credit to consumers. American financial institutions found a way to make a huge amount of capital available to people wishing to purchase homes. These regulations limit their ability to make these huge amounts of capital available. Now is this a good thing, or is it a bad thing? That depends entirely on what use the money would be put to. If its put to creative and useful purposes its a good thing. If it inflates prices, causes a bubble, etc. its a bad thing.",
"The argument for repeal is based on two basic pillars: 1.) The system put in place to monitor the banks and ensure they don't collapse again actually makes them more central to the system, making future bailouts more likely and risky behavior less troubling to the bank. 2.) The regulatory Powers under Dodds frank make it harder to give people loans and harder for finance companies and other companies to make money, as well as harder for people to get loans at certain credit levels, slowing economic growth. If course, your mileage may vary, but that's the gist of the claim",
"It doesn't. The average consumer won't benefit from this, but big banks and businesses will. (The idea is that deregulation will allow banks to lend more to businesses, who will then invest in new jobs and technologies, improving the economy overall for everyone. It never works out like that in real life though.)"
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5rvhp3 | Why do attempted murders get lesser sentences than successful murderers? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"To keep more of the victims alive. Let's say we get into an argument, and I hit you in the head with a baseball bat, knocking you unconscious. That is attempted murder. If the penalty for murder and attempted murder are the same, it is probably in my best interest to make sure you are dead...after all, you are going to be a pretty good witness to the crime if you live. But if the penalty is less, and I feel some remorse for my action, I might be more likely to let you live. It is the same reason that other serious crimes, like rape and kidnapping, also tend to have lighter sentences. When the victim is the best and often only witness, it is good to leave a legal incentive to keep them alive.",
"They feel sorry for you because you're a failure a murder just like you fail at everything else."
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5rvjep | How come when the batteries in a remote control die, if you switch those two batteries around, the remote starts to work again? | So, say that you have two AA batteries in the remote and they're completely dead and the remote won't work at all. Then you take the back off and use those same batteries but just switch which one was + and which one was - the remote will start to work again. Why is this? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because sometimes it's not that the batteries are completely dead, it's that dirt and corrosion have made the electrical contacts stop being as conductive as they should be. When you move the batteries, it removes the dirt and oxidation, exposing conductive metal."
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5rvtv6 | Why are computer CPUs so small? Wouldn't it be beneficial to make them bigger? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Electricity takes time to travel through wires. If you want to make a signal go to a bunch of different points quickly then you need to put those points closer together. This is what CPU designers are doing; by making their components smaller they are able to cram more points into a given area and achieve more without slowing down the process with more distance.",
"When you say CPUs are small do you mean the feature size or the size of the overall package? Neither CPU dies nor overall package size have changed size dramatically in recent years though the size of the individual features on the CPU have decreased rapidly as described by Moore's law. Shrinking feature size has a few benefits. You can fit more of them in a given area which usually means an increase in computing \"power.\" Also smaller features require less actual power to run them so the power consumption goes down with feature size. The reason we don't just make the die larger instead of making features smaller is because at the rate that modern CPUs run the speed of light becomes a very significant limiting factor. Light in a vacuum takes about 33 picoseconds to travel 1 cm (roughly the size of a CPU die). This is the absolute top speed that information can be transmitted. It doesn't sound like a lot but when you are doing billions of operations per second those picoseconds REALLY start to add up. If you have two circuits on opposites sides of the CPU that need to communicate then making them farther apart will actually slow the communication down.",
"Assuming you're talking about the actual, physical size of a CPU whilst holding it in your hand, yes you *could* create a physically larger one to create a shit-ton more computing power into a single wafer. BUT: 1) There's not much purpose for something like that in an average consumer market. What would the average person **do** with it? 2) The price would increase dramatically as the size and power of the CPU increased, so it would *quickly* become prohibitively expensive for the average consumer. Not to mention, creating a physically larger CPU absolutely necessitates creating a physically larger mother board and case to put it into. There's even more expense for the consumer, placing this super computer *well* out of reach for the average consumer. 3) As the size and computing power increase, so do its power requirements. The average processor takes between 90 and 120 watts to function, and the average power supply on a store-bought computer puts out between 250-500 watts, depending on the system and what it's built for. You'd need a *massive* power supply unit just to run your processor. 4) Processors generate a *tremendous* amount of heat, which must be dealt with. The standard average processor, with a default heat-sink and case fan, will reach an average of 35-45 degrees celcius just sitting there. That heat gets pulled away from the processor and dissipated into your room. Ever leave your computer on overnight with the office door shut, and come back the next day and think \"Man, it's warm in here\"? Now imagine if your processor were four or five times its current size. You could heat your whole house (and probably fry a few of your PC's other components). All things considered, the pros of building a larger CPU simply don't outweigh the cons."
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5rvugf | How do Theremins work? | I believe they're related to voltage in some way, but I'm confused about how music can be played without touching the instrument. | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Via capacitance, the antenna forms a capacitor with your hand, the air between the two acts as the dielectric in a capacitor and your body acts as the \"grounded\" side of the capacitor. The machine can basically sense small changes in this capacitance to generate the sounds."
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5rvvx2 | How do they separate plasma from blood cells for things such as plasma transfusions? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Witha centrifuge. A tube of blood will be mounted an spun at a high rpm. This will eventually separate the two. This is used to separate various chemicals and liquids from each other. Not just blood. There will be a better explanation from someone better shortly.",
"When you have dirty water, you can let it sit and the dirt will sink down to the bottom of the water container. Now think of how you get flung to the outside edges of a merry go round as it spins. The dirt in dirty water feels the same force to the outside when it is spun around. Therefore, you can speed up the dirt falling with spinning Blood placed in a centrifuge deals with the same forces. Blood tubes are placed inside a centrifuge at an angle around the edges. Therefore, the rubber tube tops are angled up, to the inside and the tube bottoms are angles down and to the outside. When the centrifuge is run, the tubes are spun, as if on a merry go round. Blood cells are flung to the bottom of the tube. Edit: oh, I didn't provide the best explanation. I very quickly read your post and just explained your everyday centrifuge, not for collecting significant volumes of plasma.",
"Besides the methods mentioned below, there's also machines, like the [\"auto-c\"]( URL_0 ) you find commonly in use that remove just the plasma from a donation in real time. These work exactly as /u/Buster_Nutt explains, but without the tube. A centrifuge is an age-old simple solution that works. In the system I mentioned above, the filter was of a certain micron (measurement) level that split the plasma away. For a simple visual of this, look at your clothes washer basket. It has holes in it to drain the water, but keeps your clothes still there. Except for the odd sock, of course... Anyway... An upshot of this method is you regenerate plasma VERY fast. Because most of your red/white blood cells and platelets are returned, you can donate twice a week, dozens of times a year. A plasma donation also is one of the very few where you can legally pay people to do, thus its popularity on college campuses. Besides this method, if you provide a whole blood sample, it will be seperated into its component parts the same way - a series of filters and centrifuges. Each part of blood is special and used in its own way - red blood cells you know about, but white blood cells are used in immunitherapy, plasma is used for more things than you can possibly imagine including makeup, and platelets (often called \"liquid gold\" because of both their value and appearance) are what make you clot and are invaluable for treating Hemophilia. Source: used to work in the industry"
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5rw7jp | What happens to homeless people if they die on the streets? | Do governments have policies or a way to deal with these kinds of situations? Or maybe it depends on the city/country? Given the amount of snow and cold weather that I've been having recently, this popped into mind. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In the UK, local councils are required to arrange a funeral for anyone who dies/is found dead within their area if no-one else can. So if a homeless person dies, they will usually get a 'pauper's funeral' which is a very simple cremation service.",
"> Do governments have policies or a way to deal with these kinds of situations? The police will send a government coroner out to collect the body. Once it is determined the person has no assets or next of kin to dispose of the body, they will be disposed of in the least expensive way the government has established. Usually this involves cremation of the body."
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5rw7yt | How do electronic pH sensors work? | This is pretty much what I wonder about every kind of sensor - electronic scales, cameras, etc. - but the one I especially don't get is an electronic pH probe. What exactly is it that "senses" the H+ ions present in a solution, differentiates from any other kind of dissolved cation, and translates the intensity of the "H+ signal", whatever that is, into an electric signal picked up by a computer of some sort? And how does it detect the total volume of the solution that the pH probe is submerged in, in order to calculate the H+ concentration that is prerequisite to calculate the pH? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"An electric pH meter is essentially just a voltmeter. An acid solution is essentially half of a battery, so the pH meter brings the rest of the battery along and measures the potential difference between the two leads on the probe. Once you've determined the voltage of your \"battery\" the Nernst equation gives you the relationship between voltage and hydrogen ion concentration. Volume is irrelevant to figuring the pH out in this way because volume does not affect voltage of a battery, just the life of the battery."
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5rw99f | How does seeding for a download decrease my download time? | When the original piratebay was still up a couple of years ago, I remember some downloads for whole seasons of tv shows only taking around 30 min because of the ridiculous high amount of seeders. When someone seeds, what is it actually doing? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A \"seed\" is an uploaded that has the entire file to provide. A leecher is a downloaded who has less than the entire file to provide. If there are more seeders it ensures that whatever piece you are looking for someone can provide it.",
"Most computers can download (receive) information much faster than they can upload (transmit) it. While your computer may be able to download 5 megabytes/second, it can probably only upload, say, 500 kilobytes/second. That means it takes 10 seeders (with the same internet speed as you) to fully utilize your download bandwidth. As well, if multiple people are downloading at once, that seeder upload is split further; if 10 people are downloading, you now need 100 seeders to fill their bandwidth. This is of course all a gross oversimplification, but welcome to ELI5."
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5rwakz | Why are those erasers tops you can put on top of your pencil shaped with a wedge? | [These things are fucking useless]( URL_0 ) | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They are designed for erasing small spots, not whole pages. The shape allows more precise control."
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5rwi6d | What's a trade war? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"One country can do something to reduce the sales from another country. This has been done repeatedly in different ways. When the other country feels they have the leverage they will react with decisions which will also affect trade between the two countries. One country raises the tariff on something from country B. Country B does things to affect trade with country A. If chosen well this can result in more damage to the economy of county A than country B. The desired result for country B is for country A to rescind the tariff."
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5rwxm6 | The Circle of Fifths in music theory | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's a geometric relationship among the 12 tones of the chromatic scale, their corresponding key signatures, and the associated major and minor keys. To start, a fifth above C is G, a fifth above G is D, and so on. C major scale has no sharps, G major scale has one sharp, D major scale has two sharps, and so on. The sharps build on each other - i.e. they're the same set with each scale adding one more to it. Once you work around to F#/Gb, the pattern reverses and the sharps become flats. Each major key has an associated minor key that has the exact same notes, just a different root note. I took a music theory course in high school and this was the foundation of the material. Easy to memorize once your recognize the pattern. Once you know this, playing and understanding music and chord progression becomes much easier. URL_0"
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5rwyml | Do governments have plans set in the event of a contact with extra-terrestrial beings? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Yes, it is called a post-detection policy (PDP) United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) and the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) have them. [Here]( URL_0 ) Private companies like the IAU, have their [official protocol] ( URL_1 ) for an ET signal.(You tell IAU. IAU contacts the world leaders(UN Secretary General). At that point they have a meeting to decide what to do next.) The UN controls this, that's why no PDPs have been formally and openly adopted by any governmental entity. Christopher Mellon (Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence) said once that the government had \"little if any idea\" of what we'd be up against and \"whatever it is would be so far beyond us it would look and appear magical or spiritual, totally beyond our ability to cope with or resist if hostile. If such an event occurred we'd simply have to muddle through as best we could.\"",
"They probably do. Major parts of the plans would deal with how to control the reaction of the population to the news. I don't think populations will react the way the media seems to think (everyone panicking / rioting / looting / etc.), but population control plans have to be in place nonetheless. Otherwise, how to deal with the extra-terrestrials themselves, it depends on what they want. Most of the stuff won't be pleasant to think about or plan for, because the level of technology that allows ET's to reach Earth would put them beyond any type of control that we could exert, and humans in general don't like being powerless like that and are likely to over-react. The answer to your question is VERY similar, in my opinion, to the answer to this question: Do governments have plans set in the event of a sudden invasion (or population movement) from a foreign nation? To go off on a tangent a bit, one of the things I didn't like in the movie Independence Day was this: replace the alien ships with futuristic planes or helicopters identifiable as from a foreign nation suddenly hovering over the major cites, and none of the waiting and decisions in that movie make sense anymore."
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5rx28p | Because symptoms like fever are due to the body fighting infection, can symptom-based treatments actually inhibit recovery? | Fighting a cold with lots of water, green tea, alka-seltzer, and emergen-C. I'm wondering if maybe getting rid of symptoms isn't exactly beneficial. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I have always followed the advice given here... don't try to lower the fever unless it gets really high. It is killing off the germs. URL_0 In the case of throat infections/colds, I also gargle warm-hot water with lots of salt several times a day, which raises the temperature even more and slays even more germs! (Don't swallow the salt of course). Vitamin C won't do any good either so you can skip the emergen-C. The source for this can be found all over google."
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5rx32x | Why crying for happy situations feels so significantly different than crying for sad reasons | About a month or so ago, I had a happy memory and starting bawling (I can elaborate if needed). Last night, I cried for a sad reason (long story. Can elaborate if needed), and the first thing I noticed was how different the two felt. I'm not fully sure how to describe the differences, just that there was a noticeable one. What might cause these two situations to feel so different, even though the same action is happening? The happy memory cry felt exactly like a cry for a sad scene in a series, which is another reason I'm confused. Is it a case-by-case thing? And what actually changes? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Not an expert but I gave it my best effort. Good question! Crying is triggered by a tiny section of your brain called the amygdala. It can't tell the difference between good and bad experiences, it only responds to how strong a feeling is. The amygdala will trigger crying whenever you feel overwhelmed although it's not entirely understood why. When you are over-stressed or overjoyed the amygdala will often respond with tears. The reason for the big difference in how you feel is based on the rest of your brain processing the cause of the crying. The left prefrontal cortex of your brain is more active when you feel happiness, and enough happiness can overwhelm the amygdala and cause crying. On the reverse, the right prefrontal cortex is more active when you feel sad and the amygdala gets triggered if the experience is strong enough. So you feel the emotional experience in that frontal section (called the neo cortex) and if it's stressful you feel bad and if it's good you feel better. So the signal for crying only checks just how strong the emotions are, not what kind of emotions are present. The role of crying in response to strong emotions is not fully understood but since we feel relief after a good cry it's thought that it helps the brain process the feeling of being overwhelmed and out of control in a world that's so much bigger than us. The brain is really neat and was called \"A machine that a ghost can operate\" by Noble Prize winning neurophysiologist Sir John Eccles. To me this is just the biological explanation of a spiritual experience."
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5rx6og | Why do problems and stresses that don't seem like a big deal during the day suddenly seem life threatening and world ending when you wake up at 2:30 AM? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I'm not sure what 'stresses' you are taking about, but I'm going to take a guess at what you mean and work from there. You are at your most vulnerable when you are asleep. You are effectively unconscious and many of your senses are non-responsive or at least sort of 'muted' as it were. This means that when you wake up at 2:30 in the morning because you heard a bump downstairs, or a loud howl of wind, your mind goes into overdrive because the 'threat' could be quite a lot closer due to your unconscious state. You need to be ready for a fight just in case. Your brain isn't perfect and it can sometimes relay that fear to other, non threatening but still stressful situations.",
"I think it's a peak in your stress hormones. One approach to dealing with it is, when it happens, write down the things you are worried about and what step or steps you will take to deal with them the next day. Then during the day, take these steps. Repeat as needed."
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5rxaz4 | Why in some sports such as football here in the UK, does the manager of the team get disciplined, fired and or lambasted in the media when the players don't perform as well as expected and win games/matches? | Surely that's like firing the CEO of McDonalds because a server forgot you order. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I'm assuming by you saying \"manager\" you're talking about the GM of the team that trades players etc. Mostly because their job is to assemble a winning team, and if they aren't winning, they aren't doing their job. If other people don't do there jobs properly, they get disciplined and the such. Same goes for sports.",
"If I owned a business where there were 5000 employees, and I was unhappy with how things were going, I would complain to the President of the company. He would complain to his general managers, they would complain to managers, who would then complain to the individual teams. If you want your sports team to do better, you complain to the guy who can make the changes, not to the players. To use your McDonalds analogy... If an individual team member pisses me off when I go to get my coffee tomorrow morning, I am going to say something to the manager.",
"It's more like firing the CEO of McDonalds because *the whole company* failed to sell enough food last month. And that does happen. It's called *being responsible for* the success of the group you run."
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5rxlx5 | How do airlines overbook flights if there is a set number of seats? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Airlines really hate taking off with empty seats - that's basically money that they *could* have earned, but didn't. So if there are last-minute cancellations, there's a really good chance of empty seats, which they hate. So they instead book more seats than there actually are. If a plane seats 100 and they sell 110 seats, obviously they can't fit 110 people in the plane, but the airline is banking on 10 people cancelling - if that happens, they just filled 100 seats, sent out a full plane, and probably made some extra cash on cancellation fees. I should point out that I made up these numbers, and the actual numbers that airlines use are based on years of data on cancellations and bookings. Sometimes, of course, not enough people cancel and the flight is still overbooked when people want to board it. Obviously, that's a downside, and some people are going to get ticked off at the airline. They're banking on earning enough money by filling seats to make up for the bad favor - and on top of that, if you get bumped from your flight, you usually get a free ticket on the next flight, a nice meal, maybe another perk or two, so they do usually try to make up for their mistake.",
"Former airline employee here. Basically as others have alluded, on virtually every flight there's always a few people who don't turn up. 'No shows' as they're known. Either because they changed their plans, or just got stuck in traffic and missed the flight. Tickets are almost never refundable, so people who change their plans rarely if ever bother to cancel the ticket, so the airline doesn't know they're not coming. Selling a few seats twice maximizes the chances of the plane being full (and thus making the flight profitable), at the risk of very occasionally having to bump a passenger or two to a later flight. As to how do they do it, they just set up more tickets for sale then there are seats on the plane. It would be extremely unlikely that every passenger would have reserved every seat at the time of booking (since that's usually an extra charge) and there's probably restriction in place to stop that happeninganyway. Most airlines either don't allocate seats at all, or allocate them at check in",
"A lot of people book a flight and then cancel at the last minute, or just don't show up. That empty seat can effectively be sold twice, so that's what the airlines do. Sometimes they guess wrong about how many. I've never canceled or skipped a flight though - who are all these savages??",
"Pretend an airplane has 500 seats. Of those 500 seats, how many passengers will cancel their tickets because of a change of plans? Miss their flight because a connecting flight had an issue? Maybe make a last minute change, etc. So a flight might take off with less than 500 seats filled. If they sell 510 tickets, they know on average only 490 of the seats will be filled, so the 10 over sold tickets can take those empty seats. Of course that's on average, sometimes 510 people show up at the terminal expecting a seat.",
"I travel probably 50 times a year for work. I book 2 return flights often when I am unsure what time I will get out. I then cancel once things become more clear. Business travel I would say drives this more than anything."
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5ry07m | How does an Oreo package reseal itself without being sticky? | Edit: I can't believe how many up votes this got! I was just a bit stoned on my couch eating these fuckers. Next thing you know I'm tits deep in answers and up votes. Thank you!! | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In medical devices they coat the surface being stuck to in low adhesion material like a thin silicone. This allows for some stick without allowing for a complete adhesion. Like the Post-it note, they use a powerful adhesive but coat it very thin. The thinner the adhesive layer the less it will tend to \"gum off\" and leave residual. Thin coats of powerful adhesive plus low adhesion coating on the surface being such to.",
"It's often used as a example of excellent flexible packaging. It uses a cohesive layer (sticks to itself, but nothing else) that is laminated between two layers of film. These layers of film are laser scored slightly offset to each other to create the lip that once exposed by opening the package, giving you a resealable cohesive bond. Long story short, once broken open there is a sticky part, but it's just sticky enough to stick to itself.",
"From what I understand, my neighbor is the designer (or part of the design team) for those Oreo packages. They come from the packaging company Sonoco, which is headquartered in my hometown. I could ask him for a more detailed explanation, if you would like.",
"Follow-up question, how do you easily access the Oreos on the sides? Asking for a friend.",
"what? you don't eat them all at once? When I buy oreo's, like once a year, I buy 2 litres of milk and finish them."
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5ry1nd | How come after you recover from a sickness such as the flu or a stomach virus, for a few days your stomach is wonky and doesn't seem to work properly? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Your body's natural response is to basically flush everything out. You might not know this but your body, when healthy, supports a functioning ecosystem of bacteria in your gut that aid in digestion. Your body basically says \"I'm not right, kick them all out\". Sort of like a party where a few bad actors get kicked out and the entire thing gets shut down. Hopefully, the stuff that you want in there is still hanging around, and now they need to start rebuilding. In the meantime....you aren't shitting right, lots of weird sounds, shit has been upended. It's just your body coming back to equilibrium. There are bacteria living in you that have evolved to live in the environment that your gut produced for millennia. Thankfully, they're right at home, and they're ready to come back as soon as things settle down."
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5ry2oa | "Can you hear me?" Scam | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Basically there are two parts: A) When robocalling people it is hard to tell which numbers are active and which are not. If you coax someone into saying something you can tell that there is a person on the line, and that the number is good. B) They ask a question \"can you hear me\" to record you saying \"yes\". Then they can record your voice, and use your voice to sign you up for things. Or perhaps they take you to court and edit your voice into another line of dialog, where it makes it seem like you said \"yes\" to giving them your life savings or something.",
"Exactly what can I sign up for by saying yes? How would that even work? I've never heard of any company doing that."
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5ry4vu | Why do Australia's and NZ's climate differ so greatly? | I've always found it weird that I can fly for an hour and come into a place that gets snow on the ground while it barely gets below 10 in Sydney. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"NZ is more southern than perhaps you realise, hey bro. Auckland at 36 latitude is slightly more north than Melbourne at 37. While Hobart at 42 latitude is more north than Christchurch at 43. & its a very dissimilar landmass, NZ having dozens of mountains taller than Australia's highest peak Mt Kosciusko"
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5ry7b3 | What about closing my eyes harder makes them that much more protected from a poke? | Posted in AskReddit, but belongs here. So, my eyelid doesn't protect me much. Does my eye go back into my head a little? How am I being protected from my son's little fingers when he's trying to poke my eyes out? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When you just barely close your eye, the only thing covering your eyeball is your eyelid (which contains a minimal amount of fat/muscle/ blood/etc). The eyelid is quite thin, and can't really protect from any blunt force. Now, you can close your eyes due to the orbicularis oculi muscles which are facial muscles that surround the eye socket. When these muscles contract, your eye closes. When you squeeze your eyes shut, you are making use of a few different facial muscles and essentially covering over your eyeball with the orbicularis oculi muscle. [Here is a diagram that should help picture the muscle more clearly]( URL_0 ). I hope this helps, and if you want a more detailed or in depth explanation let me know! Tl;dr barely close eye = only eyelid covering eyeball. Squeeze eyes shut = extra muscle tensing up and covering eyeball"
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5rybna | What did OJ Simpson do and why were there no other suspects in the case? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If you're referring to what landed him in prison last, he was found guilty of kidnapping and robbery. He claimed a memorabilia dealer was selling a collection of items OJ believed to be stolen, so he devised a plan to steal them back essentially. He had his friend who was also a memorabilia dealer set up a meet with the person in possession of OJs stuff and a \"client\" who was interested in buying the items. That client was OJ. They set a meet in a hotel room, OJ shows up with his friends and enter the room and declare nobody can leave. One of his friends brandished a gun during the altercation, OJ may or may not have told him to, depending on if you believe OJ or the victims. They then took all of OJs stuff and some additional autographed memorabilia and left. I read somewhere he was offered a plea deal but declined it and denied it ever was offered, so he got sentenced to 33 years. I think he's up for parole soon though. There was a lot of speculation that the whole thing was a ruse to fuck OJ over given that his buddy who supposedly was trying to help him had planted a recording device which I think was later used against him, proving he was there and stole the shit back.",
"He almost certainly killed his wife and a male friend of hers. The courts failed to convict him in was it now considered to be a huge miscarriage of justice. There were no other suspects because it was obvious he did it. He only prevailed because million dollar attorneys were able to tie an incompetent prosecution and judge in knots."
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5ryc7q | How would the new H 1B visa rules of US affect the Indians and asians working there? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's not clear yet, because the new rules haven't been passed. We don't know if they will apply to current visa holders or not. However, H1-B visas are not permanent - they must be renewed. So if the rules only apply to brand new visas, current visa holders won't be affected. If they apply to renewed visas as well, it could be a huge problem for the people currently residing in the US. One change currently being discussed is a decrease in the total number of visas issued each year. If that happens, a company that was allotted 10 H1-Bs may only be able to renew 5 (as an example). This means 5 people would have to go back to their original country. Another possible change is an increase in the minimum wage for the jobs eligible for H1-B visas. Right now, the job must pay $60,000 a year to be eligible for the visa (they're supposed to be used for high-skill jobs when a company can't find any Americans who are capable). If that increases to $130,000 then a company may not be able to afford to pay the employee that new minimum, or they may be able to find an American who will do the job for less than that. That visa holder would likely be sent back in that case as well. The technology companies (who employ many H1-B holders) are going to lobby heavily against this change, so it's unlikely that the changes will be as extreme as the current discussion makes it seem."
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5ryej9 | What makes Bobby Fischer better than other chess prodigies? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A lot of it was he grew up in a place that had almost no support for top chess players. At the time America was a chess wasteland. The best analogy I heard was imagine an Eskimo created a tennis court in Alaska, trained by himself and then won Wimbledon.",
"^^Yes, that, but also, he had a creativity to him that was just remarkable. While he wasn't the best chess player, he could create, on the fly, strategic lines the world had never seen and didn't know how to deal with. Whit Bobby, a move made early on, that most at the time would consider a mistake, would end up staying out until it was the only thing left on the board and ultimately the thing that wins the game. Also, he was a phenom with his bishops.",
"In part because he beat the Soviets. The USSR at the time was a chess factory. It has a state sponsored system to find and cultivate young chess talent. Fischer, on the other hand, had an impoverished and often unstable childhood, and learn chess on his own. Despite all the \"youngest evers\" he accumulated, he didn't become involved in organized chess until he was 11. To go from that to US Champion at 14 is a truly remarkable feat. And while there have been a number of chess prodigies, few have equaled Fischer's accomplishments. He had the highest Elo rating in history for over 20 years, and many argue that without ratings inflation it still would be. He still holds the record for the highest perfromance rating ever. Finally, one could argue his march to the World Championship in 1972 was the most dominant performance in chess ever. That makes him more than your run of the mill prodigy.",
"> \"In 1972, he captured the World Chess Championship from Boris Spassky of the USSR in a match held in Reykjavík, Iceland, publicized as a Cold War confrontation, which attracted more worldwide interest than any chess championship before or since.\" [Wikipedia]( URL_0 ) I'd wager that probably has a lot to do with it."
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5rygf9 | Why does time seem to move so slow when you're high on weed? | For example, when you're high and microwaving, 2 minutes usually feels like 3 years. Why's that? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The short answer is that we don't know. The long answer is that reports of time moving slow on cannabis go back to the 1800s. It's been confirmed in animals and humans, but researchers haven't figured out what exactly causes that effect. More info here: [Cannabis and time perception]( URL_0 )."
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5rygqm | Why are juices made from concentrate? | What is the point of removing the water and then adding it back in later? Why not just sell the juice they had from the start without the unnecessary step and worse tasting product? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's more efficient to transport concentrate. Water is everywhere, so there's no need to ship around the water that's present in unconcentrated form."
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5ryqio | Is there anything in the Constitution that prevents the 3 branches of government, if a party has majority of all 3, from following partisan politics and bypassing all checks and balances? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The Judicial branch is not elected. It is non-party affiliated. That is the primary check against what you are describing.",
"There are some constitutional law theories that may allow it, but they haven't succeeded in practice. They stem from the fact that while the federal government has 3 branches, that's only half of the picture. The individual states have rights as well (although they can really only challenge the federal government if they act together). The first is called [nullification]( URL_1 ). This is a legal theory that each state has the right to nullify any federal law that the state believes is unconstitutional. This isn't explicitly laid out in the constitution, and has been rejected by both state and federal courts every time it's been tried. A similar option is called [interposition]( URL_0 ). This involves multiple states acting together to prevent the ability of the federal government to enforce laws considered unconstitutional. This would buy the states time to go through the process of challenging laws. It would also wait out the clock until the next election which could correct the issues (the members of the House of Representatives have two year term limits). Then there's an option that's never been used and is rarely discussed in Article V of the Constitution. Article V discusses how amendments to the constitution are proposed, and so far they have all used the first option - a two-thirds vote by both the House of Representative and the Senate (then ratification by the states). But there's a second option, often called an [Article V Convention]( URL_2 ) - If two-thirds of the state legislatures apply for a convention to propose amendments, the states could decide to directly change the Constitution *without any say from federal government*. The state governments would be able to restructure the government at will, as long as three-quarters of the states agreed on new amendments proposed. Changing the Constitution directly isn't something to do lightly, of course. An Article V Convention is really just a last resort in case the three branches of government unite to do something extreme, like amending the constitution themselves to make the president a dictator for life. But it's a good reminder that the federal government is only given power by the states, who are given power by the people of the states, which is noted in the very first line of the Constitution. The power comes from \"We, the people of the United States\" - nowhere else.",
"I think you misunderstand the meaning of \"checks and balances\". Checks and balances is a philosophy that states that each branch should have the power to regulate the actions of each other branch. It does *not* give power to the parties in any way. The entire purpose of the structure of the government was to prevent a single organization from supplanting the power of the others, meaning that governmental power could be as decentralized as possible. If a party wins control of the majority in the House, Senate, and Presidency (yes, I know that's not the three branches of government, but it's the real focus of this discussion, so bear with me), then it is entirely within their rights to push their agenda. The government was built precisely to allow for this type of change. The support of a wide variety of people in disparate states was necessary to pull off the current Republican domination of the government, and the Constitution was written specifically to allow the people to enforce the desired change by electing representatives that support their wishes. As much as it may upset you, there is nothing unconstitutional about the current situation in government. In fact, the Democrats were in much the same position in 2008. The constitution was written precisely so that this type of radical shift in policy could be implemented by the voters if they felt that the government acting in accordance with their wishes.",
"When the Constitution was written, they didn't necessarily expect there to be parties. (Notice how they aren't mentioned in the Constitution.) There is one theory, based on the Tenth Amendment, that the states (and the people) have the power/duty to disobey laws and other actions of the federal government that are obviously against the Constitution.",
"Nope. That said, it's kind of intentional. If they're popular enough to get all 3 branches of government, the thinking goes, people must want them there for a reason. You don't even need all 3! All it takes is ~2/3 of Congress(or 2/3 to propose, 3/4 to pass state legislatures), and voters willing to keep voting you in, to make literally any changes to the Constitution/government you want. Again, the founders thinking was \"don't like it? vote for someone else\" edit: > The Congress, whenever two thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution, or, on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states, or by conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Do that, and you can do whatever you want.",
"If it does that then it's not bypassing the checks and balances at all. It's doing exactly what it is supposed to do, enacting the will of the people.",
"No. The Constitution is worth exactly the paper it's written on and what it's worth to those who profess to uphold it.",
"The second ammendment It applies to the People rather than the branches of government And it allows the people to keep their republic",
"It depends on what you mean by bypassing all checks and balances. If you just mean getting a highly partisan agenda made into law, that can definitely be done if Congress passes laws supporting that agenda, the President approves those laws or makes corresponding executive orders, and the Supreme Court is willing to rule that the actions are in line with the rules in the Constitution. However, that would probably be more like an agenda being approved by or surviving checks and balances, rather than bypassing them entirely. If you mean something more extreme like enacting laws that blatantly go against the Constitution or cause changes that would alter a branch's power, that could also be done, but it would require an amendment to be passed. An amendment generally requires approval from 2/3 of each house in Congress plus 3/4 of the states. If passed, an amendment can't be rejected by anything other than another amendment and it could even alter the balances between branches. An amendment can be as partisan as possible, although it's unlikely that a partisan amendment could pass. Also, the criteria for getting an amendment passed are very different than just having a majority in Congress and the Supreme Court, plus the President."
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5ryvsu | Persia vs iran | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"\"Persia\" is an older and out-of-date term that comes from Latin, which borrowed it from Greek, which derived it from the Old Persian word \"Pārsa\", their name for the capital city of the Persian Achaemenid dynasty, Persepolis. The word \"Persia\" was used and spread around by Greek historians to refer to the country governed by the Achaemenids. The Achaemenid dynasty eventually collapsed (citation: there is no such country today) but the name \"Persia\" just kinda stuck around and was used as a generic term for whatever the most powerful country in that area happened to be. It was also generalized by the same Greek historians to refer to the people living in said country. \"Iran\" comes from the Middle Persian word \"ērān\", which referred to the Iranian people themselves. It was an ethnic identity, rather than \"Pārsa\", which was a country (think \"Latin\" vs. \"Roman\") - although Iranians themselves have pretty much always referred to themselves as \"Iranians\", not as \"Persians\", even in the days of the Achaemenid empire. Greek historians had a habit of basically making up new names for other people that bore little to no resemblance to what they actually called themselves, so instead of calling these people to the east of them \"Iranians\", they called them \"Persians\", because, y'know, why not. The term \"Persia\" as the name for the country was formally done away with in the 1979 Iranian Revolution, in which the country was officially renamed to \"Iran\" - the word they had been using all along to refer to themselves, but which the rest of the world had largely ignored. We're still just in the process of gradually phasing out the old word."
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5rz2qy | Why is there such a problem with GMO food products? | Since the long-term effects have yet to be studied, why is there such a debate about it? I can see from the farmers standpoint, but as far as eating GMO products, are they not genetically the same as their natural counterpart? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"[Long term effects have been studied and they have been found to be completely safe.]( URL_0 ) > are they not genetically the same as their natural counterpart In many ways, yes. The crops in stores now that have been created through artificial selection, hybridization, or chemical/radiation mutagenesis have thousands of genes randomly modified from their wild ancestors. We have no idea what the results are other than the ones that are directly observable. The new GMOs use those crops already created as a template and add 1 or 2 (or sometimes remove 1 or 2) genes to create a new trait. Not only has there never been a valid study proving any negative health effects, but there exists not a single valid *proposed biological mechanism* that they could cause any harm. Just think about that. No one can even come up with an imaginary problem with GMOs health-wise. The reason there is a debate is that there are a lot of people who stand to gain a lot of money through a new scam called organic food. The people funding the phony antiGMO studies like Seralini's and the GMO labelling groups like the non gmo project [have their hands in the organic industry and stand to gain from the demonisation of GMOs.]( URL_1 ) Because these people are not too good at science, they will usually take the anticorporate angle by making up myths about seed manufacturers or just plain make up fake science.",
"> Why is there such a problem with GMO food products? The problem is that generic engineering allows for more efficient farming and competes with organic where GE is banned. The organic industry is thus threatened and therefor must demonize GMOs in order to save/boost their market share. This is why all the anti-GMO and pro-GMO-labeling groups are funded by organic industry. > natural counterpart No agricultural foods we eat today are natural. They have all been heavily modified to confer traits beneficial to humans.",
"I think there are two major categories of issues with GMO food crops. The first is the direct biological risks associated with genetic modification. The big issue is related to how genes can be transferred between organisms of different species (known as \"transgenesis\"). If an engineered gene is added to a soybean plant to give a specific effect, we may not know what the gene will do if it gets transferred to, say, an insect. Since transgenesis is used to add the beneficial genes to the GMO crop in the first place, it's not completely unreasonable to be worried that it could continue to transfer to other unintended organisms. This was a bigger concern when GMO foods were new in the 90s (there was an X-Files episode about transgenetic honeybees, if I recall correctly), but as far as I know, it has not proven to be a big issue in practice. That doesn't mean it's not a real issue, but just that it's mostly a theoretical one. The second type of issue is not directly a biological problem with the GMO crop itself, but rather an issue caused by the farming system that develops around it. Some of the same issues may exist in similar forms with non-GMO crops, so the edges of this category are fairly blurry. For instance, there can be ecological issues. One of the most common genetic modifications is to make a food crop immune to a specific kind of herbicide (e.g. the Roundup weed killer). That allows the farmer to spray that herbicide all over the crops, killing only the weeds and not harming the main crop. The potential problem is that using herbicides more widely may harm the environment (e.g. killing off milkweed plants that used to grow between fields and feed Monarch butterflies). Other issues exist which are economic. Roundup Ready plants (that is, GMO that are resistant to the Roundup herbicide) are sterile, so you must purchase your seeds from the giant agribusiness company Monsanto every year. You can't keep some portion of your crop to plant the next year, you always need to buy new seeds. This may make you completely dependent on Monsanto, and vulnerable to price increases and other shady business once you're \"hooked\". There are other issues with how intellectual property laws treat patented genetic modifications. If your crop of Roundup ready soy pollinates my normal non-GMO soy plants, do Monsanto's patents cover my beans?",
"> are they not genetically the same as their natural counterpart? No, they aren't.. Because they have been modified... They are pretty much exactly as safe as organisms that have been modified (genetically) through artificial selection/breeding over generations, except that we can be both more precise with what we change (so we don't end up with unintended changes as side-effects) and more extreme with what changes we can make (since we don't have to spend hundreds of years breeding a particular protein-making genetic code from a fish into a bean plant via thousands of intermediary hybrid creatures that could connect a fish and a plant sexually).",
"Pretty much any animals and plants that we use in farming have already been \"modified\" through several centuries of selective breeding. Wheat and apples, for example, are both human-friendly versions of wild plants that we created through thousands of years of careful management. With a GMO, we fast-forward that process. Instead of selectively breeding plants through many generations, we splice DNA in labs to create the desired traits. What once might have taken centuries could now be achieved in just a few years. Some people are afraid that GMO foods aren't healthy. So far, scientific consensus is that they seem to be pretty safe. In the interest of fairness, though, I'll list some of the concerns that people have raised: * What if widespread adoption of GMOs has some unforeseen impact on health or the environment? It's hard to rule this out completely. Studies so far indicate that GMOs are safe. * What if safety regulations and oversight are inadequate? A worthwhile question, though it also applies to non-GMOs. * What if we consolidate control of our food supply into the hands of just a few companies? To me, this is potentially the biggest concern with GMOs. I've seen cases where farmers wind up getting sued for using \"unlicensed\" seeds, for example. It's often said that people are afraid of things that they don't understand, and that seems to be the case with GMOs, too. Most scientists believe that GMOs are safe, but they're having a very hard time convincing the general public to agree with them."
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5rz40p | How does the constitution apply to non-citizens at the border (if it does)? | My understanding is that until non-citizens are actually processed and admitted at the border - they are technically not in the US and the constitution does not apply to them. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The Constitution applies to absolutely everything the US government does, so the short answer here is \"yes\". One thing to note: some rights in the Constitution are offered to \"persons\" (these cover everyone), and other rights are offered specifically to \"citizens\" (citizenship is defined in the 14th amendment). Immigrants, legal or illegal, are protected against unreasonable search and seizure, self-incrimination, cruel and unusual punishment, and several more. Bearing all that in mind, some of the protections in the Constitution are not absolute. The 14th amendment says that no one will be deprived of \"life, liberty, or property without due process of law\", but the phrase \"due process of law\" does leave some wiggle room. Likewise, courts have frequently decided that 4th amendment protections against searches are relaxed in some circumstances, such as border crossings, where there is a lower expectation of privacy and a legitimate public interest in conducting those searches. It's a fairly nuanced topic, once you really get into it, but the short answer is that yes, non-citizens absolutely have rights in the US. Some people want to believe otherwise, but those opinions have no basis in the law."
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5rz49v | How does my toaster lever only stay down when its plugged in to power? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There is a small electromagnet in there, which moves a catch which holds your toaster lever down. When it's not plugged in there is no electricity, so the electromagnet is not a magnet, so the catch doesn't move and your lever won't stay depressed."
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5rz78i | Why does the human body express emotions physically? | Why do we cry when we're sad, smile/laugh when we're happy, scowl when we're mad, sweat/generally freak out when we're anxious, increase heart rate when excited, etc? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There's something called a \"biofeedback loop\", where part of what you experience as emotion is the physical sensation, which can increase the emotion. You're anxious, and your heart starts to race, which makes you feel more anxious, etc. They've actually done studies on people before and after being paralyzed. They report being less emotional, and their feelings are less extreme. When you can't feel the physical sensation of anxiety, you feel less mentally anxious. Kind of like plugging your nose when you swallow diminishes some of your ability to taste. The loop works both ways. Smiling can make you feel happier. Or if you take cocaine, your heart starts to race and you sweat, and you feel anxious as a result. Like you're brain says, these are all the symptoms of anxiety, I must be anxious. Better be anxious."
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5rz7bm | Could investigators go back and test the dna evidence from the O.J Simpson case using today's DNA techniques to confirm if it was truly Simpson's DNA? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There's zero doubt that it was OJ's DNA. OJ's defense was that it was possibly planted by a racist detective(Furhman) as part of a systematic culture of racism in the LA Police Dept. Whether or not it was actually his DNA was not in question. Also the murder weapon was never located, so you couldn't test that.",
"No. The main defence argument was that collection of DNA and samples at the crime scene was poorly handled and their procedures made it impossible to rule out cross contamination. For example, Simpson's blood sample was collected at the crime scene and the vial of blood was carried around the site by a trainee for nearly a day before being handed in as evidence. That wasn't why the case collapsed anyway. That happened when the prosecution's primary witness perjured himself on the witness stand."
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5rz7h0 | why do we have such a strong urge to scream out when we're injured. It seems like the last thing we'd want to do from a survival standpoint is to alert others of our weakness. | Edit - a lot of posts on here are saying that there is an evolutionary advantage to having an animal scream out because it warns the other members of the tribe, and, though it may lead to the animal being killed, it's better for the tribe as a whole. I'm fairly sure that can't be true. Evolution only works in the interests of the individual, not the group (at least, not if it means sacrificing the individual). Evolution is about passing on your genes to the next generation. That's all it is. If the individual dies, they can't pass them on. That's survival of the fittest. True - screaming out may help the tribe, but if it leads to those genes dying, they don't get passed on. Editing my edit - apparently I'm wrong. Some know-it-all named Richard Dawkins wrote a book about how sometimes evolution can work for the interests of the group rather than the individual. Learned something new. That's what I love about reddit. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Humans are communal animals. Screaming alerts the rest of the tribe to the danger. It may or may not save the injured individual, but it definitely helps the group as a whole. Since genes are what matters, not individual survival, behavior that makes other close relatives more likely to survive is more likely to get passed on.",
"I'm seeing a lot about \"alerting the tribe\" but it's worth remembering how jarring a scream can be. \"Startling\" is a common mechanism in nature to scare off predators. Additionally, it doesn't have to be either/or.",
"I know with puppies and kittens, they learn how to coexist peacefully by responding to their parents' and littermates' cries. Puppies and kittens who are separated from their litters too early often have issues recognizing other animals (and even people's) boundaries. So when a puppy is playing with its littermate and bites too hard, the other pup squeals to let him know that it's inappropriate play. Obviously this doesn't quite fit for instances where the animal is being attacked, but it is still an important function of communicating pain.",
"The first thing you want to do is alert everyone else. One of two things will happen, which is either that the other humans come and save you, or they run and at least some of the tribe survives. Same with other animals. If one deer makes noise when bitten it might scare off the predator, and it also lets the other deer in the area GTFO so that they can live.",
"I didn't see a very high level post addressing this but being under attack isn't the only time we cry out. Imagine you get injured in a ditch or between rocks or something. Crying out loudly will more likely get you saved than a more quiet response. Same with a predator attack if you're around other armed humans. You will be more likely to survive if you get help fast. Food for thought.",
"Humans generally speaking do not want to kill other humans, even if they are causing harm. People just want to defend themselves and avoid danger. If you are defending your food, yourself, or your territory from another human the goal isn't to kill them but to make them stop. Screaming may actually be a survival trait from before we had complex languages. It was a way for a human to signal to another human that they are in pain and are 'beaten'. No time or effort needs to be wasted in killing the person now as you know they are beaten. It would also help signal in pre-language times that someone in your tribe is very hurt and that there is likely some sort of danger around to either tend to or flee from."
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5rzgyp | why people eat salty food then crave sugary food and repeat the cycle? What's going on in human body that causes this craving? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"We've evolved in environments where sugar and salt were no where near as abundant as they are today, and because they're so vital for our survival we've evolved to enjoy the taste of them in order to make us want to eat them to get the nutrition we need(ed). Now, there's a bit of a mismatch because of how readily available sugar and salt are. Not sure if this explains why you'd crave one after the other in a cycle though.",
"We need salt and sugar to survive. Salt is vital for water retention and brain chemistry. And sugar is used by the body as well and natural sources of sugar like fruit and veggies are extremely good for us. Also sweet and salty I believe are two major components of our taste. So our brain rewards is heavily for getting those things into our mouth and into our system."
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5rzsi7 | Pig skin is meant to be similar to human skin, so would roasting a person make them crackle like a pork roast? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"EMT's and firefighters report that people burned alive smell like roast beef. It makes them gag and avoid meat afterwards. I did not read about them reporting a crackling. They are trying to rescue."
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5rzsy9 | How did something like the holocaust and nazi's happen without the law finding out? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The Nazi's happened through the law, then they were the law, then the holocaust happened when there was no law, but nazi law.",
"Well at the time of that nazi era atrocities going on, the nazis and hitler were the law. They basically owned Germany",
"If you want the history of the Nazi rise, basically the people were not happy following the Great war (WWI), about their loss, their reparations, many factors. A young soldier named Adolf Hitler was outraged at the plight of his country and people. He saw the state of the country and wanted to (pardon me, this isn't meant to be a jab) make Germany great again. As a well respected soldier, He rose through the ranks of the German socialist workers party (Nazi party) and was elected to the highest office. From there he began to work from within to change things, gain the people's trust, and garner more power for himself. He was so well respected that the people *voted* him in as basically \"leader for life\". The country decided he was what they needed to bring Germany to it's former glory. Now, on a worldwide scale, this wasn't scary yet. we have lots of countries where this is the case. The United States itself has funded terrorist regimes to bring down local governments, a man being declared leader for life isn't a huge thing on a global scale (It is, yes, but this is the case in many countries). He then began to basically go against the treaties put in place after WWI, like making a larger military than the world agreed Germany should have, pushing into areas that didn't belong to them, and basically testing the waters of how much they could break the rules. The rest of the world had *JUST* got out of a huge war, expended massive resources, many lives, etc. Nobody really *WANTED* to fight again, and so they let Germany grow, because the alternative was another war, once again dragging everyone in. Germany had a lot of success by focusing its anger and aggression on the Jews: amidst the poverty of the citizens and general economic turmoil, the Jews were doing just fine. So it was easy for Hitler to say *they* are the cause of our problems. Let's kill them. (this later expanded to include many other peoples including the Roma (gypsies) and others) and so the people had a (mostly) common goal and enemy: Kill Jews, reclaim former German land, become great again. Everyone else was just too tired to stop it until it was too late. By the time people realized it was actually VERY serious, and everyone was in danger, Germany was bigger than expected. I tried to keep it short, but it's a lot to explain.",
"The Nazis \"happened\" because nobody really knew how dangerous they were until it was too late. In the 1920s, it was a small group of thugs in Munich getting involved in bar brawls and prancing around in stupid outfits. Hitler got himself noticed with his speeches, but was written off as a ridiculous buffoon, ranting hysterically about Jews and Communists -- he looked more like a parody than anything else. But the law did notice. Several members of the movement, including Hitler, were found guilty of treason in 1923, and had to spend some time in prison. That's when Hitler wrote *Mein Kampf*, which is about the most disappointing autobiography imaginable: badly-written, full of dry, political theory and only occasionally livened up with an antisemitic diatribe or two. Nobody saw him as a credible threat. But his movement continued to attract supporters and eventually became an actual political party. Soon, they were winning seats in the Reichstag, eventually becoming the biggest party. Many politicians saw the Nazis in general, and Hitler in particular, as a threat. At one point, they almost succeeded in preventing Hitler from being appointed Chancellor, but Hitler outmanoeuvred them and left them with no choice. Many commentators hoped that Hitler could be reined in, that most of his more outrageous election promises would never actually be kept, and that he would prove to be a fairly \"normal\" Chancellor. But the Nazis had some tricks up their sleeves, and used bullying tactics to get their way. A lot of these tactics were clearly illegal (such as posting armed members of the party's paramilitary wing around the debating chamber for a critical debate and vote), but not enough members of the Reichstag felt brave enough to stand up to him. In fact, 201 of them were either in prison or on the run; many others had received nasty threats against them and their families. The law found out, but it didn't have much effect. A successful tyrant comes to power either through an actual violent coup, or through a long process of erosion, making small, strategic advances. The aim is to weaken opposition through legal means if possible, until it is powerless to resist. As for the Holocaust, the wholesale slaughtering of Jews didn't actually begin until relatively late in the day, when Germany was already at war, and wasn't discovered by the Allies until they started liberating the death camps. Originally, Jews were simply sent to \"labour camps\" for \"their own protection\", and the way these camps were described didn't sound too bad (watch Charlie Chaplin's masterpiece [*The Great Dictator*]( URL_0 ) which showed [what people in 1940 thought Nazi prison camps were like]( URL_1 ). Indeed, the Nazi regime began by encouraging Jews to leave the country voluntarily and join the movement trying to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine, which is why you'll sometimes hear the bizarre claim that Hitler was sympathetic to the Zionist cause -- in fact, the Haavara Agreement was about the ethnic cleansing of Germany and sanction-busting. Other Jews were \"encouraged\" to leave the country through rampant antisemitism, then came expulsions and deportations, then internment, then slaughter. In short, it didn't just happen all at once: things ratcheted up bit by bit.",
"Other countries knew. Or suspected. But by that time the Nazi's were very powerful. And the countries who could stop them had to find allies, and then the allies had to agree to go to war, and some of them decided no let's try talking first, so there was disagreement... All this took ages. And in that time the Nazi's didn't stop what they were doing."
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5rzt1b | Why the deep ocean creates total monstrosities compared to other regions. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The simple answer is evolution. As /u/friend1949 said it's all about perspective and what we are used too seeing. The deep ocean is an environment totally unlike anything we experience on a day to day basis, and life has evolved to survive in those conditions; Lack of sunlight means skin pigments become pointless to protect the skin, meaning most deep see animals are full or partly translucent; Why would a fish need bones or a tough exoskeleton when it spends it's life floating in water and not coming into contact with a hard physical surface it's entire life; They develop big eyes and bioluminescence to hunt and evade prey/predators. There's nothing about the deep ocean that creates monsters, it's purely a very different environment that we are not used too. If humanity had evolved to live underground in cave systems instead of the surface we would look and act very different to how we do now, and wouldn't consider monsters of the deep so strange.",
"The concept of monstrosity is in your point of view. I am sure to a boy monster the girl monster is very cute. So your question is, In a part of the world very strange to us, with tremendous pressures, cold, lack of any light, and being in salt water where creatures without legs are the norm, do we see some really strange looking creatures who do not resemble anything we are used to seeing. We are used to giraffes with long necks, snakes without legs who wiggle around, birds who fly through the air, but creatures in places we never go look strange. Why is that? Well we never go there and see them on a daily basis.",
"They look like monstrosities to you because they're very different from what you're used to. They look very different because they live in conditions that are very different to the ones you're familiar with. The deep sea is dark, cold but most of all it's a desert. Very little nutrients make it all the way down there before being snatched up by other life. For starters that means life has to be very energy efficient because very little new energy comes into this system. Which is why a lot of deep sea life are either filter feeders or ambush predators. Most predators fail more often during hunts than they succeed, simple fact of life. Down there, hunters can't afford to fail too often. Every failure expends energy without getting a return. So a lot of the monstrous looking adaptations deal with successfully catching any and all prey that comes within reach. Numerous long fangs intended to catch slippery prey and hold them successfully. Oversized mouths or even stretchy bodies so a predator doesn't have to pass up prey because it's too big for it's mouth. Some deep sea fish can eat prey larger than themselves. Along the same lines in such utter darkness light becomes everything. Oversized eyes for seeing every scrap of detail they can manage. Some predators use light to lure prey. Some life forms use light to disorientate the hyper sensitive eyes of predators or to communicate and actually find a mate in the deep, dark emptiness. Finding friendly faces is such a big challenge down there that some fish simply won't let a partner go once they found one. When the male angler fish finds a female, he bites into her body and their bodies slowly fuse together. He'll receive nutrition through their now shared bloodstream and she'll receive his seed for fertilising her eggs. Eventually the male will atrophy into little more than a pair of testicles attached to the female. Light can even be camouflage. In the deep sea above is brighter than below. Some fish use weak bioluminescence on their bellies to make themselves invisible against the light coming in from above. While at the same time having dark backs to disappear against the inky depths when seen from below. And the differences go well beyond what you'd expect. Bright red for instance is a perfect camouflage color down there. Have you ever noticed how things tend to look a little greenish or blueish underwater? Water acts as a filter to light. Colours with a higher wavelength like red get filtered out first while colours with a shorter wavelength get filtered out last (same reason tv's in living rooms look bluish when you look in from the outside at night). Without any red light to reflect down there, red is a perfect camouflage color and many fish have a creepy reddish skin color. Of course for every defense there's weapons that counter that defense. Since there's no red light down there, most deep sea fish eyes can't even detect right light, their eyes evolved a sensitivity to other wavelengths. So one fish in particular evolved eyes that *can* see red light... because it has a bioluminescent light that emits red light specifically. Effectively it gives him a search light that highlights red fish yet at the same time no fish can see it's searchlight. Anyway in short deep sea life looks radically different because they're dealing with radically different challenges than the rest of the ocean."
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5rzx3d | Perfect argument popping into your head after the argument ends? | Is there like a subconscious process to all of this? Ever had a great argument just pop into your head conveniently after it ends? Happens to me without even thinking about it consciously. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There's a term for this, originally French: > L'esprit de l'escalier or l'esprit d'escalier (\"staircase wit\") is a French term used in English for the predicament of thinking of the perfect reply too late. So you only think of the witty response as you are leaving via the staircase.",
"Everything is clearer after the fact when you're not caught up in the moment and have time to stop and think. Simply put, hindsight is 20/20, as they say."
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5rzxob | The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform. The negatives that will come from being removed | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"One of the best things Dodd Frank happened was the creation of the CFPB. They are an agency with the monumental task of keeping mortgage companies from making predatory loans. Remember no income qualifying, interest only loans? Yeah, you could qualify someone for that, bury the details in paperwork, sell it to someone who doesn't fully understand what they just signed, and in three years when their interest rate adjusts they can't afford it. They go late on payments & get foreclosed. That's not even the worst type of shit. Imagine a loan that can actually get bigger over time rather than smaller. They're basically foreclosure machines. Those existed, they're finally almost gone, but they're probably coming back. Who protects consumers from stuff like that? The CFPB, created by Dodd Frank. They make sure mortgage companies follow the new laws meant to prevent loans like that which caused the foreclosures that caused the financial crash. I'm just skimming the surface here",
"One of the major issues that often goes unmentioned when we talk about the housing market crash is that government interference via Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac propped the loan market up and incentivized the irresponsible lending practices we saw from the time that Glass-Steagal was repealed until 2008. These quasi-government agencies securitized these risky loans and when they failed, the government swept in again to repair the damage that they provided incentives to create. That is not capitalism. In a truly capitalist system, if you take a big risk and you succeed, the victory is all yours. If you take a big risk and fail, *you* fail. That is not what happened. My understanding is that one of the provisions of Dodd-Frank is to prevent this \"too big to fail\" situation from occurring again. If that is the case, then this is the first time that I, as a Trump supporter, would take issue with one of his proposed actions. I am all for a capitalist free market, but what was witnessed during the financial crisis and the government response immediately after was not the free market at work, it was a textbook case of crony capitalism.",
"One aspect that stemmed from Dodd-frank was the department of labor's ruling that investment advisors have to act in their clients best interest. More often than not, advisors do act in their clients' best interest, but there are several that do not. One example is qualified annuities. Annuities are a very expensive investment that serve a very specific purpose. They are a tax deferred investment, similar to an IRA. Advisors were selling annuities inside IRAs, which often doesn't make sense because it does not add any tax benefit. It isn't always the right or wrong thing to do, but it is one of the most expensive investments that pays the advisor the most money.",
"We should add that heavy financial deregulation is *yet another* area where the US is doing something that no other advanced country in the world wants to do (See also: Healthcare, criminal/drug policy, strict two party governance, ...). So either all the other countries in the world haven't realized how great US policy actually is, or the rest of the world is looking at the US and thinking \"Why the %*#* are they doing this to themselves? Again!\". Any thoughts on which it is? (Serious question)",
"This is a fun one. In the 1990s to 2000s, we had the rise of a type of financial instrument called a derivative. Clinton's administration, then Bush's administration, flat out refused to regulate them because banks were making money on them. If you haven't noticed, the department of the Treasury and sometimes the SEC are revolving doors for bank executives. Many of these derivatives had complicated names and lengthy legal contracts, but on the surface they were just banks gambling with your money, *e.g.* if the price of this commodity I don't own goes down to this value, you give me this much money, but if it goes up to this value, I owe you money. These derivatives were mostly unregulated and opaque to the consumer or regulatory agencies, but they played a large role in the financial crisis through swaps. Swaps are generally a way of gambling to reduce risk by trying to offset the risk to others. The party who is doing something risky offers a monthly contract to another party who, if the risky thing they're doing falls apart, agrees to pay for the original party's losses. The other party gets paid to assume this risk, but sometimes the other party doesn't even have the money to pay the original party back for the failure of the bank's risky gamble (2008). Dodd-Frank sought to regulate these to make sure that the issuance of these derivatives was clear to the government and public, and that people weren't gambling more money than they possibly could have in them (margin requirements). They also added a lot of new rules to help prevent banks from gambling with your money. Unfortunately for the banks, this all ends up being very expensive. Trump wants to tear out all the requirements of Dodd-Frank that make banking expensive. Banks like it because it gives them greater profit margins. People like it because they make more money in their investments. The risk is that the banks will start gambling too much and lose more money. More here if you care: URL_0",
"Lots of answers here that are too complicated. Once we had rules banks had to follow. Those were repealed, and in not following the rules the banks causes the 2008 recession. New rules were put into place to prevent the same kind of stuff from happening again. Now, they want to take those rules away. It's likely going to cause another recession, but these people don't care, because they will make a lot of money in the process. By the way, the recession led to record profits because once you sabotage everyone's pay, you don't need to increase it again until you start running out of people who need jobs.",
"There was a pretty great planet money podcast recently that sums up Dodd Frank and its affect on the banks. An interesting take URL_0",
"Your teacher has a helper who takes everybody's lunch money at the beginning of the day and buys everybody lunch. Last year, you found out that the helper was cheating you. He's been using your lunch money to run a business on the side. Nobody notices because his business is doing great. But one day his business does badly, so everybody goes hungry that day. Scared, your classmates stop buying lunch from the school. To save the lunchroom, your teacher assigns a police officer to watch the lunch helper, to make sure he doesn't do anything too sketchy. Donald Trump wants to fire that police officer.",
"Legit question, were there any negative sides to Dodd-Frank? Many of me real estate friends seem to be too happy about this and that worries me.",
"* It requires banks have more cash or near-cash in case people get spooked in a bad market and start pulling money out. * The huge banks have to pass an annual test that simulates a crash like the one we had in 2008. * Super huge (global systematically important) banks must keep up to 3% of its stock equity in somewhat liquid form. * It makes some limitations on trading activity for banks. The negatives if it's repealed? Banks could be vulnerable and fail or require serious government intervention / loans like they did in 2008.",
"Basically, it makes debt a more effective tool for control at both the micro and the macro level. This bill includes measures for making sure that the debt is meaningful in that it gets paid, otherwise it's not really a debt. If the debt is unpaid then their needs to be a process to recoup the \"value\" they lost from giving out the loan. All this is written into bank law under this bill. Previously, the banks didn't really see a point in going through the work to collect debt and that gave the impression to the public at large that they can just print money when ever they want, which is not true. They have to borrow money from the Federal Reserve who does the printing. The effect of Trump repealing this law is that banks will now have more autonomous control over how they run their operations, so they might cause another bubble. For example if they give out a $10 loan that doesn't get paid then sell it to a debt collector for $2, then spend another $3 doing follow-up paper work, they've lost $11. Now they can go back to writing off those loans so that they only lose $10. This puts the onus of maintaining the dollar back on the Fed and lets bank do more actual local bank things like banking money and issuing loans and making a profit. If anyone downvoting me can point out where I'm wrong I'd love to hear any counter-opinions on the subject.",
"Could someone ELI5 why anyone would support its repeal?",
"While not claiming to know everything, I'll tell you from personal experience how Dodd-Frank hurts the average person. It put tremendous requirements on a recent mortgage application of mine resulting in copious amounts of paperwork and fine print. It puts tremendous strain on agents to help navigate said requirements etc. Dodd Frank prevented my prior bank from waiving late fees accumulated years ago when the economy was at its worst. Even though the banking agent wanted to do more, she was limited to only removing one fee per Dodd Frank. Lastly as a business owner it made access to funds to grow my business nearly impossible to get. While fees where added and increased at nearly every level, lending became almost non existent for small businesses. Banks will always find a way to make money despite restrictions etc and usually the friends of those writing the laws make out the best because they know the rules and ways around them before they are even written. I see no reason why guidelines can be put in place that are common sense based without targeting any particular outcomes. If people can't afford a loan they shouldn't get one and nobody should be forced to give them one regardless of race creed or color. If a bank wants to take a risk and charge more for it, more power to em since most people want to to the right thing and honor their debts. But that should be the banks risk not yours and mine. And I don't think we need to lose any forests to provide the countless amount of paper needed to close a simple loan........"
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5s0a1p | Why is it that when something irritates you, you sometimes exacerbate it? | To elaborate, say for example you have a canker on the side of your tongue. And you rub it back and forth along the edge of your tooth, even though it hurts. Or am I just nuts? Is this actually a thing everyone does? Is there a reason for it? Right now one of my molars is sensitive, I noticed after a bite of food when something pressed hard into it and it hurt. Now when I drink ice water, the cold and ice makes the nerves sing in that spot a little bit. Yet for some reason instead of avoiding it, I target it on purpose. Obviously this doesn't apply to serious levels of pain, just more bearable nuisance level pain. My best guess is the mind constantly checking the status of something that is wrong with the body, so it knows if it's getting worse or not. Is this a dumb question? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Your mouth is one of those places where you have a muscle that can consciously do what it wants. The tongue (and rest of your mouth) is one of the most nerve rich and sensitive spots on a body. When you're injured, there is a subconscious impulse to feel the injury to assess (is it getting worse? How swollen is it?) But it's also a truly primal instinct... When animals injure themselves, they don't have the evolutionary luxury of hands to carefully clean a wound. The next best thing is to lick a wound so it can become cleaner. This is especially so for injuries in the mouth because an animal might not be able to paw INSIDE their mouth. I'm no expert, but I was in the dental field for a decade and I always thought it was a compulsory instinct. I also equate this with why if you cut your finger, a common human response is to suck on it really quick."
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5s0fml | What is a 'beer belly'? | How do they form and what do they consist of? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's actually a combination of fat from a poor diet and an inflamed liver. Alcohol causes inflammation of tissues, particularly in the liver. Add in a crappy diet with carb-heavy beer, and the gut takes on a swollen appearance. Just a plain old fat belly won't be as round and swollen looking as a beer belly because a beer belly is actually swollen.",
"It forms from consuming too many calories and/or not exercising enough. One difference between a beer belly and just a flabby belly is that, in the case of the beer belly, much of the fat is visceral, whereas, in a flabby belly, it's subcutaneous. Visceral fat is associated with more health risks than subcutaneous fat."
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