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5t5qbd | Why is the term "blue-collared" used to describe people who do manual work? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It used to be that the stereotypical image of a manual laborer be that of a man in a light blue button up shirt with either jeans or khakis and boots, while the salaryman and middle manager was stereotypically in a white shirt and tie with khakis or slacks and dress shoes. In other words, literally wearing a blue and white collar respectively.",
"I'm not a 100% sure but I believe white collared refers to dress shirts and blue collared refers to jumpsuit uniforms.",
"Traditionally factory workers wore inexpensive and durable cotton or canvas shirts, and blue was a popular color since indigo dye was inexpensive and blue hides dirt and stains well. That's why you'll often see things like boiler suits and overalls in shades of blue."
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5t68vm | Why does rigor mortis make bodies stiff? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It has to do with the way your muscles work. The muscles have fibers that extend and contract using the energy of ATP molecules. Those fibers are mainly made up of actin and myosin. They slide along each other to make the movement. But the way it actually works is that ATP breaks the connections between those fibers to allow them to move in the first place. It's a third molecule, that I can't remember the name of, that actually does the pushing and pulling. With no ATP, after death, the actin and myosin fibers are locked together."
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5t69op | When do babies gain awarness of themselves? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Sometime between 15-24 months. Babies/children will take a step in self-awareness. If you would place a child in front of a mirror before their 15th month, and they have for example a postit stuck on their forehead, they will not realise that it's on their own head. When the children are between 15-24 months, they begin to realise that the reflection is their own. They will not only begin to understand that it's a familiar sight, but also that they are seeing themselves in the mirror."
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5t6b7s | How do nations such as Saudi Arabia (predominantly Muslim nations) convince the public that chopping a persons hands off for thieving, for example, is in line with Islam and peace? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"\"The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger, and strive with might and main for mischief through the land is: execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land: that is their disgrace in this world, and a heavy punishment is theirs in the Hereafter; Qur'an 5:33 As to the thief, Male or female, cut off his or her hands: a punishment by way of example, from Allah, for their crime: and Allah is Exalted in power. Qur'an 5:38 Hadith[edit] While the majority of Muslim translators have remained true to the Arabic text, many apologists have attempted to obscure the plain meaning of Qur'an 5:38. However, the hadith prove its meaning is entirely literal. Furthermore, Prophet Muhammad and the early generations of Muslims had no qualms with it being so.\" From wiki Islam"
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5t6blo | What is actually keeping China from invading Taiwan and simply ending this whole "one China" policy? How is this different from the South China Sea? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Tawain does have a military and international support and recognition. URL_0",
"Taiwan has defensive military pacts, notably with the US. If China invades Taiwan, it means war with the USA. (unless Taiwan declares independence first in which case that defensive pact doesn't count)."
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5t6fhb | Why are some imgur-links viewable on reddit itself and some aren't? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Depends on what you use to embed the picture. Also sole users tend to post the imgur URL ( URL_0 ) instead of what they should post which is the picture URL ( URL_1 )."
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5t6j3y | what is the difference between butter and margarine? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Margarine is a non-dairy product created as a substitute for butter. While originally made from animal fat in the 1800s, today the primary ingredients include vegetable oil, water, salt, emulsifiers, and some also include milk.",
"> Tub margarine can easily be substituted for butter at the table for spreading, and some people use it on the stovetop for cooking, though we typically favour using oil over margarine in cases like this. In baking, melted margarine could work in recipes that call for melted butter, but in recipes that call for softened butter, swapping in tub margarine may change the texture; for example, cakes will be less tender, and cookies will generally spread out more and be less crisp. > Tub margarines are too soft for pies, pastries and other recipes that call for cold butter, and don’t stand up in icings and frostings, either. Low-fat/light margarines tend to be inappropriate for cooking and baking due to a high water content – be sure to read the label! > Stick margarine, also known as block or hard margarine, has the same texture as butter, and is therefore a better substitute for baking and cooking than tub margarine. However, stick margarines are generally high in trans fats, which have been shown to be bad for our heart."
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5t6lua | How do drug withdrawals actually kill you? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Only alcohol and benzos (Xanax and the like) have withdrawals that kill. At least as far as common recreational drugs go or include suicide. It happens because they work by increasing a neurotransmitter called GABA in the brain. GABA makes your brain (and you) chill out. It's necessary. Addicts brains get used to not needing much of it. If they stop too fast they can die because the lack of it causes seizures. This can be prevented by gradually reducing the dose.",
"Quitting any drug, prescription or illicit, can be dangerous. Some of them should not be stopped without medical supervision, because it can become potentially fatal to stop cold turkey. Alcohol is one such drug. Alcohol withdrawal can be mild, moderate, or severe, depending on how much one drinks and how long they've been an alcoholic. In severe form, one might experience acute alcohol withdrawal syndrome. What happens is the person develops tremors, anxiety, insomnia, restlessness a fever, extreme nausea, diarrhea, and delirium tremens. In about 10% of patients, a fever develops followed by rapid breathing, tremors, and profuse sweating, followed by delerium tremens. DTs are characterized by hallucinations, mental confusion, and disorientation. The mortality rate among patients that progress to DTs is up to 25%. Another potential effect of acute withdrawal is withdrawal seizures, which consist of generalized convulsions alternating with muscular contractions (tonic-clonic seizures). Some patients will then progress to Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome. Wernicke's syndrome is a disorder of the nervous system caused by a thiamine defiency and alcoholics account for most cases in the Western world. The syndrome is characterized by severe cognitive impairment, ataxia, and paralysis of certain muscles, particularly in the eye. Korsakoff's syndrome is a potentially disabling memory disorder. Fewer than 5% of patients initially exhibit a depressed level of consciousness, but the syndrome may progress through stupor, coma, and death. Another possibility is cardiovascular complications. The heart is a major site of alcohol-induced disturbances of heart rhythm. This leads researchers to the conclusion that acute withdrawal increases the odds of sudden cardiac death. Another dangerous drug to withdraw cold turkey: benzodiazepines. Benzo withdrawal can lead to hypertension, elevated temperature, worsening bizarre behavior, movement irregularities. Eventually, the patient can develop seizure like activity and eventually, death. However, benzo withdrawals, as severe as they can be, rarely lead to death. There'd only been 2 documented cases in the US, as of 2009. Next on the list is opoids. Ironically, heroin withdrawal rarely proves fatal, but methadone sometimes does. Like benzos, methadone withdrawal can lead to malnutrition, seizures, and heart failure. Fatalities from most drug withdrawals are very rare, but it is easier on the person both mentally and physically if they step down, rather than go cold turkey. Programs that require cold turkey without the proper medical supervision and assistance with withdrawal symptoms are more likely to lead to serious complications."
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5t6n7m | What is synesthesia? How can people taste words and smell sounds? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You can open a JPEG in an audio program. The result will be weird noise, but it will be sound. This is the same thing."
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5t6u0i | why does the body store unhealthy amounts of fat | So I know the body store fat for survival reasons, but why does it let it's self go to the extreme on storing fat to the point it risks its own survival? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If you get stranded somewhere without food those unhealthy amounts of fat is going to be the thing that keeps you alive. It is only in the last few generations that food is pretty much guaranteed at all times. So too much fat have just recently become unhealthy.",
"Because this is the first time in history we have mass over abundance of cheap food and coupled with being way less active physically than at any other time in history. So, in the past in times of plenty our bodies would store the extra for a bit until when food is more scarce. During the scarce time your body supplements you by burning the fat. All this means our bodies are storing all that extra fat, and never having a time to use it. Our bodies have never dealt with that on a huge scale ever before. They \"don't know\" to release the fat because our body is waiting for that scarce food time. The body just needs time to evolve to changes.",
"Here's the explanation I've gotten: imagine you've been storing firewood in the shed behind your house. You don't have much to store, since you live in a pretty cold area and you usually don't have too much to spare. This works for a while, and so you get used to just throwing whatever spare you have into your storage area, since there's basically no way you'll ever have enough to really need any sort of organization or anything like that. One day, however, you start getting more firewood. WAY more firewood. So much that you couldn't possibly burn all of it, so you start putting a lot more in storage. You're pretty used to just chucking it into your shed by this point, so you just do that. This continues for a while, until, oh shit, your shed is overfull and things are starting to get cramped, to the point that you've started storing wood in your house, too. Even though it's starting to get in the way, you never learned how to handle this situation, since you figured there was no way you would ever have this much spare wood. In this analogy, firewood is analogous to calories, carbohydrates, etc. All the stuff we store as fat. Since our bodies evolved never having access to the amount of foods we have now, they never really had the chance to figure out how to store all this stuff, and so when there's too much it starts to get in the way of the body's functioning.",
"I've asked a similar question to my aunt, she's a doctor. So, for thousands of years humans diet consisted in Meats from hunting, grasses and herbs and those types of nomad foods. (\" about 195,000 years ago\" According to Wikipedia ) There was no crops or farming in 200.000 b.C, So there was almost no Carbohydrates in their diet so the body never adapted to them. They were almost non-existent. I know that agriculture started around 10.000b.C but at that time people ate so little because there their production was low. With the Industrialization we are capable of getting Carbohydrates (sugars mainly) way easier than we used to in the Pyramids time. Our DNA never experienced that amount of caloric intake, so it's not adapted to release the extra fat. But Carbs and sugars play a bit role in this",
"So everyone saying mostly the body does not know it does not need the extra stores. Then why does you body not store vitamins and other things it needs. If you consume more of them then you need your body mostly just flushes them out. Or is there a difference or reason your body can't store those things. I know people always seem to be lacking some of these. When I was in the hospital I almost always had a potassium drip cause I was low on that."
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5t6wnd | The conservation of energy | Energy can not be created or destroyed, just changed from one form to another So if I punch a wall, where does the energy end up let's say 5 years from now. I'm assuming some would be heat, maybe some light. Then what? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You punch a wall, it's going to go into a few different main forms of energy: - Kinetic energy, or energy of motion. This is the parts of the wall that move in response to your punch - Sound energy - Heat energy The kinetic energy very quickly dissipates into the wall as vibration, whilst the sound energy is vibration in the air and this propagates outwards. Eventually these vibrations also dissipate as heat, which is just the random energy of motion of particles. This ultimately what all the energy will end up as through varying processes extracting concentrated motion into random motion. Once the energy is transformed into heat, it is very difficult to get it back in the form of useful work. This whole process will take a lot less than five years."
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5t7879 | Why are stray dogs often found in far worse condition than stray cats? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Cats can get anywhere. They can climb walls into bins, catch mice and have claws to protect themselves. Tgey also have had very little selective breeding so are still like their wild ancestors. Dogs on the other hand have had their instincts bread out of them. They rely on people and are restricted by walls and fences. I suppose they have less opportunities to find food.",
"Domestic cats are fairly \"wild\" - they are still built mostly like wild cats, they still instinctively hunt anything small that moves, so if need arises they'll be able to hunt for food. Whereas a stray chihuahua is never going to form a pack and hunt like a wolf.",
"What you're seeing are *feral* cats. Cats that *never* lived in a home with a family and have been living in the wild for, quite possibly, generations. Take one of those into your house and you're in for a world of pain. These cats have figured out how to live in and around Human habitation - they can hunt small birds and rodents, and often go through trash cans. Stray dogs are very likely to be pets who got lost. They never lived outside or had to hunt/fight to survive. If a pet cat runs away and gets lost, they're not likely to survive (not impossible, but not likely). There are also some other reasons. Dogs are pack animals, for example, so a lone dog is not a natural thing. Cats are smaller and more agile so can leap higher and get into smaller spaces. Very few wild/feral dogs like living in cities, too (coyotes are one of the only species that thrives in modern human habitation)."
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5t79h1 | Why does hair on certain parts of our body, e.g., legs and arms, seem to stay the same length without trimming, while hair on other parts of our body, e.g., head, require periodical trimming? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's due to the cyclical nature of our hair follicles that go through three distinct phases. Anagen(growth), Catagen(transition), and Telogen(resting/release). The total cycle time determines the length of the hair able to be grown before it naturally falls out and is replaced. These phases are different around the body, longer for head hair, shorter elsewhere. You don't notice this ever happening because hairs are constantly being replaced and are always reaching the same length given the follicle type.",
"Hair grows, then it stops, then it falls out and is replaced by a new strand. Hair on your head grows for longer before it falls out then hair on your arms and legs does, which is why most people cut it to make it easier to deal with. If you don't cut it it will eventually reach a point where it won't grow longer, which is why not just anyone can set a world record for hair length."
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5t7qlv | Is Monopoly random? | I heard somewhere that some spots are landed on more often than others. Is that true? If so, how is that possible if rolling the dice is random every time? Thanks in advance. | Mathematics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The position of a Monopoly piece is affected by more than just dice rolls. There are draw card spaces, which may send you to specific spots across the board, and the jail, which can pop up quite often in a normal game.",
"The odds of rolling 2 or 12 is 2.7% (1 in 36) because there's only one way to roll those numbers. But there are 6 ways to roll a 7 which makes the odds 16% (6 in 36). We also have things like the cards or other rules like jail which affect where people land. So if we took a few hundred players and kept track of where they landed there will be spots they are much more likely to end up on the board. People have done this a lot and we end up with something like [this board.]( URL_0 ) the redder a space, the more often someone landed there. So we can see that jail is the most common place you'll end up. There's also a lot of ways to skip the green/blue side of the board. The most landed on spaces, and the properties that will make you the most money overall, are the orange and red properies next to free parking. So someone playing by the official rules with things like auctions and no money on free parking, would be able to take all this into account and make smarter choices about what properties to pursue. This makes them much more likely to win a game than someone who just sat down for the first time.",
"Well consider dice rolls There is only one possible combination that allows a 2, and one combination that allows a 12. On the flip side, other number totals have far more combinations, making those rolls more likely. This means, at least on the first circle around the board, there are spots that are indeed far more likely than others.",
"Yes, some spots are landed on more than others. The highest probability being the Orange properties. The biggest reason being that these spots are 6-9 spaces away from Jail. If you stop and think about it for a second the Jail spot is the most landed upon spot of the game because there are three ways to get there: a go to jail spot that directs you there, rolling three doubles, and finally there are multiple chance cards that will land you in jail as well. There are a couple spots that have a chance card that lands you at that specific spots, and these spots are also proportionally higher, but only slightly. Another factor to consider is that the spots in the front half of the board are landed upon more often because there are more card that direct you back to go, and a player is more likely to bankrupt and exit the game on the second half of the board. All of these factors mean that the properties don’t all have the same chance of being landed on, but at the same time the chances are only very slightly better. Here are the actual chances of landing on each property that have been mathematically calculated in case you’re interested. As you can see the highest probability properties only have an additional 0.3%-0.5% chance of being landed upon, so not that significant in the scheme of the game. URL_0"
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5t7rfu | Why does fire always point up? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Hot air rises because it is less dense than cold air (Like how a helium balloon rises). The air in a flame is hotter than the surrounding air, so tries to rise. The flame rises with it until it cools enough to no longer glow. Then, it is just hot air rising some more!"
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5t7xfe | "One China" | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Top comment is missing a bit of the nuance (I can't think of a less arrogant but equally concise way to say that.) The One China Policy does *not* mean \"the U.S. recognizes that Taiwan is part of China.\" The Chinese Civil War created two governments, each claiming to be the legitimate government of \"China\": the communist People's Republic of China (\"PRC\") and the nationalist Republic of China (\"ROC\") The ROC *de facto* lost control of the mainland and fled to the Island of Taiwan. Yet down to this day both the PRC and the ROC governments both claim to be the legitimate government of \"China.\" Both governments, however, agree that there are *not* two separate countries: there is only *one* China, and they disagree only about who its legitimate representative is. The \"One China Policy\" is, simply, the agreement of that one fact: there is only one country called \"China.\" To the PRC government, this is useful and good because they think that time is on their side and what they view as the self-evident absurdity of a rump state claiming to be at the head of the country will eventually become too obvious to ignore and they can take Taiwan. To the ROC government, this is useful and good because in the unlikely event that the PRC government suffers some sort of calamitous failure, the ROC will not have relinquished their claim over everything included under the umbrella of \"China,\" and also because a formal declaration of independence would very likely result in war. To the US government, this is useful and good because it creates a helpful ambiguity that allows us to have relations with both governments without forcing us to go all-in for one or the other. In 1979, the Carter administration, building on a Nixon-era initiative, transferred primary diplomatic recognition to the PRC government, even as it acknowledged that it would continue tacit relations with the ROC government.",
"China had a civil war. Communists won the mainland, while the nationalists control the island of Taiwan. The \"One China\" policy means that the U.S. recognizes that Taiwan is part of China, and not an independent state. This helps keep tensions low, since the mainland is very sensitive about this issue and still considers Taiwan theirs."
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5t7y7e | When a judge awards millions in a person to person court case, does the winner ever get paid? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Maybe. Can't squeeze blood from a turnip. If you sue a homeless person for something, and the courts say you're owed $3 million. How do you plan on collecting that 3 million from a guy who is bumming change and digging in trash cans for food? At that point it becomes a paper victory, because there's no cash, no assets to seize or puts liens on."
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5t7zw6 | How do movies request songs by artists and what happens if they don't like the song? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Although [this video]( URL_0 ) focuses on the making of a film for Prince, it does touch on how the process is basically: * Ask * Maybe trade favors Might be some information in there to help...but the video is still hilarious. Edit: I do wonder how Tom Petty feels about how I associate *American Girl* with Buffalo Bill.",
"I feel like this one answers itself. They request the artist and commission them to write it. If they (the film crew don't like the song, they request another to be written, or they hire a different artist."
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5t84q0 | Why doesn't Donald Trump sign an alternative EO that covers immigration/terrorism while the courts decide on the first? | I mean if there's such a high threat of "Terror", isn't there other less controversial things he could order? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Couple of reasons. (that I see) 1 - That would require that Trump is capable of admitting he might lose the court battle. I don't think Trump's ego can take that. 2 - Any EO he issues on this subject is liable to be immediately shut down by the court, referencing the one that is already in place. So even if he wanted to, I am not sure he can.",
"A similar order would almost instantly be blocked as well. Not just on its own grounds, but on the grounds there is already a pending case. It could also prejudice the judges in the existing case. Part of what will be argued is the intent of the law, and if the administration shows they are acting in bad faith, that can be used against them.",
"If he does then he might be held in contempt of court as the court have said that such an order would be a violation of the constitution."
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5t8ayq | What are the disadvantages of masturbation? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Only one I can think of is that you get use to the particular tighness (grip) of your hand and when you finally have sex with a girl, a vagina doesn't feel right or tight enough... thereby leading to the inability to climax or experience full enjoyment with that girl."
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5t8duq | Why do you get that strange fuzzy feeling in you belly or genitals whenever you see someone getting hurt (like watching a video of a skateboarder falling and breaking an ankle) AND is there a name for this phenomenon. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's called synaesthesia; \"Neural mechanisms potentially involved in synaesthesia for pain include “mirror systems”: neural systems active both when observing an action, or experiencing an emotion or sensation and when executing the same action, or personally experiencing the same emotion or sensation.\" You see that someone is in pain, and your body can empathize based on pain you've experienced."
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5t8le2 | If energy can't be neither created nor destroyed. How did it came into existence? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"No idea... and it's a big open question. Answers are all some version of kicking the can... *Cyclic (It's always been!) *Cyclic Ecpyrotic (It's always been, because of higher dimensions interacting!) *Eternal inflation (Ceases to be a meaningful question, \"it's always been!\") *The universe is a simulation (God did it!) The thing is though, conservation of energy isn't a law that applies to whole universes, it's part of a set of constants that is a feature of the universe we live in. Conservation of energy doesn't mean much, if anything, when you're talking about the entire system, from the outside.",
"Good question. We don't really know. Our math can only get us to 1 planck time after the big bang, at which point all mass/energy that would ever exist had already come in to existence.",
"Matter *can* actually be created spontaneously in our universe, but only if it is immediately destroyed. In all empty space, particle-antiparticle pairs are constantly forming, existing for a fraction of a fraction of a second (ridiculously small time scales), and then annihilating. Normally this is not an issue and doesn't violate conservation laws, as the particle pair is immediately destroyed, before it can interact with anything, and so the total energy of the system is still 0. We call such particles \"virtual particles\" because they don't (or shouldn't) exist. Interestingly, these pairs are the reason for Hawking radiation - if a pair is produced on the edge of the event horizon if a black hole, then it is possible for one to fall into the black hole while the other escapes. This causes a problem - energy has been produced from nothing, and that just won't do. To rectify this, the universe determines that if the particle which escaped is made of positive energy, then to keep the energy of the system at 0, the particle which fell into the black hole must have had negative energy. Thus, the black hole loses mass, which escapes in the form of the newly created positive energy particle. In some ways, it's possible to view the universe in a similar manner. Our universe could be made of *loaned energy*, which will one day disappear or be destroyed and hence return the overall system to 0 energy. This is a very basic view of some very complex ideas and it's very speculative, but I hope it helped you to understand one of the possibilities.",
"Scientific laws are observations on how we see the universe work around us, not prohibitions on behavior. So if we do a lot of tests, and tons of observations, and we never see energy being made or destroyed, we eventually say, \"well that's a law.\" The caveat here is, we really don't know what happened to 'start' the universe. It's not something we can test or observe, and it doesn't appear to be a repeatable process still occurring today. So we can't say the same laws applied to that process, nor can we come up with a definitive alternative, nor can we say that there weren't circumstances unique to that event that the law as-it-is-now doesn't take into account. For instance, the law could be, more accurately, \"Energy cannot be created or destroyed except when a universe is jump starting\" and we just don't know it. It would still be consistent with our observations.",
"There's first of a caveat that energy conservation probably does not apply on a cosmological scale. But aside from that, there's a simple classical physics notion that might help. That idea is that there is no absolute scale for energy in classical physics. Let's take the example of a roller coaster, where you probably remember that the total energy of the system is the sum of potential energy and kinetic energy: E = KE + PE. As the roller coaster descends from the top of the hill, the potential energy PE decreases, and the kinetic energy KE increases, but the total stays the same the whole trip. Customarily, one says the PE is zero at the bottom of the hill and positive at the top of the hill. But the kicker is that you could also say that the PE is zero at the top of the hill and negative at the bottom of the hill, and the physics of the situation is exactly the same. The only difference between these two choices is a shift in the overall value of the total energy E. This tells you that the physics doesn't depend on the total value of E, only the *changes* in PE and KE that happen while stuff goes on. In a very rough sense, you could say the same thing about the big bang. You could suppose that prior to expansion there was a state that was all potential energy, and then there was a change in that state that converted it into other forms of available energy, which created the universe. Well, how much was the original PE to begin with? It doesn't *matter* because the only thing that counts is the exchange of that PE to other forms of energy. This is so ELI5 that people might complain about its accuracy, but hopefully this gives some idea why it may not matter.",
"I saw a documentary with Stephen Hawking once in which he claimed that the reason for all the energy in the Universe is actually due to space being filled with negative energy as well. Apparently spacetime itself has negative energy in it, which is what allows for the positive energy to exist.",
"Everything we know, and all our laws of physics came into existence immediately after the big bang. What existed right before did not play by the same rules, and thus we will probably never have a scientific answer.",
"The simple concept to be clear on is the the physical laws of and within the universe do not necessarily apply prior to or outside of the universe. How the universe was 'initiated' does not need to adhere to the rules of demonstrated behavior within the now-existant universe."
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5t8o24 | What happens to current debt during times of great inflation? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The value of that debt goes down. That's why lenders factor inflation risk into their risk premium."
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5t8p3c | Can you get DNA from Dust (Seeing as dust is meant to be dead skin)? | If it is true that dust is mostly dead skin. Could dust be gathered and the person's DNA identified. For example could you tell who lives in a room by just looking at dust taken from the room. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Yes, It's possible. In early 2000's we were able to get some dna from viruses found in dust. In 2008 researchers in Richmond were able to identify human DNA from indoor dust. DOI: 10.1016/j.forsciint.2008.01.016"
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5t8zrc | Why has every washing machine I've used taken 10+ minutes longer than the timer said it would take? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Modern washing machines have sensors that judge the weight and sometimes the amount of dirt in the water. They don't judge these until it starts operating, and they may or may not update the time after the initial prediction. In addition, they may be judging the temperature of the washwater and spending time heating it. This won't get factored into the time. Finally, front loaders have programming to deal with balancing the load for the spin cycle. It may start spinning, get up to half the desired speed, detect an imbalance, stop, agitate a bit to stir up the fabrics, and then try again. This can add a fair bit of time to the wash that couldn't have been predicted in advance."
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5t9450 | Why isn't television open and free like the Internet is? | By open and free, I mean how in television cable charges extra and puts channels into packages (Like could you imagine a social media bundle if net neutrality goes away???), and not just anybody can make their own tv show. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Once upon a time, television was only available 'over the air' they broadcast it from a station and you picked it up with an antenna. There was no way to charge you for receiving it, so it was entirely ad supported. However since there were only about three networks ad money wasn't really spread out that much as well. But the thing about broadcasting a signal is there's only so much bandwidth, only so much range of frequencies you can send a tv signal in, and if two people try to use the same frequencies in the same region the signals will interfere and people won't be able to watch either. So the television band needs to be regulated so that people can reliably receive a broadcast. So people couldn't just start their own with a low power broadcasting antenna. There are however public-access channels, which have frequencies set aside for local public use, because the airwaves are held to be something that is not owned by anyone person but like a natural resource that should be used for the public good. (This is also the reason the FCC has the power to regulate content on them) Now cable sends the same types of signals (at least non-digital cable) as the over-the-air tv, but it does it within a well... cable. So there's no risk of interfering with other people's broadcasts, and they don't have to be regulated, you can also get better signal quality and fit more channels in. But you still have only a finite number of channels, and every channel is sent out to all the subscribers. There are points where the cable company controls the splitting of the signal to individual houses where they can turn on and off service, but in essence what they're sending to everyone is the same things. Early pay per view movies were just a series of channels where a movie was playing continuously over and over, and you called the company and said, I want to watch this movie, and then they would provide the information to the cable box to de-scramble the signal. But the signal was always coming in. The reason you paid for cable was the company owned the actual cable lines, and the company maintained them, and the company had the licenses with various stations to provide that content, and the high end satellite receivers to get the signal to distribute. The internet however works differently, you're not providing the same content to every single person, a person sends out a packet of data that goes out through the network and gets to a server that sends data back. And it has to be routed to a specific person. Its much easier to send one signal to every house on the cable network, than to send a different signal to each one. The amount of data that cable tv transmits every second is vastly more than the internet speed you get because you want specific internet sites not just tuning into a channel that everyone gets. Its not worth the money or effort of the cable company to use their equipment to mix in some random likely low quality channel that most people probably won't care about. Sending that one signal to every subscriber, and considering how many internet streams there are out there, it would overwhelm the bandwidth pretty quickly. For those specialty things, internet works better, if only a few people want to watch them then they can be sent to only a few people.",
"There is open air TV. I have open air TV and receive 44 channels and their associated digital offsprung. I think he last time we counted there were 101 channels, but there still isn't anything on. Also, there are some rules about Public Access Television, where you could produce a show. But why pay for all the studio rental when there are video hosting sites that allow you to reach a much larger audience. If you don't like cable charges, vote with your check books and cancel the cable. Cable is dead, those noises it's making are just various gases escaping. Don't be a sucker and pay for those gases. If anything, Cable providers should be PAYING a household for the privilege of putting so much advertising infront of their eyes. TL DR looks rant-y. If you all committed to NOT watching Game of Thrones, HBO would make it free to get eyes on those commercials so they can keep charging astronomical ad space fees."
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5t9cza | Net Neutrality and its opposition | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"That's not Net Neutrality. Net Neutrality is treating all internet traffic equally. Here's an example: Comcast owns NBC and has a stake in Hulu. Comcast specifically makes your Netflix connection worse and gives priority to Hulu. This is Comcast specifically giving one source of traffic preference over another. Throttling your entire connection is a different thing.",
"Unless you're Netflix or FoxNews, no rules are being broken here. The idea behind Net Neutrality is that we (as citizens of the U.S.) have equal access to all information on the internet. So, what does that mean? That means when we go to URL_1 or URL_0 or URL_2 , we can get access to each site equally as efficient as the next site. Companies wanted their customers (i.e. Netflix, Wikipedia, FoxNews) to pay a premium so their customers (i.e. you and me) could access their sites more efficiently than other sites. So, mom-and-pop news sites or sites that did not want to pay the premium were not as efficient. So, how is this \"not fair?\" Well, imagine a world where all the \"rich\" sites paid that premium. They could spout off political opinions and what-not and be a lot more influential. By creating a \"fair\" internet for everyone, we allow everyone to create content and make it efficiently available to everyone else. It has nothing to do with a citizen of the U.S. trying to access the internet in the middle of the night from his laptop in his apartment. edit: Also, opposition. Some people believe in the free market. That if you can afford a premium and people will pay for it, so be it."
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5t9j3a | If amphetamines are considered harmful and a Scheduled II drug in the united states, why is it ok to put it in adderal and give to children? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Thats why its a schedule two, it has medicinal value but can also be abused. Shedule one has no medicinal value.",
"Because just like **almost every single other thing you can put into your body**, they can be helpful or harmful, depending how they are used. The universe isn't black and white, drugs aren't all good or all bad. Things can be good or bad depending on the situation.",
"Many people have made the point that stimulant medications can be abused, so I'm not going to labor over it. I just wanted to point out that a lot of people are heading towards non-stimulant ADHD medications like atomoxetine to get around some of the issues of giving kids stimulants. There have been many cases of people abusing stimulants like coke as a sort of self-treatment for ADHD. Giving someone access to regulated medications is always the healthier and less risky option. (Not that cocaine and Adderall are exactly the same, to be clear.)",
"There's a lot of information on this topic. Adderall, Vyvanse, etc. are amphetamine derivatives. They are not pure Meth (N-methylamphetamine), although there is still a possibility for abuse. Vyvanse is a [Lisdexamfetamine]( URL_0 ) which is a class of [amphetamines]( URL_1 ). According to \"Chapter 9: Medications for ADHD\". In Millichap JG. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Handbook: A Physician's Guide to ADHD (2nd ed.), extensive long-term studies have confirmed the effectiveness and safety of long-term use of the medication.",
"It is not handed out like candy. For people with ADD, when given in controlled ways, it has different effects than it has on other people."
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5t9ky5 | How do ants know where to make an anthill. | They seem to work methodically to generate an anthill, how do they decide where is a good location? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I'm no ant expert but from my understanding where ever the queen goes the rest of the colony goes too. And all that dirt on an ant hill is from the worker ants moving dirt out to make their little ant highways in the ground.",
"My understanding of ants is this. Queen flies off and digs a hole, starts laying eggs. Eggs hatch and the workers begin expanding the hole into a series of tunnels. The hill is the dirt they removed from the tunnels. If the place sucks for ants to live in and they all die, no hill is formed. So, only good areas will have an anthill...there's probably countless failed colonies you'll never know about Basically/TLDR they don't choose, you only see successful places Edit: and yeah iirc ants fly during mating"
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5t9o4h | Why are animal genitals always in roughly the same anatomical location? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's at the same position because the genetic program responsible for the formation of genitalia is actually connected to the formation of the kidneys and the hind limbs (in humans our legs) and this plan is shared by all vertebrates. It makes anatomical sense to derive a tube that produces large cells, ie genitalia, from a tube that filters liquid, ie kidneys. But why are they there? The answer isn't really known, but I'd guess: because evolution. Our tuncate-like ancestors had their organs at the bottom, which in our fish-like ancestors became the hind part of the animal. My guess is: it developed the way it did and it wasn't detrimental and so it stayed this way."
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5t9p37 | How Does Emulation Work? | Specifically: Why does it take so much more power to emulate a machine that has significantly less capabilities than the machine you're emulating it on? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Software developer here, Emulation isn't a 1:1 translation from one CPU instruction set to another, you also have to replicate missing hardware instructions, their side effects, and most importantly, their lockstep timing. The side effects and timing are the hardest part. You can write code that emulates the logic gates, and then you only have to perform a little calculus to time the clock ticks of the original system, but emulating the actual physical circuitry in this manner takes a heavy amount of computation time, and you'll still need certain software functions in your emulator to mimic particular behaviors that don't exist purely in the logic of it's gates, like cross talk, some errors, and any analog components. There can even be side effects as a consequence of its physical construction. You cam mimic this in something like Spice, as an electrical engineer would do, and you can even program and simulate in it, but that's a full featured analog circuit simulation package - if you want to run that in realtime, you'll need a massively powerful computer. The typical thing to do is try to take advantage of the host hardware as much as possible, but that complicates matters as some steps will compute faster, some slower, and you have to synchronize all that, while trying to take advantage of the time left from the faster instructions. And if you're writing an emulator for a fixed set of inputs, like an NES emulator for the number of ROMs out there, then you can take advantage of that and write code specific for that ROM to ensure faithful reproduction, possibly without actually executing those ROM instructions or running through the emulated hardware, just some sort of short circuit function."
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5t9sxv | How would abolishing net neutrality influence people outside the US? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Indirectly. There wouldn't be a difference up front because your ISPs are regulated by your own country's laws. But let's say Comcast decides to extort Netflix to pay millions of dollars or have their data throttled. Netflix has to recoup those losses from their customers, and so they might decide to hike the price on subscribers even outside the US. But that would require businesses to be selfish dicks, which we all know businesses never are. Right?"
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5t9tcj | How do they ensure such precise amounts of fat (say 20% fat / 80% lean) in ground beef? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The butchers will remove the fat before grinding the meat and add it back in at whatever ratio they need. My butcher will usually only go up to 40/60 but we go way back so he gives me 50/50. It's good to have friends in the business. *since people are messaging me the same question I figured I would answer here. The highest ratio I have tried is 70/20. Slightly too soft for my preference.",
"I'm not sure about exact percentages, but it's done by weight. I worked for a butcher and the fat trimmings from other cuts of meat were kept in a huge bin. They would buy huge boxes of frozen beef and you would take out 80lbs of that and then use your own 20lbs of fat trimmings and then you combine the two in the grinding process to get your 80%. But they also buy both from the distributor in big 50lb boxes. (Either beef trimmings or fat trimmings) then all you do is combine it into your desired percentage.",
"I use to work in a meat department and when we ground the 85% from all of the butchers trim, we had a little quality control device of sorts. It basically cooked a measured amount of beef from the batch, about a half a dollar sized dollop worth. The fat drains into a test tube and the lines on the tube indicated the amount of fat.",
"I worked as a meat cutter for a few years. We ground our own meat daily, so we would do a round of ground chuck, and a rounf of ground round. For ground chuck we would do two things - take the steaks that were expiring for sale that day, and add them to some primal chuck cuts (front shoulder.) We would then add in trimmings from the previous days steak trim we kept in a tub in the fridge overnight. For ground round, we would take straight peeled knuckles from the back hip area, and add in the same trimmings. We would run 85/15 for chuck, and 80/20 for round. We added less fat to the chuck, as we were also putting in steaks with fat included, plus the chuck cuts themselves have fat throughout. So, the 15 or 20 was the added amount, not necessarily the amount you were getting.",
"My butcher does math and then uses a scale. A bit of information on the process. Our grocery store gets beef in two ways. One is a tube of ground beef, the other is vacuum sealed primal cuts. From your primals you get items like a sizzler steaks, rib steaks, spencer steaks, bottom round roasts, et cetera. In order to get these from the primal, we use an item like a band saw or a knife to cut them into smaller parts than the slaughterhouse sends us. During this process we'll trim fat and bone from the meat and put it in a big plastic bin. Now we buy beef by the case, but that case's prize is set by it's weight, so trimming trims from our margins too. Because we have a meat grinder, however, we can buy tubes of grinds at 83/17 instead of 80/20, and then just add the extra 2% in trim.",
"It really depends on the place you are buying your ground product from. If it's a big box grocery store they are probably buying their ground beef previously ground. They then take the product and regrind it to blend it and give it oxygen to give it color. The product they are getting is typically from a large processor that is blending a large batch of trimming and fat to dial in a specific fat content. They do this by taking a smoke of the blend and burn it off to see the fat separation and get their ratio. If you are buying your ground product from a smaller butcher you can assume that they are using daily trimmings in their fattier blends to efficiently use their off cuts. Restaurants typically buy from a big broadline company that offers everything or they buy from a company that typically deals just meat. Those companies that deal in just meat usually grind whole muscle and with today's meat packing standards are able to consistently blend muscles to a desired fat percentage. With industry exposure you are able to judge how fatty a muscle blend will grind out, even then there will be a variation.",
"Most of the time its ballparked. Ground beef is mostly trim cut off big chunks of meat and through the central limit thereom ground beef tends to have a mean of around 15% fat 85 meat when taking trim from all parts. If a butcher wants to push a large quantity of extra lean high quality ground beef they would use the sirloin, but normal ground beef is a mix of a lot of lower end cuts (so no tenderloin ground beef). Source: Meat Clerk 4 years",
"So many butchers and meat clerks giving estimates and approximations... The simple answer is actually this: there is no non-destructive way of accurately measuring fat content. What testing agencies and labs do, to ensure that ground meat actually has the fat content it states, is taking a sample and rendering the fat by cooking the meat at around 60 degrees Celsius. Rendered fat floats to the top, gets collected and weighed and a percentage of fat VS the initial meat is calculated.",
"You're thinking backwards. If i take trim meat from chucks and grind it its going to be right around 80/20, that's why we call 80/20 ground chuck. If i grind round its going to almost always be right at 85/15. If i grind most stuff out of a sirloin its going to be right around 90/10. Ground beef is usually super lean trim mixed in with pure trim fat guesstimated right at around 70/30, this is done by weight. Large scale commercial is different though. Remember pink slime? All pink slime really is in incredibly fine ground incredibly lean ground beef. For really large batch processing they just grind whatever, test it, and calculate how much \"pink slime\" to add at the end to get the right ratios. Large scale processing ground beef is both trim meat from making large primals or sub-primals (large cuts that go to smaller shops, grocery stores) and low end meat with no retail value elsewise, like cheek meat, or weasand meat (the muscle lining the esophagus)"
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5t9vyv | Why is it easier to learn a new language as a baby rather than as an adult? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Neuroplasticity, the young brain has more potential to absorb new information. There is a \"critical period\" hypothesis that asserts language development peaks around age 2 years old. During this period a \"vocabulary explosion\" occurs. That said, the neurobiological details of language acquisition are not fully understood."
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5ta326 | Why do rich or famous people often get more lenient sentences? Shouldn't they be sentenced to the letter of the law, no matter how good their lawyer is? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I'm going to have to come at this from the other angle: The reason that poor people tend to get screwed by the Legal System is because they are saddled with a Public Defender. Public Defenders aren't bad Lawyers, they're usually *shockingly* competent at their jobs. *However*, due to their small numbers, Public Defenders are required to take on an *insane* number of cases. Public Defenders *usually* don't have much time to prepare for a case. Most can't afford to spend more than 15 minutes on a single case, and are *insanely lucky* if they can afford an hour of preparation for a single case. It's virtually impossible to win a case without time to prepare. You need to research the relevant Laws, and **all** of the Case Law that is binding in your Jurisdiction. Then you need to review the Prosecution's Evidence, and get Evidence that was illegally acquired or questionable thrown out. You also need time to coach your client on how they should behave in court. It's *physically impossible* to accomplish **half** of the preparations required in an hour, much less 15 minutes. As a result, most Public Defenders recommend that *most* of their Clients just take whatever plea-deal is offered by the Prosecution. It'll be a lighter punishment than they'd receive if they go to court and lose, and the odds of not losing are *basically zero*. The exception to that *most* are clients who *can* realistically be defended. This generally means that the Case against the Client is full of holes to the point where the *Jury Members* would probably catch the procedural errors, or relies upon evidence that's *blatantly* inadmissible in court. --- Meanwhile, Wealthy People can afford to hire a Private Lawyer. These Lawyers can control their case-load, ensuring that they have **all** the Preparation Time that they need. They can take their time, do their research, coach their client, and pick apart the Prosecution's case. Even if the client is blatantly guilty, the Lawyer can actually hold the Court to the Letter of the Law regarding sentences... but this is going to require some explanation. Most Judges in the United States, outside of the Federal Circuits, are *elected*. Because of our current culture, it's best for a Judge to maintain a public image of being \"Tough on Crime.\" If you pass down a relatively light sentence on someone, you can bet your ass that your Opponent in the next election will plaster it all over their campaign ads. As a result, Judges are incentivized to be as harsh as possible when it comes to sentencing. This trickles up to the Federal Circuit as well. Federal Judges are generally drawn from State Judges, and getting promoted up in the Federal Circuits requires you to be Nominated to that position by the President of the United States. *Being* a Candidate for a Federal Bench (which you can hold for life) requires you to hold onto your State Bench. Moving up in the Federal Circuits requires the President to move you up... and the President has incentives to put Judges that are \"Tough on Crime\" onto the Federal Benches. However, a Good Lawyer can hold a Judge's feet to the fire when it comes to sentencing. Excessive Sentences can be used as a justification for Appeals, and having your judgements *overturned* by a higher court hurts your chances for advancement **even more** than not being \"Tough on Crime.\" A State Judge up for re-election can spin not being \"Tough on Crime\" as being \"Merciful,\" but it's difficult to spin \"Incompetent Judge's Decision Overturned by Appellate Court\" into something vaguely positive.",
"The issue is that the letter of the law allows more lenient sentences, or lesser charges, or other mechanisms that allow a person to receive a preferable sentence. A good lawyer is better at convincing a prosector or judge or jury that those mechanisms should be used to the benefit of their client. That's what makes them a good lawyer. Additionally, rich and famous people often have options less well off people don't. A prosecutor might be willing, for example, to let a famous person off with \"community service\" because they think kids will actually listen to them and not, say, do drugs if they go around telling people not to, something that wouldn't be true of your average accused.",
"Also, if you can pay an attorney to contest every aspect of every detail of your case because of your massive resources, you're draining the Prosecutor's office with a much more finite amount of resources. They're more willing to settle to just be done with you.",
"The lawyer is there to be a pain. Against a public defender who can't really dedicate the time to a young delinquent from a poor family, it's an easy slam dunk to convict them and throw some years at them. Easy win, get the stat. With a PITA wealthy lawyer, expect extensive attention and appeals and calling the judge and prosecutor into question. Bad stats, waste of resources, risk of being overturned on appeal. It's just human nature to go down the path of least resistance. Especially if the people are represented by politically-minded workers. The lawyers need to become judges, judges need higher court and eventually maybe Justice. The consistent, \"tough on crime\" stats makes picking on the poor way easier than going after the rich.",
"The situation is arguably worse over here in New Zealand. For many convictions courts have the discretion to order name suppression for convicted criminals. The wealthy and the famous are more likely to be granted permanent name suppression than the average Joe. Never mind whatever the penalty might be you'll never even know someone granted name suppression was convicted of anything.",
"If how good your lawyer was had no effect on your case, what would be the point of hiring a lawyer?",
"I do believe that the US legal system is flawed and rich people do get off a lot easier than the average Joe. But... with that being said, some average Joe's are just lucky when it comes to legal matters or they're masters at getting sympathy from court judges. My brother is a piece of shit wife/kid beater and he ALWAYS seems to get off easy. He's broke as shit and usually drunk and usually unemployed. Whenever he gets arrested, and he has been arrested at least 4 times now (that I know of) its usually for beating his wife or fighting with neighbors/strangers or some other gang related shit, at least 1 weapons charge. Either way, the most jail time he has gotten was 3 months, 3 glorious drama free months. Then business as usual when he gets out. Once he and his wife apparently got pulled over for driving erratically (he was drunk) and the cop gave him a stern lecture and asked his sober wife to drive instead than sent them on their way. Oh his kids were in the car. Good times.",
"Very few ELI5 explanations here so I'm going to give it a shot. Imagine you bought a toy that you have assemble on your own. You follow the guidebook and fit the part together but some components are a little loose, but it generally works pretty well. Your friend buys the same toy but because he is rich, pays someone to do it. The person he pays has had years of experience and so fixes the toy really well, better than yours. Now, the end result is varied even though you both had the same toy and same set of instructions. The law works in very similar ways where the lawyers rich individuals hire are the \"toy assembly men\", doing the work much better than others. So even by the same rules, you get distinct results. That said, if you can assemble toys really well, yours can be as good as your friend's. So it's not necessarily the case that the rich always get more lenient sentences, but that they generally do.",
"I've never been a public defender, and have much respect for them. I did civil law before a foray into criminal law. I can tell you simply retaining a private attorney will get the attention of any prosecutor and judge. Even if they are a shit attorney. It shows you are willing to pay into \"the system\" and more importantly pay... Indigent clients, even if initially retained, are treated better than one from a public defender. But if your client can pay, it worries all involved. I am not talking about murder or serious felonies, but if a public defender goes up to a prosecutor and tells their \"case,\" they are likely to be low-balled because they just can't afford the time and effort for one individual client. If a private defense attorney does the same, they are much more likely to offer something reasonable. Because I will take it to trial, and a cushy plea is better than ever losing a trial for a (usually politically aspiring) prosecutor.",
"Honestly, it may seem like richer and more famous people get more lenient sentences, but it's mostly perception. The fact is every nonviolent offender gets a relatively lenient sentence, but when reported in the papers the media tends to compare it to maximums, e.g. \"Paris Hilton was released after six hours for drunken driving, out of a possible two week sentence.\" (note: not a real example, but close to one) What the media never reports is standard or common sentences, which are very, very lenient for first time offenders because jail's expensive and devastating for the defendant.",
"I think it's partly because rich or famous people will have much more attention directed towards them forever. Therefore, there is bound to be much more judgement and condemnation directed towards them forever. It's much harder for acquaintances to ever believe they \"turned over a new leaf\" or had a true \"change of heart\" because the wealth or fame might still allow them to avoid any consequences most of the time. The much easier option is to keep their crimes a little more low key in the future. Guilty or not, the \"stink\" of the charges stays on them a lot heavier than someone who has never been famous or wealthy. In my opinion, what is much more dangerous is when the CHILDREN of a rich or famous person get a lenient sentence. They have more of an inborn psychology to block out all the kinds of attention that don't suit their agendas.",
"> Shouldn't they be sentenced to the letter of the law, no matter how good their lawyer is? Yes. > Shouldn't they be sentenced to the letter of the law, no matter how good their lawyer is? Power and influence. Many judges are elected. Being elected costs money. If you sentence me harshly, and I am a millionaire with many millionaire friends, we might decide to donate a lot of money to your opponent next election cycle. For the judges who are appointed, well the people appointing them are elected. And we might donate lots and lots of money to that person, and casually drop the hint that we don't like you. If they want the donations to keep coming to them, not their opponent, we would appreciate a more lenient judge. Usually if you are famous, you are also rich.",
"Do famous people really get more lenient sentences than Joe public? What's your data? You are exposed to famous people on trial, but never see the Joe public cases that get lenient sentences. I don't think there's any evidence famous people get better treatment than anyone else.",
"Because the wealthy can pay for legal fees that allow them to make it more of a PITA to prosecute them than to cut a deal",
"How good a lawyer is directly affects how much they charge and, by extension, how much they charge reflects on how skilled they are at effectively arguing your case.",
"Why would good lawyers charge more then if they can't make a difference in the outcome? For that matter, why would there even be lawyers if their skill doesn't influence the outcome? Why not have everyone represent themselves if it doesn't matter?",
"Although the posts about the worth of a good lawyer are absolutely true, many people don't realize how many people get a fairly lenient sentence regardless of their affluence. There was a guy in my city not too long ago who was sentenced to probation for attempted murder. He was not rich or influential, he just tried to shoot a guy but missed.",
"Some good answers but you shouldn't look at it like rich people are not sentenced to the letter of the law, but that poor people get too harsh of sentences. The same law/reason that a rich person faces a lessor sentence exists for poor people, but their attorneys don't find it or argue it successfully. So when the prosecution or police officer makes a mistake, infringes a right, obtains evidence illegally, makes a bad argument, the good lawyer that the rich person has catches it, calls them on it and obtains justice for their client. The attorney that a poor person has doesn't do this. So poor people get screwed, but it's not because of the law but rather that the prosecutor and law enforcement got away with something that a better attorney would've caught and not let happen. As has been pointed out, better could be better for any number of reasons, some of which is obviously time to prepare and number of people defending."
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5ta65x | What do the motions mean when a conductor is guiding the orchestra with his wand? | I was watching [this video]( URL_0 ) the other day, and the conductor's movements piqued my interest. Areas where other instruments suddenly come in and crescendo into a grand sound, I don't understand what a conductor is doing exactly, or what the waving means. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"At its simplest, the conductor is counting the beat. If the song is 4/4 time, then everyone in the band needs to be mentally counting \"one, two, three, four\" to themselves to keep the rhythm. Each movement of the conductor's hand matches one of these beats. At the simplest, he's a human metronome. But there's more to it than that. Unlike a metronome, he can manipulate the speed of the beat as needed. If he feels a song should slow down at parts, he can move slower, and the band knows to follow him. He can control other aspects as well, such as volume. If his motions become really big and exaggerated, this tells the band to increase in volume or energy. If his movements become very small, he means the opposite. Jerky, quick movements means he wants jerky, \"staccato\" music, while smooth flowing movements signify flowing \"legato\" music. And so on. You can think of it as the conductor interpreting how the song should sound, and he pantomimes this out for the band to perform.",
"To expand a bit beyond the scope of the other answers, and specifically with regard to orchestral conducting (i.e., an ensemble with string instruments like in your example): There's a general trend that the more professional/experienced the orchestra, the less the conductor will stick to the straightforward prescribed notions of simply indicating tempo and beat. At top levels, the conductor is taking advantage of the ensemble's ability to generally self-synchronize to give more artistic direction through natural gestures (and facial expression) to guide the nuances of style of playing. There can be a double purpose when a section is waiting for their entrance and the conductor \"cues\" them: both providing insurance they'll start playing at the right spot (counting lots of measures of rest, even pros might lose count occasionally), and nonverbally communicating the style and volume they should enter with. The conductor and orchestra will usually have recently rehearsed the music, so the real purpose of a lot of these gestures is also to remind the musicians what was verbally explained during rehearsal. I.e., what you see on the podium during the performance is far from the full extent of the conductor's job, just the culmination of it. There are some notable and fairly rare examples of conductors who, once the piece has started and tempo established, actually stop all movements and just let the musicians do their thing (typically in a slow and quiet piece with a steady tempo). It can actually be problematic in amateur groups when the conductor is trying to be \"fancy\" like the pro orchestras can handle. We amateurs often would rather just see a clearly defined beat than all these gestural nuances. Btw you would get really good answers to this question (better than mine) if you posted it to /r/classicalmusic .",
"If there's a choir involved, conducting is even more necessary to show things like when to breathe and give phrasing directions. People respond both consciously and unconsciously to certain types of gestures, and conductors use this to change vowel color, timbre, etc. Also, because sound travels way slower than light and different performance spaces have different acoustic properties like reverb, it can be a lot harder for lots of performers to stay on tempo since sound waves of different frequencies and amplitudes behave differently in the same space. Since they all can see the conductor's motions at essentially the same time, it's a better indicator of tempo than listening to the sound around them.",
"FWIW, there is nothing particularly meaningful about the baton. People in previous eras used whatever cane, rod, or staff they had laying around. All it does is give the musicians a visual signal to start, stop, and keep time so that they all play in unison.",
"Usually he's keeping time, but many of the motions are in areas that need to be emphasized, like a big entrance or a certain rhythm they were working hard on. He doesn't tell each individual section what to do unless it's very important for him to do so. Some motions can be whether to get louder or softer, he can dictate exact notes, and so on."
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5ta83c | How are dictionaries organized in languages like Mandarin that have a symbol for each word rather than an alphabet? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"None of the answers are quite complete / accurate. Chinese characters can be ordered in two main ways, by pronunciation and by radical. The sound of each character in Mandarin can be written out using Roman letters (a phonetic system called pinyin), which can be arranged alphabetically, A to Z. For example, the character 你 (you) is listed under \"ni\", and the character 她 (she) under \"ta\". Mandarin also has 4 tones, so for each sound such as \"ni\", there will be further ordering \"ni1\", \"ni2\", \"ni3\", and \"ni4\", where the number indicates tone. So 你 is actually under \"ni3\" and 她 under \"ta1\". This ordering is useful when you know how to say the character, but don't know/remember how exactly to write it. For radical, things are slightly more complicated. Most Chinese characters can be split into a \"main\" part and... the other part. The main part, called the radical, often gives a general idea to the meaning of the character. If you know Chinese, you can easily pick out which part is the radical (it can be on the left, right, top, bottom, left-bottom, top-left, 3-side-surrounding, 4-side-surrounding, etc!). At the start of every dictionary is an index -- a list of all the radicals. Under each radical, you see a list of ALL the characters having that radical (there are very very many). Take your time to find the one you're looking for, and it tells you which page to go to for that character. This kind of ordering is useful when you know what the character looks like but not how it sounds. **Pros and cons**: the radical ordering works everywhere, as long as you can read the written characters; the pronunciation ordering only works in a particular spoken Chinese language. Since Mandarin is the largest spoken language (not in Hong Kong!), that's what dictionaries always use. **BONUS**. You may ask, how do you arrange all the characters under the same pronunciation (for example 思斯絲司私撕廝 or 顆科柯棵苛)? Or how do you arrange them under the same radical (確礦碳碼 or 開關問聞)? Heck, how do you arrange the radicals in the first place (亻宀忄口火馬鳥)? In this case, we use the number of strokes. Basically, it's the number of times you have to lift the tip of your pencil to write the character, according to a standard way of writing that everyone must learn in school. This save you some time, but there can still be dozens of characters with the same radical and the same number of strokes. Check out and play with the [radical-stroke index]( URL_0 ) **BONUS2**. Your title is not entirely accurate. Chinese is a language family made up of a wide range of different regional languages that cannot understand each other when spoken. Mandarin is just the name of a spoken language. There is only ONE written language, so the same character can be pronounced differently but still understood by everyone. (Except Mainland China writes most characters a bit differently than Hong Kong and Taiwan. We won't get into that here.) Since dictionaries are about the written language, you should write \"Chinese\" instead of \"Mandarin\" in the title. **TL;DR** Chinese characters can be ordered in two different ways: (1) Romanised pronunciation - > tone number - > number of strokes (2) Number of strokes of radical - > radical - > number of remaining strokes",
"Some dictionaries are organized by radicals. Most Chinese characters are made up of smaller characters called radicals. 好 being 女 and 子. Since 女 is on the left, you would search by that using the number of stroke. Once you find all the 女 entries, they're organized by number of extra strokes. So 女 is three strokes and 子 is also three strokes, so you can look it up that way.",
"The appearance of a character and its pronunciation has less correlation than other writing systems, so in Chinese the following two are both possible: knowing a character but not its pronunciation, and knowing a pronunciation and meaning but not knowing how to write it. For the pronunciation to character index, some dictionaries have that as an appendix. The harder problem is looking up a character based on appearance with no knowledge of its pronunciation. Every Chinese character is written using one or more strokes, and the [stroke order]( URL_4 ) is more or less predictable. Furthermore, most Chinese characters are composed of simpler characters. Some of the simpler characters are considered [\"radicals\"]( URL_0 ), which you can think of as a \"meta character\". There is a fixed number of radicals. - First there is an index of radicals, sorted by ascending stroke count, since radicals themselves are also characters. - Then all characters are sorted first by radicals (in the same order as the index), then by the remaining stroke count. There are irregularities that come with the radical system, so here are some examples: - 語 (\"language\") has a total of 14 strokes. Its radical 言 (\"speech\") happens to occur on the left-hand side. 言 has 7 strokes, so first you look up 7, and find arrive at the page where all 7-stroke radicals are. Once you locate 言, it tells you which page to start for all the 言-radical characters. Once you flip to that page, there are 14 - 7 = 7 strokes remaining, so you keep flipping forward until you get to the 言-7 section, and that is where you will find 語 as well as any other 17-stroke whose radical is 言. - 情 (\"emotion\") has a total of 11 strokes. Its radical 心 (\"heart\") also happens to occur on the left-hand side. The inconsistency is that in radical form, it is 3 strokes, but in isolated form, it is 4. A lot of radicals diverge between radical form and isolated form, e.g. 水 (\"water\") is the isolated form and the left-hand side of 河 (\"river\"), 氵 is the radical form. For the purpose of looking up the radical 心 itself, you use 4. But for the purpose of calculating the remaining stroke count, you use 3, so 11 - 3 = 8. The character 情 can be found in the 心-8 section. - 慶 (\"celebrate\") has a total of 15 strokes. Its radical 心 (\"heart\") is in the middle of the character. Not every character's radical is on the left-hand side! In this case the actual occurrence is in regular form, so 15 - 4 = 11, so 慶 is in the 心-11 section. - 花 (\"flower\") has a total of 8 strokes. Its radical 艸 (\"plant\", \"grass\") is on the top of the character, in the radical form of 艹 with 4 strokes. This is a double whammy! Not only is the radical not on the left, but the radical itself has two different forms just like 心 (\"heart\"). Where you would find 艸 is a more interesting question: some dictionaries say 艸 itself is 6 strokes, while some prefer saying 艹 is 4 strokes. They are the same radical in two different forms, so it's a matter of preference and standards. The character 花 can be found in the 艸-4 section. So in summary: - The radical can reside anywhere in the character, but the most common locations are on the left or on the top. The right or the middle are less common, but it can happen. - A radical may have two different forms. One is the isolated form, when you write the radical as its own character. The other is in radical form, when you write the radical as part of another character. Depending on how common the isolated form is, one may look more alien than another. For example the isolated form 水 (\"water\") is just as common as its radical counterpart 氵, but you seldom see 艸 (\"plant\", \"grass\") other than in the context of radicals and the radical counterpart 艹 occurs much more frequently as part of other characters, e.g. 花 (\"flower\"), 草 (\"grass\"), 藝 (\"art\"). - How many strokes a radical has is trickier if it has two forms. The Taiwanese Ministry of Education, for example, prefers the stroke count of the radical form. - How many strokes a character has is less contested, but can happen. This is due to disagreement between whether a stroke is [simple or compound]( URL_2 ). Going back to the two different problems whether you know the character's pronunciation: on a desktop computer it is very common to input a character's pronunciation and let the [IME]( URL_3 ) automatically choose and / or let you select the right character. Other IMEs work by letting enter a series of radicals (e.g. [Cangjie]( URL_1 )) or straight up let you use a trackpad or touch surface to handwrite characters for recognition.",
"In Taiwan, the dictionaries are organized by number of strokes in each word followed by the next number of strokes and so on.",
"Japanese has three written alphabets, of which two are phonetic with each symbol representing a combination of what English speakers would call a consonant and a vowel. With the Gojuon system, words are arranged by their phonetic sounds regardless of how the word is written. The order is the consonant + a i u e o, so a, i, u, e, o, ka, ki, ku, ke, ko, sa, is, su, se, so etc. There are also variations of smaller and larger sounds with the larger coming first. There's also a poem called \"Iroha\" which uses every kana only once. In really old texts and official documents, this poem was used for the order when alphabetizing.",
"Arabic is organized by the root of each word. Most words have a 3 letter root from which are stemmed dozens of other words such as كتب which means to write. If you add م to the beginning it means desk or office. If you add م to the beginning and ة to the end it becomes library or bookstore. And so on. There are dozens of words that can be made from the 3 letter root so from Arabic to English, words are organized by the root in order of the script.",
"just to add on to this discussion, in my school, we use electronic dictionaries for examinations, which have a database of words that can be found through typing how they sound like. I'm sure anyone that has learnt mandarin since young would have learnt something similar to the phonics, which is how you find it in the dictionary. sorry if this was confusing but i'm just trying to contribute :/",
"Tibetan does have an alphabet but it does some funky things where letters can get attached to one another or pre-fixed or post-fixed. and vowels are affixed to the root letters as well. e.g. ག་ གྲ་ གྲི སྒྲི་ བསྒྲི་ བསྒྲིག་ བསྒྲིགས in all cases ག་ is the root letter but then a subscript, then a vowel, then a superscript are attached...so these would all be in the ག་ section of the dictionary. So dictionaries use the Root Letter to group words and then they are ordered after that based on (i think) vowel, superscript, subscript, prefix - though I could be wrong. Digitized dictionaries make everything so much easier.",
"Iirc in most dictionaries for Chinese all words are first sorted by their pronunciation, pinyin or such. A word that sounds like bai would come before zhou. When there are words of the same pronunciation or pinyin, they would then be sorted in that section by their number of strokes or bihua, which in most of the times is less relevant as words filling up a pinyin seldom occupies more than a couple of pages.",
"I've seen simplified Chinese dictionaries sorted in 2 ways, either by radicals followed by no of strokes, or by pin yin(phonetic alphabetical spelling) in alphabetical order.",
"There's a number of ways to do it, but it's generally done by radical. See: URL_0 Other potential options include alphabetical by pinyin (mainland), or bopomofo (Taiwan) (which I'm not familiar with). I don't think I've ever seen those in printed Chinese-Chinese dictionaries though.",
"In the front of the dictionary, there is a list of small symbols called radicals. You find your radical on the list (hopefully you were able to identify the radical part of the character). Next to that radical might be a page number. You go to the page for that radical. Then, there are a list of characters with that radical. The list of characters is grouped by stroke count, as in, how many extra strokes (of the brush) does it take to make the full character, not counting the strokes in the radical. Once you find it, it tells you the page number that the character is on. This [online dictionary]( URL_0 ) is much quicker and easier than the book version. Many people also use software where you write the character onto a pad and the computer looks it up for you. EDIT: [Here]( URL_1 ) is a short and potato-quality (sorry) album of my dictionary.",
"Im a fan of [this article]( URL_0 ) that explains Chinese characters in terms of English for answering the obvious follow up questions like what is a radical.",
"Because pronunciation may not be dictated by the character's form, my dictionary is organized two different ways. The entire book is organized by pinyin, and there is a table of contents for you to look words up if you can't remember how to write something you know how to pronounce. If you can't pronounce or don't know the meaning of a character you saw, after the table of contents, there is an index indexing all characters in the book by their radicals, which are brush strokes that many characters have in common. (e.g. the fire radical, 火, is in 炉, 炬, 烽, 燧, 爓, 炮, 燃, etc. There's also the mouth radical, 口, which is in 嘴, 吻, 喙, 吃, 啖, 喝 etc.) The radicals themselves are organized by the number of brushstrokes, meaning you'll find radicals like 厂 and 冫, which have two strokes each, before radicals like 血 and 雨 which have 6 and 8 respectively. Then within each radical category, the characters are also organized by the number of strokes. The characters that don't have a radical are organized in their own section after that, again organized by the number of brushstrokes. It takes a bit longer than an English dictionary, but it's organized quite well if you count the brushstrokes correctly.",
"How long would it take a native English speaker to become proficient (understandable) in Chinese?",
"I'm surprised no one has mentioned how indexes used to be done which is the 4 corner method. URL_0",
"Japanese is by stroke count. You can learn the order of the strokes over time and you can count them. However, its also done by their alphabet as well. That part is more complex than I can explain.",
"My mum has two really old Chinese dictionaries that she had when she was in school and it's ordered by the number of strokes, followed by which way the strokes go when you write it. English wasn't her first language so pin yin wouldn't have helped her. (Edit more info)",
"I live in China, but I'm not a mandarin speaker. I use a dictionary phone app. I sketch the character roughly into the app and select the character that 5 pops up. I see chinese folks using app dictionaries, too, but they type pinyin instead because they're already familiar with the characters. When I lived in Japan, before smartphones, I had a Japanese-English dictionary that was organized by pronunciation in furigana. Furigana are the small hiragana (Japanese syllabary) that float above the kanji ( chinese characters). It was very helpful for me since I couldn't read kanji, but I could read hiragana.",
"In my dictionary the 200 some radicals are listed in order by stroke count and the words containing those radicals are listed in order by the count of additional strokes. Looking up a word can be somewhat time consuming compared to using an alphabetic dictionary. If you know the pinyin form of the word, by all means try that first. BTW... not a native speaker of Chinese so, at first, I assumed that it was a slow process for me because of the lack of familiarity. I have since had the opportunity of watching educated native speakers use the dictionary and it looks like they are slow too."
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5tag6y | Pros and cons of solid state vs regular hard drive | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Pros for ssd's: -Smaller form factors available -Significantly faster read/write speeds -Very low thermal output -No vibrations -Substantially less degredation in speed over time Cons for ssd's: -Higher price Sorry for formatting, am on mobile.",
"A big one for mobile users: SSD is much less susceptible to damage by shock. Imagine your phone with a mechanical drive in it.",
"Similar to what u/hamzakria said but with formatting: SSDs: Much faster read/write speeds, longer product lifetime, smaller form factor, lower power usage, lower thermal output. HDDs: Much cheaper, higher availability, larger capacities."
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5tahws | Buoyancy: how can massive cargo ships stay afloat? | also can it apply to swimming(staying afloat for long periods)? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Imagine a pool filled to the very top with water; there is isn't any room left in the pool for more water. Let's take an object that is 1 cubic metre in size and sink it in the pool. Doing so will overflow the pool. If we collect all the water that overflowed and measure it, we will find that it is 1 cubic metre in size, just like the object. That is what displacement is, the volume of water that a submerged object replaces. An object will float if it does not weigh more than the weight of the water it displaces. Let's take the example I mentioned above. The volume of displacement is one cubic metre. One cubic metre of fresh water weighs one metric tonne. So, if the object weighs less than one metric tonne, it will float. If the object weighs 500 kg, then it only needs to displace 500kg of water. Since the object has a total buoyancy of 1000 kg, the object will float half submerged. Ships float because they have a lot of underwater volume that displace a lot of water. When a ship is loaded with cargo, the majority of the hull be under the water. For example, my ship has a deck that is 14 metres deep, and when we are loaded, almost 8.5 metres of that depth is submerged. To think of it another way, ships float because they sink to a point deep enough where they start to float."
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5tairy | What would it theoretically take to create artificial gravity? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Artificial gravity can be created by either acceleration or mass. Mass is difficult to manage with a spaceship (you need to move around a moon or something) but you can easily get acceleration just by spinning something around in a circle. Stand on the inside of the spinning object and you have an apparent acceleration downward as you try to be thrown away and are stopped by the floor. This can feel weird if the circle is too small and the speed of your feet and head is too different, but a reasonably sized spinning ring or tube would provide usable \"gravity\" while not consuming much energy. You probably don't want to throw projectiles without practice though as they will behave oddly.",
"There is no such thing as artificial gravity except in science fiction stories which take liberties with physics. You can simulate a pull which resembles gravity by having habitable structures spinning on a wheel. You will get the feel of this on a fast marry go round. Space stations have been conceived using this idea."
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5tapu3 | why is it hard to diffuse a bomb? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because bombmakers don't want you to diffuse their bombs, generally speaking. So they will create paths where interruptions cause detonations, for instance, so that by yanking out all the wires you set off the trigger.",
"It's not that easy to defuse a bomb because terrorists could always set it up to basically blow up when the detonator stops receing an electrical current."
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5taq6f | how does insurance billing work in a multi car accident (10+ cars)? | Being it snowed a foot here recently and resulted in a 25 car pileup it got me to thinking, how does insurance deal with that? Does it just pay you like your at fault or what? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I was the middle car in a five car pile up. Only the person who caused the chain reaction was charged (she was texting). My insurer tried to hit her insurer, only to discover that she wasn't current and didn't have coverage at all. I assumed that my insurer would simply make me financially whole again, and they did, but I had to testify against the woman who caused the accident on behalf of my insurer. The trial sucked. It was a four hour drive away and it kept getting continued. In other words, I had to take the day off, gussy up, drive four hours, pay for parking, go to the courtroom and then hear her attorney ask for another delay."
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5taqim | Why traditional hard drives never come in normal boxes and do not have backplate but just exposed board ? | Like seriously. I just got new hdd and it is sold just as hdd I got 20 years ago. In ESD shield wrap. No box. And they still have that fragile exposed board on the downside | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"That's OEM packaging, if you buy them in bulk, the come in a large box with foam slots in it. If you spend a bit more money, you can get retail packaging with a box and padding and cables and a manual. As for the exposed board, there is no reason to protect it. They are mounted inside cases with a bunch of other exposed boards."
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5tarze | Why do people get third nipples, and not like. Third eyes? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Hippies notwithstanding, it is possible for any structure on the body to malform or duplicate, but the chances diminish with the complexity of the organ. Third nipples are normally immediately next to a normal nipple and are caused by the mammary gland forming an extra spout. When the eye malforms, it generally doesn't split into two complete eyes, it creates one eye with extra features, most commonly [the double tris]( URL_0 )"
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5taus9 | How do USB/HDMI/DisplayPort keep getting faster? | Are they making new discoveries? If so what are they? Or are they simply making thicker cables? Eg. HDMI 2.0 -- > HDMI 2.1 went from 18Gbit/s to 48Gbit/s USB 3.0 -- > USB 3.1 went from 5Gbit/s to 10Gbit/s DisplayPort 1.2 -- > 1.3 went from 17.28 Gbit/s to 32.4Gbit/s This was last look at [5 years ago]( URL_0 ) with speeds doubling again do those answers hold up? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Improvements in various things. For example in HDMI the speed increase is associated with a higher clock rate. Much like faster processors increased in Mhz, and into Ghz. HDMI Max Clock frequency to Data throughput - HDMI 1.0 - 1.2: 165mhz = 4.95Gbps - HDMI 1.3 - 1.4: 300mhz = 10.2Gbps - HDMI 2.0: 600mhz = 18Gbps - HDMI 2.1: ?? Spec not out to public or vendors yet, [here is some speculation though]( URL_0 ). This increase in clock speed is kind of like increasing the speed limit on the road. If the speed limit goes up from 25mph to 50mph, twice as many cars can go down that road. There are various reasons that increasing the frequency of the signal is difficult, and just gets harder the higher the frequency gets. Sometimes bandwidth increases come from adding pins/wires. This is like adding another set of lanes to that 25mph road. More lanes, more cars."
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5tav2e | What is actually happening when we daydream, why does it happen? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"It is an altered state of consciousness. Normally, our consciousness is concerned with stimuli entering our sensory store; we're attentive to our surroundings. However, when we daydream, we dissociate and enter a different level of consciousness. We enter a so-called \"autopilot,\" as our attention and consciousness draws inward. This state of dissociation is characterized by more vivid imagination, introspection (or rumination), and a blurring of the external world. Daydreaming happens usually when we're bored with our surroundings (under-stimulated or under-attentive), or when we are trying to escape the external world (more akin to maladaptive dissociation associated with anxiety)."
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5tb48s | In the Pixar movie Inside Out, why did Joy get sucked out of the control centre with Sadness? What emotional/neurological occurrence was that meant to represent? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Because when Riley moved away she became depressed and angry. She stopped feeling happy, but she wasn't mature enough to express her grief in an emotionally healthy way. That's why Fear, Anger, and Disgust were left in control. She spends most of the movie trying to suppress her unhappiness rather than admitting it and dealing with it constructively."
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5tbabt | How is one car parked on the shoulder of the highway able to cause over an hour's worth of stop-and-god traffic? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Slinkage. Car sees stopped car, slowed down just a little bit. Car behind slowed a little bit. Next car behind slowed down a bit. The cars at the end are stopped. This is because each car acts individually and no don't maintain distance between each other, deceleration, and acceleration at the same amount. Same issue happen in troop marching, lots of training to keep people from slinking."
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5tbak6 | Why does the infinite monkey theorem guarantee every possibility? | Supposedly if you give an infinite amount of monkeys typewriters and leave them, they will eventually write the complete works of Shakespeare and every other combination of text imaginable. I don't understand why this has to be the case. Surely if you roll a die an infinite amount of times there is a possibility that it could roll a 1 every single time. So what guarantees the monkeys will write anything? Surely it's possible that every single monkey only types gibberish, or only types the letter "A" etc. | Mathematics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The issue you're having here is in understanding the concept of infinity. Infinity is not just a really big number. It is endless, without borders, never stopping. Given an infinite amount of time in your monkey scenario not just Shakespeare would get written, but literally every possible combination of letters, spaces, and punctuation. At some point the monkeys would then run out of things to type, having typed all possible things, and they'd still have exactly the same amount of time left. Infinite means infinite."
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5tbbfq | Are babies ever physically awake while in the womb? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Yes. They spend most of their time sleeping but they do spend time awake and aware. They will react to things outside the womb and move around more when they're awake.",
"You posed a yes-or-no question, so the answer to your question is, It depends on what you mean by \"awake\". To explain: Babies open their eyes in the womb. They kick, they suck their thumbs, they turn around, and they kind of punch their little fists at times. This behavior is usually pretty predictable for the mom, and they seem to sleep when she's moving and become active when she sits down to relax, though it's probably different for every mother/baby pair. That said, this article in Scientific American discusses EEGs (measures of brain activity) of babies in the womb, and it looks like they are \"asleep\" 95% of the time. URL_0 So, maybe the other 5% of the time, they are \"awake\". But they also do not seem to have the awake brain activity that babies outside the womb have.",
"I used to play Simon with my daughter when she was in the womb. I would tap my wife's stomach and she would tap the same spot.",
"Yes. It's sometimes obvious when the baby is awake, especially late in the pregnancy when the baby is bigger. The baby moves around much more. There are periods of activity and periods of inactivity. After a baby is born, a parent will recognize the baby's jerky, uncoordinated movements as the same ones they felt in the womb.",
"Actually babies swallow amniotic fluid and pee it out. Their circulatory system is set up to bypass lungs in a way until birth. They go through sleep and wake cycles as well as can detect light as well as sound.",
"Anecdotally, absolutely. I am currently 29 weeks pregnant and can predict when my baby will or will not be active, based on what I've recognized his sleep pattern to be. [Less anecdotally]( URL_0 ), > After about seven months growing in the womb, a human fetus spends most of its time asleep. Its brain cycles back and forth between the frenzied activity of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and the quiet resting state of non-REM sleep.",
"But how do they go from zero oxygen environment and living attached to the host to a oxygen rich environment breathing on their own?! Blows my mind"
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5tbd9w | After years and years of pirating, why haven't they figured out a way to duplicate console game CDs in such a way the console can play them? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Several reasons First the basics, Each console has a developer signing key, that key is used to encrypt and mark the software you master to CD to make sure that even if you managed to copy it, it will not run becuase the copy is not signed with a valid key from the authorizing authority being the console manufacturer. That encryption is VERY hard to crack and in the last 3 console generations people have resorted to actually modifying the console to execute unsigned software by changing the OS or in some cases even flashing the CD/DVD drive so it reports all discs as valid. Another issue is the duplication equipment, home CD, DVD and BR burners only burn the normal data tracks on a disc, while when you manufacture the disc on a factory from a master its stamped from a mold. This allows you to add extra tracks and features which can not be duplicated by a home burner, and the cost of setting up a Blueray duplication system based on mastering an original and stamping it would be prohibitive for pirates."
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5tbwzu | It is estimated that some sharks lose over 30,000 teeth in a lifetime - where does a shark obtain the levels of calcium necessary for such rapid tooth replacement? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Well they don't have bones to worry about. We have a whole skeleton to upkeep, and we manage. But sharks eat a lot of things that have bones, and calcium in them, and what's more many calcium compounds can be dissolved in water, there are calcium ions just floating around the ocean, about 400mg/L of water. They don't really need anything to get calcium, they're swimming in a solution of calcium among other salts."
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5tc2id | Why is there a zipper on this throw pillow that gives me access to the cotton inside? Am I supposed to replace it or something? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"some pillows are to soft others not enough , it allows you to put as much as you want or dont",
"It's so you can take off the cover and wash it if it gets dirty without having to wash the cotton. Also it let's you add more if you want a fluffer pillow or take some out of you want it to be slimmer.",
"It's usually for ease of manufacturing. Using a zipper instead of sewing allow the inner cushion to be easily inserted and then the zipper draws the outer covering tight over the inner cushion. It's far easier to sew a cheap zipper onto the outer cover than to sew the seam when the stuffing is in place."
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5tc5x1 | For 30 years now, I've been hearing about how the biotech/genetics revolution is going to revolutionize our lives. Were those predictions overblown, or are huge changes just around the corner? | This question is prompted by picking up an old copy of Michael Crichton's 1990 novel Jurassic Park. Quote from the first page: "Biotechnology promises the greatest revolution in human history. By the end of this decade [i.e. the year 2000], it will have outdistanced atomic power and computers in its effect on our everyday lives. In the words of one observer, "Biotechnology is going to transform every aspect of human life: our medical care, our food, our health, our entertainment, our very bodies. Nothing will ever be the same again. It's literally going to change the face of the planet."" It seems fair to say that hasn't happened, even 17 years after 2000. Sure, Jurassic Park is just a trashy sci-fi novel, but I feel like I've been reading newspaper articles and listening to scientists on TV saying similar things for the last 30 years. What gives? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"One can argue it already has. Things we can do now that we couldn't do 30 years ago - Screen for certain genetic diseases during pregnancy - it's a much more mature tech now Test for BRCA gene (breast cancer gene) Treat certain conditions with gene therapy (see: URL_1 ) CT and MRI scans are normal, and now we have PET scans 3D printing medical and surgical devices Use fingerprint locks on our devices (maybe this was around 30 years ago?) The health sensors on our phones - the ones that let us monitor heartrate, sp02, etc. Oh, and we mapped the whole fucking human genome URL_0 There are probably many, many more examples I can't think of - I'm not a scientist, just have a passing interest in medicine."
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5tcqk0 | New inventions gender? | If you invent something brand new, do you get to decide it's gender in languages (French, German, Spanish etc)? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Except for borrowed foreign words, the conventions for the gender of new words are based largely on the endings of similar existing words. Exceptions tend to be very old and \"grandfathered-in,\" rather than new. Regardless of the gender you choose for your invented word, people are likely going to use what sounds right to them. Suffixes usually carry their own gender, so any French word that ends in \"-ette\" is feminine, any German word that ends in \"-chen\" is neuter (including, as Mark Twain pointed out, the word \"mädchen\", a young lady.)"
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5td04y | How do you prove that space really exists? | I read in a thread about a girl who believed outer space doesn't exist with the argument "Have you ever been there?". Now I'm a reasonable guy, and I know the stars aren't just lights on a giant dome around the earth, but how would a common redditor like me empirically prove to a girl like that that outer space exists, and there is something beyond the sky? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"You can't prove space to that individual beacuse it not about proof, it is about belief, it is what they believe. Beliefs do not require proof and can be held independently from facts, belief does not require rational thought or logic. You can offer all the facts and scientific understand of space to that individual and may never change their belief. I am not saying that beliefs could not be based on facts or scientific understanding, just that beliefs do not require them. You could try science, logic, and reason. You could try an emotional argument, about space I do not know what that could be. You could argue based on another system of belief (ie. God made the heavens and that is what space is...). Or you could move on and let the internet consume that person.",
"Do you mean outer space, or space? Space is just location. You are in space right now. There's just a lot of other things in nearby space. Outer space, specifically, has to exist because light has to have somewhere to be to travel from stars to us."
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5td30u | How do cryptocurrencies work? | I have been googling around for the past hour and I still can't really get a good idea of what cryptocurrencies are. How do alt-coins work? Why are AMD GPUs better for mining? What are the best cryptocurrencies to mine? etc. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In a normal banking system you have central banks that keep track of all transactions between all bank accounts in a huge ledger. By summing up all the transactions related to a bank account you can get the current balance. So when a new transaction comes in the bank will check the transaction against the current balance and either approve or reject the transaction. If two transactions come at the same time the bank will handle them one at a time and might reject the second one if the first used up the remaining balance. Cryptocurrency is a decentralized system so you do not have a central bank. Instead the official ledger is public to everyone and everyone can validate it. However you do have a problem in that two transactions might be in conflict. You need someone to decide what transactions is valid and official. But instead of a central source which might become corrupted they use a cryptographic proof of work system. The \"miners\" do a lot of heavy calculation and might come up with a valid answer, if not they have to start all over again. The difficulty is determined by an algorithm so that someone finds a valid answer at regular intervals. Those who have gotten a valid answer gets to sign a new block in the block chain with new transactions for the ledger. They also get to add a bit extra money in the ledger that they usually give to themselves for their work. This reduces the potential for conflicts. There can be a bit of conflict if two people find a valid answer at the same time but then there is a majority rule. Of course the more heavy cryptographic calculations you can do the more likely it is for you to find a valid answer."
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5td4z7 | How are 2/3 of you ancestors female? | I saw this post: URL_0 which claimed 2/3 of your ancestors are female, not 1/2 but how does that make sense? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Let's take an extreme example. Let's say your mother's father and your father's father are the same person (i.e. your parents are half-siblings). Ignore how gross that is for a second, and look at the male/female ratio of your grandparents. Your grandparents are 2/3 female. Examples this extreme are thankfully not very common, but if you go far enough back in your family tree, branches are going to start joining back together, and there's no way around it. That means that the same person will occupy multiple positions deep in your family tree. The paper that thread links to says that men are more likely to occupy multiple positions, which will make things sort of like the grandparent example.",
"After reading the article that his post linked to, it seems to me that the article was in fact talking about a population and not an individual. So your personal lineage is still half and half."
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5td6p7 | Why did humans grow throughout history and will they continue to? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"They haven't grown throughout history. They grow in response to nutritional supply and access to food, also with what is desirable. Homo Erectus and Homo Neanderthalenthis and the early Homo Sapiens were all relatively tall, standing around the current height of a Western Male (approximately 6'+). It was only with people congregating and food not being as easily accessible that humans began to shrink, hence why during the Middle Ages when there wasn't a huge surplus of food the height shrank. And in all likelihood human height will continue to fluctuate widely.",
"People grow throughout history because of more + better nutrition. When crops fail or poverty strikes there's noticeable differences in people's heights. In countries like the USA people are shrinking because of poor diets, whereas people in Scandinavia are growing and are the tallest people on average because of their varied + abundant diets. People could continue to grow, however it's expected that the largest average height for a country would be around 6'3\" for men and about 5'11\" for women."
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5tdbhv | If I get youtube search results from 7 years ago and youtube never deletes videos, 30 years from now will my search results look exactly the same as they do now? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"People do delete videos and accounts even if the company doesn't. In addition new videos are added all the time and the ranking changes due to how many views and the duration of each view, so \"less popular\" videos drop down the search list."
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5tdmn7 | If I moved 1 meter/second below the speed of light, why does it appear to move at light speed from me? | The Speed of Light is 299,792,458 meters / second. If I move at 299,792,457 m / s why would I witness light traveling at relativistic lightspeed from me? or am I misunderstanding and i'll witness photons moving at speeds of 1 m/s? I'm quite confused. | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"your time will go slower the faster you travel. therefore, if an observer at our \"speed\" looks at you and a photon he will see you traveling with a speed difference of 1m/s. For you, since one second will be much longer time, any photon can travel through much more space in that second, effectively increasing its speed conceived by you. Another effect of special relativity is space dilation. The faster you go, the smaller one meter will be. Therefore light even has to travel less meters in that longer second to obtain speed of light."
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5tdpmk | If you and a sound travelled at the same speed, what would you hear? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"**TL;DR**: *You won't hear it because you're perfectly riding its pressure wave, just like a perfectly timed motorboat can ride ocean swells without going up and down.* A soundwave is a difference in pressure that moves through the air at a certain speed. You \"hear\" it when the difference in pressure contacts your eardrum and your brain interprets it as a sound. Say you're standing still and someone nearby cracks a whip. That whipcrack creates a very sharp \"bump\" in pressure that launches outward in a wave. That wave passes over you and contacts your eardrum, and KERACKK. Now say you're travelling away from the whipcrack at the exact same speed that its pressure wave does. What's going to happen is that you're \"Stuck\" in the exact same pressure since you're in the middle of that soundwave, effectively riding it just like a motorboat can ride the top of a wave on a windy ocean. In the same way the motorboat can stay exactly level, even in giant waves, as long as it's speed is exactly right, your eardrum will stay still because the pressure it's experiencing is not changing. You'll still hear other sounds coming at your from other directions, assuming your ears are protected from the MASSIVE amount of air that's flowing over them at super-high speed. But you won't hear that whipcrack.",
"I think you would here nothing of that sound wave. Sound is the oscillation in time of the density of a material, let's assume it's air. The faster you travel along side of a sound wave, the lower the frequency of this sound wave would become. This is because you would see less crests per second. In the extreme case in which you travel exactly at the same speed as the sound wave, there would be no oscillation of the air density in time, just a static dc air pressure of some value. Of course the air you are travelling through however will produce sound which in general will become noisier the faster you go. But this sound is unrelated to the original sound wave."
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5tdq4c | Where are the colors that a human can't see? Is my wall secretly another color? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The electromagnetic spectrum of light is very, very long. We call colours the wavelengths that we can see with our eye. But there is a lot more in the electromagnetic spectrum than the range between 390 and 700 nm. The wavelength is a particular feature of the wave, imagine a sinusoidal wave (a nice smooth curve that starts at 0, goes up to 1, down to 0, continues to -1, returns to 0). The distance between the first and last 0 is called the wavelength. It can be a nanometer (Xrays), several hundreds of nanometers (visible light), it can be several meters (radio). And I'm talking real distance. As in the wave starts at the wall and ends 1 meter later (and then it repeats itself). Probably you've heard of frequency, frequency is the inverse of the wavelength. Long wavelength, low frequency; short wavelength, high frequency. The first colour we see is red (700 nm), before that we call light infra-red. Then we see all the colours of the rainbow ending with violet (390 nm), beyond that we call light ultra-violet. A few species can see a bit in the ultra-violet range. It is believed that insects choose certain flowers because of their pattern in the UV, and not by the bright visible colours that we see. In total, you would have (in increasing wavelength): gamma rays - X rays - UV - visible light - infrared - television and radio waves. Edit: your wall totally emits infrared radiation, because it is at a certain temperature. It will emit less than you, unless your wall is crazy hot. This principle is why nocturnal vision cameras work. It is electromagnetic radiation, yes, but it's not a \"colour\".",
"I am not color blind but I am not very color sensitive either. Women tend to see more colors or be able to recognize more subtle differences. So it is probable that your wall is painted from two different cans of paint that are \"different\" but not enough for you to notice. It would also be possible to intentionally mix the paint so that they are sufficiently different that my sister would notice but I would be oblivious and say they are the same. Here is a good article on the subject. URL_0"
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5tdr54 | What sense does it make for bats,opossums etc to live upside down? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When you clutch to a tree branch it makes more sense to hang from it upside down, because it’s a self-stabilizing equilbrium (you can’t fall from that position unless you let go of the branch).",
"These animals bodies are designed that when they hang upside down they are actually relaxed. It takes less energy for them to hang like this. TIL: Bats fall into flights as they don't have the wing strength to propel themselves from the ground"
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5tds9l | Stock Options, calls, puts, index, and indices. | Looking to gain some insight on these terms. | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Option - a category including calls and puts, as well as more complex versions of the same Indices - plural of index - Call - If you own a call on a stock, this gives you the (optional) right to buy the stock at the price that was agreed when the call was written. For example, if today's stock price for MYINC is 50, I might write a contract that says whoever holds the contract has the right to buy 1 share of MYINC for 60 at any time in the next year. If you expect MYINC's price will rise by 15, so the price becomes 65, then you might feel that this contract could pay off 5. If we agree on a price, I'll sell you the call. If the price of MYINC end up over 60, you get to buy it from me for 60. If the stock rises to more than 60 + the price you paid, you profit from the extra. If the price doesn't go over 60, I keep the price you paid for the call and we are done. Put - It's the same as a call, except it gives you the right to sell the stock for the fixed price. You might buy a call if you expect the price to rise, or a put if you expect the price to fall. Both are called *leveraged investments* because the amount of money you might gain or lose as a % of your investment (the investment is the price you pay to buy the call or put) is more than proportional to the amount that the value of the stock rises or falls. The real purpose of options is to allow investors to decide exactly how much exposure they want to gains and losses of the asset (it doesn't have to be a stock, it could be the price of gold, oil, a bond, a mortgage, etc.) Index - Someone chooses a portfolio of stocks, and adds their value together. It's like a barometer for how that group of stocks is doing. But with such a general question, you would do well to look online. URL_1 or URL_0 would be good places to look for information."
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5tdtu4 | How is music digitally stored AND played? | I've been wondering about this for quite some time now, but can anyone explain it without sounding overly complicated? There are no musical instruments inside a speaker, so how is it able to play recorded music? And relatedly, how is a recording instrument able to store sounds/music? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Every single sound is just a combination of waves in the air. Instruments and the like are designed to create certain specific combinations, which is why (for example) a trumpet sounds like a trumpet: it vibrates the air in a attern that is (more or less) unique. Speakers are cool in that they are capable of producing any sound wave. They do this simply by vibrating a plate back and forth very carefully to create the exact same wave that was recorded. (This vibration is caused by an electric current creating a magnetic field that can push or pull the metal plate) Recording sounds works in very much the same way. If you play loud sounds at a speaker, the plate inside it will vibrate, and then produce a current which can be stored as data."
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5te2hq | What is black light and how do we artificially produce it? | I thought the colour black was absence of light, how can we produce a lamp which shines black light? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Black light is light of a color that is outside of our visible color range (usually ultraviolet). We produce it just like we produce any other color of light...either make white light and pass thru a filter..or find something that produces, only ultraviolet when excited. Even though we can't directly see the light, it performs like light energy in other ways (converts to heat when it hits and object). And there are other animals that can see an extended range of colors",
"To expand a bit on what /u/fryanimal12 has written, x-rays, gamma rays, ultraviolet, visible light, infra-red, micro-waves, and radio waves are really all the same thing. They're all really just forms of light (well, technically \"electro-magnetic radiation\", but I'm trying to keep it at least vaguely ELI5). When you see a rainbow, you are seeing the light from the sun separated out into the various colors. The thing is, our eyes only see some of the light that comes from the sun. A rainbow has light we can't see in the area outside the violet part and also light we can't see outside the red part. The light just outside the violet part of the rainbow is what we call ultraviolet (black light), and the part just outside the red is infra-red. The main way that black light is produced these days is through those tube-based black light lamps you see that are violet colored. They are basically just fluorescent lamps. The way they work is that they have electrodes on either end of the tube, and the tube is filled with a gas (usually argon) and some mercury vapor. Electricity passes through the electrodes and through the gas and pumps energy into the gas, exciting it. The gas will release the energy, and when it does so, it releases it as light. The color of the light released is very specific and depends on the particular chemicals used. The reason that mercury is in these lamps is that when you excite it in this way, it will release a lot of its light in the ultraviolet band. Mercury produces light at some other colors (as does the argon), too... so the tube is colored to filter out some of that light and leave just the violet and ultraviolet light. By the way, fluorescent lights you might have in the home or office work on the same principle, but with an addition. The white \"paint\" you see on the tube is a chemical coating (phosphors) which absorb ultraviolet light and then release that energy back as visible light. The coating works on the same principle as those glowing paints you see that react to black light. Another way that black light can be produced now is through LEDs. That technology is fairly new, I believe. Frankly, I don't know enough about the physics of LEDs to explain how they work. I believe a black light LED works on the same basic principle as a visible light LED, however... the only differences being the materials used and the details of its construction.",
"There are some thorough explanations in the post, but to be clear the term \"blacklight\" is used to refer to ultraviolet (UV) light, not the actual color black. You are correct that the color black comes from the absence (or complete absorption) of light. Blacklight lamps do not produce black colored light.",
"You know how a rainbow goes red-orange-yellow-green-blue-violet? Prisms have the same effect: a prism in a window will cast a rainbow-like splash of colors that are always in rainbow order. The splash of color is called a spectrum. In 1800, scientist William Herschel decided to measure the temperature of each color. What he discovered was amazing! There are colors we can't see! There are colors \"lower\" than red and \"higher\" than violet. Below red is called infra-red and higher than violet is called ultra-violet. Black light is just ultra-violet light. We can make it just like we make all kinds of lights -- Christmas lights come in all kinds of colors, and people have long ago figured out how to make infrared and ultraviolet. Fun bonus facts: some animals (like bees) see some of the colors we can't, and they use infra-red lights for security cameras.",
"Many kinds of light bulb produce a wide spectrum of wavelengths, including ultra violet light which is invisible to the human eye, but can have the effect of causing white items to fluoresce when UV light is shone onto them. I understand that there is a kind of glass which blocks the visible light spectrum, but not UV light. Light bulbs using this kind of glass will appear to emit no light, but in reality, the UV light is getting through and is observable when shone on objects which fluoresce."
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5tecmo | Where does the money to pay off a loan come from? | Ok so I can't quite get my head around this- Let's say there's $1000 in circulation which is split between 10 people. Let's say Bob takes a $100 loan with 20% interest. So Bob has to pay back $120 to the bank. After he pays back the $120, this means that he had made the additional $20 by providing goods/services to other people. But now the total money in circulation is only $980, the bank has the $20 for themselves. Does that mean that loans make people poorer and banks richer or am I missing something? Please explain. | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Yes. Loans do make people poorer and banks richer. It's a business so they obviously want to make money.",
"Your scenario doesn't allow for anyone to have a job and make more money. There is not a finite amount of physical money in existence in the economy. But yes, loans make banks richer, and borrowers pay a interest fee. If your fee is greater than your income, yes, you are losing money.",
"Money grows with time. All of us have the ability to create money (because we work and the economy is going upwards). So you are a little wrong: Bob has payed 120 back to the person who lent him 100. This means Bob has created those 20 by providing goods or services to whomever. Those new 20 are now part of the game. The bank lends them to other people, or invests them, or buys something with them. But banks always get richer. They sell money at a 3% interest and in turn, the money you lend them (because the money you keep in the bank is for the bank to play with) has a 0.35% interest (or less)."
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5tehry | What is the difference between Common and Civil Law | In a practical sense what are the differences in how laws are made/upheld, how would a court cases differ, what are the advantages/disadvantages of each? Thanks! | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are variations on civil and common law but in general: Civil law is based on a code of principles that describe how to handle crimes. Much of Europe uses civil systems which refer to guiding principles to decide cases. Common law is more evolutionary and looks to past cases (called \"precedent\") to decide cases. If a previous case is similar to the current case, then the current case should be decided the same way as the previous case. In practice much of common law has been codified now by statutes and many civil law courts also refer to precedent to see how the code was interpreted before so the two systems blur quite a lot. The major practical difference is that under common law two sides present their case to a judge and the judge decides who has the better case. In civil law the judge is usually the \"chief investigator\" and has a more proactive role. Common law is often called \"adversarial\" for this reason since it's set up as two sides in opposition. Civil law is \"inquisitorial\" since there's an independent party seeking to establish the facts."
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5tenyg | George Soros' Theory of Reflexivity | I am trying my upmost hardest to understand but with only basic knowledge of the financial markets I am struggling to conceptualise the theory!! | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are objective truths and subjective truths. Objective truths are true no matter what anybody thinks. This is how most truths are; if it's night and I say it's day, I'm wrong because it's actually night. If you have a dog and I say you don't have a dog, I'm wrong because you have a dog. My thoughts don't have any effect on the time of day or your dog ownership. But then you have subjective truths, where what people think directly effects reality. If people think Google stock is going to go up, they'll buy a lot of Google stock, and that will make Google stock go up. If they think it's going to crash, a ton of people will sell and it'll crash. If I thought AMD was going down, I could sell all of my AMD stock right now (well, technically Monday, since the market isn't open on weekends), and it would go down. The change would be practically non-existent since I don't own enough shares to matter, but it would go down a tiny fraction of a percent. So basically, it's nearly impossible to reliably and accurately predict the markets over time, because they change based on human perception. There are just too many variables."
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5teyra | Why is it that whenever I go to open a jar I closed, it seems like it was closed with a machine? | Whenever I close a jar, and go to open it the next day, it's always really hard to open. Why does this happen? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I always assumed it was vacuum pressure. When I close a jar it had almost always been out for a bit. After I seal it it goes in the fridge, where it obviously cools down. Contents contract, there's a pressure differential, the lid is now \"sucked\" onto the jar and doesn't want to move.",
"When closing a jar, you are probably applying more torque than you need to seal it. That torque is being applied against resistance.",
"LPT: Wrap a thick rubberband (broccoli ones work great) around the perimeter of the lid. Put sunglasses on. Open jar like a boss.",
"Often times small bits of whatever was in the jar gets caught in the seal. Forming a gluey bond that makes it harder to open it."
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5tezf1 | Why does a ball bounce higher when it has more air in it? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When a ball bounces, it deforms. With a ball that deforms more, more energy goes into the deformation, and more goes into \"wasted energy\" (heat, sound). With a ball that has higher pressure it deforms less, less wasted energy, and due to the conservation of energy, it will return more energy and bounce higher. TD;DR: a higher pressure ball wastes less energy and energy is conserved so it goes into movement."
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5tf25m | Why do some companies print their products expiration date in code instead of an easy to read format? | URL_0 for an example | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"That's not an expiry / best before date. It's a lot number. In case of complaints etc. it allows the company to know which production batch the pack is from. This allows them to investigate any problems more easily and trace where units have gone if they need to recall a batch due to e.g. finding out there was a problem with one of the ingredients.",
"It's a lot number, mostly because the product doesn't have a proper expiration date (they are NOT required to have them for most products). Anyways, usually you use lot numbers to include more information than a simple date, for example, if you have 5 factories, each with 5 production lines, and they can each produce different products, the lot number will usually include specific production dates, locations, and details that will assist in doing a recall (where simply a date isn't enough, it doesn't identify what vat it was in and in what factory). Frequently they'll use base-36 numbers in it to shorten the code as well (so they use day of year instead of month and day, converted to base 36 so it can be printed in 2 characters)."
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5tf4fo | Why do eggs become solid when we cook them? | Why do eggs become solid when being cooked? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Eggs contain a lot of proteins. Proteins in normal states have a very precise structure and there are 4 levels of that structure. While proteins have their structure intact, they look like a ball of tangled string. If you heat up these proteins, they start to unwind, destroying this tangled webs of bonds and unwinding. Now, proteins are really long, while tangled they occupy a little space but when untangled they are super long and act like interlaced book pages and its harder for them to move. They change from a gel-like substance to a solid. Internal structure of these proteins lets light go trough it but once they are untangled they stop light, thats why they change from a transparent gel to a white solid. EDIT: The process in known as denaturation and occurs not only due to heat, read about it on wiki, theres a lot of info about how the process works.",
"Eggs contain proteins and they don't like hot water. What happens is that the proteins are damaged and then they become solid."
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5tfedt | Why do chefs routinely handle food using their bare hands instead of using gloves? Isn't it unhygenic? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Gloves are not the end-all-be-all in terms of hygiene. It is actually more sanitary to wash your hands after touching something that requires it than to just wear a single pair of gloves all the time. If you watch a real chef, you'll see they are very careful about what they touch. They're not going to rub their nose/face and not wash their hands. If they touch something that would contaminate something else (raw chicken for instance) they'll immediately wash their hands before they do anything else. Gloves block your the transfer from stuff on your hands to things you touch, and vice versa, no more. If you wear gloves and handle raw meat, or money, or any of the other unhygenic things and never change your gloves you're actually more of a problem. But for some reason, there seems to be this belief that gloves are a panacea for anything unsanitary.",
"As a chef you are very aware of the fact you are handeling food to be eaten by others. In cullinary school it gets imprinted onto your brain (here in Belgium we had tests about HACCP on a regular basis) Furthermore a kitchen reflects the kind of chef that works there. So a clean kitchen means a chef who knows how to handle their food in a proper fashion. Do not use this to base a kitchen during peak hours, sometimes it gets kind of messy but never to a point where it becomes too much Furthermore many chefs myself included get a feel for their food, be it the texture or if your steak is cooked to perfection. Finally those goddamn gloves get in the way of everything they are uncomfortable, and when dressing a plate its just not as easy to handle your products with these gloves.",
"No! I have my food handlers managers license. In my course we actually did a demonstration that showed the amount of germs that you can trap underneath the gloves. Most health inspectors prefer that you do not use gloves as they trap germs, foster a lovely moist warm environment for bacteria to flourish in, and use of gloves actually discourages hand washing. We wash our hands constantly and mine get dry and they hurt from doing it so much in the winter. But you are better off that way, promise.",
"Clean gloves aren't any cleaner than clean hands. The things that get hands dirty also will get gloves dirty. Regularly changing into clean gloves isn't any more sanitary than regularly washing ones hands. Using gloves is only really helpful if you don't want to contact the things you are handling with your bare skin such as with caustic chemicals, for some reason you can't clean your hands with soap and water (which brings up the question of how your work surfaces are cleaned), and if for some reason a hand has an open wound. In those cases you bandage the wound completely and then put a glove over that. Customers not wanting skin to touch their food is purely psychological, there is no increased danger.",
"They wash their hands more frequently when they aren't using gloves because they can feel the oil, etc. When you wear gloves, it's easy to not notice foreign materials on your hands and transfer them onto food.",
"Gloves are only more hygienic than bare hands if they are getting changed frequently. Too often in busy restaurants this isn't happening enough. You'll see the deli guy handling the bread with the glove, then the turkey with the glove, then the tomato, then the knife to cut it, then the refrigerator door, then you may even see him handle the money in the cash register or a broom... does he toss off those gloves before he cross contaminates something else behind the counter? Who knows. Is the cook wearing the glove to protect the consumer from the person preparing food, or to protect the cook from the food he's preparing? Sometimes, it's hard to tell. It's more sanitary (and economical) to have cooks wash their hands frequently than to have them use gloves for everything, and use them properly.",
"Constantly taking off dirty gloves and putting on new ones is very time consuming, especially with super sweaty hands since they've been under a glove so long. I used to only wear gloves when handling raw chicken.",
"Also, I don't want that glove dust on my food. Plus some people are allergic to latex. Washed skin is clean, sanitary, and normal, and I'd much rather see my food touched by a hand than a glove.",
"Another problem with gloves sold for food prep and other purposes is that they're still somewhat porous, so they can still let bacteria and other contaminants through. The only gloves that are completely impervious are usually the gloves used in the medical field."
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5tflsl | What keeps antarctic penguins from having frostbitten feet? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Bunch of things. For general heat conservation: * Huddling in groups with a constant rotation from outer towards inner and back [Youtube Link]( URL_2 ) * Thick, tightly overlapping down feathers * Good general body design to minimize surface area exposed * Thick blubber For feet specifically: * the ability to dilate vessels and control flow * very little, if any, muscle in the feet. Movement is controlled by tendons which attach to muscles located deeper in the warm areas of the body [Penguin skeleton]( URL_0 ) - from u/Wolfy21_ * keeping them tucked under their warmer skin * counter-current heat exchange: veins and arteries are organized closely together in a way that allows the blood leaving the warm heart to run near the colder blood from the feet before it actually reaches the feet. Benefit is that it warms the colder blood before it reaches the main body and the warm blood loses its initial heat to other blood instead of ice/air. [image]( URL_1 ), credit to u/wildflower8872 from a similar thread years ago",
"Let me tell you a little story that I learned in nursing school. I actually asked one of my nursing professors this question too, in a joking fashion because I told him I've always wondered about it since I was a kid, and why penguins didn't melt through the ice. He went on to tell me an amazing explanation as to why a penguin's foot is like a human testicle. In human biology the testicles sit outside of the body so that sperm can be produced because at a internal temperature of 98.6 degrees they cannot produce sperm. However sitting outside the body exposure to colder air can also decrease the Bloods temperature enough that when entering back into the body it could cause a person to go into shock. So in the human testicle there exists a cross current system where the artery coming out of the body into the testicles passes by the vein that returns back in thus cooling the internal hot arterial blood when it comes out, and warming back up the cold venous blood when it goes back into the body. The same exact cross-current system exists in a penguin's foot so that the arterial blpod can be cooled down to a temperature that the feet can not melt through the ice and then warmed back up on its way in so it doesn't cause Penguins to go into shock. And that my friends is why a penguin's foot is like a testicle.",
"[Counter current heat exchange]( URL_0 ) is the primary factor for a lot of animals in arctic climates. Essentially, it allows them to retain their core body temperatures by \"allowing\" their extremities to be more cold than the rest of their body. Frostbite in general happens as a result of the body restricting vessels in very cold extremities to maintain its core temperature, instead of allowing the cold blood to recirculate. Penguins, arctic foxes, and others don't have this issue, because they have counter current exchange systems in place, in which the returning blood is re-warmed by the oxygenated blood.",
"Surprised this hasn't been mentioned. In the cells of their feet, the phospholipid bilayer has a higher concentration of unsaturated fats than saturated. This causes the cells to have a lower freezing temperature. There are of course other factors, but they have already been mentioned so far in this thread",
"For everyone saying counter-current heat exchange, that actually makes their feet colder than they otherwise would be. That is the mechanism to prevent hypothermia, not frostbite. Frostbite is prevented by simply having high-enough temperature blood to provide to their feet, and by their feet being made up of flesh that doesn't require being very warm, like dead skin, bones and tendons.",
"Your blood, other than the obvious, is used by warm blooded animals as a central heating system. Penguins are really good at using the thermostat to save energy. They also have a system that warms up the cold blood coming from the feet, and also cooling the warmer blood going to the feet. Basically, penguins are good at keeping their feet *just* warm enough not to get frost bitten, but cold enough so they're not wasting energy through them.",
"You might enjoy the book \"Why Don't Penguins Feet Freeze?\" I bought it and thought it'd never come in handy, so here's my chance to shine! Part of the answer has a biochemical explantation. A binding of oxygen to haemoglobin is normally a strongly exothermic reaction: an amount of heat (DH) is released as the molecules attach. The same amount of heat is usually absorbed in the reverse reaction. However, as oxygenation and deoxygenation occur in different parts of the organism, changes in molecular environment (e.g.: acidity) can result in heat loss or heat gain in the process. With regards to cold peripheral tissues like the feet, DH is much smaller than humans. This has 2 benefits. Heat is absorbed by the birds' haemoglobin when it's deoxygenated. The second is a consequence of the laws of thermodynamics. In any reversible reaction (e.g.: absorb/release of oxygen by haemoglobin) a low temperature encourages the reaction in the exothermic direction. So at low temps, oxygen is absorbed more strongly by most species' haemoglobin, and released less easily. A modest DH means that in cold tissue the oxygen affinity of haemoglobin doesn't become so high that the oxygen cannot disassociate. 2 mechanisms are at work; penguins can control the rate of blood flow to the feet by varying the diameter of arterial vessels supplying the blood. They also have 'counter-current exchangers' at the top of the legs. Heat flows from warm to cold blood, so little of it is carried down to the feet. In winter, their feet are held a degree or two above freezing - to minimise heat loss, whilst avoiding frostbite. (Ducks & geese are similar, but if held indoors for weeks in warm conditions and then released, their feet may freeze, because their physiology has adapted to warmth which causes blood flow to be virtually cut off and their foot temp falls below freezing) Tldr; they've adapted to the cold and can lessen blood supply to the feet. They also hold their feet at a steady temp, a degree or two above freezing. Less heat is absorbed by the birds haemoglobin when it's deoxygenated. The low temperatures encourage an even more exothermic reaction.",
"> A seagull does not freeze, even while standing on ice. How does this creature conserve its body heat? Part of the secret is in a fascinating design feature found in a number of animals that dwell in cold regions. It is called the countercurrent heat exchanger. > The countercurrent heat exchanger in a seagull’s legs enable it to stand on ice Heat transfers, remains in the body. Cold stays in the feet What is a countercurrent heat exchanger? To understand it, picture two water pipes strapped closely together. Hot water flows in one pipe, and cold, in the other. If both the hot water and the cold water flow down the pipes in the same direction, about half of the heat from the hot water will transfer to the cold. However, if the hot water and the cold water flow in opposite directions, nearly all the heat will transfer from the hot water to the cold. > When a seagull stands on ice, the heat exchangers in its legs warm the blood as it returns from the bird’s cold feet. The heat exchangers conserve heat in the bird’s body and prevent heat loss from its feet. Arthur P. Fraas, a mechanical and aeronautical engineer, described this design as “one of the world’s most effective regenerative heat exchangers.”13 This design is so ingenious that human engineers have copied it. URL_0 [search_id]=e20a0380-1733-45e4-8b03-8141eb55d704 & insight[search_result_index]=0",
"As far as withstanding colder temperatures: When ambient temperature declines, penguins release a solute into their bloodstream which will act like an antifreeze that buffers temperature changes by preventing ice crystal formation of the water molecules. The compound is released from the liver and is glucose! Glucose is not a strong electrolyte and therefore doesn't cause generation of a large osmotic pressure that would cause shriveling of cells (crenation) but does effectively interact with the water molecules in the blood, preventing them from forming ice. TL;DR: Sugary blood acts like antifreeze.",
"Same Question / How Come Deer Feet Don't Freeze when the stand for days in the snow & ice ?",
"Countercurrent exchange of warm thoracic blood with returning cold venous blood. As the warm blood from the thorax moves towards the feet, it is in close proximity to the venous blood that is cold and returning to the body. The heat from the warm arteries flowing down heats up the venous blood so that the returning blood is now slightly warmer."
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5tfnf9 | Why do some people have opposite reactions to caffeine and drowsy medicine? | My sister can drink coffee and energy drinks, and she'll fall asleep almost instantly, but drowsy medicine will keep her up. I always thought it had something to do with dyslexia...what's the real reason? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"This is actually a fairly common occurence, especially with certain types of drugs, and it's often referred to as a \"paradoxical reaction.\" Diphenhydramine (Benadryl) is especially well known for having these sort of side effects; it will cause drowsiness for most users, but will cause hyperactivity in some patients. The reason for these paradoxical reactions vary from drug to drug and person to person, and can be complex (especially if they affect the brain). Generally, these reactions are caused by genetic differences involving metabolic chemical processes or brain structure or chemistry or all three. Diphenhydramine hyperactivity, for example, is thought to be generally caused by the presence of an extra or altered copy of a gene for a metabolic enzyme (Im pretty sure its related to either CYP450 2D6 or 3A4). This mutation causes the body to sort of \"over react\" when that metabolic pathway is activated, which results in \"ultra rapid metabolization\" of all 2D6 substrates, including diphenhydramine (and a huge variety of other things, including chemicals which affect brain chemistry and mood). This breaks down the diphenhydramine very quickly, and leaves the metabolic pathway in an excited state for some time. This ultimately changes brain chemistry and mood, temporarily. If you want the specifics, ask and ye shall receive. Other \"different reactions\" can be caused by tolerance/exhaustion, or interactions with food and other drugs, and in some cases even mental state or environmental stimuli. TL;DR / ELIactually5 Some people have different reactions to the same medicine. This happens because not everyone is the same. Sometimes two people can even have the exact opposite reaction!",
"I've had ADHD my whole life and wondered why I was yawning and drowsy after my daily espresso. My little sister was actually prescribed Mountain Dew before she went to school since, like ADHD meds, its a stimulant and has proven effects to actually calm the hyper active brain. Even upwards of 15 shots of espresso I still have no idea what it's like to be wired or have shaky hands. It's honestly frustrating to not have something get me up and going as the product intends. It helps me focus and stave off headaches but not without a lot of yawning."
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5tfrva | Why is cold water a more refreshing drink than warm water? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The reason you sweat is because your body is overheating. The sweat serves to cool your body from the outside. Drinking cold water serves to cool your body from the inside. You're helping your body preserve homeostasis. Your body has systems in place to reward you when you help it not die. So, your brain is giving you a mental thumbs us when you drink cold water on a hot day. Same thing when you drink hot chocolate on a cold day."
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5tfy2w | Why do subscription services like Hulu or Netflix take down titles that are in demand? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They license the titles with a certain time frame. After it expires, they can sign a new contract. Perhaps the licensor increase the price and Netflix doesn't want to pay for it.",
"Being in demand does not matter. They take down titles when their rights to stream them expire and they can no longer legally stream them.",
"Netflix licenses content from its owners for a certain price for a certain amount of time. Once that time is up, they need to renew the license. However, if the show is in demand, the content owners will want a higher price for it, and Netflix may not want to spend the extra money"
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5tfzl3 | Why is it that the same degree from different universities in the same country are valued differently? Shouldn't they all teach the same knowledge? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because they don't necessarily teach all the same knowledge. Different schools have different standards for the education of their students. While they do need to follow guidelines in order to be considered accredited (and thus be reputable as legitimate) some can and will be better than others."
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5tg0k1 | How does a hydrofoil ship work and why is it advantageous? | [Like this one for example] ( URL_0 ) | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The hydrofoil works a bit like a wing does in air. When the ship picks up speed, the hydrofoil generates enough lift to raise the ship's hull out of the water. They're efficient because as the ship's hull is not in the water, less drag is generated, which means it takes less fuel to propel the ship and keep a constant velocity."
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5tg7ua | Can a person who breaks their neck (say from a hanging), have a chance to still be alive, just end up paralyzed from the neck down? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Just gonna leave this here: **National Suicide Prevention Lifeline** URL_0"
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5tgn7q | Why do we see (what appears to be) so many women who kill young children suffer so little consequence? i.e. Casey Anthony, Andrea Yates, Katrina Effert, Louise Woodward, among others. | Of course, many are justly punished, but it would seem that in cases of women and their children, a surprising number of women are found not guilty, or do little to no time regardless of the evidence. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In Casey Anthony's case at least, it wasn't that they went easier on her. The jury named her not guilty, aka there was enough reasonable doubt that they weren't sure she committed a crime. Otherwise I can only imagine they succeed in pulling heartstrings and making people sympathetic, even if they did something abominable.",
"In order to be convicted of murder, the state has to prove it. They couldn't. Perhaps they fucked it up but the fact they couldn't is not necessarily related to whether they committed murder or not.",
"There are many hormonal changes around childbirth which can greatly impact mental state so that misconduct can be blamed on insanity. Also culture skews the courts in favor of women being treated more leniently than men. It isn't fair but it is difficult to control."
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5tgsnl | Why does water have a blue/green color in oceans, lakes, etc when it is actually clear? | The green in lakes and oceans I can somewhat understand because of algae, but what makes it appear blue? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> but what makes it appear blue? Because water *is* blue, not clear. It's just a very, very faint blue that looks clear in small amounts. From [the article about water on Wikipedia]( URL_0 ): > Light in the visible electromagnetic spectrum can traverse a couple meters of pure water (or ice) without significant absorption, so that it looks transparent and colorless. Thus aquatic plants, algae, and other photosynthetic organisms can live in water up to hundreds of meters deep, because sunlight can reach them. Water vapour is essentially invisible as a gas. > Through a thickness of 10 meters or more, however, the intrinsic color of water (or ice) is visibly turquoise (greenish blue), as its absorption spectrum has a sharp minimum at the corresponding color of light (1/227 m−1 at 418 nm). The color becomes increasingly stronger and darker with increasing thickness."
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5tgwv6 | What's the history of the prefixes in front of many African American first names? | As an example, the NBA has: DeMarcus, DeMar, DeMarre, D'Angelo, DeAndre, LeBron, LaMarcus, JaMychal, JaVale... | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Well to understand it, we should ask about the suffixes that were before. During the civil rights movement, many black people wanted to reconnect with African roots since they had been forced to forget their African languages and carry European names. Many black Americans started naming their kids African names or names with African sounding suffixes. That is where all of the *-isha -kisha -tisha* names came in. Lots were converting to Islam during that time so a lot have Arabic names. Kadijah, Layla, Alisha. This kind of opened up the idea of not being restricted to a list of names and parents began giving their kids names that were \"unique\" so today a lot of the names are picked for the way they sound or they are hybrid of other names. The *La-, Le-, D'-* prefixes are meant to make it sound fancier like French or Italian which is ironically European again. More than anything, it's just a trend so those types of prefixes are not common in kids born in the last ten years but maybe people aged 25+."
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5tgxcl | Why do too sweet or too salty things make us thirsty? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The hypothalamus in the brain continually measures the osmotic value of blood, which is a measure that indicates the \"concentration\" of blood. When consuming salt, simple sugars (glucose, fructose) or food rich in electrolytes, the osmotic value of blood rises, i.e. the blood is more concentrated. This is noted by the hypothalamus which then in turn leads to a sensation of thirst. Drinking water will dilute blood and thus lower the osmotic concentration back to normal."
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5tgxjf | How do LEDs work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Applying voltage to an LED makes electrons jump across a small gap between two crystals of different semiconducive materials. One with a higher energy state than the other. When they move from high to low, a photon is released. The frequency of this photon is determined by the semiconductors used, and the differences in their energy states. Smaller differences release shorter wavelength red light, while larger differences push the frequency towards the ultraviolet."
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5th5ad | Why do many discount retailers create their own generic products to undercut name brand products they're trying to sell? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Because the generics cost less for the store to purchase than the name brand. And the bigger margin on generics than name brands."
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5th7fv | The difference between avoiding and evading paying taxes. | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Generally speaking, tax avoidance is legal whilst tax evasion isn't. Tax avoidance is cleverly exploiting loopholes in tax law to pay less tax. This might include things like setting up trusts or changing your tax residency. Tax evasion is doing something that actually contravenes tax law and therefore not paying as much tax as you are legally obliged to. It can be difficult to determine what constitutes tax evasion, however, because the tax laws of countries are often extremely complicated."
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5th9ix | Can you really find someones browsing history through Google? | So my friends have always told me that you can look up someones history through Google, if you just search their IP and shit. But I don't reallt believe that, I think it's totally BS. But is it really true? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You cannot find someone's browsing history through Google- the only way someone could see this would be if they had access to your computer or phone, or your ISP (the company that provides your internet) gave it away (they can see your Internet history). What you may be talking about is a website that gained some popularity recently (www.iknowwhat-- URL_0 ) which claims to be able to see what you have torrented based on your IP. I don't know if this has been verified to work, but even if it is legit this shouldn't affect most users (regular downloads won't be tracked, only torrents) Overall, there is nothing to worry about. You friends cannot just google your browsing history. EDIT: made the link invalid since I can't 100% guarantee it is safe, given the dodgy nature of the service it offers."
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5thcrs | If someone was brought up without being told about sex, would they still know what to do? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Everyone else failed to consider that all the teenagers getting pregnant today are also exposed to huge amounts of sex in the media and their daily lives. If a straight male and female were completely isolated from any mention of sex, then they were introduced to to each other after puberty, it would take some trial and error, and it might take a long time, but they could eventually end up with a kid. The guy would quickly discover that his penis gave him pleasure when he messed around with it. The girl, through cleaning or scratching, would figure out that her vagina gave her pleasure. If they spent enough time together, they could feasibly begin to share these experiences beginning with a form of mutual masturbation. As they fumbled around with each other's parts, and became more familiar with what made each of them aroused, then pregnancy is a possibility even without penetration. It would only take a small epiphany to move to direct penetration. There is a movie called the [Blue Lagoon]( URL_0 ) that covers something like this, though it doesn't go too into detail about the steps that the couple crossed to discover penetrative sex.",
"Yes indeed....humans, and all other mammals, have a sex drive hard wired into our brains. No instructions necessary.",
"Absolutely. Although they would probably also put their penis in many other places as well. It's all good. The only reason we need \"sex education\" is to reduce the associated risks (mostly disease and unwanted pregnancy) and hurt feelz."
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5thd0i | How does an IV drip work? How does the body accept and process that fluid? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's a windy day outside. You're holding a glass of water and turn it over. The water spills out. Does it fall straight down? No - it falls at angle in the direction the wind is blowing. This is similar to the fluid entering your blood. When the needle enters the vessel, the fast moving blood \"pulls\" the fluid out of the needle and into the bloodstream in the direction of blood flow. The IV bag being elevated relative to the needle helps this along. This can be further explained with some basic fluid mechanics (engineering principles). I can elaborate if you'd like. Blood is made largely of water and other chemicals (along with the blood cells). IV fluid, whatever it may be, is mostly water, so the body processes this normally - hydrating tissues until it reaches your kidneys where excess water is filtered out and turned into urine. This is why you'll have to urinate frequently while on an IV drip even if you're not drinking anything. The chemicals in the IV drip are absorbed through various tissues and also eventually filtered out through the kidneys and sometimes liver, turning into urine or solid waste."
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5thg2s | How do they make Gorilla Glass stronger than regular glass? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I don't think there's really such a thing as \"regular glass\" as you might think of it. Take steel for example. Steel is what's called an \"alloy\" which in it's own case is Iron mixed with some ratio of other elements, usually carbon. There is no standard type of steel. You mix in different elements in different ratios to get the type of steel you need. Stainless steel for example has chromium mixed into it and this is what prevents it from rusting. Glass too (and other materials) can be made this way, although technically not called an alloy I think (alloy is always metal). Typically the main component of glass is silicon dioxide (quartz) and mixed with other elements in certain ratios to give it the properties desired, although not all glass uses silicon dioxide to my knowledge. Other things can be done to it as well. Gorilla Glass has found some mixture of elements in this way that causes their glass to be extra strong compared to other glass mixtures.",
"They take regular glass and soak it in molten potassium salt. The sodium atoms in the glass come out, and the potassium atoms replace them. Potassium atoms are 30% bigger than sodium ones. Say you are playing Red Rover. A bunch of kids are lined up holding hands, and another kid tries to run between them. When the kid runs through, his goal isn't to split another kid in half. It's to run in between two kids and get them to let go of each others hands. If you replace 15 little kids with 10 big kids, then there are fewer places the running kid can split the line."
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5thj2r | The Golden Ratio | What exactly is it, what applications does it have, and why does it make that cool spinny thingy? | Mathematics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I'm a bit out of my depth but I'll try my best while we wait for the experts to pitch in. Imagine a line divided at one point such that the ratio of the short part to the long part is the same as the long part to the whole length of the line. Clearly that can't be the mid point at it turns out to be around 61% of the way along the line. So that answers the question what is it. Just a bit of mathematics fun you might think. However, it crops up in nature all the time. In England we use paper of a certain dimension we call A4. Turns out it is based on the golden ratio or golden cut as it is sometimes known. It turns up in art and music because for some reason it is attractive to humans. The fibonacci series 1,1,2,3,5,8 (where each number is the sum of the two numbers preceding it) as the numbers get larger and larger the ratio of the last number to the preceding number approximates to the golden ratio. It is found in flowers and nautilus shells, possibly as a product of the fibonacci series. Try it right now. 2/3 = 0.66 not too far from the golden ratio. 5/8 = 0.625 getting closer to the golden ratio, 8/13 = 0.615 closer still and so on and infinitum. As for the cool spinny thingy, sorry but I have no idea what that is a reference to so can't help you there. I suspect this will be a rich thread once the mathematicians, scientists and artists join in. Good luck. I'll come back and read all the fascinating stuff once it arrives."
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5thkds | Who puts together programme schedules? And in the case of 24/7 channels, is it somebody's job to watch TV all night? | Who puts together programme schedules? And for channels that run 24/7 - is it somebody's job to sit there and keep an eye on the channel all night as nobody else would be around if it say, shut down or there was an error? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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],
"text": [
"There are major network executives who buy shows and then programming coordinators are usually the ones who are involved with scheduling. If there is a 24 hour station, you best believe at least one person (if not a few more) are at the station making sure, if there is a problem, that they can either delay the signal and fix the problem or just insert a new version (HDcam is the normal output version)."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
5thkw0 | Why can receipt printers only use thermal paper? What's the difference between receipt printers and regular printers? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ddmjeu1",
"ddmjd9r",
"ddmkkua"
],
"text": [
"Thermal paper is fast and cheap to print on, but you're not going to get any kind of high quality images on it. Since receipts don't usually need images and only basic text, it makes the most sense to use it instead of a regular printer. Regular printers use ink or toner and these cost more and take longer to produce.",
"Thermal reciept printers do not use ink. Instead, the paper is designed so that it darkens when it is heated.",
"Receipt printers use thermal paper because it simplifies replacement and means that you only have to replace paper. Your local 7-11 can't bother with having an IT staff to maintain the devices. Thermal paper simplifies the process."
],
"score": [
4,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
5thtnm | Why do advertisers allow their commercials to repeat over and over when aired on a steaming device? They must know it enrages their potential customers, right? | Is it so much to ask? I'm watching It's Always Sunny on my FX app on Apple TV and every god damn commercial is a delta spot with the stupid song from Snow White. It's driving me nuts! IT'S NOT ROCKET SCIENCE WHY ARE THEY DOING THIS TO US??? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ddmnaqs"
],
"text": [
"Most of the time the point of commercials is not to actually sell you anything but to get their brand in mind. You may not like that they play commercials so much on your device but you do remember who's commercials are responsible don't you? Now how many other of that same type of business can you name? Chances are you can't name that many. There are well documented studies on the effect of brands and how it influences our purchasing decisions. In most cases people cannot remember more than 7 brands in a particular category, but if they do remember your brand they are far far more likely to seek out your brand and purchase your products. The commercial itself may be a minor annoyance but the brand recognition is far more valuable to the business. Edit: a word."
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
5thub4 | Why do we have eyebrows? | And dogs have them too, in another colour than the rest of their fur. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ddmlfz7",
"ddmmh36"
],
"text": [
"They're meant to catch dust and the like, similar to eyelashes, to protect your eyes. It may also have something to do with the angle of our brows during evolution, so that the underside (similar to armpits) were less exposed and kept the hair. Extra text in case of the subs minimum word count or whatever.",
"Eyebrows are important to keep things out of your eyes, notably sweat, rain, etc. They're also very important in communication, and help us to express ourselves to others."
],
"score": [
4,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
5thvs6 | Why Does My shower Curtain Pull Inwards All The Time? | Like it says every time I shower it tries to get up on and and I have to hold it down with my foot. Is there any particular reason for this? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ddmln87",
"ddmqon2"
],
"text": [
"The warm air in the shower is rising, drawing cooler air in from outside the shower, pressing the curtain in. Try opening the curtain on the side away from the shower head. That way air can come around the curtain.",
"Contrary to the other responses posted so far, it's mostly not caused by convection. You can see this by running a cold shower. The water creates a vortex. This vortex is at a low pressure, which draws the curtain in. Source: the last paragraph [here]( URL_0 )"
],
"score": [
5,
5
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[
"http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1369/why-does-the-shower-curtain-blow-in-despite-the-water-pushing-it-out-revisited"
]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
5thzq7 | Why is the Netflix series: Dear White People so unpopular when it is based on the film Dear White People which is the same premise and popular? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ddmn9pv",
"ddmmbvv"
],
"text": [
"The series won't even come on Netflix for another 2 months. How could it be unpopular already? We have no idea if it will or will not be popular buddy, its not out yet",
"As far as I can tell, the issue is that the advertisement for the Netflix series was made to sound much more controversial and get people talking about the show more than accurately represent what it's about, and a lot of people took offense at what they perceived to be hatred aimed at white people."
],
"score": [
4,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
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