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5sumkc | How is fire instantly hot and max temperature? | So when you light a candle or match the fire is instantly hot (I assume it's at its max temperature). What causes this, is it just the friction or what? Some flames are hotter than others, so how is max heat determined? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Fire is an exothermic chemical reaction. Exothermic means that it releases heat when it occurs. The amount of heat released is a function of the chemical potential energy of the fuel. Some fuels contain more energy than others."
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5supxb | How people can hack your phone/computer with a USB drive? | Saw it on Mr. Robot, didn't know if it's movie magic or actually possible. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It is technically possible. Heck, it may even be possible to hack your phone over the air. Hackers look for vulnerabilities in your software that allow them to install their own programs. They'll use these programs to gain root access and/or get your password. Vulnerabilities are typically code defects that occur in areas where we are dealing with outside data entering the device. Imagine a program that reassembles USB packets. As it gets each packet it copies it into memory somewhere. What if we could trick it into copying more data than it should? Imagine you have a bucket that can hold a gallon of water. If you pour more than a gallon in what happens? It spills right? This is called a buffer overflow in computer science terms, and it allows hackers to write data into places they shouldn't. Sometimes that data can be a program or a piece of code that allows them to install their own programs. It gets complicated quickly but the gist is \"If your program is handling outside data it can potentially be exploited\"",
"One approach depends on the fact that there's nothing to tell your computer that the USB device you plugged in is supposed to be a drive. There's nothing to stop the \"drive\" telling your computer that it's actually a keyboard and mouse. As soon as it detects power, it plays back a prepared sequence of key presses and mouse clicks to compromise your computer. I actually saw devices like that used in place of USB drives to distribute slides and supporting material at a conference. You'd naturally assume that it was just a drive containing the files, but what it actually did was appear as a keyboard, open the Run dialog (assuming that everyone uses Windows) and type the URL of their site to launch it in your browser.",
"The scene in Mr. Robot actually uses a real device^1 and there are a number of known vulnerabilities in USB implementation such as BadUSB^2. With the USB Rubber Ducky, it is possible to write a script in such a way that it will be able to 'detect' the OS and execute the corresponding exploit to gain access^3. There are many limitations though, and many of the known attack vectors are fixed, often it would require access to an unlocked machine. I believe it was possible though the BadUSB vulnerability to edit the code of the USB Controller (physically located on the motherboard), which would basically enable the attacker to do anything to any USB device plugged into it. 1. [USB Rubber Ducky]( URL_0 ) 2. [BadUSB]( URL_1 ) 3. [HAK5 Tutorial]( URL_2 )"
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"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kX90HzA0FM"
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5sushz | Why did we domesticate wolves and not say... Bears? How fucking cool would that've been? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Wolves are instinctively social creatures. They want to work with others, they want to make a pack structure, they hunt in groups. They'll also listen to people who are a \"pack leader,\" someone they've grown up with or someone who rewards them for their behavior. Bears are not. Bears want to hunt alone. Bears don't share. Bears attack the young of other bears to eliminate competition before it grows up. Baby bears who are raised by humans may STILL attack their \"friend\" humans as an adult if they are viewed as competition for food. Even modern people who train bears must be EXTREMELY careful with such enormous predators who will attack if you're viewed as competition.",
"Wolves are very social animals so it's easier to fit into their social hierarchy. Bears are primarily solitary except during mating season (when they hit it and quit it) and when females have cubs."
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5susov | Why are the front of a lot of city buses a flat square? Isnt that the least aerodynamic shape there is? | Seems like theyre so heavy anyway they'd try and save fuel. | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A more aerodynamic shape would help fuel efficiency some, but not that much for two reasons. First, buses don't travel that fast and drag (air resistance in this case) becomes a bigger deal at higher velocity. Second, there are two different types of drag: drag from pushing air out of the way and drag from air passing over the surface of the vehicle. For a short car, there isn't much surface for air to pass over so pretty much all of the drag comes from pushing air out of the way. That's also the sort of drag an aerodynamic shape helps with. For a long vehicle like a bus, drag from air passing over its surface area is a bigger deal. There's still more overall drag on a bus from having to push air out of the way, but skin drag is a much bigger component than it is for cars. This makes the drag from having to push air out of the way in the front less important for buses. Those are just reasons why an aerodynamic shape won't help a bus as much, though; they're not reasons to not do it. The reason buses are designed with a flat front is that it maximizes volume and a flat front and window allow the driver to see better, especially when turning. The increased space and visibility are more important than any small increase in efficiency from a more aerodynamic shape. tl;dr - Buses benefit less from aerodynamics because of their long shape and they would be hurt by a more aerodynamic shape because a flat front maximizes space and driver visibility. Edit: In response to the multiple comments saying that some buses go fast, we know that. But most buses do not and when buses are designed it's usually not clear exactly how they'll be used. And even for the ones that get on the freeway, the flat front is better for volume and for turning once the bus inevitably leaves the freeway.",
"Aerodynamics took a back seat to maneuverability on downtown streets where corners tend to be more square and congested. If transit buses were built like school buses the nose would swing way into oncoming traffic when making turns. Flat front buses have the front wheels behind the driver and closer to the rear axle so the turning radius is greatly reduced. Source: drove city bus for five years, like flat fronts more. Edit: spelling and front wheel tweak.",
"Interior space efficiency is more important than exterior aerodynamic profile in busses as they generally travel at low speed. Aerodynamic drag increases as the square of velocity, so at low speeds it is less important. A more aerodynamic nose shape generally requires an overall \"pointier\" shape, which means you can generally fit less into it inside. This space could be used to fit more seats, so the bus can haul more people in the same foorprint. So at a low speed where aerodynamic drag is almost negligible, interior packaging profile is prioritized. It's also a maintenance issue. Flat parts are also easy and cheap to both make and replace, much more so than contoured aerodynamic shapes. Busses hit things and get hit fairly often, so having cheap exterior panels is a big plus. Long haul and tour busses that travel for extended times at speed make more of an effort at aerodynamics, by adding some rake angle to the forward face and having more contoured panels. But the lower the speed the bus operates at, the higher the priority of packaging and ease of construction/maintenance, hence simple flat faced city busses.",
"They don't really move fast enough to worry about having to be particularly aerodynamic. A more aerodynamic front would take up more space front-to-back and buses are already super long anyway. Plus it is less expensive to build due to having lower material costs.",
"Simply turning radius and visibility. In Europe you rarely see heavy trucks like in North America, they use cabover style. URL_0",
"All vehicles have a maximum design length, width, and height. A bus's primary purpose is to transport as many people as possible, fuel efficiency is much further down the list. Buses are designed to have the largest volume you can drive safely on most roads without special consideration. That's why they're low-riding boxes on wheels. Designers do their best on fuel efficiency through the motor, but aerodynamics at sub-40mph are really negligible anyway. Carving out triangles to gain aerodynamic efficiency is taking away from storage, seating, or engine space, which is the whole reason your customer bought the bus in the first place.",
"Average speed of a city bus is ~10mph so aerodynamics has little effect on fuel efficiency.",
"I notice that one of the reasons thst people are giving is low speed. Yes, city buses don't tend to travel fast, but similarly designed tour buses travel at interstate speeds.",
"No nose makes pulling in and out of spots easier as you do not really have a blind spit on the front of the vehicle.",
"Also because NO intercity engine will ever produce more than 8-9 mpg Tops. I have been in the Diesel field for 20yrs now and even the small fleet of Hydrogen buses in our transit fleet have lousy mileage. Until city buses become fully solar electric there will never be a benefit to \"aerodynamics\".",
"There are mainly two reasons: 1. A Bus is not really fast, that means the aerodynamic is no that important. The faster an object moves, the more important is aerodynamic. 2. A Bus will carry people, in a lot of countries, there are laws about the length of a vehicle. If you make the Bus more aerodynamic, you will need to remove some rows of seats, if you aren't allow to build a longer vehicle, this will make a Bus less profitable. Even, if the is no law, about the length, is there a maximum length, because the Bus will need to get around a curve."
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5sutze | When we're sick, why do we feel the worst right when we wake up? Why do we wake up groggy at all in the first place? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When you sleep your body goes through cycles lasting about an hour-and-a-half. If you wake up right after this cycle ends you feel energized, otherwise your body kind of needs to adjust. As to the other stuff while you are awake you can take in fluids, like water and juices, but while you are asleep those are consumed (much faster when you are sick) causing you to wake up dehydrated and thus all gyucky."
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5suv99 | loss of appetite to drugs | What happens when you take a drug that suppresses your appetite but you know you're hungry. For instance like stimulants like adderall or even harder drugs like coke or meth. You don't want to eat but your tummy is rumbling saying it's hungry | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"\"Appetite\" is a large collection of feelings you experience when your blood sugar drops below a certain level, triggering a series of chemical reactions in your gut, which cause you to experience mild discomfort - hunger - and perceive an \"emptiness\" in your stomach. Normally, these also trigger a bunch of other reactions in your brain, which coordinates all the other parts of your body responsible for hunger: you start to salivate, your jaw muscles become excited, and your thought process starts to gravitate toward seeking and consuming food. Stimulants, like all drugs, disrupt the brain's signalling. Specifically, they affect how dopamine and serotonin, two neurotransmitters, are used. Our understanding of them is limited, but essentially, your stomach is able to send the direct message via your nervous system saying \"I'm empty, put stuff in me\", but the cascade of other effects in your brain \"Stomach is empty, I should tell Body to go get some food and eat it\" never occur because they've been disrupted by the drugs. Even if you can override your endocrine system and force yourself to put food in your mouth, the relative inactivity of your jaw and throat muscles, as well as your salivary glands, means that eating will be physically more difficult than usual; swallowing won't come as naturally and your mouth will likely be drier than usual. tl;dr- hunger and appetite normally occur together, and roughly correspond to the physical sensation of low blood sugar and the cognitive drive to eat. Stimulant drugs disrupt appetite by diverting the signaling molecules used to trigger it - dopamine and serotonin - toward other parts of your brain.",
"It's like you know you need to eat, but the thought, or even the smell of food is disgusting."
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5suwlb | Why do some countries outside of the US use the US Dollar? | Some countries have replaced their official currency with the US dollar. What's even more confusing, though, is the countries that have their own currency, but still use US dollars frequently. Costa Rica, for example, has their own currency, but they often use USD to pay for things. It's not even limited to the tourist attractions. What's the point of using a foreign currency when you have your own? Is 1 US Dollar really that much better than 550 Costa Rican Colones? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are two specific reasons: First - oil is bought and sold on the open market in US dollars. So when Saudi Arabia sells oil to France - France has to use US Dollars to buy the oil from Saudi Arabia. Russia, Iran, and China are trying to move away from the petro-dollar for this reason - so they don't have to have US dollars on hand. Second - certain countries experience hyper-inflation - to the point that Zimbabwe issued 100 trillion zimbabwe dollar notes. Because of this - the people would lose faith that they would not be able to purchase goods in the international market with their domestic currencies. So if a baker wanted to import wheat from Egypt - the Egyptian merchant might say, \"I won't take Zimbabwe money - I'll sell it to you in dollars.\"",
"The US has a very stable currency. If $1 buys you a hamburger today, it will probably buy you a hamburger tomorrow. In many countries this is not the case. A hamburger might be 100 shekels today, 120 tomorrow, and 70 the next. This is hard on both business and consumers because they have to try to second guess the currency. You might be able to make a profit selling that hamburger for 100 sh, if you knew the currency would stay put, but instead you sell it for 120 sh just in case. You sell fewer, but you know you aren't losing money. Using US dollars instead makes things safer for both buyers and sellers. The problem also exists on a higher level. If the government want to higher a German engineering company to build a bridge, they don't want to be paid in shekels, which could lose their value. They want dollars or euros or yen. If it just so happens you sold a bunch of oil to the US for dollars, you are going to keep those around to pay for that bridge, so even at a governmental level you have to use dollar. Most countries that don't have a strong, widely traded currencies, including Russia and China, have to keep large reserves of foreign currency on hand.",
"Historically, all money was backed by gold. So if you wanted, you could take a peso or a ruble or a dollar to a bank and get back some amount of gold that was considered equivalent. This created a whole bunch of headaches with countries and limited growth, so a bunch of them started moving off the \"gold standard.\" Often this happened during war, as a country needed to be able to print more currency to fund said war. Most of the time they'd return to the gold standard afterward. Then World War 2 happened. The enormity of the cost of this war was incomprehensibly massive. Almost every country dropped the gold standard and traded off their supplies of gold to fund the war. The one country that didn't need to do this was the US, because the US was basically selling huge portions of its GDP to the war effort. Consequently, after the war the US controlled almost the entire world's supply of gold. The battered remains of European industry couldn't hope to get back on the gold standard any time soon, so most of the world decided instead to back their currency with the US dollar instead of gold. Since the US dollar was still on the gold standard, this was almost as good. Eventually, the US Government dropped the gold standard as well, but the tight rein that the government maintains on the value, its ubiquity due to the aftereffects of WW2, and the reliability and stability of the US government itself all combined to make it a common currency used in exchanges around the world. Most of the countries with stable currencies don't use US dollars for anything but international trade (see: the Euro, the GBP, the Yen). But for countries with less confidence in their government or more fluid currencies, the greater confidence in the US dollar makes it a useful item to have around."
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5sux2l | How can the placenta share maternal and fetal DNA without being attacked by their immune systems? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When the mother becomes pregnant a protein called glycodelin is released in huge quantity around the growing child. This acts as an immunosuppresent since as you say, half the DNA of the foetus is foreign. Immunosuppresents function to minimise effects of the immune system by restricting its activity. Glycodelin has been shown to actually induce apoptosis (programmed cell death, basically a 'tidy' way of getting rid of a cell in a managed way) in activated T cells, which are one of the components of the immune system. There may be other factors at play too, but this is my field and I know this effect to be significant.",
"The placenta is actually only formed by the blastocyst (very early fetus) so is 100% fetal DNA. The placenta acts as an exchange for maternal nutrients to the embryo. The blood vessels of the mother bury into the placenta and pass very closely to the fetal blood vessels which allows for the exchange over the vessels. This allows the mother to give all yhe oxygen, nutrients and immunity to the baby while it is in the womb. The mother also has a reduced immune system during pregnancy which prevents most possible immune reactions. However, sometimes a mother can be \"sensitised\" to the fetal blood. This happens when mother who has a specific blood type, called rhesus D negative, comes into contact with blood that is rhesus D positive. The mother's immune system will create antibodies to the D positive blood (because her body has never encountered D positive blood and treats it as an \"invader\", like your body would treat a bacteria). The exposure to the Rhesus D positive blood most often happens during a first child birth. If the same mother were to have a second child that was also rhesus D positive, her immune system would recognise the same \"invader\" as last time and will create antibodies to fight it. These antibodies are small enough to cross over the boundaries between the maternal blood vessels and the fetal blood vessels. Once the antibodies are in the fetal circulation, they attack the fetus' red blood cells which carry the Rhesus D positive marker. To stop that from happening, a rhesus D negative mother needs an injection after giving birth to stop her body making antibodies against the blood she may have been exposed to in childbirth"
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5suyt4 | How does a Fitbit count your steps so accurately? | I recently got a fit bit and have loved playing around with it but it has kind of terrifying how accurate the step counting is. You can watch the number go up for every single step you take. Well, now I know that it isn't as accurate as I once thought. But, how does the Fitbit count your steps? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"~~It's actually under debate as to whether or not it can accurately track steps during heavy exercise. There's actually a class action lawsuit against Fitbit right now.~~ I was incorrect. The lawsuit is over the heart rate monitor not the step count.",
"It's not very accurate at all. If you've ever worn it to sleep, you'd notice. Sometimes I wake up with 50 extra steps. Or sometimes I get like 30 steps when putting on pants."
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5sv2zb | what exactly is 5G supposed to be and how is it different than 4G LTE? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"At the moment 5G is just a phrase and people do research on how to make things better then 4G. 5G is supposed to be better in any way then LTE. Faster, better energy efficiency, better range, use less bandwidth, etc. It's the next big thing in Communication and that's why there's lots of talk and research about it. But that's about it, still in developement and no facts yet. If there'd be a celebrity magazine for communication technology it would be filled with 5G and IoT at the moment. People love to read about those things and journalists really hype it up, so if you just add \"for 5G\" or \"for IoT\" to the end of your paper you'll have a lot more readers. Only the future will show how 5G will improve the techniques already in use by LTE. At the moment it looks to me like there aren't any big breakthroughs yet that will reinvent communications. So i'd say 5G will be just like LTE, but a little bit better. A lot more interesting to me is that they start to turn of 2G and or 3G to make space for 5G soon - that will have a rather big effect on lots of old phones and make them basically useless."
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5sv8zh | what is the purpose of female genital mutilation and how is it different from circumcision? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It is the removal of the exterior female clitoris and hood of the clitoris. This is the equivalent of removing the penis entirely, rather than just a fold of skin near the tip. It pretty much removes the main sexual pleasure center in most women. The reason is to reduce the woman's sexual pleasure with the intention of making women less likely to want to cheat on future husbands. It basically is used to control women at a sexual level.",
"Female genital mutilation, in the most severe cases, is designed to remove all pleasure from the sex act for women. They are made to not enjoy sex at all. This is intended to keep them loyal to their husbands and put them in their place. While male circumcision is problematic, female genital mutilation would be more like cutting off the entire tip of the penis, if a comparison had to be made.",
"Female genital mutilation or clitorectomy serves to reduce or eliminate sexual pleasure. The thought is that if your wife can not feel pleasure,sexually, she will not cheat on you/ fuck other guys. It's a primitive way to control women in the Muslim community.",
"This is a confusing question. \"Female genital mutilation\" is an entire *class* of mutilations of varying degrees. \"Circumcision\" is one specific *kind* of mutilation within the wider class of \"male genital mutilation.\" It's difficult to compare a class of mutilations to one specific mutilation.",
"There isn't a difference insofar as the underlying motives. One or both or neither is tolerated depending on the culture. The one asymmetry is that male suffering is more easily tolerated in the west than female. FGM used to practiced in the United States by Christians as well."
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5svf6t | What is actually meant by the term Geoeconomics? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"While economics studies the market in a more abstract way, geoeconomics considers the geographical and political factors that affect the market in a given location, such as natural resource availability, isolation, distance from the industrial centers, trade relations with neighbouring countries, etc."
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5svksu | Why is the NEA against school vouchers? | Question says it all | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"NEA is for public school teachers Voucher program will result in more private schools reducing member rates and therefore lowering union dues. Their spoken reason though is they think that voucher program will encourage private schools will raise the cost of education and sacrifice the quality of education.",
"You can read why the NEA opposes it [here]( URL_0 ). While there is some argument that they favor unions - the overall argument is that vouchers have not shown that they lead to any better success than their respective counterparts in public schools (i.e. low income students in public schools did no better than low income students getting a voucher to attend private school). Moreover, vouchers allow the state to fund religious organizations. Sure, sending public money to a Catholic School sounds great - but then you would also have to send money to fund madrasas and maybe the Church of Satan would like to set up Satan Worship Elementary and the state would have to fund that too.",
"This link has the NEA's position on charter schools: URL_1 This link has their position on vouchers: URL_0 The general answers you are going to get in this thread are, I suspect, going to be one of two types: 1.) They are corrupt villains who only care about public school teachers and charter schools will pry education from their stranglehold grip 2.) They are dedicated educators valiantly guarding against vulture capitalists and zealots who aim to cripple the public school system by diverting funds in a way that is political acceptable but will ultimately lead to the collapse of public school funds. Which side you believe, and to what extent you believe it, is sort of beyond ELI5."
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5svmwd | How does soap disinfect? | Both liquid and bar soap disinfect, but how specifically? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There's two general types of soap. But you have to understand how how germs work with humans... generally the microbes hang out and fester in your bodily oils on your skin. Soaps break down that oil and when you rub your body using soap you mechanically scrub the microbes away. Rinsing away the soap with water rinses away the oils and germs with it. That's normal soap.. works fairly well. The longer you scrub, the better job it does at getting rid of germs. Antibacterial soap works in much the same way, except it has chemicals that actually help kill the bacteria such as triclosan, triclocarban, and chloroxylenol. So it's more effective at disinfecting."
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5svtkc | Why do all these businesses open up during income tax season but you have online websites that do it for free? | So why do many websites/companies offer to do it for free, but then you have people opening businesses or doing it as a side job around this season? How do these websites benefit from these filings, or why do they do it for free? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Most websites and services like turbo tax will offer basic services for free and then charge for more custom/complicated services. Similar to in person tax advisors and what not. If you make 50k a year and don't have any deductions filing your taxes is easy. If you got married last year, moved states, just bought a house, are renting out a room in it while also working from home and are raising a kid your taxes are much more complicated and while you can still file with the free services it is much more efficient and potentially rewarding to pay additional fees to get tailored help.",
"If you have small income and uncomplicated taxes, those online websites are made for you. If you have larger issues like you own a business, are married, have a baby, etc., then sometimes going somewhere like a business is better. Some people also prefer to do things in person. I've been going to a CPA that charges me about $175 for my taxes but he's also found me *much* larger refunds since I've been going. The benefit definitely outweighs the cost in my scenario."
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5svvzd | In French, what is the difference between passé composé and imparfait? | This is probably one of the more difficult areas for English speakers learning French. The reason I ask this here instead of r/French us because I'm looking for a simple explanation I can share with other students of French language. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Generally, the passé composé is supposed to be used for specific actions in the past: something happened, and then it was over. The imparfait, on the other hand, is to be used for continuous states in the past, or for actions that were ongoing. I've always thought of them as \"short\" and \"long\" actions, if that helps. So passé composé would be used for things like: **J'ai coupé mes cheveux.** (I cut my hair) **Jimmy a frappé sa soeur.** (Jimmy hit his sister) Both of those were \"short\" actions - they happened, then they were over, pretty much instantly. Now if we try some imparfait: **J'habitais dans New York.** (I lived in New York) **Il pleuvait hier.** (It was raining yesterday.) These are longer actions and they describe a state of being, which doesn't always have to have a specific beginning and end. And you can even combine them in a sentence! **Il pleuvait quand j'ai coupé mes cheveux.** (It was raining when I cut my hair.) One action is a general state of things, the other is very specific, so we can use both tenses in one sentence. Sorry if any of that grammar was a little off, I was much better at French in college... but the stuff about the tenses has never failed me!",
"Passé composé refers to an event that was completed at a moment in the past. \"I was born.\"/\"Je suis né.\" \"I wrote a book.\"/\"J'ai écrit un livre.\" \"It snowed yesterday.\"/\"Il a neigé hier.\" Imparfait, as the name implies, is a process or state of being that was not completed (not perfected) at a more specific moment or period in the past that the sentence talks about. \"I was writing a book when I became a teacher.\"/\"J'écritais un livre quand je suis devenu professeur.\" \"It was snowing at noon yesterday.\"/\"Il neigeait à midi hier.\" Plusque parfait is used if the action was completed even before the specific moment in the past."
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5svwtj | The phenomenon of "infinite mirror images" that occurs when two mirrors are facing opposite of each other. | Explain to me the phenomenon when you are either in a room with mirrors on two walls opposite of one another or when a television broadcast shows a monitor that is also broadcasting the program, and there is the appearance of infinite "mirror images." What causes this, and is there a limit on the number of "mirror images" that are created? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"URL_1 URL_0 You might find these previous posts on the question useful"
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5svyow | Why do major chords make one feel uplifted/happy and minor chords make one feel contemplative/melancholy? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Check this paper out, it's about how minor chords potentially mimic sad human voice and that's why you associate them with sadness. Pretty cool stuff URL_0",
"First of all, let's establish that feelings associated with music are cultural and not just physiological. You're talking about Western music, and that's what I grew up with too. Other cultures might associate different levels of consonance and dissonance with different feelings. Next, let's get to the [harmonic series:]( URL_0 ) anytime you hear a \"note\" on a musical instrument, you're hearing a combination of tones produced by the instrument. The harmonic series is an essential function of sound, and our Western musical scales are based around this series. If you look at the top music staff on that page, you'll see the fundamental note of the example as the very low note. You can listen to the little example to hear that the notes at the beginning fit with one another better than the ones in the middle and the end. Consonance would describe the notes closer to 1, and dissonance would describe the ones farther away. The major third of that fundamental (C) is the 5th harmonic (E), and then again the 10th harmonic (E). You don't have the minor third (E-flat or D-sharp) until the 19th harmonic. The closer those numbers and the corresponding notes are to 1, the closer that note is to being consonant with the fundamental pitch. Consonance will in general sound \"happier\" than dissonance. As a side note and to demonstrate the point, have you ever been to a casino? Many of the machines play a C major chord when one plays, and it seems to me like the machines are tuned together on purpose. The ambient sounds of the slot machines is a continuous major chord with no progression at all. It sounds to me as if time is suspended, because there is no way of measuring time in a chord that never changes. Maybe a clever psychological way of helping a person forget how much time has gone by. Edit: A word I forgot - no."
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5swbqs | How do we breathe? | How does our brain just know to breathe? What part of the brain controls it? What else does that part do? I realize that breathing is involuntary for the most part, but what happens in our brain that causes us to inhale and exhale? Thanks for your help! | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There is a portion of your brain stem that regulates breathing, sending signals to the diaphragm to contract and relax. It adjusts as needed such as increasing depth and rate if CO2 levels in the blood rise."
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5swc1c | Why do adhesive stickers/tape become harder to remove over time? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The adhesive material on the sticker or tape simply hardens over time as it is exposed to the elements and temperature changes. Duct tape left alone as a roll will harden and expire as well if left unused. For a more complex answer, polymers (adhesives in this case) undergo degradation when exposed to heat. URL_0 URL_1"
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5swdk5 | Where does money come from? | Eg I give Billy a dollar for his Babe Ruth rookie card. The physical bill was printed by the Treasury obviously, but where did the value come from? How does the economy grow? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"This is a big question, lets get into it, as simply as possible. Before money, or in places today that do not use money, people traded goods or services for other goods or services. For example I trade some fruit for some wood, and the build you a chair in exchange for a... fishing net. Get the idea? Well we decided thats impractical, and through the social tool of 'agreement' (which is the basis of all laws, governments, markets etc.) decided to use 'money' to represent goods/services to be claimed at a later date. This was extremely helpful since these representations don't spoil, and were easy to use, store etc. So lets put this into our example, I trade fruit for money, I use this to buy wood 2 weeks later, I build a chair and sell it to you for money. I use this money to buy a fishing net in the spring. Money has value because we all agree that it has value, it is not as circular as it seems, but it is fragile. Money only works when we can trust that its value will be recognized by others at a later date. Throughout history we have seen that when this trust fails (corruption, disaster etc.) the value of money is one of the first things to go. This is why you don't see Rick and his friends on the Walking Dead carrying around briefcases of cash, theres no agreement on its value, or trust that such an agreement would hold."
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5swfft | why is a large propane oven with 6 burners safe to use indoors while a small propane camp grill is not? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Small camp grills are portable and cheap. They more likely have poorer burning of the propane or less oxygen supply built in. If you completely burn propane you get carbon dioxide and water. In very large amounts carbon dioxide will suffocate you but its unlikely to build up much. However incomplete burning makes carbon monoxide. This lovely compound in small amounts attaches itself permanently to the molecules that carry oxygen around your body, and its the small amounts made in camp burners that can cause issues in poorer ventilated areas."
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5swfpp | The difference between polarized and non-polarized lenses in sunglasses. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"ELI13: Light travels in two [directions]( URL_0 ) towards our eyes. The vertically polarized light is helpful in our sight; the horizontal polarized light is what we consider 'glare'. It actually interferes with our perceptions of images. Non-polzarized sunglasses filter out ~50% of both vertical and horizontal light, whereas polarized lenses filter out only the horizontally polarized light. EDIT: so many people correcting this 5-sentence explanation for \"accuracy\"....it's explain like I'm FIVE not explain like I have a good working knowledge of photon mechanics....I understand how light travels but let's make the assumption that OP does not. Check my post history for more technical answers about light."
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5swix0 | How do people featured on crime shows depicting illegal activity not get punished? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Um, because it's just a show? They're acting?"
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5swmb4 | How can the human brain be considered more "powerful" than a modern computer? What is used to measure this? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"u/ezbot0 made a really good post already. Info storage and problem solving are both issues for computers currently. However, those aren't the reasons that people talk about the power of the brain vs. a computer. I recently finished a neuroscience class and what I learned was that the brain is more powerful than any computer because of something called computing, or processing. Computers today are really, really good at something known as linear computing. This means they can work, or focus, on 1 problem at a time. This is why calculators work, because it's really easy for a little computer to do a math problem since any math problem can be translated into a linear sequence that can be broken down in a linear fashion. The human brain is really, really, really, incredibly good at something called parallel processing. This means that your brain can focus on and solve multiple problems at one time. Lets assume you're reading this answer on a cell phone. Right now you are holding a cell phone, focusing your eyes, receiving visual data, interpreting that visual data, breathing, your heart is beating, you are maintaining your muscular posture, your organs are functioning.... and so much more. And all of those processes are being controlled by your brain all of the time, the vast majority of which don't require any conscious thought to do. That is the power of the human brain, it can do 100 things all at the same time. No computer on Earth could control so many complex tasks at the same time TL;DR: The human brain is more powerful than a computer because the brain can perform numerous functions at the same time, whereas computers cannot",
"The brain made the computer. Everything the computer can do is a product of what the brain can do."
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5sxb5n | Trickle down economics | Is there any evidence to suggest it works or doesn't work? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There is vast evidence that it does not work, in the end, at best viewed as a \"cleaver wording\" or intentionally misleading term. Basically its just a way to give higher level people more money, under the guise of helping the low level folks. The wording makes it seem as that money will eventually make its way down to the lower levels... but it never really does. Basically the money really doesn't \"trickle down\" except in tiny fragments, its still kept at the top Some sources: URL_3 URL_1 URL_2 URL_4 URL_0",
"Trickle down economics is the Regan-era name given to is the school of thought that holds that deregulation of the private sector and tax breaks for corporations and the wealthiest citizens will benefit the middle and working class because the expansion of business from the top will create more job opportunities for the bottom. Edit: There is more evidence of it actually having slowed the growth of the economy at the time. URL_0"
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"https://www.hks.harvard.edu/news-events/publications/impact-newsletter/archives/autumn-2009/trickle-down-economics-revisited",
"http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/economic-theory-science-scam/",
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5sxbql | Why do people who cut soda or alcohol out of their diet lose a significant amount of weight, but people who don't drink either struggle to lose weight? | I'm not overweight but am intending to lose weight and struggling. I don't drink soda or alcohol either. Had a friend just tell me he lost 5kgs just from cutting soda and alcohol out of his diet and it's a noticeable physical change too. Thanks everyone. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"soda and alcohol contain a ton of calories relative to what your actually getting in terms of content so much so that people often don't realize. For many people just by cutting those drinks out they are creating a huge hole in their calorie intake and thus lose weight without really noticing because you can easily drink water among other things that contain little to no calories that will quench your thirst while still eating the same amounts of food. If you never drunk either before though and you still managed to gain wait then you're just plain over eating on the food side of things.",
"Because people who cut it out are cutting out a significant portion of their calories. People who don't drink either were taking in too many calories from other sources."
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5sxi0t | What is the reason to the sound of words having a "feeling" to it, matching its definition? | Sorry I'm probably explaining this terribly, but when I think of the word "concrete" or "brick" I think of the characteristics of concrete and brick, and "pillow" and "feather" just seem like softer words to me. Is that because I associate the word with its definition, or was the word made to sound like its definitions characteristics? Or am I just going crazy? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"We as humans evolved to associate things. For example when I think of kitten I also think of soft or cute. our brain does this to link things and experiences to bad or good memories, making it easily identifiable as good or bad. If you've had a bad injection from a new nurse its likely that the next time you need blood drawn or a flu shot you will be afraid or reluctant. This also would help us in our primal days, if you see your friend get eaten by a lion, its likely next time you see a lion you'd run or hide. This also occurs when we eat bad food, if you eat food and get sick afterwards your brain will link that experience to the food. this can sometimes be bad though. There is a (for lack of a better word) disorder (yet again not bad and in some cases boosts mental cognition) called synesthesia that links senses like color and sound, meaning that as someone hears a sound they also see it. This can also happen with any other combinations of senses IE: taste and hearing. A lot of say synesthesia is a blessing rather than curse though. Hope I've been helpful.",
"This is a complicated one, because on the one hand most words are completely arbitrary (there is nothing actually brick-like about the word \"brick\"), but on the other there seems to be a correlation between sounds and concepts. For example, look at [this image]( URL_0 ). One of those shapes is called \"kiki\", the other is called \"bouba\"; but which do you think is which? The vast majority of people will automatically answer that the spiky shape is \"kiki\" -- and this is consistent across languages and cultures all over the world. So at some deep level, there does seem to be a connection in our minds. Looking at the words themselves, \"concrete\", \"brick\" and \"kiki\" all have the \"k\" sound, which in phonetics is written [k]. This sound is pronounced at the back of the mouth, and involves first completely stopping the airflow, then releasing it very suddenly -- a type of sound called a \"stop\" or a \"plosive\". With \"pillow\", \"feather\" and \"bouba\", most of the consonants are pronounced at the front of the mouth: [p], [f], [ð] (the \"th\" sound in \"feather\") and [b]; also, [l] is pronounced fairly near the front of the mouth. Two of those consonants are stops (the [p] and [b]), but they're pronounced at the front of the mouth, and [b] is \"voiced\" (meaning you also use your vocal cords). All the other consonants are \"fricatives\" (meaning the airflow isn't stopped, but is forced out between the articulators, meaning the tongue, teeth or lips), except [l] which is a \"lateral approximant\" (the air flows around the sides of the tongue). In other words, when saying the \"softer\" words, you don't stop the airflow so often; and when saying the \"harsher\" words, you stop the airflow more often, and often at the back of the mouth. But this isn't a universal rule: it sometimes gets overridden. Take the word \"kitten\", which you almost certainly associate with something cute and cuddly: it begins with [k] -- and so do the words \"cute\" and \"cuddly\". The word \"monster\", on the other hand, ought to belong to the group of \"softer\" words just going by the sounds, but describes something scary and dangerous. So, there's something very complicated going on here. The Bouba-Kiki effect demonstrates that at a very basic level, we associate certain sounds with certain concepts. But we don't always stick to this rule, and the actual definition of the word is sometimes more important than the pronunciation."
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5sxsbl | 65% of people worldwide are lactose intolerant, especially in Africa and Asia, where rates of 90% aren't uncommon. But I've eaten cheese-covered pizza all over the world with people of all national origins and never once has anyone had a problem...how? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When making cheese a lot of the lactose is separated in the whey that is pressed out of the solid curd that makes the cheese. What lactose that is left in the cheese is often consumed by bacteria and fungi during the maturation process of the cheese. So there are many varieties that can be eaten by people who are lactose intolerant and only those with the most severe intolerance reactions will have problems with it."
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5sxudo | What is frame invariance? | A little background on this. I'm working on worldbuilding for a novel I have an idea for, and I got this from the mailing list that I was asking for some help with the consequences of the method of FTL travel I was working on: > It just seems to me that new physics that justifies FTL jump points > ought to be based on frame invariance, just like everything else. > Otherwise, how does the universe know that some particular two-body > system is special? I have never herd of frame invariance, and my background is geared more towards building websites than writing n-body algorithms. I looked it up, and the wikipedia page on it basically hit me between the eyes with the math which I didn't have the math-fu to understand. I'm not planning on coming up with some mathematical formula for my universe's FTL. I just need to know what frame invariance is in layman's terms so I can at least get something sound enough to fit with the rest of the universe without making physicists cringe. | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Reference frame invariance means it doesn't change depending on what reference frame you're in. Sometimes it's easiest with examples. So what are some things are are *NOT* frame invariant? Velocity—your velocity is entirely dependent on what reference frame you're on. From your own reference frame, you are moving at 0 m/s. From the reference frame of someone in a car driving towards you, you are traveling at 30 m/s. This then means that kinetic energy and momentum also vary with reference frames. The energy of a photon also varies depending on your reference frame. What is reference frame invariant? Mass—the reason why is actually a bit complicated (these days, mass is defined as the length of the 4-momentum), but it's invariant. **the laws of physics** and this is a big one. A major postulate in physics is that no matter what reference frame you're in, physics is the same. F=ma when you're standing still and when you're in a train. What the user is talking about is that if you make shit up for FTL, it shouldn't be based around reference frame. You shouldn't have something like \"if you travel at 200,000 m/s, you enter a warphole\". Because there's a reference frame *right now* in which *you* are traveling at 200,000 m/s, and it's just as valid as any other reference frame you construct. In other words, it's just as valid to say you're moving at 5 m/s, 40 m/s, 100,000 m/s, 99.9999% the speed of light as it is to say that you're moving at 0 m/s. It all depends on reference frame. There is no universe reference frame. So your made up physics should adhere to this."
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5sxwci | Why do the sun and the moon appear to be the same size? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Due to cosmic coincidence, the ratio of the size and distance to the sun and Moon are nearly identical.",
"The Sun is bigger, but it's also further away. Just like you can hold your thumb out and cover up the Sun with it: it's not that your thumb's the same size as the Sun, it's that it's closer. ELI15: Angular size in degrees can be calculated: \\(size x 57.29\\) / distance. [According to Wikipedia]( URL_0 ), the Sun has a radius of 695,700 km (and so, a diameter of 1,391,400 km) and an average distance of 1.496*10^8 km. Plugging all that in, you get an angular size of 0.533 degrees. If you mapped out the sky with a protractor, that's how much of an angle would contain the Sun. If you do the same equation with the Moon you get an average of 0.518 degrees, so about the same angular size as the Sun. Again, it's all about size vs distance."
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5sxy9o | why the image of black and white television was so much sharper than the first several years of color television. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Cathode ray tube TVs worked by having an electron gun draw each line of the image, one by one, around 30 times a second. The beam form the gun would strike a phosphor (think pixel), the strong the beam, the more brightly the phosphor glow. By adjusting the power of the beam at just the right times, a moving image was created. Color TVs use three electron guns, and each \"pixel\" consists of three phosphors. That made the pixels larger, and less sharp to begin with. Also, it could be difficult to keep the electron guns in adjustment. With a B & W TV, the whole image would shift over a pixel, you wouldn't notice that much. But with a color TV, two guns could be hitting adjacent (or worse) pixels when they should be aimed at the same one, which would also contribute to a less sharp picture."
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5sy12t | Why do some scientists warn about AI becoming self aware? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because we don't know what it will be capable of or what it's intentions will be. If an AI becomes capable of improving itself it could become out of control and escalate it's abilities, and without morals it could go on as rampage destroying financial systems, traffic systems, power grid infrastructure, all kinds of things. We can understand the motives of a hacker or a terrorist but what an AI want to do could be beyond comprehension.",
"When people think about AI and the risks involved, they typically jump to the terminator or some other similar story. The problem with these examples is that they assume that a machine would think in a way similar to humans, but we know that they don't. Humans have an inherent self preservation instinct. Humans have their own wants or desires. Humans want to be free. A machine has none of these things unless we give it to them which would be sort of pointless in most cases. If you were developing an AI that kept track of the stock market and figured out when to buy and sell stocks, giving it a desire to be free of its human users would be pretty stupid. Now, that isn't to say that there aren't serious potential risks. This video has a thought experiment that illustrates what sort of problems we might run into with AI. The whole thing is worth watching, but the example starts at around 2:30 URL_0"
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5sy38v | Why do websites only display a small part of an article with a button "Read More" that displays the rest? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"the button click is recorded and it means the user is a human that expresses interest in the article content more than just the headline/first paragraph. this is a data point for creating a more accurate user profile's interests."
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5sy5nk | Why does the iPhone require a passcode after restart if the fingerprint scanner is secure? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"As was made famous by the FBI/Apple confrontation from last year, recent iPhones do a pretty decent job of encrypting all content stored in the phone. The way the encryption works is that the *master key*—the big, 256-bit secret number that's required to decode the phone's contents—is never stored in the phone's permanent memory, but rather reconstructed when it's needed. Reconstructing the master key requires two pieces of information: * The phone's secret unique ID, stored in the processor when it is built; * The passcode selected by the user. The fingerprint scanner cannot be used for this, because it's an *inexact* scanner that doesn't produce the same result twice. It's like taking two photos of the same person—you can recognize that it's the same person in the two photos, but the photos won't be identical. But reconstructing the master key requires an exact match—something that's possible with a passcode but not with a fingerprint scanner. So the phone uses the fingerprint scanner to reduce the frequency at which you'd need to reenter your passcode. The phone can only use your fingerprint to let you in when the master key is available in temporary memory. Restarting the phone loses the content of the temporary memory, so you must reenter the passcode.",
"because the finger print scanner is not secure. It was created out of a need to be more secure without sacrificing usability. The finger print scanner stops your friend from being able to pick up and go through your phone, but it will not stop a determined actor from gaining access as your fingerprints are everywhere (including on the phone that they unlock). The thought behind the passcode on restart is to verify that you are the owner of the phone and that while it is turned on you will provide the necessary security.",
"Because you need a warrant for the password, and cops can scan your finger onto your phone as legally as they can your finger onto a finger print card. TLDR: turn off your iPhone if ever arrested. Edit: in the US anyway."
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5sy6ww | Which would cause more damage: 2 equal sized cars ramming head on, both going 60mph OR 2 equal sized cars, 1 parked, the other going 120mph? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Roughly the same. One major postulate of physics is that all reference frames are equally valid. So there is no difference between two cars moving towards each other each at 60 and one car moving towards the other at 120. I say roughly, because in real life there's retarding forces, material properties, and several other factors which will impact what happens. But in theory, the two are the same. In fact, there's no distinguishing from the two situations. edit: an additional answer from Quora > We assume cars of equal mass, and the collision is inelastic. Then, yes, it's equivalent. You can think of this as a result of (ordinary) relativity. In the 120+0 case, consider moving in a reference frame that is going 60mph w.r.t. the earth. Then it is clear; you would see nothing different than if you were stationary and the cars do 60+ -60. > But you may ask: Does not the 120+0 case have twice the initial kinetic energy than the two 60's case? (120^2 is 4 times 60^2+60^2) The answer to this is that the combined mass of the two cars in the 120+0 case, by conservation of momentum, continues to travel at 60mph. Thus not all, but only half, the initial kinetic energy is used up in the collision.",
"Both cases are identical. They might seem different, but the energy expelled in collision will be the same. case one (+60, -60, stationary observer): they collide and stop at the point of collision energy before collision: **2 x mass x speed^2** energy after collision: zero (both stationary) case two (+120, 0, stationary observer): they collide and move at 60mph together after collision (conservation of mementum) energy before collision: mass x (2 x speed)^2 = 4 x mass x speed^2 energy after collision: 2 x mass x speed^2 energy expelled in collision: (4 x mass x speed^2) - (2 x mass x spped^2) = **2 x mass x speed^2** in both cases energy difference between initial and ending conditions is the same, so the damage will be the same. Also, you can look at the same incident from a different reference frame. Say, I pick a frame that moves at 60mph along one of the cars. This will exactly reverse the case one and case two situations: in case one they continue to move after collision(they actually stop, but the observer is still moving)."
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5sya3o | Why does drinking increase the amount of hiccups. I'm drunk. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You know how alcoholic beverages are fermented? During fermentation, CO2 is released during the conversion of pyruvate to acetaldehyde. (With modern beer, I think artificial carbonation is usually performed as well because we like carbonated stuff). So, when you drink five or six or seven drinks, that carbonation causes your stomach to expand. When that happens, the phrenic nerve is irritated and your diaphragm involuntarily spasms."
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5synfr | is bubbly soapy water as antibacterial as putting soap directly on dishes? | Also I want to know if the bubbles themselves clean or are just a residue of the soap. When the bubbles die down is it still able to clean as effectively? [ELI5] | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Anti bacterial properties are due to antimicrobial chemicals in the soap, anti microbial chemicals work on 3 criteria, exposure, concentration and duration of contact. Bubbles in the detergent are due to its emulsifying properties, meaning detergents can allow oil and water to mix. So yes bubbles clean oils and grease but antibiotics, heat, pressure and time kill microbes. Cheers!"
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5synup | How is signing an official document (contract, form, etc.) considered safe when it can be forged or mistreated so easily? | Examples include: - putting a fake signature (nobody checks signature authenticity, and later on you can object to having signed the document) - printing extra characters after signing - attaching extra pages - someone copying your signature onto a different form, claiming you signed it It feels like it is widely accepted and people are genuine about it, but is it not easy to forge, and as a result, highly unreliable? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Fake Signatures: This is a form of fraud, and a fraud investigation will ensue. For significant and important documents alternate forms of identification are often part of the record, such as a copy of a Drivers License, Social Security number, copy of a Birth Certificate, etc. If fake versions of these are also prevented several other counts of fraud/forgery have taken place, and/or identity theft. Extra Characters: There is typically an indication that a statement or number has ended, such as a full stop or dash, or they will be justified/aligned to prevent further words or figures from being added. Significant numbers are also often rendered in both words and digits, as when writing a check. (\"Five Hundred Dollars and No Cents $500.00) Further steps are taken for preventing more significant alterations from being made. See below. Extra Pages: If a page has significant content on it, or disjointed content that doesn't logically flow from the surrounding pages, and additional signature or initial is often required for the significant page/clause. Both parties should also have a copy of the contract or document. Copying of Signature/ Forgery: Forgery is difficult, and there are people who are specifically trained to confirm a signature is a forgery and argue that point in court. Some further points: The signing of important documents, especially outside the realm of licensed businesses, is typically done in the presence of a Notary Public in the US and other places. This is someone who is certified to witness the signing of documents and stamp them indicating they were witnessed and are authentic copies. They log these transactions, and would have to conspire in the fraud. This makes it a much larger crime that is much more difficult to conceal. But the bottom line is the reason it's considered secure by most people is because a lot of effort goes into preventing, then detecting fraud and convicting the perpetrators, and despite its flaws and potential for abuse it generally works.",
"1. Forging is significantly harder than it appears and there are entire professions surrounding the art of authenticating documents and the like to determine the validity of signatures. 2. The reason that it is always recommended that you \"save a copy for your records\" is not only for you to reference but also so you can produce in the event a different contract is produced 3. More important documents, like ones signed for making large purchases use carbon paper to further re-enforce the above points.",
"In addition to what is in the other answers, the other side of the equation is also important. If a paper has to be signed, the idea is that you will remember signing it if you did so. They sometimes let people sign with an X or a mark, which could be even more easily forged. But this is because the idea is not just to be able to have the document stand on its own, but to ensure that the parties to the document are more likely to remember what happened and when and what the document said."
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5sysb3 | How can people hold up someone being tasered without being electrocuted themselves? | When I was in 8th grade we learned how electrical current worked at a Science Museum to an extent. We all held hands and one person was shocked and we all felt it (Que powerlines). How is it that someone being tasered for their passage to carry a taser is held up by both arms by people and the people supporting them don't feel it? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Electricity takes the path of least resistance to complete a circuit. Since a taser attaches both contacts to the victim relatively close to each other, the electricity has no reason to flow through anything else, it just goes from one contact to the other."
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5syxuz | Playstation/Xbox CD's copy protection, how does it work? | How does playstation or xbox games on cd's copy protection work? I mean I know you can't put disc into optical drive on your PC and clone it to blank blu-ray disc, I mean it will work but disc wont be recognized by console (Not sure if this changed but back when PS1 was a thing I tried it and it didn't work). So how does copy protection work? I mean if software like Nero clones data on disc identically onto blank disc, how can console see it's cloned? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"One method of optical media copy protection relies on the fact that legit media is pressed on specialized factories while pirated media is burned with home devices. When you burn an optical media you cannot control topologically where each piece of data will be located. Also, you cannot introduce intentional flaws and unconventional ways to write data. However, the common optical reader is able to pinpoint the physical location of each piece of data (sectors/clusters) and/or malformations. To check if the media is legit, it's only a matter to analyze how the data and reading errors are physically distributed through the media. Pressed media will *always* have exact the same configuration. In the other hand, to override the DRM validation, the game data should be written alongside a table containing where each sector was supposed to be located by describing the general topology and characteristics of the media. A tampered media reader would read this table, report as legit information and lure the console into believing that it is indeed an original disc."
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5syzqz | Why do all sci-fi space helmets now have ambient lights on the inside? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's most likely just for cinematography's sake, it keeps the actors/actresses photogenic and easy to visually identify. It would unlikely ever be practical for the same reasons driving with your interior lights on is not practical.",
"A dark mask expresses very little emotion, which is why a bad guy will generally have no light. If you're paying, let's say, Chris Hemsworth as your helmet wearing hero you're damn well going to show his face and get those tickets sold through a little ambient light. Kind of the same reason a dark room is sometimes showed as a blue ambient light because a fully dark room serves little purpise unless there's a jump scare coming."
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5sz3wi | Why can we see in our products which country they were produced in? | Just noticed that with everything we buy, a little tag that says "Made in [country]" comes with it. Is it some sort of global agreement? Is there a treaty to it? Do companies all over the world just do it because it's become convention? Thanks!! | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If you live in the USA it's because of government regulations that require a country of origin on most products."
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5szdv4 | How do we know/guess how many died in historic plagues? | Hello all, I've done a bit of hunting on the web, but don't seem to be able to clear this up- how do historians arrive at a number for epidemic- related death tolls? Wikipedia lists epidemics going back centuries, and some of the numbers dead for the Antonine Plague/Black Death are truly astronomical- but it got me thinking- how do they know? I don't doubt many died, but to even get within an order of magnitude of the correct number would seem to be tricky if you are looking back a millennia or so. Anyone got any experience in this field? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> but it got me thinking- how do they know? People wrote stuff down. Even back then it was important if people died, and keeping track of population was important for things like taxation. Researchers can look at a period of time and see how the deaths differed from normal and deduce about how many people died from a certain plague."
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5szkz0 | how do scientists fire just a single elementary particle? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Usually they do not. For example the Large Hadron Collider emits protons in bunches of 100 billion. [source.]( URL_0 )",
"They don't, but they do clever things like fire a very small stream of them (lets say photons, particles of light) and then put a bunch of \"filters\" between the beam and the target detector. In many cases there are filters which only let light with a particular polarization through, and if you work it correctly according to the power of your beam, you can work out a system that lets a SINGLE photon hit your detector each time you \"fire\" it. This is how you can see shot noise build up to form a full image, or watch individual photons form, over time, interference patterns on a plate."
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5szmsa | The UK home owning system | I can't really get my head around the UK housing system. What is a freehold? What is a leasehold? What are the issues one should be aware when having one or the other? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Freehold means you own the house and you own the land it's on. Leasehold means you own the house, but you're leasing the land it's on. The leases tend to be valid for very long times. You'd usually have a lease of 100+ years. If there is less than that left on the lease it will lower the value of the property because at some point it needs to be extended, which costs money. You also have to pay ground rent on a leasehold. It's not much money compared to renting a house itself. For example I paid £50 a year in ground rent for a flat. Generally for houses freehold is better. But flats are often leasehold, because that land contains other homes too.",
"Simply put freehold and leasehold situation refers to who owns the land that the house is built on. If you own the freehold then you can do whatever you like with the house, its all yours forever. However with a leasehold then someone else owns the land and you are just leasing it and the property. The lease is usually from 60 to 999 years, and a 'peppercorn' ground rent must be paid every year, this is usually a small value (mine is £15). When you buy a leasehold, you are just buying the right to the property for the remaining duration of the lease, whether it is 80 years or 999, after this time ownership reverts to the freeholder who owns the land. For this reason, if the lease has ticked down to 40 years or less then the property can be essentially worthless, because by the time you've paid off a mortgage the property would only be yours for a few years before ownership reverts to the freeholder. Although with some negotiation you can renew the lease with the freeholder, this gets more expensive the closer it gets to running out."
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5szsoo | How is it possible to film light passing and bouncing of a mirror? | [This post]( URL_0 ) from /r/gifs seems to claim that's what's going on. Isn't light to fast? How is something like this achieved? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They use extremely fast camera shutters to capture a very short moment so you can see the light beam. However they can not reset the camera in time for the next frame so they cheat a bit by sending a new beam of light for the next frame. They make sure to synchronize the short beams of light with the camera shutter but offset it a bit so the beam will appear to move forward a bit for every frame. It is actually a different beam for every frame but the same setup.",
"Light is fast, but what do you think is captured by a regular camera if not light? If a single camera can't take multiple pictures fast enough use several cameras with correct timing set and then reassemble photos into animation."
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5szw31 | how it is ensured website domain names are unique when there are hundreds of hosting services | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Hosting does not equal the management and sales of domain names. A host is a service that offers you webspace (i.e. the storage of your files that is accessible via the internet), basically the host is a company that builds and/or sells the house the homepage \"lives\" in. The domain is the \"address\" however and that will be centrally managed. Companies that offer you to \"buy\" a domain basically do either of two things: * They only manage the registration with the central registration for you, acting like somebody who files paperwork for your newly build home or * They sell you an already existing domain, acting like a realtor.",
"They have people who keep track of this information at a place everyone has access to. It is called [internic]( URL_0 )."
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5szx75 | What makes music sound good? what causes it to release dopamine in the brain? | im asking about the process that happens between the time you listen to the musical piece (anything good to the listener) and until it feels good. what happens in between? why are specific tones, frequencies and pitches sync with the brain's pleasure center? especially if you hear music for the first time | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Others have attempted to answer your question regarding the biological processes by which music is interpreted by the brain as *music* rather than just a collection of repetitive sounds. But I don't see anyone taking a stab at explaining why certain sounds are \"pleasant\" or \"unpleasant.\" It turns out that there is a fairly wide range of diversity between cultures on that point. I'm not talking about the contrast between, say, hardcore punk and baroque fugues. Distinctions between harmony and counterpoint aside, both of those are firmly located in the Western musical tradition and are largely indistinguishable in terms of their musical theory. Their \"opinions\" as to what sounds \"happy\" and what sounds \"sad\", for instance, are basically identical. Both of those genres have far more to do with each other than either has to do with, say, Eastern European polyphonic vocal traditions, which make significant use of intervals that Western music, for the most part, deliberately avoids. Or some Indonesian traditions which use instruments intentionally designed in such a way that when they are properly tuned, they produce the same kind of frequency beats that are the hallmarks of what defines an instrument as being *out* of tune in the Western tradition. So yes, we have a pretty good idea as to what happens, biologically/neurologically, when we hear sounds/music that we consider to be pleasant. But exactly *what* sounds/music any particular individual or culture perceives to be pleasant appear to be almost entirely arbitrary functions of human culture.",
"1. When we expect something and we get it, it feels good. Music is made primarily up of patters, and when the pattern yields a certain set of notes that you expected to hear, it feels good. Imagine striking the keys of a piano descending order and making a full octave. It's not a stretch to say that the final note it what makes it. If the last note were to be something disharmonious however, that would pretty much ruin the progression. A single melody isn't the whole picture though, there are patterns of expectation and reward on smaller and larger scales. One might argue that the notes themselves yield a micro pattern of expectation and reward. An a note gives way to a c note, etc. the song as a whole also follows a pattern. If y hear a certain progression of notes, the listener expects to hear directly afterwards another certain progression of notes. this is most likely why listening to a song after the tenth time playing sometimes feels better than that first time. When we expect something and we get it it makes us happy. Surprise also plays a role too. When we expect something and we get something different, we also like it. We don't want to get bored. This is why 99.99% of music is a carful mix of repetition, expectation/reward, and surprise.",
"Neuroscientist here... Music doesn't cause \"dopamine release\" in the brain. It's a pop-culture myth that feelings of happiness / euphoria / reward / etc. are due to dopamine release. The underlying truth is that *one* of the many dopaminergic circuits in the brain appears to be active when an unexpected good (OR BAD) event happens. But the release of dopamine in that circuit doesn't directly affect the rest of the brain, just like release of the neurotransmitter glutamate (the most common excitatory neurotransmitter in the brain) in your visual cortex doesn't directly affect the rest of your brain... Neurotransmitters have *local* effects, by definition. Additionally, that circuit I mentioned *also* involves at least a half-dozen other neurotransmitters besides dopamine. including acetylcholine, glutamate, GABA, glycine, phenethylamine, tyramine, and serotonin. We call it a \"dopaminergic\" circuit, but in truth it's no more dopaminergic than it is glutamatergic, or GABAergic, or glycinergic, or serotonergic... Et cetera. **tl;dr:** There is a brain circuit that is *very tangentially* related to reward, but it does NOT simply fire whenever something feels good. That brain circuit contains dopamine releasing neurons, but so do a lot of other brain circuits. This circuit also contains neurons that release at least a half dozen other neurotransmitters. We can stop saying \"pleasure = dopamine release\" now.",
"Here's one theory... Music is communication, just like a conversation. The frequencies used in music to convey emotion are [similar in pattern]( URL_0 ) to the frequencies used in speech to convey the same emotions. So for example when we hear a sad song, the notes and their corresponding frequencies are mimicking the patterns we'd hear in the phrases used by a person who was talking about something sad. And differences in Eastern and Western musical scales is indicating the difference in frequency and cadence of the common languages of those regions.",
"[This]( URL_0 ) is an amazing book on the subject. Well worth the read. Guy's a former pro musician turned neurosurgeon. It's amazing.",
"The sense of musical beauty and emotion is created by the presence of tension and release. I'll explain how this plays out in the domains of harmony, rhythm, and melody. When we talk about harmony we are are talking abut how different pitches (musical notes) sound when combined. If we play two pitches at the same time and look at the ratios of their frequencies, the ones with simpler ratios such as 1:1, 1:2, 1:3, 1:4 sound pure and restful. Those with more complex ratios sound less so, and in some contexts may even sound ugly. We call this restfulness consonance and the opposite dissonance. It varies from culture to culture and over style periods exactly where to draw the line between consonant and dissonant, but in general movement from complexity to simplicity results in a feeling of tension and release. In rhythm, we are dealing with placing musical notes in time, so imagine this as being the horizontal axis of music. Most music has the concept of the pulse or beat. Patterns of beats create a feeling of strong and weak beats which when manipulated give a sense of motion and direction. Think of walking; before you can take a step you must first lift your foot. At the moment your foot is in the air, it is like a weak beat in music, and when it comes down this is the string beat. Just like when your foot is suspended in air, there is a natural urge for it to come back down, so is the urge for the weak beat to progress to the strong beat. Melody, or the tunefulness of a musical passage, is created by the interaction of dissonance and consonance and the weak-strong beat structure. We also take into consideration the melodic contour. Generally speaking, a rising line builds tension and a descending one releases it. Wide leaps create more tension than stepwise motion. For example take the tune \"Somewhere Over the Rainbow.\" It begins with the leap of an octave, which is a wide interval so we start the tune of with a dramatic expression that builds tension, followed by progressively smaller leaps in the 3rd and 5th measures. The phrase resolves with stepwise motion leading back to the same note it begins on. With a bit of quick explaining of the mechanisms behind what makes music work, I hoped to share what is actually going on from a musical perspective. I cannot really speak to the biological response because I am not a doctor or scientist, but it is my belief as a musician and music teacher that these processes can be understood intuitively, and the pleasure we feel when playing and hearing music is from the mind being subtly engaged in tracking all of this beautiful order.",
"Full time music producer here: What makes music satisfying is exactly what makes a good story, movie, or joke satisfying. Anticipation is set up to receive something, and then we receive that thing in a way we didn't expect. I.e. We know Taylor Swift will sing the title of the song at the end of a chorus and end the chorus melody on the tonic note. Even if we don't know that logically, we've heard the pattern enough times that we have a deep Pavlovian expectation. What we don't know is what path she'll take to get to that note, or what lyrical context she'll put the title in. If she can do both of these things in a way we didn't expect, it's the perfect amount of relieving and surprising to feel like a mini orgasm",
"RadioLab actually did an incredible podcast on this but I can't remember exactly which one it is. If I recall correctly, the basis of the podcast was about how hearing is actually a form of touch. When the audio signals are sent to the brain, music that sounds \"happy\" (mostly major keys) creates an even quarter note type pattern. Music that sounds \"sad\" (mostly minor keys) creates spastic, uneven patterns as it is sent to the brain to interpret. The patterns of the first and chaos of the second are the catalysts to the way we \"feel\" when listening to music. I'm not sure if it's the same episode or not but they also did a piece on a ballet (I want to say it was Stravinsky but I don't recall exactly and can't check right now). The music centered around a type of chord that had been outlawed and was not common at all in music back then. Since people had never heard the chord, they literally went crazy because of the chaotic patterns it created in the transfer from ear to brain. They rioted. A year later, when people wanted to see this show that caused a riot, they were expecting the chaos and ended up carrying the conductor out on their shoulders. I may not be recalling all of this information perfectly but that is the gist of it. I highly recommend checking out RadioLab.",
"I remember reading a while back about there being (untested) theories about certain wave frequencies hitting the ear apparatus and cranium which are perceived as pleasant by the brain at a low/subconscious level before \"filters\" like taste or preference are applied, so music in harmonic resonance with those frequencies can be said to be \"good\". Tried to find the article, couldn't find it. Sorry.",
"what about people who don't like music? is there some biological entity missing?",
"To put it very shortly and coming up with a legitimate universal reason - that applies to all genres, ethnicities etc etc: The human brain interprets music as a mathematical and thus logical unit. (agreeing that music is merely sounds defined within a combined yet distinctable rhythmic and tonal spectra). And when exposed to sound in a understable order, that we (aka our brains) can recognize - we get a kick or sensation of subconscious arousal (dopamine, endorphin etc) This is mostly due to a pattern recognition in the brain that rewards the listener as he/she either predicted the combined set of rhythmic and tonal complexity or found logic in a new unpredicted one. This gives you the: \"hey I am smart kick\" (still subconsciously) to put it simply. as we keep on listening we expand our understanding and horizon for these \"challanges\" in general. And that is why some people rather listen to jazz than to modern pop. To dive further into the subject of genres and why: The reason (shitty #sorrynotsorry) monoton pop-songs - is the most popular, is because its only played in 4/4's and with a maximum of 4 chords. This makes the interpretation process easier for the majority of the peer group that hasn't gone much into the music itself, but rather listen to the lyrics. (which has nothing to do with music in that sense) This is also why the standard pop guitarist plays 4 chords in front of an audience of 5000. and the jazz pianist plays 5000 chords in front of an audience of 4.",
"If nobody has suggested it yet, you should pick up a copy of 'This Is Your Brain On Music by Daniel Levitin. He's a cognitive psychologist, neuroscientist, writer, musician, and record producer. Fascinating read.",
"Can you be addicted to music induced dopamine release? I would assume yes, at least partially.",
"I want to know what happens in the brain, exactly, when pleasant or unpleasant (depending on the listener) songs are listened to. Like why do some genres sound so bad to some, but are the holy grail for others? Edit; grammar.",
"AI researcher here: No one brought the up the fact that the brain is one big pattern analysis and prediction machine. If you were ever surprised by anything then that's because your brain predicted/expected other things to happen. Music is a temporal sequence of sounds and the brain does naturally try to predict the future notes, harmonies and sound patterns. Improvements in your ability to predict are naturally rewarded internally... This is pretty much alike the rewarding feeling when having the *aha* moment of understanding something difficult.",
"With all of this talk about the pleasure laying in the predictability and surprise of patterns, basically breaking music down to math and anticipation, is there any thoughts on pleasure or enjoyment being because the sound and its sensation is simply likable? Like how I can expect or not expect to see boobs, or feel silk, or any other nice thing. Those sensations, expected or not, patterned or not, are awesome. Similarly I never want to be burned, or hear nails on a chalkboard. How come I'm not seeing all that much about sounds being enjoyable, cultural tastes considered or not? Even the few posts I saw addressing cultural considerations are mostly about expecting different patterns or tones. I get that music will, by default, include enjoyable sounds rather than bad ones, but even considering that patterns in melody, tone, beat, etc... are necessary is there something to be said for tones or beats just being enjoyable on their own? Like how (pardon my like of technical terms, I'm not a music expert) a driving bass-line in heavy metal brings about feelings of aggression? How the voice of a young woman can bring about happiness and slight arousal? What about certain beats that have a basic pattern which humans can dance to or which encourage dancing, and these basic patterns are noticeable in a variety of physically similar dance/musical traditions? So what part does enjoyment of a sound play in enjoyment of music? You can set Styrofoam squeaks to the same beat as a Queen song, but it won't make me feel anything nearly like it, whether I anticipate it or not. Is there a musical style where the enjoyment of this type of sound is not steeped in tradition and cultural associations? I've heard of music being introduced to foreign people, where the sounds are foreign to them, but they still enjoy the music. This seems like there is a basic enjoyment of sound, rather than music enjoyment just being anticipation, subliminal math, and cultural references."
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5t06c0 | Why is it that the sprinkle of a hot shower is cold yet the water is hot? | I understand that the water beforehand is cold and therefore the beginning of the stream would be cold but why are the sprinkle cold? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It has to do with the difference between temperature and heat. When we feel heat, it's the energy in the water transfering to our skin. Temperature is one thing that determines how much energy the water will release (the higher the temperature, the more energy is released as heat). The other thing that determines how much energy is released is how much water there is. A water droplet of a certain temperature can only contain so much energy. A bucket of water has many more droplets, and so it can contain a lot more energy. Droplets in the shower sprinkle simply don't have enough energy to release for us to really feel like it's 'hot'. The shower, however, itself is made of a lot more droplets, and even streams of water, so all together there's enough energy for us to feel it. There's a similar effect with aluminium foil as well. When you take the foil out of the oven, the temperature is 400 degrees, but if you pinched the sheet you couldn't possibly burn yourself because the foil is too thin to hold enough energy for that."
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5t06e8 | When writing an amount of money, such as '£50' or '50p', why does the '£' come before the amount of money but the 'p' comes after? | I guess the same logic applies to American currency with '$50' and '50c' (I don't have the symbol for cent on my laptop). I'm just wondering why money values have the larger symbols ahead of their money, but the lesser values always come after? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's a quick glance tactic to avoid mistakes. If there is not a 0 and a decimal written before the number, one might actually misread ¢50 as $50 or vice versa, so the ¢ was after the amount. This was more prevalent in days of handwritten books as the two symbols were really only one curved stroke apart from each other. However, the presence of the 0 and decimal point can work just fine in electronic spreadsheet modernization. $0.50 is much more largely considered acceptable today as it's usually a computer doing the calculations.",
"If you put the dollar (or pounds sterling, or whatever) in front, it keeps some one from adding a number infront of that. If you put the cent (or pence) after, it becomes obvious when it goes from 50p to 150p. Easy red flag, and far less expensive to the person whos check is being forged than 50$ turning into 150$. So we pu it in front $50.",
"I've read before that it's a historical holdover from when everything was handwritten. It would have been extremely easy to add a digit, at the least a 1 in front of a value and defraud someone. Putting the $ sign at the beginning eliminates this because at worst someone could tack .99 onto the end of a dollar value. Same reason you put the little squiggly line in the area behind the value you write on a check. This could all be made up (not the squiggly line part, that's legit) but it seems more palusible to me personally than anything else in this thread.",
"Follow up question... Why do interwebs people put the $ after?!? It's $50, not 50$."
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5t09p7 | Why are Twitter recording such huge quarterly losses? | They earned 717 Million Dollars in revenue in quarter 4, largely from advertising. But still posted a loss of 167 million. What on earth are they spending so much money on? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"From Twitter's official filings as a public company URL_0 - Revenue 717,206 - Cost of revenue -305,710 - Research and development -202,128 - Sales and marketing -260,603 - General and administrative -92,392 Cost of revenue = servers and operations staff to keep servers running R+D = developers to make new features for twitter S+M = advertising Twitter itself, sales staff to reach out to companies and have them advertise on twitter",
"It costs money to maintain the business as well as expand and grow. The revenue is the total amount of money made by the business BEFORE the costs are put into the equation. Things that they could be spending money on: Research and development, Employee salaries, server maintenance, garden gnomes , merger/acquisition ( buying smaller companies), Debt ( companies borrow huge amounts of money to grow themselves)",
"As others have already pointed out, Twitter is an expensive operation. I want to drill down on one specific aspect of its operations. If you talked to anyone at Twitter, they would actually tell you that they made a net profit this last quarter: > * Q4 GAAP net loss of $167 million and **non-GAAP net income of $119 million**. ^(_- from their SEC filings, emphasis mine_) That's quite a big difference! What is this GAAP and non-GAAP business and why does it give such wildly different profit models? Herein lies one of the costliest aspect of Twitter's operation: **employee retention**. This is a well-known secret within the tech industry, and it is somewhat peculiar that a (relatively, by the tech standard) mature company has to spend so much money to keep a reasonable tenure rate that it's pushing their profit margins into the black hemisphere. **GAAP vs OLD NAVY** GAAP and non-GAAP are two different accounting models that the CFO and his analysts use to compile Twitter's financials. In simple terms, GAAP is the model that the security exchange wants, and the non-GAAP model basically takes some of the expenses of running Twitter, and reasons that they are \"self-reinvesting\" enough that they shouldn't be accounted for as an expense altogether. For Twitter, their non-GAAP trick is to magically erase the impact of \"Stock-based compensation expense\" and \"restructuring changes\". In other words, they don't believe that their accountants should really care about what they have to pay their employees to show up everyday because that's not really reflective of whether they will succeed. Of course, this raises several questions. **Why would anyone care about the no-compensation model in the first place?** Compensation is as much of a cost of operations as RnD, servers, physical assets, or a host of other expenses required to keep Twitter chugging along. This is obviously the opinion of the SEC as well, so why does Twitter even think it can get away with reporting a, quote, \"non-GAAP net income of $119 million\"? Well, it turns out that there is some precedence for evaluating a company's *potential* even when they are not profitable. For many early companies, shelling out for good talent from time to time (or during growth sprees) isn't really an ominous thing. Nevertheless, standard accounting of their financials would lead your shareholders to believe that, because Foofle brought on an expensive director this year, its profit suffered. For healthy companies, excluding these expenses actually can give shareholders more clarity on the long-term direction of their company. So far everything seems reasonable, but there's more to Twitter than meets the eye. **Why are Twitter's financials peculiar?** Well, it's actually not that difficult to answer. Including both stock compensation and restructuring fees, Twitter spends around $240m to make sure that their employees keep coming into work every morning. With a total revenue of $700m, that's over a third of its total revenue! (For reference, Facebook, who pays the third most to retain employees, only pays out 15% of their total revenue) No other comparable companies in that vertical, or even in tech in general, spends that much to keep their employees. Why is Twitter having trouble here? Well, the fact of the matter is, the RSUs (stock units/shares in Twitter) that the company grants to its employers is losing value every quarter. If you look at the historical price per share since Twitter went public, it's been dipping monotonically. As a result, the shares that were granted to an employee is only worth a fraction of the prices that they are worth when they were granted. (Some of this depends on the technicality of how those shares vest/when they can be sold). Obviously, people are generally not very happy when they are holding what appears to be a depreciating asset. As a result, to keep their employees happy, Twitter will re-issue refresher stocks each year to compensate for the depreciation in the value of their equity, as well as a bit extra as a bonus (probably). So what's wrong with that? Nothing. It's just that Twitter's performing so poorly that, to keep their compensation competitive, they're actually eating up a third of its revenue in order to keep their engineers, their strategist, and their other employees happy. But there's some good news for Twitter at least. This percentage of total revenue that goes towards employee retention is declining every year (it was about 50% back in 2014). For the most part, this is mostly due to increasing revenue. However, if they become GAAP profitable and beat earnings, their stock prices will probably go up. At that point, their employees stocks will suddenly become an appreciating asset. As a result, they'll probably also stop bleeding so much money out to compensation.",
"Operating costs, R & D, customer acquisition. The big thing to look at in these huge companies in base user growth, and daily/monthly users which is usually why its also reported in their earnings statements. This can help show investors, \"yeah we lost $150m but we gained 5m users this quarter and are set to lose less or profit next quarter/year/century\" That or they're just hemorrhaging money and we could be looking at a BK in a few years",
"*My first reply I only saw the title* Most of the expenses are likely from not only the servers that run Twitter, but the back ups of the servers as well. In addition, you would need an IT staff around the clock to be able to put out any fires before they have catastrophic consequences. Twitter whole purpose is to allow people to post thoughts and weblinks, etc. immediately. In other words, twitter being down would completely unacceptable, otherwise you'll lose business as people will go to other social media platforms to post their items and ad revenues would decrease as companies would spend money elsewhere. So they are losing money still, but if their reliability is compromised, they would likely be hemorrhaging money even further."
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5t0erl | What exactly makes an electron negative and a proton positive and why are they seen as complete opposites? How do this relate to antimatter? | Hi all Subject has a couple of questions but they all (at least according to my limited knowledge) refer to the same thing. What exactly is negative and what is positive at a fundamental level? Why is an electron negative and an anti-electron positive, what exactly determines this. Is it impossible for something else to exist that is not negative, positive or neutral? What is charge? What exactly makes an electron to have a negative charge and a proton to have a positive charge? Does charge have a weight? Are there things smaller than an electron inside an electron configured in a certain way that makes it negative? And these things are arranged / move in an opposite direction in an anti-electron (positron) to make it positive? How can a positron contain the same amount of electrical potential, but it is a point object the same size as an electron, where as a proton, which is very much larger needs three sub particles in order to have the same potential? How is charge saved in the positron? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Electric charge is a *fundamental property* of particles. Mass is another. Spin (angular momentum) is another. Electric charge simply refers to how the particles **behave/interact with the electromagnetic field**. As far as we know, they don't have things like midi-chlorians inside them dictating this interaction. It's an intrinsic property of the particle. Unfortunately, physics does not have an **Ultimate Theory of Everything** which might explain *why* there is such a thing as an electric field and *how* it affects particles, why there are 4 fundamental forces instead of 1 or 7 or 0, or how the Atlanta Falcons managed to lose the goddamned SuperBowl. Electric charges will spontaneously move toward areas of opposite electric potential--i.e., an electron wants towards positive electric potentials and away from negative electric potentials (similarly to how they repel same charges and are attracted to opposite charges). When moving, positive and negative charges produce magnetic fields which are oppositely oriented toward eachother. When subjected to a magnetic field, they move in opposite directions. Electromagnetic interactions are mediated by photons. Is it possible for something to be something other? I suppose technically you could find a particle that had a completely different behavior, i.e. it repels both (+) and (-) charges but is attracted to itself and creates a totally different magnetic field. I don't know of any theories that would predict this in our universe. I think it's pretty unlikely we'll come across something like that. What we call (+) and (-) is somewhat arbitrary but is longstanding convention. If we found a third charge there's no reason we couldn't rename them to be Purple, New Zealand and Hippopotamus. An electron is a point particle. It has no volume. As far as we know, it's not composed of anything smaller. When it comes to protons and neutrons, they are made of smaller particles called 'quarks' and *these* particles have the electric charge. When you add their charges together, in the case of a proton they sum out to +1 while a neutron has no net charge. But coming back to my first paragraph, this is just something they appear to *have* and we label them based on how they behave/interact electromagnetically. We don't fundamentally understand these interactions as unsatisfying an answer as that is.",
"We just call them positive and negative, but we could also say the electron has positive charge or it has Charge A vs Charge B. The only reason we say positive and negative is because it fits well in our mathematical models of potential energies and force.",
"The initial guess at the polarity of the electron (Ben Franklin?) was wrong. He thought electrons brought positive charge, but his apparatus removed electrons rather than adding them. Oops. When this was fixed in later experiments, it was easier to just add a minus (-) to the charge equations so that electrons had negative charge. It doesn't really change anything, the labeling is arbitrary. Electrons and positrons are leptons. They have charge on -1 and +1 respectively. There is nothing inside them. Protons, neutrons, anti-protons, and anti-neutrons are made of quarks. Up quarks are +2/3 and down quarks are -1/3 = > 2 ups and a down = proton; 2 downs and an up = neutron, ... The [Standard Model of particle physics]( URL_0 ) explains all these sorts of things. it's a more complex situation that the simple +/- concept you've asked about."
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5t0f7z | How does US armed forces overseas deployment work? | So, this is really about 100 questions... I obviously get the concept, but how does the US military execute it? How do we get hundreds of thousands of troops to a designated area in a short amount of time? What are the implications? What type of planning goes into it? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"As an Army vet -- First, we train for it constantly, and actually test on it annually (at a minimum). When it comes to actually deploying, we loaded everything up on big ass USAF planes, and flew to where we were needed. The major part of any US Military branch's mission is to get where the action is in a minimal amount of time, so they maintain readiness to do so. It's not like they are just lounging around, doing nothing until such time as they are needed."
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5t0fax | How is so much internet data sent through undersea cables simultaneously? | From what I understand, the vast majority the internet is sent through these cables, but I dont understand how so much data from billions of people can be instantly transmitted through so few of them. Like if I send an email, for a brief moment of time, is the entire cable dedicated to transmitting my message? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> if I send an email, for a brief moment of time, is the entire cable dedicated to transmitting my message What you're describing is called a *circuit switched network*. That's how the telephone network used to work, and the telegraph network before that. Basically when you had a telephone call between two houses, switches in the telephone company building would connect a physical wire all the way from the sender to the receiver, for the duration of the call. Nowadays almost everything's a digital *packet switched network*, meaning digital data is broken up into relatively small packets [1]. Stations on a packet-switched network use *store-and-forward*, basically they receive packets from one physical cable into a memory buffer, then transmit those packets on another cable whenever that transmitter becomes available. Each packet has coded source and destination addresses in its control information. The equipment has software and data which tells it how to use the address information to decide which cable should re-transmit which packets, with the main goal of moving data toward its destination [2]. A single transmitter only sends one thing at a time. Figure an email the length of this Reddit post might be about 6000 bytes including control information (as well as the 40 bytes per-packet overhead, there's mail headers to consider). Network transmission speeds are usually measured in bits per second. 10 gigabits per second equipment is widely available (and 1gbps equipment is almost universal in new wired network equipment). So figure a single fiber can transmit ten *billion* bits a second. So the four packets of your email message takes about 4.8 microseconds (4.8 millionths of a second) on a single 10gbps fiber. As other users have said, each cable has many fibers. So the secret is each fiber is very fast, each cable is a bundle of many fibers, and there are multiple cables. Again, because this is a packet switched network, the 4.8 microseconds of transmitter time isn't a contiguous block of time that is scheduled to you specifically. Rather, the final piece of networking equipment which is physically connected to the actual undersea cable queues packets as they arrive and then sends them out along the cable as the transmitter becomes available. [1] For an idea of the size, most modern networks are based on a standard called Ethernet, which limits each packet to a maximum size of 1500 bytes. About 40 bytes or so is control information used to handle routing, sequencing, integrity checking and flow control; the rest is user data. [2] There are other goals which may affect the routing policies a network operator will program into its networking equipment. These concerns include security, fairness to all users, helping the network operator make money, and legal / regulatory compliance.",
"Google's submarine cable can do 60Tbps, that's just one of those cables. As for whether the cables switch between jobs, no, they do simultaneous transfer, and then where they transfer it sorts it out, sends it someone, sorts it, and etc. until it reaches you."
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5t0ff9 | Why is the Coca Cola recipe inside a giant vault guarded by securities? | Why is it important for a recipe thats probably not a big deal to be guarded so no one can get their hands on it? What could happen if someone actually managed to steal the recipe? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Marketing, mostly. There are [plenty of public recipes]( URL_0 ) for Coke. This American Life (a US radio show) even did [an episode on it]( URL_1 ) where they made a batch. IIRC, they said that it tasted pretty similar, but it wasn't quite right. Their explanation is that having the ingredients in the correct proportions is only part of it; the other part is using the same suppliers to get *exactly* the right quality and type of ingredients to get that \"Coke\" flavor.",
"It's mostly a marketing/branding thing, same thing with KFC's chicken spice blend. A few million on a vault is relatively cheap for a giant company but brings a certain \"Look how special we are, we go to this much trouble to protect what makes us look special\". With a bit of Googling you can actually find a picture of a notebook from the creator of Coke's lab, that is actively on display at their museum, that shows the original recipe. From there one can make a few assumptions and adjustments for modern times, and easily replicate Coke.",
"It's not really important that it be guarded, but that does create hype about Coca Cola that translates into publicity. It would not make much difference if someone stole the recipe, since it is already effectively a matter of public record. The book \"Big Secrets\" by William Poundstone, has a really great discussion about various secret recipes, along with history. It's a well-written, engaging book that I'd highly recommend. URL_0",
"Have you ever tasted own brand supermarket cola?!?!",
"The thing protecting the Coke recipe isn't a vault, its just a trade secret protected by non-disclosure agreements. If only the top echelon knew how to make coke, then factories wouldn't realistically be able to make enough to supply the absolutely massive amount of coke for global distribution."
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5t0fmh | why do they scan you boarding pass when you buy stuff at the airport? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's worth noting that this only happens at duty-free shops. You purchase things (usually tobacco, alcohol, or other products that have a fair amount of taxes) without paying said taxes, with the understanding you'll pay them in the country you are going to. Most countries have an amount of product that can be purchased overseas without being taxed, though. Them scanning your boarding pass confirms you are actually going overseas and are not staying domestically (where you would need to pay the tax). You can read a little more about it at the wikipedia article for duty-free shops: URL_0",
"I think this is purely for tax purposes. Think about if someone is just stopping off to catch a connecting flight and hasn't gone through customs or formally disembarked at the location. Airports sort of exist in a state of limbo; even if you got off the airplane until you go through customs you haven't \"entered the country\". As a result you sometimes don't need to pay tax on purchases in airport shops because you aren't in the country yet. These \"duty free\" shops have an interesting position regarding tax law. However what is to stop local people from going through security just to visit the tax free shops? Scanning a boarding pass would prevent the shops from becoming just a regular shopping destination."
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5t0kcf | why did western nations bail out their banks? What were the consequences if they had not? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The bailout of 2008 was premised on the notion of Keynesian economic theory, which basically means that economic cycles can last longer than human lifetimes hence government intervention into capitalist systems are necessary in the \"short term\". At first, the administration toyed with the idea of allowing the banks to fail, then letting the system repair itself. That's why Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers weren't bailed out at first. It's important to recognize that shareholders were screwed anyway; in a bailout you basically dilute all your equity. So a bailout was less of a handout than a genuine rescue of the economic system. However, the intertwining relationships between banks and major financial \"too big to fail\" entities like Fannie Mae or AIG meant that allowing one bank to fail would mean a cascading domino effect across the board. The way it works is like this. Many banks work essentially by taking short term debt (deposits, money instruments, etc) and investing it into longer term debt (mortgages, bonds, etc). Loss of confidence would spark a liquidity crisis much like a global bank run on US financial entities; and with many banks reliant on each other to pay back their loans, one big default could mean everyone would fall like dominos. This was because their assets were marked to market; in layman's terms, they were worth whatever the bond market thought they were worth, so overnight they could become \"worthless\" and therefore bankrupt, even if nothing had changed in one day. (fundamentally, they were supposed to be bankrupt in an orderly fashion a long time ago) Hence the immediate bailout response (TARP) was more of a liquidity measure rather than a fundamental rescue (there was nothing to rescue anyway) to give confidence to the international pension fund and institutional money managers, so they didn't do a \"bank run\" on the US economy. This allowed for a slower, more controlled release of the pent up financial panic, and gave some breathing room for the government to come up with a solution. The next order of bailouts that the general public is more familiar with, Quantitative Easing, is basically the same thing but on a much grander scale. Essentially, nations themselves can become over leveraged with debt, although in a slightly different meaning as they also can print money. But the basic idea was that the US economy as a whole had far more credit in the system than was represented by the productivity of its population - which means some lenders had been suckered and weren't getting their money back. In order to \"deleverage\" the economy as a whole, you had to remove the debt in the system. This was done by buying up toxic assets from aforementioned financial entities and retiring them, using printed money since the government unlike most financial entities can print money. Governments have a host of options available to them that goes beyond the scope of this topic, but generally speaking the idea is the same. Remove debt so that the amount of credit in the system more closely matches actual productivity. As there is just way too much debt accumulated over decades (started since around the 80's), there is no easy solution. Going against the Keynesian model and doing things the traditional way by letting the economy fail and correct itself had actually been done before - following the Great Depression of 1929. This had disastrous results for everyone, sparking mass suicides and social unrest, and the economy languished for over a decade and would have continued to do so for who knows how long had it not been for massive war spending. As Keynes himself put it, \"in the long term, we're all dead anyway.\" This formed the basis for the bailouts, justified by the premise that it was the lesser of two evils. To the common man on the street, the main thing you should be taking away from this is that the bailouts were necessary, but things aren't going to get much better soon. Adjust your expectations lower, as this will be the new normal going forward, at least for 10 years or so.",
"Economy goes down, banks lose a lot of money. People get scared that the banks will collapse and withdraw their money, so the bank now has even less money, which can make more people scared, etc. This can spiral out of control, leading to banks actually collapsing, meaning anybody who didn't already withdraw all their money just lost it. ~~This is how the Great Depression started~~ This was one of the major contributors to the Great Depression. There are now government program in place to prevent this from getting as bad as the Depression was, but it still ends up with the economy being totally fucked up. Or we can just bail out the banks at the beginning and prevent things from getting to that point in the first place.",
"Matt Taibbi from *Rolling Stone* did a fantastic job of explaining it. URL_0",
"We did it in America because Obama is a Keynesian and one of the main ideas behind Keynesian economics is that during prosperous times the free market should run its course and during recession the government must spend our way out of it, lest the free market would make the recession worst.",
"To give a brief idea: too many banks would fail, Govs wouldn't be able to pay the guaranteed deposits to virtually every member of their economy and also deal with the collapse in trade from the absence of the payment systems and money dealers. Also, all the publically traded business or investors who would lose all their investments from the collapse of the equity markets. Plus mass unemployment, not just from the banks themselves but also all other businesses going bankrupt. Also the inevitable collapse in the currencies. Essentially, if a too big too fail bank goes under its macro-prudentially significant enough to bring down the others banks and in turn pretty much the entire economy.",
"I will add with the idea of the consequences of them doing so. Bailing out the banks cemented in the minds Wall Street execs that the government will always bail, at least most of them, out given the right circumstance. This is called \"Moral Hazard\" where banks are incentivized to engage in risky behavior that is likely to lead to further fraud and risky behavior. Are the consequences disastrously bad if we did not bail them out? Yes, but they are also not very good for doing so. I will also bring in the ideas of Hyman Minsky. One of his overarching claims is that stability is destabilizing. The government has worked to create stability for decades now in the form of safety nets for the unemployed and failing businesses. It is this stability and appearance of safety that specifically leads businesses to engage in risky behavior. If nothing is planned to go wrong and you wont be punished for what you do, why not keep pushing the line a little bit further?"
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5t0qst | Why do we randomly stutter or horribly mispronounce words we know even thought we have no actual speech impediment? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Have you ever seen a sign on the wall of a shop that says something like: * Good * Fast * Cheap **Pick Two** That's essentially what's going on with our brains. A human brain uses up about 20% of the food we eat everyday, which is a lot for something that doesn't have to move us around or pump blood or anything 'strenuous' like that - but they could use a lot more. A computer that could do what our brains do would be enormous and would use thousands or millions of kWh of electricity. So, our brains are actually pretty efficient or \"cheap\" for what they do, which includes things like figuring out the right things to say and how to pronounce each word whenever we have to talk. So, if they're \"cheap\" that means that they can't be as good and fast as we'd like. They're going to make mistakes sometimes. It's better to get the words right 99% of the time and be pretty fast and efficient, then it is to get the words right 100% of the time and be huge and use way more calories all the time. **Edit** - For a non ELI5 way to think of it we can [think of our brains as lossy compression of things we've learned]( URL_0 ). Instead of perfectly mapping inputs to outputs we map the responses on top of each other where possible, which results in a network. This saves a ton of space and energy, but it means that often our responses are \"good enough\" instead of being exactly what we might've wanted.",
"Our brains are hardwired in a way where each cell (neuron) is connected to many other cells. It's like a computer where one wire connects to other ports and wires to create a while computer. Once in a while, a neuron will fire when we are speaking but will go down a little different path which our brains are not used to. This will cause some lag just like a computer program that was not used in a while. This can ultimately lead to a stutter. To my knowledge, this occurs randomly and unpredictably.",
"I was wondering the same thing when I was talking to my brother in-law about camera equipment and gear (he wants to buy my sister a camera for her birthday). Photography is a nice hobby of mine which I am passionate about. When I was telling him all about it, I was getting out of breath and was stumbling with my words a lot. I had to stop talking and take a few deep breaths in the middle of the conversation to recollect myself and catch my breath. I think I was just too excited to talk, and wasn't thinking about breathing and exactly how I was going to word something. I had too many thoughts in my head at once and wanted to say it all.",
"I was also wondering, don't know if allowed, what it is when you're talking but then your airway seizes up and you can't finish the word? It happens when you're trying not to cry most frequently. its like a spasm in your throat or something. never understood what it was",
"Often when this happens to me it's because I'm unclear on the exact word I want to use and my brain creates a bastardized combination of my options.",
"You can control it to a certain extent if you can control your breathing. Cross your arms in front of you and notice how you breathe into your chest, stretch your arms to the sides and notice how you breathe down into your belly. When you stutter or mispronounce your words it's because you get excited, nervous or wound up in some other way, you're almost always breathing with your chest. This is your body's emergency breathing system, and using it also produces cortisol, the stress-hormone causing you to loose full perspective on what you want to say and be more focused on 'getting the sentence out' (often because people think the listeners will lose attention if they talk normally) leading to [frontal lobe shut-down]( URL_0 ) essentially shutting down your capacity to think broadly. Our brain talks to our nervous system but our nervous system also talks back, if you can force yourself to breathe right you won't fumble words that way. Also, people will perceive you as more confident if you do this.",
"\"...even THOUGHT we have no...\" Was this done on purpose??? Haha",
"Whoa, so many stellar replies! From a language processing and production perspective, there are many places within a speech act where things could go awry. A key thing to keep in mind is that people who stutter have an aspect or combination of contributing factors which can put a production \"off-course.\" This could be due to the complexity of the language task, stress-level of the speaker, etc. Essentially, **we all stutter** (or experience dysfluencies). People who we identify as those who stutter do so more regularly due to genetic make-up, language ability, gender, a whole host of risk factors of the speech production hierarchy. Of note: (We don't really say speech impediment or stutterer in the field of speech-language pathology; past threads I've read have delved into the rationale for that.)",
"Our brains are always trying to be as efficient as they can. The popular show Brain Games, or the book \"Thinking Fast and Slow\" are perfect examples of our efficiency. Take this amazing example presented in the book above; [Click here to view]( URL_0 ) What did you read? What did you think? If you're like most people, you read ABC, Anne approached to the bank (as in to deposit her money), and 12 13 14. You could have easily just read A13C, Anne approached the bank (as in the bank of a river), and 1B3. If you look again, the \"B\" and \"13\" are **exactly** the same The same mistake happens with words, we always make assumptions and take shortcuts to make our own life and survival much more efficient. Like, for example the the way you probably just skipped over the second \"the\" in this sentence. Our pyschological quirks are manipulated quite often in advertising. Edit: 123 changed to 12 13 14. My brain was being efficient.",
"if you are about to day something that may be considered inappropriate, or may have unwanted consequences, your brain unconsciously generates inhibitions that can block the train of speech/thought. in a social situation where you are not supposed to talk, this inhibition makes you \"unable\" to speak. maybe actual speech impediments can develop from this",
"In times of stress, like if you're anxiously trying to explain something or think of a word, your limbic system (those areas of the brain that process fear and emotions, like the amygdala and thalamus) becomes more active. When this happens, you start relying less on your conscious \"executive\" functions and more on your unconscious, reactive \"fight or flight\" functions. As a result, complex tasks (like recalling the a concept, putting a word or phrase together to represent that concept, and coordinating the complicated muscle movements of the mouth/larynx to express that word or concept) can easily become jumbled. I know you said \"randomly\", but it doesn't take much to set off this anxiety (even just momentarily forgetting a word), particularly if you have any sort of anxiety issues (which seem pretty common in this day and age).",
"Because we're not perfect. A speech impediment means you're less perfect than average, where it creates an issue in your communication. But everyone makes mistakes, whether it's with speaking, walking, typing, whatever. Professional athletes are very coordinated, but they sometimes trip over their own feet. Even your heart--which literally has one job--messes up a few times a day. We're simply not perfect. If you're tired or stressed or rushed or distracted, you're more likely to make errors, but they can happen anytime. The act of speaking is actually a very complicated coordination between a number of muscles, even discounting the \"thinking\" part of it, and yet in many ways it's nearly effortless. It's really amazing that we don't make more errors."
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5t0sxt | Why is that some Americans move different states for a job? | By no means am I saying all, it just seems more common for people in America. For example in London if you are in a certain position you can do the same thing in another part of London without having to leave the city. | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Certain industries are concentrated in certain states, so sometimes you have to move if your job is industry specific. For example, most airplane design and production takes place in the Pacific Northwest, so you're most likely to find a job in Washington State for that (though I think some of the production plants may be moving). That only accounts for a small percentage of moves, though. Most of the time people move it's because they found a better job and it just happens to be in a different location. Say you're a lawyer in London and make 100,000 pounds/year. You get offered another position in another part of London at 120,000 pounds/year or a position in Glasgow for 150,000 pounds/year. Unless you have a strong connection to London, why wouldn't you take the Glasgow job?",
"England is a more centralized than the US, it is pretty much London and everything else. New York is nowhere as close to being culturally, politically, and economically dominant in the US as Londnn is in England. Moving to LA or Washington DC isn't the same sort of \"step down\" as moving to Manchester or Birmingham. That say, people *do* move out of London. I worked in Leeds for a while, and there were plenty of Londoners there. They move for the same reason Americans do: * lower cost of living * greater opportunity within the company (\"we need someone to run the Leeds branch\") * specialized regional industry (I worked in a factory that made artificial joints) * quality of life (less crime, pollution, traffic, etc. (but maybe not Leeds :) )) * different lifestyle (many people who lived in a flat in London owned nice houses in the country in Leeds) * economy differences (London might be in a recession while Leeds is growing)",
"Because the Greater London area is basically 13% of your whole country's population. Greater New York City is basically the same size as Greater London, but only makes up about *two and a half* percent of our population. For something of comparable size with respect to our population, we'd need a city of 45 million people, or about 5 and a half New Yorks/Londons all in *one city*, or about the same size as Tokyo *and* New York/London together. At the same time, our population is spread out across a much, *much* larger area; we're about 38 times larger than you, as far as land area is concerned, while only being a little over 5 times larger than you population-wise. Thus, most of our cities (particularly away from the coasts) have lower populations. Less people means less work, and fewer varieties of work. Thus, to work in given fields, you have to move states.",
"Here in Oregon your options are very limited. Our economy is crap. For me, I had to move to another state that had my niche career and would give me a chance without a masters degree. Sometimes people want a change of scenery too. Sometimes people get promotions that require moving, in the same company. The USA is quite large compared to the UK so we have to travel further for something that may be available to you closer to home. Edit: UK",
"Each state is essentially it's own mini country of sorts led by a Governor (President) and has its own senate, house, laws, etc. Each State also has its own economy and standard/quality of living. Some states have laws that are beneficial for certain industries. Some states have better educated individuals for certain industries. For this reason certain professional jobs often tend to collect in geographical areas. For example, if you want a job in stock/investment Finance, then NYC is often your best bet. If you want a job in banking/credit, etc then Delaware or NYC tend to be popular. If you want a job in IT, then NYC and San Fran tend to be major hubs, etc. So as an example, there is little need for a highly technical network engineer in Wyoming. There just aren't a lot of companies looking to hire that resource. However, if you go to NYC, Chicago, Atlanta, etc you'll find there are plenty of companies looking to hire that skillset. So you go where the jobs are."
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5t0ukm | - How do the tiny fragile hairs on my face cause a sharp metal rasor to become dull? o_O | ELI5. Never understood this... I shave my face like once every few weeks with my razor and after a couple of uses, the blade becomes dull. How do the miniscule hairs on my face do this to a metal blade? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Hair is flexible, and easily breakable, but it's TOUGH. Hair is made of a protein called keratin, same as fingernails, and it's difficult to cut. Believe it or not, human hair can be as tough as copper wire, which can easily dull even a steel razor.",
"> How do the miniscule hairs on my face do this to a metal blade? They don't. Think about what happens when you shave. You lather up, pull out the razor, shave, rinse off your razor and then put it back on the shelf until the next time you use it. What's happening is that in between the time you use it, it's corroding. So if you had two razors, One you used to shave normally and the other you didn't shave with, but rinsed and basically copied the same actions as the first razor (other than shaving) they would both be dull after a few weeks.",
"The edge of a razorblade is necessarily very thin, and thus is subject to getting bent and curled by slightly off-center forces, even though the metal is very hard. For a demonstration of this principal, take an aluminum baseball bat and a sheet of alluminum foil. Now try to bend them. Uness you're Superman, the bat, a big, thick chunk of metal, will not bend in your hands. On the other hand, the foil can be easily crumpled and crushed together in your hand because it is merely a thin sheet without the structure to give it strength. The same applies to a razor blade's edge.",
"You're looking at two factors: 1. The thinness of the razor. -Someone already mentioned this with an analogy to an aluminum baseball bat and aluminum foil, but it goes without saying: Due to the small, thin size of the razor itself, it's easy for the blade to deteriorate/become dull after multiple uses of shaving. 2. Corrosion - This was also mentioned, but bears repeating: When you shave, you tend to lather, shave, rinse, and repeat. After your rinse your blade with water and leave it to dry, it becomes at risk to corrode, or wear away. Corrosion doesn't happen quick enough for it to become visible, but it'll be enough in due time to reduce the sharpness of your blade."
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5t0xer | People think international borders are heavily guarded, but aren't 99% of borders in the world just untouched nature? Simply lines on a field or in a forest, a hill, a river..? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Yes most countries take a risk-based approach. Where there are a lot of people they concentrate guards, fences, etc. Where's there are no people, the cost vs. benefit of guards just doesn't make sense.",
"Which is why I have never understood people getting caught at a border. If I was on the run, I would simply look at a map, pick the least populated spot and cross there. No passport or ID required and no records. As long as you can speak the language of the country you are entering and your skin tone doesn't give you away, I can't fathom why anyone would ever get caught. EDIT: This post is getting a lot of flak about survival in non-populated areas. I grew up in a very rural area and had a childhood filled with camping and general Boy Scout type training. I am, by far, no Bear Grylls, but I feel I have the basic skills and instincts needed to survive a long trek on foot with only basic supplies. I suppose I take this knowledge for granted that others do not have it.",
"Yes except for in China they built a wall. Like a really big wall. I guess you could call it... the great wall.",
"Countries aren't terribly concerned about individuals crossing borders illegally. They aren't crazy about it, but they know there is not much they can do to stop someone prepared to make a 20-mile trek on foot through the wilderness. They are more concerned about armies or a convoy of trucks. Most borders are rivers and mountain ranges, which for the most part guard themselves. Border patrols concentrate their efforts on places where is easy to cross, and rely on spot checks for the rest."
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5t0yz5 | What are the Dead Sea Scrolls? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They're bits of old Jewish scripture, sectarian guidelines, and some non canon scripture found around an old Jewish settlement. There were eleven caves where they found them, but a couple days ago they found a twelfth cave and are going to investigate that."
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5t16pj | Why do some people have bad handwriting and some people have good handwriting? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"From my experience, I have horrible hand writing because I'm trying to write faster than I can because my brain is so far ahead of where my hand is. It may just be some people don't think as far ahead into their writing as others do"
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5t16t4 | Alcohol destroys brain cells but what does that actually mean? Does our IQ drop? Do we lose personal memory? Is our thinking process slowed down? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The basis for saying alcohol destroys brain cells was from a man applying alcohol directly to brain cells in a Pitre dish. Drinking doesn't actually kill brain cells when people drink, because it's not coming into direct contact in such a high concentration. If it actually acted like that, people would be severely mentally impaired (and permanently so) after just a few visits to the bar, especially the way some do on their 21st birthday. Also, when people get so drunk that they don't remember what they did, it's not that they can't remember their actions, but rather at that point of drunkenness their brain simply stops recording memories.",
"Actually, the idea that alcohol destroys brain cells is entirely a myth propagated by the temperance movement in the early 19th century. Alcohol doesn't destroy brain cells, even though shitfaced drunks might *look* braindead. Chronic alcohol abuse may result in Wernicke–Korsakoff syndrome, which is a severe, potentially fatal, neurological condition with symptoms like amnesia, confusion, and confabulation. To the untrained eye, this makes an alcoholic look like a bumbling idiot. It's important to note alcohol itself doesn't cause WKS, rather, it's a deficiency in thiamine (vitamin B^1) which alcoholics frequently encounter as A) their diets are usually very poor and B) alcohol inhibits the body's ability to absorb B vitamins. That's why alcoholics (such as myself) often take vitamin supplements."
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5t1aon | - Why do health nuts say drinking apple cider vinager (acid) will make your body alkaline? Am I missing something here? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Apple cider vinegar itself may become alkaline in the body once it's been digested and the acetic acid decomposed. ACV taken regularly may cause the body to adjust the ratios at which digestive enzymes are secreted. The body is constantly adjusting to what it's fed, but the change is in pretty small percentages, so it's unlikely to have any long term effects after digestive secretion is slowed down. As a result it *may* alkalinize the stomach ever so slightly for a brief window. It certainly does not affect body chemistry outside the digestive tract. Human pH is very tightly regulated to be within 7.35 and 7.45 all the time, because this is one of the optimal conditions for enzyme function. So technically we are already slightly alkaline. If you consume a lot of acid, e.g. as vinegar (lemon juice was also mentioned), your pH will tend to go down for a while. This can also happen with aspirin overdose. Technically this would be called a metabolic acidosis. Your body will respond in two ways. Within a very short time your respiratory rate will increase and you will eliminate more CO2 than usual. This response is called a compensatory respiratory alkalosis and is only a short-term fix, but it helps to keep the pH normal while the definitive solution takes place over hours, which is that the kidneys gear up to pee out the extra acid. This is a compensatory metabolic alkalosis. Normally this is quite sufficient, but in circumstances where the external or internal acid load (for example lactic acidosis due to critical illness) overwhelms these responses, then acidaemia develops, which is almost always a life-threatening situation. So, to recap. The body has powerful and flexible buffer mechanisms to keep pH in the right place. We can consume more acid and the body will cope quite nicely (in fact nearly all foods are slightly acidic and some are very acidic). But taking in more acid doesn't alkalinise the body in any meaningful way. \"Health nuts\" talking about how certain foods \"acidify\" or \"alkalizes\" the body is pseudoscience masquerading as science in science vocabulary, and is total garbage. You can drink a whole liter of lemon juice and it won't change your blood pH one tiny bit."
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5t1gsu | Film grain even in modern movie blurays, is it purposeful or why cant it be cleaned out? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Film grain is a product of the chemistry that makes film. It can be made smaller, but the smaller grains take more light to switch on (expose). That makes finer grain film \"slower\" and it's a tradeoff between lighting and grain size. To eliminate it would take very intense light, so that's not practical."
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5t1h8z | we can keep a lot of different cells in culture. Why can't we just keep a culture of the cells that produce spermatozoids so we have plenty of them instead of needing sperm donations? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I might be wrong but even if you cultivate those cells, I don't think they can provide unlimited sperm. Also, cell cultive is way more expensive and complicated than just having a donated sperm."
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5t1ppp | why do words start to look unfamiliar or misspelled when you look at them for a long period of time? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It is called *semantic satiation*. If you look at a word long enough, you stop seeing the word, and start seeing letters, which have nothing to do with the word. The is nothing about the letters c, a, and t that connects them to a cat, so they start losing that meaning. If you look longer, you stop seeing letters, and start seeing squiggly shapes that have nothing to do with what the letter means, further alienating you from the word.",
"To answer your 'why' question: we have no answer (yet), which is why this 'thing, process' is called a 'phenomenon'. One of the other commentors commented 'semantic satiation', but I think 'orthographic satiation'--or 'Gestaltzerfall', German for 'shape decomposition'--is a more accurate term for your question, where words or characters (such as in Chinese, Japanese, Korean) seem to break apart into their constitutient letters and components. The difference is that in orthographic satiation, one can still understand the word--it merely just looks weird--whereas in semantic satiation, one has trouble understanding the word (hence the word 'semantic'). (Also, semantic satiation seems to occur more frequently aurally, i.e. repeatedly reading a word causes the meaning of the word to be lost to the listener, rather than visually.) Also, orthographic satiation occurs only after the reader understands the meaning of the word. In other words, if you are not fluent in, say, Chinese, you will not experience orthographic satiation with Chinese characters--you'll just see the character as a drawing, or a scribble anyway."
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5t1qe0 | Why are car batteries lead-acid monstrosities and not cutting edge 18650's cells? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"The cost is way lower. Both initial cost, and also in service lifetime over endless recharge cycles."
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5t1u2n | effects cannabis can have on developing(teenage) brain? | I have read lots of different opinions on this, since I know a handful of people who smoke regularly. I've heard peoples opinions, but I want unbiased information. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"At the moment there isn't any concrete information. Being as marijuana is still a Schedule 1 drug the process for acquiring the correct permits to do studies on it is nearly impossible and will remain that way until the DEA decides to reschedule the drug. A side effect of it being so hard to actually study the effects marijuana has is that we know very little about the long term effects use can have on developing minds, or any minds for that matter. In fact if you were to go looking for research about marijuana you'll probably find about 50 contradicting studies, once a week you'll get a legitimate study saying \"The dangers of marijuana abuse\" and another legitimate study saying \"Marijuana found to have no adverse effect on congition\". So until the DEA stops it's ignorant game of monopoly we won't see any concrete information. The few things we do know is this: Marijuana IS addictive. Addiction can cause serious dependancy over long term use. Withdrawals can include insomnia, depression, anorexia, and mood swings. Marijuana is detrimental to short term memory. Unfortunately the extent of this is unknown. Marijuana can cause panic attacks. How or why, there is no concrete information. I have to add that combustion is obviously not good for your lungs, but there is a vaporizer and edible only movement with the cannabis community too. Hope that helps."
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5t1w3x | Why do members of the Senate state 'My colleague the senator from _____' instead of stating their name? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Edit: See the bellow top level replies. I think, all things considered, they're more accurate than mine. Because people know their state's name and most know what a senator is, not so many know their senator's name. \"My colleague, the senator from Nevada is against kicking puppies!\" Is going to have a lot bigger impact than \"Dean Heller is against kicking puppies!\" Very few know who their senator is, mentioning senator+state resonates more. Heck, they may even bother to learn about this Nevada senator who doesn't like to kick puppies! Note: I made the puppy part up, I have no idea what the senator from Nevada's stance is on puppy kicking.",
"Tradition, mostly. It's how Senators have been referring to each other since the Senate was founded, and is itself borrowed from how things were (and are) done in the English Parliament. But why is it tradition? Issues of name familiarity aside, it's to emphasize that the people speaking are doing so *in their capacity as Senators*. Nobody gives a hoot what \"John McCain, private citizen\", thinks about anything. But a *lot* of people care what \"the senior Senator from Arizona\" thinks. The office of \"US Senator\" exists independent of the individual people who happen to hold that office at any given time, and the extent to which what a Senator says matters has entirely to do with the authority of the *office*, not their individual identity. Referring to other Senators by their titles formally emphasizes that what is being done on the Senate floor is official business.",
"In the Australian parliament it is considered disorderly to refer to a senator as anything other than Senator *(name)*, a member of the House of Representatives as The Member for *(electorate)*, ministers as The Minister for *(portfolio)*, the Prime Minister, the President of the Senate and the Speaker of the House as their respective titles. Failing to adhere to this may result in warnings and potential ejection from the chamber under Standing Order 94."
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5t1zf7 | Why won't companies like Whatsapp and Instagram enter the Ipad market? | I find it extremly difficult for me that these companies don't have an app. This leads to using other 3rd party apps with many crashes and bugs. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They don't need to. Remember their goal is to capture users ? There are very few people with an ipad and not an iphone. There's no reason to build and support an ipad app for people who are already using your service."
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5t222u | In what circumstances could inflation be seen as a good thing? | As I understand it, every year the Fed aims for around 2% inflation, and tries to adjust rates depending if we are above or below that percentage. Why is inflation a good thing though? Shouldn't we be aiming for 0% inflation rates, or would that cause problems? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Inflation is good for people who have borrowed money; for example, let's say I own a business and I bought a bunch of inventory for $100,000, with money I borrowed at 4% annually. So, at the end of the year, I've sold $500,000 of my inventory, but my total debt I owned(not counting what I've paid back) is $104,000. Now, I'm in year two, and due to inflation I've increased my prices by 6%, so I can sell my remaining $500,000 for $503,000 -- so I've sold $103,000, and my interest for the two years comes to roughly $108,000 on the loan -- 103,000 is 95% of 108,000, or 5% over two years, or 2-1/2% annually. I know that's not figuring any profit or compound interest, but it's a close estimate in round numbers. For an extreme example: you know those people who bought a house in the 1980s for $50,000 and had a 30-year mortgage payment of $97 per month? Inflation is the reason those prices sounds so crazy. Their debt shrank immensely due to inflation in the housing market. So, inflation can be seen as a reduction in interest charged on debts.",
"Inflation is also good at spurring people to spend money. Hitting a 0% inflation rate is pretty much impossible and going negative is very bad. A negative inflation or deflation can stop the economy in its tracks. If we have deflation people basically put off buying items until the last possible moment. Why? Well if you have $100 today to buy a TV that also costs $100, you could buy it today if you wanted OR you could wait a month and due to deflation the price of that TV drops to $90. Expand this from just TVs to literally everything you buy. People would stop buying in hopes they can get it cheaper in the future. You'd just put all your money in savings. By not spending money goods don't get sold and manufacturing drops out thus we have huge unemployment. Bad news for the economy. On the other hand inflation at a small rate, encourages people to spend money today compared to tomorrow. One of the best was to save money is to buy stuff in bulk. Firstly, because it's just cheaper to buy a ton of stuff in a large size. The second way is a little more complex. Take laundry detergent, imagine you can buy 1 years worth at a time. Today it's $100, next year it's $102 due to inflation. You can either buy 2 tubs today and pay $200 or buy 1 today and another in a year which would cost $202 in total. You'd pick the cheaper option if you had the cash available. Finally like someone else mentioned let's talk about loans and investment. We need loans to run our economy. Can you imagine trying to start a business without a loan? You'd need a million bucks in your bank account available. If we had deflation banks could just sit on their money and 'make' a return by letting prices drop while their money amount stays the same. With inflation it's the opposite, prices increase but their money amount stays the same. Unless they invest (meaning give out loans), by having inflation you force the banks to give out loans in order to make a profit/keep up with inflation."
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5t261j | How is kilogram a unit or mass and not weight? (flair physics) | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Mass is a unit of how much \"stuff\" is in something - if two objects have the same number of particles (subatomic stuff - protons, neutrons, electrons), then they'll have the same mass, anywhere in the universe. Weight is a little different, because it's actually a unit of force - in most cases, it's the force of gravity we're talking about. And that'll change anywhere - you weigh slightly less at the top of Mt. Everest than you do in Death Valley, CA, because of your distance from the Earth. On the Moon, you weigh even less. But since weight is a force, we can also use it to measure, say, the force of a punch. So in everyday use, \"mass\" and \"weight\" are mostly interchangeable, because we figure that gravity isn't changing much across the Earth. But they're not exactly the same thing, because weight is based on more than just the mass.",
"Weight is the measurement of how much force gravity exerts on an object. Since gravity can vary, weight can also vary. Mass is the measurement of the amount of matter something contains. If the object is unchanged, it's mass will not change. Practically, for day to day usage, mass is measured by weighing items in a space where the gravity is known. So, for example, we know the gravity of your bathroom, so we can weigh you in your bathroom and determine your mass from that.",
"Because humans have pretty much exclusively lived on earth their entire existance, mass and weight are colloquially synonyms, however for the few spending meaningful amounts of time not on earth, or for various non-weight related applications of mass the difference between mass and weight become more apparent. Mass measures how much matter something has, weight measures how much force gravity exerts on it. If you were in orbit, your weight would be zero, but you would still have inertia due to your mass, or you have the same mass on the Moon as you do on earth (let's say 75kg) but you have much less weight (your weight drops from 735N on earth to 125N) because the moon has less gravitational pull than the earth. The kilogram is a measure of mass (and for 99% of human activity we can ignore that there's a distinction between mass and weight in almost all inhabited places on earth). You need a scale with precision in the millionths to notice the variation in Earth's gravity."
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5t2f7w | Why aren't more companies taking advantage solar power since the Sun's energy is always there and free to collect? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The Sun's energy is **not** always there. It is not there at all at night. It is not there in nearly as high an energy level when it is cloudy. It is **not** free to collect, the panels and/or thermal equipment needed to capture it require a significant capital expense.",
"It's not really free to collect, you need to maintain the solar panels, pay for land, pay for batteries to store power, pay for the solar panels themselves, etc. Power is really really cheap, like 20 cents per kwh, and 1mx1m solar panel can only realistically make one kwh every four hours during the day, so basically the question is \"is it worth maintaining solar panels if they only pay back at a rate of 5 cents per hour per meter squared, and the answer to that question is usually no.",
"Because it's only \"free to collect\" once you have the infrastructure to collect it. That means panels, batteries, land, and monitoring equipment. That's kind of expensive right now, such that it's significantly cheaper to just use the existing power grid.",
"It is only free to collect if you have solar panels. Solar panels are not free. They are so not free that it takes a really long time to make up the difference in cost against buying electricity normally. Most people like to see return on their investment without waiting years."
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5t2fxw | Why is increased sucidal thoughts or actions always a side effect in antidepressants ? | Seems counterproductive | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"To start, it's not a common side effect. The first theory is that since antidepressants tend to resolve the physical symptoms of depression before emotional or cognitive symptoms, people suddenly have the energy to act on thoughts of suicide. The second is that it is simply a paradoxical reaction. For example, there is a small group of people who feel wired when they take medications that normally make people feel drowsy. No one is really sure why it happens. Brains are complicated, man. The third is that people already have thoughts of suicide and misattribute those thoughts to the medication rather than the reason they are taking antidepressants. The fourth is that people feel optimism that they are starting treating and become more depressed when treatment doesn't work as well or as quickly as they expected. The problem with antidepressants is that they take weeks to really start working and they are not a cure-all. If some sort of external problem is impacting your mental health, medications can't make those problems go away. The efficacy rate of major antidepressants is in the 50 - 60% range. Some people find the right drug on the first try, but many other people need several trials to find a medication that works for them. Bottom line: if you start to have thoughts of suicide after starting an antidepressant, talk to your doctor right away.",
"It's not always a side effect. It is sometimes a side effect because antidepressants are intended to make you feel motivated to do stuff. For most people that stuff is positive things that make them feel happy, but for some people it makes them feel more motivated to think or act on suicidal thoughts that they already have.",
"[This Hyperbole & a Half comic ]( URL_0 ) explains depression and the very unpredictable journey of recovery with the assistance of SSRIs, brilliantly. Idk about the chemistry side of things, but this nails the emotions (and lack thereof).",
"So the \"black box warning\" was primarily for teens and young adults. Depression at younger ages can indicate other, more severe moods disorders, like bipolar. Some anti depressants can cause folks who are BP to unexpectedly \"flip\" to a manic state, where the risk for suicide is higher. So no, not always. It's a result of incomplete knowledge and overzealous drug producers."
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5t2hj1 | why does the sun feel so good on your skin when you have a fever? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because when you have a fever, your body is internally very hot, which means heat is flowing out of your skin rapidly, so you feel cold. When the sun hits your skin, you stop feeling cold because heat is flowing into your skin as well (almost 2 horsepower worth of heat per square meter)."
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5t30w8 | why does the US spend so much money on military? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"600 billion. But your concern is legitimate. The US has funded a security umbrella that extends over much of the world. And, on the whole, promoting security overseas by helping allied nations has paid off tremendously. It is also very important to maintain technological superiority. But a lot of politicians perceive the military to be a revenue source they can use to promote spending and jobs in their voting blocs, and the idea morphed into what is called the \"military industrial complex\" in which military, politicians, and manufacturers all feed each other.",
"The military buys just about anything you can think of. Cars, computers, planes, printers, toilet paper, staplers, glue, screw drivers, Food, etc. Not only do they buy everything, they do it in extremely large numbers. Almost every corporation in America has their hand in the military cookie jar in one way or another. The Department of Defense also employs a lot of civilians directly, and in directly through private contractors. Wherever you see a military base in the US, which is damn near everywhere, there's a lot of civilians employed there. Whenever talks about military budget cuts come up, talks of base closures follow. The congressman with a base in their district, fights like hell to stop it, because it means lost jobs and tax revenue in their district."
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5t33d1 | Why is the president immune from the ethics laws, when the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 expressly states otherwise? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Standard disclaimer: political, keeping bias to a minimum. The current President is immune to ethics laws because the majority party at the moment (the Republicans) aren't holding him to those ethics laws. Simply put: right now, they're a police officer who's blatantly looking the other way as someone's getting mugged.",
"No one is actually stating what should be obvious, our current president is **not** in violation of the Ethics in Government Act. There are only two reasons you would think he would be in violation: you think the act has some generally ethical clause in it, or you think Trump has not disclosed his financial reports. *Option 1: you think the act has some generally ethical clause in it.* The Ethics in Government Act covers the disclosure of financial reports, a few other technical things, and establishes oversight of this process. That's it. It in no ways says things like \"The president must be ethical\". This act is solely about financial disclosure, nothing else. Speaking of that... *Option 2: you think Trump has not disclosed his financial reports.* Well guess what, he has. [Here]( URL_0 ) it is, go read it yourself. You may have heard that Trump has been refusing to release his tax returns. That is correct, he has refused to do that even though most other Presidents have. *But* that is not legally required. Trump has done everything he legally had to do to disclose his finances, thus he is not in violation of the Ethics in Government act. Hopefully that makes sense to you.",
"When Congress made these laws, they likely wanted to avoid direct conflict between the branches and the Constitutional problems it might create -- you can imagine an unscrupulous Congress using conflict of interest rules to launch baseless attacks against the president. It never really was an issue, because every president before Trump has acted as if the rules applied to them, both to avoid political problems and because people who run for president generally have an inherent belief in the country and its institutions. By leaving the president and vice president out, you avoid having to answer some tricky questions about separation of powers that might tie up the law in court. But now we're in an unusual situation where the president seems indifferent to ethics norms, and there aren't really any mechanisms to constrain him if Congress abdicates is responsibility as a coequal branch of government. Buckle your seat belts.",
"The simple answer is that the only real limit on any President's powers and actions is a united Congress' willingness to impeach him. Laws mean nothing if no one is willing to enforce them...",
"If politicians weren't immune from the same laws that government regular citizens, then these laws could be used to game the system. For example, if the police were allowed to detain politicians for question, then they would simply stop their political opponents, delaying them long enough to ensure they missed their chance to vote. So it's the same with ethics laws. If you allow people to challenge someone for everything they do as an ethics violation, then he will be tied up in court all day answering to these charges and unable to perform his duties. I mean that's what we're talking about here after all. You're asking how there might be a way to stymie Trump for the next four years by tying him up in court 24/7. Now you might think you're being clever, but you have to remember that when the shoe is on the other foot, your opponents will do the same exact thing to you. Think of it in the context of executive orders. You hate these things so much when Trump uses, but you never gave a second thought to them before when Obama was doing them. So in this same way, be careful what you wish for, because you might just get it.",
"Many of the checks and balances that were created to prevent corruption have become rubber stamps and in many cases actively work against what they were inteded to do like the electoral college and its electors... essentially most of our checks and balances are now used as tool to exercise control by the party in majority so they can stay in power",
"The President and Vice President, Congress and federal judges. are specifically exempted from having to follow the same ethics laws as employees. Congress sets their own ethics rules. Following is the relevant part of the law where they are all exempted: “Except as otherwise provided in such sections, the terms ‘officer’ and ’employee’ in sections 203, 205, 207 through 209, and 218 of this title shall not include the President, the Vice President, a Member of Congress, or a Federal judge.”",
"The ethics in government law is fairly limited in what it does. Also, in a fight between the president and Congress, the constitution is the controlling document. That has supremacy in how things get handled. The Constitution allows impeachment for \"high crimes and misdemeanors\" and it also allows for significant Congressional oversight - if they choose to exercise it. They are not choosing to exercise it. Congress has the power. It's just not using it.",
"Separation of powers is how. (Dont believe the hype) Congress cant pass a law that limits the constitutional enumerated power of the executive branch (they need an amendment to do that) and since the Constitution states quite plainly that power of the executive is vested with the president. Meaning that all of the powers of the executive branch are contained solely with the president, congresses only redress with the president is to impeach him. Since impeachment usually requires high crimes and misdemeanors, and as a practical matter requires overwhelming support, any other \"ethics\" sanctions are impossible to levy on the president."
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5t34su | Why does water have no 'taste' when it's chilled but when it is room temperature it can have odd flavours? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's just a case of cold numbing your sense of taste, so that what is still there at low temperatures, is only strongly sensed at warmer temps. You'll find that it's harder to taste *anything* when it's cold... that goes for dissolved stuff in water too."
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5t3a6n | Why can certain people, even children, handle high levels of spicy food while others turn into a mess with lower spice levels? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Often, people who cannot handle spices are \"supertasters\", including me. To quote directly from Wikipedia: \"The cause of this heightened response is unknown, although it is thought to be related to the presence of the TAS2R38 gene, the ability to taste PROP and PTC, and, at least in part, due to an increased number of fungiform papillae. Any evolutionary advantage to supertasting is unclear. In some environments, heightened taste response, particularly to bitterness, would represent an important advantage in avoiding potentially toxic plant alkaloids. In other environments, increased response to bitterness may have limited the range of palatable foods.\" URL_0 There is a list of foods on that article that, if you dislike, you are probably a supertaster."
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5t3e9o | Is it true that if someone you love very much dies, you can also die of a "broken heart" and if so explain it. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Your body has a lot of hormones. When you experience a lot of stress that feeling you get is due to sudden creation of many hormones. When you are old and your heart is weak this jolt of hormones can damage your heart. And if you are fragile enough you can die. It is common to lose elderly married couples in pairs for this reason.",
"When someone you love, especially a long time spouse, you can become depressed. You don't eat, you don't exercise, in general, you don't take care of yourself. If you are elderly, and your health isn't great, this can make things even worse. Maybe you don't keep up on your meds, maybe you don't go to the doctor right away, maybe you don't eat right or stay clean. You don't actually die of a broken heart, but you do things that hasten your demise."
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5t3fdc | What happens in our body the moment we fall asleep? Also why dont we ever remember falling asleep? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"This is because there is no moment when you fall asleep. Falling asleep is a gradual process with a slow slipping away of awareness over several minutes, not something where you're awake one moment and asleep the next.",
"You can train yourself to remember when you fall asleep. I remember some of the time. I just start thinking about things and forgetting where I am. It's weird. And hard to explain."
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5t3m5z | Why does desktop Windows 10 not support dynamic backgrounds when they are such a common feature in mobile OS? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"it might have if it came out in the dark days of cursor packs and desktop buddies. fortunately the desktop world has matured a bit and doesnt regard such gimmicks as a priority anymore. hopefully the mobile world will catch up soon"
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5t3zqp | What is the difference between donating my organs and donating my body to a school? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Donating your organs is if you die unexpectedly while healthy (like in a car crash) and they can be given to people who need them for transplant (it requires that they be fresh). If you're much older, your organs may not be ideal for transplant. Donating yourself as a cadaver, they'll preserve you so you can be examined by people in school.",
"Organ donations is *directly* saving lives, or at least improving them. Your organs can go to many different people, depending on need and your condition. Donating your body to science means it gets used to educate future doctors. That is not *directly* saving lives, but it could potentially helps save many in the future."
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5t41g8 | How does freezing water simply make ice while rain freezes and becomes snow, which has completely different properties despite being the same thing? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Snow isn't formed from rain. It's formed one molecule at a time from water vapor in a divergent process from rain.",
"This happens because when a large body of water (something bigger than a snow flake) freezes, it has a bunch of other water molecules to attach to. This allows the ice to form a really big piece. Snow forms from tiny droplets and the water eventually runs out of buddies to freeze to. It becomes a tiny individual snow flake. Snow is fluffy because it's ice made of many different pieces. If you shave an ice block, you make a bunch of tiny pieces that are also fluffy."
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5t4bvm | Net Vertical Impulse with a drop jump AND a counter movement jump | Hi Reddit. I could use some help. I've taxed my universities tutor abilities. My professor basically said, "Good luck." I'm having a hard time understanding net vertical impulse. Below is the problem: What is the net vertical impulse for an athlete performing a drop jump from a 0.30-m box if he or she jumps 0.45 m (include the vertical impulse to arrest the initial downward motion)? I'd really prefer to not be given the answer. Thanks for any assistance. | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When the athlete drops 0.3m, he will land with a velocity. When the athlete jumps 0.45m, he has an initial velocity. We seek the change in velocity first. We know that position = velocity × time. We know that position = acceleration × time × time An athlete falling 0.3m will fall for: 0.3 = 1/2 × 9.8 × time × time 0.6 = 9.8 × time × time 0.6/g = time × time Sqrt(0.6/9.8) = time During which time, your athlete will accelerate: 9.8 × time or 9.8 × Sqrt(0.6/9.8) That is how fast the athlete hits the ground. When the athlete jumps, he will leave the ground with a velocity sufficient to hit 0.45m. That is to say: Upward velocity - gravity's acceleration maxes at 0.45m Gravity's acceleration will again be 1/2 × a × t × t Solving for t gives us sqrt(0.9/9.8) for the duration of the upward part of the jump, at which point, the athlete will have accelerated 9.8 × (0.9/9.8), giving you your starting velocity for the jump. So, the total change in velocity from down to up is: gravity × sqrt(2 × distance down ÷ gravity) + gravity × sqrt(2 × distance up ÷ gravity) Or gravity × (sqrt(2×distance down÷gravity)+sqrt(2×distance up÷gravity)) Reduce as you see fit. Figure out the mass of your athlete, and solve your momentum."
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5t4c9h | What is the 9th circuit court of appeals? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The US is divided into 11 geographical areas called circuits, each of which is served by its own, independent Federal court system which consists of two tiers - district courts and the appellate court. Federal Courts are only answerable to higher courts within the same system and the Supreme Court. So, for example, a district court in the 8th circuit can ignore the rulings from any other district court in the country as well as the rulings from appellate courts in any other circuit. However, that same district court has to follow the rulings of the 8th Circuit Appellate Court and the Supreme Court. Likewise, the 8th Circuit Appellate Court can force its opinions on every district court within the 8th Circuit and is free to ignore the rulings of every other district and appellate court in the country - the sole exception being that it has to abide by rulings from the Supreme Court. The 9th Circuit covers most of the western half of the US and is by far the largest circuit in the country, both geographically and in terms of the amount of population it serves. Its also important in that the 9th Circuit Appellate Court is *extremely* liberal and has a reputation for playing as loose as it can with Supreme Court precedent. To give you some idea of how often it goes against the Supreme Court - if the Supreme Court hears a 9th Circuit decision there is over an 80% chance that it will reverse that decision, for other circuits that chance is about 60%. One of the judges on the 9th Circuit's Appellate Court - Judge Reinhardt has also made statements about how he is essentially free to rule however he wants because the Supreme Court can only take so many cases a year. This means that if he produces more rulings than the Supreme Court can hear some of his rulings will get through just by force of numbers. This is additionally important because in politically charged cases its frequently possible for groups to pick the circuit in which they will file their case by finding a potential plaintiff who lives there. Because of the 9th Circuit's reputation, groups looking to advocate for liberal causes almost always file their cases there in the belief that there is a much higher chance that they will obtain a favorable ruling as compared to the other circuits in the country.",
"The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit is a U.S. Federal court with appellate jurisdiction over the district courts in the following districts: District of Alaska District of Arizona Central District of California Eastern District of California Northern District of California Southern District of California District of Hawaii District of Idaho District of Montana District of Nevada District of Oregon Eastern District of Washington Western District of Washington Basically, if you go to court in one of these districts, and you lose your case, you can appeal to the appellate court of your district. Each circuit covers a different geographic area of the US. The 9th circuit court is the largest one, so lots of different cases get appealed through that court. If you lose again, you can keep appealing until you reach the Supreme Court."
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5t4cu6 | How do MRI's work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The machine uses a very powerful spinning magnet that aligns the nuclei of water (H20) atoms inside your body (Since most of it is water), it creates a magnetic field that causes the atoms to resonate, a phenomenon called nuclear magnetic resonance. The nuclei produce their own rotating magnetic fields which aligns the proton \"spins\" and the scanner detects it and uses it to create an image.",
"This is what I do for a living so let's see if I can give it a go. Basically the body part we are looking at is placed in or on a coil (commonly referred to as a camera). That body is then moved to the centre of the magnet (known as isocentre). All the hydrogen in your body is aligned with the direction of the magnet's (scanner's) magnetic poles. Keep in mind you have 2 parts Hydrogen in every molecule of water in your body (something we have a lot of). A radio frequency wave (RF) is applied to the area of interest (yes the same frequencies your car stereo picks up) and the coil measures the speed at which either the hydrogen recovers to being back to being in-line with the magnetic poles or the speed in which the hydrogen decays from it's position immediately after the RF pulse. Now that's a very basic version of how it works. The differences in measuring give different weightings of images (i.e. different tissue appearances. Infection may not show on one image type but will on another). Someone astute might point out that there is not water in your lungs (or shouldn't be at least). Which is true! Lungs are basically the only area MRI can not image. That said, the hospital I work at recently started a new study seeing if we actually can at least measure lung capacity via MRI.",
"Hydrogen nuclei (protons - I will use the words proton and nuclei interchangeably) distribute themselves between two quantum spin energy states when placed in a static magnetic field, and only in a magnetic field. Hydrogen is a type of nucleus that is said to be magnetically susceptible (has nothing to do with a positive charge, which all nuclei have, but rather the existence of quantum spin states), and it is ubiquitous in body tissues, so a good choice. The lower of the two energy states is said to be aligned with the field, and the higher energy state opposed. More nuclei are in the ground state (aligned), because it's lower energy. The energy difference between the two states lies in the range of radio frequencies. Only a pulse with a frequency precisely matching that energy difference will cause spin state excitation, which means that a nucleus in the lower energy state is promoted to the higher energy state. A radiofrequency (RF) pulse, which comes from a transceiver consisting of a coil placed around the area being scanned, will excite a population of protons to the upper state, and this tips the bulk magnetization vector (average alignment of the magnetic spins of all the protons) out of the direction of the magnetic field. This creates a signal that is detectable by the RF coil, due to the spins of the nuclei within the magnetic field. One is detecting the average of all the spins, and the frequency emitted from the protons is the same as what was required to excite the protons to the higher energy spin state. One tries to achieve a duration of RF pulse that tips the spin vectors by 90 degrees, with respect to the magnetic field direction (and by extension, with the ground state orientation of the proton spin vectors); this gives the strongest signal. The rate of decay of the signal, from excited state to ground state, which is the basis for the imaging, is determined by a number of factors, but suffice it to say that hydrogen nuclei on molecules in various kinds of tissues have different decay (aka relaxation) rates. The RF pulse sequences chosen are designed to exploit those differences. You can imagine that if you have two kinds of tissues next to each other, and you want to be able to distinguish them from each other on the image, you might sample the RF pulses from their spins at a point in time after the excitation pulse that the protons in one tissue have relaxed completely, and the others have not, so that the latter shows a brighter signal. It's more complicated than that, but you get the general idea. One problem is that the detector does not know where the RF pulses are coming from, in terms of 3D localization from the area being scanned. Magnetic field gradients are used to create spatial resolution. There is a high-powered supercooled permanent magnet, usually 1.5 Tesla in strength, and then electromagnets that are tuned to produce a field gradient through the area being scanned. Stronger fields create a greater energy difference between the two proton spin states and therefore require a higher frequency RF pulse for spin state transition, and they also emit a higher frequency after excitation. So the RF pulse is broadband, exciting all protons, and the computer is able to parse out the various frequencies emitted. Since you know the magnetic field gradient, you know where the pulses are coming from and can therefore construct an image. There are also gradients created by altering the phase of the RF pulses being emitted. You need gradients in all three coordinate axes to know where an RF signal is coming from, to give a proper 3D reconstruction. The images are formatted as 2D slices in various planes, and what the computer determines for image construction is the strength of the RF signal from each small volume element in the area being scanned; these are called voxels, the volume equivalent of a pixel. A higher strength RF signal, by convention, gives a brighter signal. You can do multiple different types of RF pulse sequences to make various kinds of tissues bright. One kind will make water bright, another fat. The reason you are in the scanner for so long is that the RF signal being detected is very weak and scarcely discernible from noise, so the area being scanned is pulsed repeatedly and the signals obtained after each pulse are summed, so that background noise falls away, leaving a good signal to use to create an image. The thumping noise in the scanner, I'm told, is from the electromagnets creating the field gradient with each pulse. Beware of explanations that say the scanner is detecting the bulk magnetization vector of the protons, as is the case in some texts, including radiology texts. I've seen some BS graphs depicting this. The detector is picking up RF pulses, not magnetization. I don't know if you can even measure such a tiny bulk magnetization vector from the protons inside a static 1.5T field. I suspect not. But that's a moot point anyway, as there is no magnetization detector on an MRI scanner. Sorry so long, but it's super complicated. A Nobel prize was awarded for this technology. I think it's cool. Source: I'm a sports medicine physician also with a PhD in Chemistry. TL;DR: quantum spin state excitation and decay in hydrogen nuclei."
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5t4fr0 | Why can you tame but not domesticate wild animals? | I hear this often but what is the reasoning behind it? I mean my mini Cockapoo still has wild tendencies and she's as far removed from wolves as you can almost get. How do animals genetically get used to human socialisation is my end point I guess. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"URL_0 those past posts might answer your question.",
"Domestication involves altering the genome of a species such that it engages in behaviors and exhibits traits we find useful. For most of human history, this was excessively difficult to do and only a small number of animals were chill enough, bred quickly enough, and were easy enough to capture to make it possible. That said, you can still teach an individual of a species that would be incredibly difficult to domesticate how to do things (that is, you can tame it) fairly easily."
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5t4i63 | Why does the inner reflection of a spoon show you upside down, while the outer shows you normal ways up? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Concave surfaces like the inside of a spoon will invert reflections, showing them upside-down, while convex surfaces like the outside of a spoon will show reflections as we see them normally, though they're distorted by the curve of the spoon.",
"Spoons are curved in a way that reflects light horizontally if it's coming from the opposite side of the spoons \"spoon\" shaped divot. So light bouncing off your face bounces horizontally below the middle of the spoon, while light bouncing off your feet bounces horizontally when it hits the the portion of the spoon above the middle."
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5t4j18 | When you burn yourself, for instance by running very hot water over your hand, why does it take a solid second or two to actually feel pain? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"This coming from highschool bio knowledge so someone else might be able to give you a better answer. But there are 2 different kinds of nerves. The reason you pull your hand back is the first nerve in action, it's a reflex nerve. This saves time for the brain. Rather than have the signal go all the way to the brain, and all the way back to the muscles to move the hand, the reflex nerve takes it and does it quickly, then the signal to the brain is sent Sorry if it's not very clear, been a while side I did bio.",
"Because it takes a solid second or two for the layers of skin to heat up to be the same temp as the water. You aren't feeling the temperature, you feel the rate of change as heat is applied or taken away from your skin."
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5t4m8g | Why do you sometimes feel nauseous/queasy when you're extremely hungry? | It seems really weird that at a moment when your stomach is almost (if not totally) empty, that you can feel like you're about to throw up. What's going on there? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When you have very low blood sugar, your pancreas releases a hormone called glucagon into the blood stream, which triggers the liver to convert stored glycogen into glucose to raise blood sugar levels. A side effect of glucagon is nausea, and we're not really sure why.",
"Two main reasons: * your blood sugar has dropped enough to cause a mild case of hypoglycemia, which can be associated with nausea, shakiness, lightheadedness * an excess of stomach acids is irritating the lining of your stomach and causing inflammation. This happens in people who have issues with their stomach emptying properly especially.",
"Yes it is a huge relief. My doctor also recommended a high protein diet especially first thing in the morning to get longer lasting stability. Mine is caused by the way my celiac's affects my hormones and endocrine system. Took a while to figure it out, but finally found a doc that focuses on auto immune diseases and how they interact with the endocrine system. Helped me so much to try to manage it, but it is still a constant battle to stabilize since hormones are so variable throughout the month. My hypoglycemia is much worse during ovulation and my period. Realized this after my doc made me track symptoms on a period tracker app. Connected the dots after that."
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5t4ovp | what causes that clarity in thinking that comes after you leave high school? | For some it doesn't hit til after college. But I feel like I'm able to grasp things quicker now (late 20s) than I was in high school | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The full development of your pre-frontal cortex, the part of your brain that evaluates risk and planning.",
"Your mind matures, and if you have them, your student loans. Gotta do useful things, or else!"
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5t4pjp | It's said that a single strand of DNA contains roughly 4 megabytes of information. How exactly do they know this and how are bytes convertible to something physical like base pairs? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Well, with only one of four nucleotides possible at any position on the strand (A, C, T, G), the nucleotide could be represented by a number 0, 1, 2 or 3, or the binary equivalent 00, 01, 10 or 11 (two bits per nucleotide). From there, it's just a matter of multiplying by the number of positions on the DNA strand for the total number of bits, and then dividing by eight to get bytes. The number still seems a bit off though, so perhaps I'm missing something.",
"A bit is a binary digit. A byte is an 8 digit number, in binary. In decimal, a ten digit number could represent a high count of something, or each digit could have it's own significance. For example, in a telephone number, where it really just represents what button to press. It's conceivable that every two digits could combine to represent something. Kind of like the first three in an American phone number represent a region. DNA is made up a discreet number of pairs of bases, no? The are four bases that bind in two different pairs. Even if it matters which is left and which is right, relative to something arbitrary (for instance the pairs of the entire preliminary length of the strand), it's all powers of two. So in the case of DNA it would be pretty simple to convert to bits and bytes. Without even knowing specifically how many kinds of bases there are, or whether the chirality matters, as long as everything must pair up, each pair is represented by a strict number of bits, with no waste. I.e., if there are 4 bases I'll call a b c and d, but the pairs only form like ab and cd, then that's either 0 or 1 in binary. One digit covers all those possibilities. If chirality confess into play, so that relative to the first ab or cd, you can have ab ba cd or dc, then there are 4 possibilities, which are entirely grasped by two digits with no wasted digit. By waste I mean, imagine if you had 5 possibilities. That would require 3 digits, but wouldn't use all the combinations of those 3. Although, even if the third digit is used, and a little bit a waste, it would still factor correctly into an amount of dat a, so that's somewhat moot."
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5t4vzj | How come some gold is edible and some isn't? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Edible gold is the same thing as regular gold. It's just cut very thin so that if you eat it, it won't damage your intestines. You don't actually absorb the gold. It just goes through your digestive tract until it comes out the other side."
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5t4xe7 | Why do smokers get a calming response from cigarettes when they are distressed, nervous, or anxious; when it seems like nicotine (a stimulant) should have the opposite effect? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When your brain wants you to do something, it releases **dopamine** to force you to do it. The more dopamine your brain releases, the more you feel compelled to do whatever it is your brain wants you to do. In other words, dopamine is your brain's \"gotta have it\" chemical. It is what makes you crave things to varying degrees. And the more dopamine your brain is outputting, the more uneasy and uncomfortable you feel until you act on its urges. Then when you finally complete that task that dopamine has forced you to act on... and you've gotten whatever \"prize\" was waiting at the end of that task... your brain releases a rush of **serotonin** to match the dopamine it just outputted. Serotonin is your brain's \"got it\" chemical, shutting off the fountain of dopamine that was compelling you to seek out whatever you wanted. But, more importantly, the **brief combination of high dopamine and high serotonin in your brain** acts as a reward mechanism. It gives you a feeling of immense pleasure. It's nature's way of rewarding you for taking a specific behavior. Think about a time when you were a little hungry... then really hungry... then completely starved. It was dopamine being released in varying quantities in your brain that caused to feel those growing levels of hunger. And think about how relieving it felt when you finally ate. You likely gorged yourself and you felt INCREDIBLE. That was the combo of high dopamine and high serotonin in your brain. You experience the same thing when you build up the nerve to ask a girl out... and then she says yes. Or when you go on a long run and then make it home, safe and sound. And when you jump out of an airplane (followed by landing safely on the ground). And when you watch scary movies (then go back to \"safe\" reality). It's all dopamine making you feel uneasy (escape! eat that food! make it to safety! get out of this awful situation!)... followed by serotonin when you'd achieved your mission... followed by pure unadulterated bliss in the brief moment when your brain was flooded with both chemicals at once. Long story short, **nicotine \"artificially\" creates this rush of serotonin in your brain**. So if you're stressed (i.e. you have extremely high dopamine levels from something being incomplete or scary in your life), cigarettes temporarily create the surge of serotonin that turns off dopamine -- and leaves you feeling extreme pleasure. But, since they're not *actually* solving the issues causing high dopamine for you, the dopamine just comes back... but eventually comes back at higher, and higher, and higher levels. It acclimates to your \"artificial\" serotonin source. So the pleasure and calm you get from cigarettes (and their \"artificial\" serotonin hit) increases with time -- but your addiction (and stress) also grows. Source: [The Craving Brain]( URL_0 ) by Ronald Ruden",
"You have to see what part of the nervous system it stimulates. There's sympathetic (which is fight or flight) and parasympathetic (which is rest and relax). It stimulates the parasympathetic part which gives the relaxing effect. Apart from that it increases blood flow leading to more blood to the brain making you more alert and focused. Hence why people smoke when they are anxious, to be more focused and calm.",
"Nicotine acts on different receptors in the brain than the stimulants you're probably thinking of. A chemical's effect on the body can't be adequately explained in one word such as \"stimulant\" so you're bound to get nuanced effects that require greater understanding to differentiate rather than lumping everything into one category",
"There is a lot of crazy unsubstantiated nonsense posted so far. This is complicated so I'll try to give you a thorough yet layman explanation. Nicotine has different affinities for receptors in the brain versus the peripheral nervous system. It also does not bind all nicotinic receptors equally. What the result of this is: is that nicotine produces both a sympathetic type of effect, due to the actions of epinephrine, norepinephrine, and glucose released from liver, and also parasympathetic type actions that improve cognition and decrease stress through the actions in the central nervous system, chief among these being the release of dopamine. In a nutshell it puts your body in fight or flight Mode, while putting your brain in a relaxed state that is better suited to cognition. There is also a weird pharmacokinetic property that the stimulant versus sedative effects reverse based on the level of nicotine in your blood. At a low concentration in your blood it will act as a stimulant, but at a high concentration like a sedative. This effect plays out not only due to the amount of nicotine ingested, but also the distribution of nicotine throughout your different body fluid compartments due to their varying permeability to the molecule. Clear as mud?",
"The answer is rather complex, actually. No, its not just response to an addiction. No, you do not go into full blown withdrawls after an hour. Yes, this has been studied by many groups; some more reputable than others. Stimulating the parasympathetic system is part of the answer. The dopamine released is an obvious answer. The trained neural response towards the activity of smoking is another. And, obviously, the clearing of a nic fit does intensify all of these. First time i inhaled tobacco, i received relief from chronic anxiety. It was like finding an answer to a question i was created with. Im not saying its superior to other anti anxiety medicine- just that it helps myself.",
"I started taking Wellbutrin for depression a while ago and the doctor told me that one of the side effects is that it could severely curtail your desire to smoke. He said that Wellbutrin was developed years ago to help people quit smoking but they also found that it could help people with depression, so that became the primary focus of the drug - I still smoked for several months before I decided to quit, but it was like forcing myself to smoke because I lost the desire to do it, the drug is so strong and so good at stopping the urge to smoke (at least for me it was) - In January, 2016 I stopped smoking after over 40 years (and many frustrating years of trying to stop on my own) and I have not had any urge at all to smoke since then and I am very grateful - I feel fantastic now just like everybody said I would. Quitting smoking completely changed my life.",
"Smokers are addicted to nicotine. Addicts who go too long without the substance they're addicted to go through withdrawal, the symptoms of which include stress and anxiety. By smoking a cigarette, a smoker gets more nicotine, curbing his withdrawal.",
"Reward factor.. Just part of the addiction really.. I sat through a nice meal,a cigarette will be the icing on the cake. Just finished that assignment,i deserve a cigarette. Nice coffee,even better with a smoke. Crack a beer,cigarette will go perfectly. Fuck this is stressing me,have a smoke and think about it... They are all just an excuse to light up.. Source: Former 18 year smoker..",
"I've had a theory for awhile but I could be off base. Smoking requires some sort of controlled breathing. Try copying the behavior. Taking some shallow but deep breaths, holding them in, exhaling and repeating is very relaxing without a cigarette.",
"I think Alan Carr nailed this one. His idea was that cigarettes cause the nervousness/anxiety/whatever in the long term but alleviate it briefly in the short term hence the strong and regular compulsion to spark up (plus the addictive chemicals obv). Everyone is different but it certainly worked this way with me. (30-40/day for 20 odd years, quit using vape)",
"smokers are used to having a certain level of nicotine running through the bloodstream. because it's such an addictive substance, smokers experience physical withdrawal in the form of anxiety or general shittiness, etc. by smoking another cigarette, the nicotine level rises and the negative feelings are relieved. AKA negative reinforcement - the frequency of the behavior (smoking) increases due to its ability to remove a negative stimulus (withdrawal/general shittiness). the behavior of smoking can also be classically conditioned as a stress reliever, as smokers often feel triggered to smoke when they feel stress, and in turn the physical relief of smoking will lead them to continue the cycle of stress triggered smoking in addition to many other triggers. ie. finishing a meal (in which case the feeling of satiety and the positive feelings induced by eating become associated with the behavior of smoking afterwards). not to mention the fact that smoking generally increases blood glucose in a way that's similar to the increase you'd expect after eating a piece of candy or small meal, and that in itself is a pleasant feeling. consistent with positive reinforcement, the behavior would be expected to happen again as it provided a positive stimulus. although yes, in high doses nicotine will function in smokers as a stimulant. i'd add a source or links but i need a smoke",
"There was a study done that determined it was partially based on how you inhale. Unfortunately I don't have a link. But smokers fluctuate between both uses.",
"You wear LiveStrong bracelets because they're cool. They take getting used to, but they're cool. You take them off, and your hand feels weird. Not right. Bad. Put it back on. It feels better. Hand only feels good now if you wear the bracelet. Bracelet is addictive! Take it off! Ooof. Took it off. Hand feels bad. Bracelet is not addictive. Just makes hand feel good. This is addiction.",
"Because nicotine affects the addiction center of your brain. It basically gets linked up in the part of your brain that gives you urges based on survival like the urge to eat, drink, and sleep. Once you begin to go without nicotine for a while, your brain thinks you need it to survive and starts causing all kinds of problems; like a kid throwing a tantrum until it gets its way. Withdrawals can range from simple anxiety and nervousness, all the way to more severe symptoms like back pain and ulcers forming in the mouth. Once you indulge in that addiction, your brain releases dopamine, a substance also released in response to other primal urges being satisfied. Dopamine is a powerful chemical that causes a deep down satisfaction and state of relaxation. That is why smokers get a calming, relaxed sensation after experiencing nicotine.",
"The effects of nicotine on the brain have been gone over ad nauseam by other posters, but I'll just add this non-nicotine related tidbit: When you smoke, carbon monoxide in the cigarette smoke binds to your hemoglobin and actually reduces your blood oxygen levels temporarily. This has the effect of making you feel slightly tired or \"relaxed\". Full on carbon monoxide poison, basically, gently puts you to sleep as you suffocate and die. Smokers who smoke regularly have increased red blood cell production to make up for this. It's almost a little like blood doping. So in addition to titrating your nicotine levels because you are addicted, if it's been a while since your last smoke, your blood oxygen levels are higher than you are used to, and you feel energetic and antsy. Smoking that sweet carbon monoxide takes your nervous energy down a peg. If you've ever quit smoking cold turkey, you can attest to the fact that you have an insane amount of energy for the first week or two. Like constantly fidgeting. It's a combination of the nicotine withdrawal and your blood oxygen levels being higher than usual."
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3,
3,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://www.amazon.com/Craving-Brain-addiction-overeating-alcoholism/dp/0060928999/"
],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
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} | [
"url"
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|
5t5095 | Why does the Railgun in this video appears to have a muzzleflash? | URL_0 Hello, I have a quick question about ^this video^ of a Railgun test-fire. A Railgun uses magnetism to hurl out an object at incredible speeds, right? So if there is no gas being lit to propel said projectile, what is the muzzle flash we see coming out of the barrel of the railgun in the video above? EDIT: Didn't see my spelling error in my title, would a Mod mind helping me out? :P | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ddk75ew"
],
"text": [
"When there is electric current through a conductor (a conductor is say a stick of metal), there is something called resistive heating. Now, when a current passes through say the rail of the railgun, especially the MASSIVE amounts of current that a railgun uses, it will cause scorching amounts of heat because it makes the molecules in the rails excited, like giving a kid a ton of sugar. Enough to burn the air around it, and partially melt the rails. This actually causes railguns rails to wear out quite quickly, and is an ongoing problem with the development of railguns. We actually don't get told too much about US railgun development, so who knows if they've solved this problem yet or not? So what you are seeing is the massive resistive heat caused by a sudden, absolutely huge, amount of current going through the two rails that propel the armature (the armature is the piece of metal the bullet is attached to while inside the rails. That's the stuff you see spinning away from the bullet when it gets fired) forward."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
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} | [
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5t5mn7 | why is there a universe? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ddkc1tq",
"ddkcnrl"
],
"text": [
"Honestly we do not know. There is no scientific evidence available to explain why the universe exists, instead of not existing at all.",
"Why does there need to be a reason?"
],
"score": [
6,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
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]
} | [
"url"
] | [
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] |
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