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5vc819 | Is trash island a myth or is it real? Has any organization made an effort to clean it? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's not a myth but it's not really accurately represented a lot of the time either. Calling it an island isn't really that accurate either - what it is, is an area in the pacific ocean (there are others but not as large as the pacific one) where a number of currents converge and as a result plastic debris have built up in the area The reason I say it's not accurately represented is because those photos you see of huge piles of rubbish aren't real (well they are real, but they aren't of trash island). The bulk rubbish is actually quite spread out and the biggest issue is actually smaller (minuscule) sized pieces of debris. It's also rarely visible from the surface because most of the rubbish sits in the currents under the water. Some groups are trying to clean it up but it's not an easy (or cheap) task and the amount of rubbish being added to it is greater than anybody is able to remove at the moment. URL_0",
"It's real, but the plastic is mostly not visible. The Ocean Cleanup is a great organization which is working to solve the problem. Donate to them, if you can! URL_0",
"Its not an island - its a large area where the amount of suspended particles of garbage (often microscopic) is increased above the normal ocean concentrations. Its not visible to the naked eye, and there isn't great piles of stuff floating around. There's about 25 lbs of mostly microscopic garbage per square mile."
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5vc8a8 | Viewed as an expanding sphere,does the Universe consist of concentric spheres of galaxies?Or,is it a single layer of galaxies? | If it has onionskin layers, where does the Milky Way fit in? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The universe is what is called \"Isotropic\" and \"Homogenous\" on large scales. What that means is that when you start to look at the observable universe as a fluid, with galaxies as particles in that fluid, you notice this: The universe is roughly the same, as seen from anywhere, in any direction. The distribution of matter and energy are what you'd expect from \"random\", the temperature is what you'd expect as well. It's a very even soup, and galaxies and all of the stuff we're made of are like thin ribbons of condensed \"stuff\" in the soup. So no... it's not layers, it's a bowl of soup that might not have a center or an edge. Everyone in the bowl of soup, looking into the night sky, sees that they're at the center of the bowl of soup, no matter where they are, or how far they go in any direction."
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5vcao5 | If a Canadian Border patrol agent on Canadian soil shot and killed an American citizen walking on American soil, with no compelling reason, what would happen to the agent? | Would she be extradited to the US or tried in a Canadian court? Face internal disciplinary action? All of the above? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It would be a complex situation... \"with no compelling reason\" assuming you mean he just up and shot someone, then the agent would be charged with murder and extradited to the state in question eventually probably... but there would be ample grounds for legal petitions of many kinds to deny extradition Now if there was a reason of some kind (accidental discharge, mistake in position/identity, etc etc) then it gets far more complicated and would take years to figure out in court rooms and negotiating tables, probably not as a criminal case for extradition though. Now here's an even screwier version... Canadian agent shoots say German Citizen standing in the USA... funtimes for the lawyers, not so much for any one else involved. Other border in world would probably be simpler outcome... it would be a straight up Act of War in many cases."
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5vcf86 | Why does 1st and 2nd class post take different amounts of time to arrive? Doesn't it all just go through the same system? | I had to post something today, it wasn't urgent so I sent it 2nd class, but it got me thinking: if it all goes through one system, why does it take different amounts of time for each class? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It helps to deal with spikes in demand. Most of the time it may well be treated just the same and arrive at the same time. However, maybe there's an unusual amount of post heading from your city to your destination today. Instead of paying for a second truck to get everything there tonight for delivery tomorrow, they send the first class post and keep the second class (or just some of it). That can go on tomorrow's truck, and be delivered a day later. It can also make a difference if you post something late in the day. There may not be enough time to sort everything from the last collection and get it on the right trucks that evening. So they can sort just the first class post, and leave the second class stuff to be sorted the next day.",
"depending on distance it does take the same amount of time on occasion. but for further mailings it adds up. they have same day flights, over night transport, trains, boats, etc. that can be used for transporting mail. a 2nd class parcel might go out tomorrow via train whereas a first class might go out the same day on a train, or even on a plane. within your city depending on time of day, it might make little difference though."
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5vclso | why do racing cars have so many sponsors - what's the point or benefit to the companies? | I'm trying to understand this, even though cynical part of me says "tax writeoff". Why do racing cars have so many sponsorship decals on them. You might say "it's a great promotion if the car has T-Mobile livery" - that's fine, but what's with dozens and dozens small, almost invisible stickers and logos plastered all over the car. Do people really see some miniscule bumper logotype on a photograph and think "wow I should google these guys". Please explain. | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's not about the viewers immediately Googling the name. It's about getting viewers subliminally exposed to the name over and over. It's the same reason they play the same commercial sometimes multiple times an hour, so the first thing you think about when you want oil is \"Valvoline\".",
"I am a rally driver and I can explain it. There are two things when it comes to sponsorship. First one is branding - it goes well when the livery is easy to recognize and the logos are big. Consumers see a car and if the like it, it makes a positive connection with the brand. You asked: ok - full one brand livery is ok, but what with the small ones, often barely visible. This is second thing. The company that have a logo on a car can use the team, the car or the drivers (it all depends on the contract) for their advertising purpouses, and build positive connection to their product or company. Some minor sponsors of F1 or WRC use whole team as their communication. They can use some part of the car with a logo and say - proud sponsor of XYZ racing/rally team. It works good with specific target groups and it cost much less money than being main sponsor.",
"The sticker on the car is less important than purchasing the right to call themselves an official sponsor, which they can then do in their own promotional material.",
"It's branding... in addition to having your logo seen on the cars during a race, there are also additional benefits that come from sponsoring a race team, such as having those drivers in ads for you, being able to promote giveaways/sweepstakes featuring the race team, etc. Many race fans are very loyal to those who sponsor their sport and favorite race team/driver so they will seek out who is sponsoring them. As for tax write-offs, that's not a business practice for making such a decision... while spending $1 million on a sponsorship would be an expense that would reduce their profits, they spend more money than they save so it's still a net expense."
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5vco5x | What did William Casey, CIA Director mean when he said "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false" | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I don't think anyone now can speak authoritatively on what precisely he meant then. But disinformation is well within the purview of intelligence operations. For example suppose radar is developed and now the Allies can detect aircraft at much greater range, through clouds, and at night. They need to keep the existence and capabilities of radar secret as long as possible but also need to have an explanation for how they are getting their informaton. To achieve this they can spread word that they are feeding carrots to their fighter pilots so the vitamin K will improve their night vision. This helps keep radar secret and was effective enough that many people still think vitamin k improves eyesight. If intelligence agencies couldn't create cover stories and plausible lies then they couldn't do their jobs properly."
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5vcteg | Can someone explain geocaching to me? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Geocaching is like a modern day treasure hunt. Someone takes a container of some sort and places in it a log and usually some nicnacks. They will then hide that container somewhere public or where they have permission to hide it. They are also responsible for the upkeep of the container. Then they post GPS coordinates on a website that will allow others to find it. Anyone who finds it can sign the log and/or trade an item and post on the website that they found the container. There are also tiny containers that only have a log since they are too small to put items in."
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5vcxsi | Why do some devices (like a cordless razor) slow down as the battery runs low but others can put out full power (like a laptop or smartphone) | I am wondering why my razor slows down as the battery level decreases, but my laptop can run games with full brightness and sound right until the moment it powers off at 0% battery. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"As your battery runs down, the voltage it outputs drops. For a device with a motor like a razor, that means that it runs slower, since the reduced voltage doesn't push/pull on the electrons quite as hard and the current flow is reduced. With many digital devices, however, the circuit contains a \"voltage regulator\". This device takes in the power source on one side (be it from batteries or a wall transformer) and outputs a steady voltage on the output. That output is the power input to the rest of the circuit. The reason this is done is that digital logic circuits depend on the voltage being in a specific range to operate correctly. Once the voltage is too low (or even too high), the design parameters that were used when designing and verifying the circuit operation no longer hold, and it could misbehave. So on something like a laptop or a cellphone, the voltage that comes into the regulator from fresh batteries is actually higher than what the circuit needs to operate. The voltage regulator reduces the voltage output to the right range. When the battery voltage gets too low, it starts to warn the user. When it gets so low that the voltage regulator can no longer provide an output in the right range, it shuts down the device. A really cheap digital device (such as a toy) may not have a voltage regulator. It is designed to try to be tolerant to a wide range of voltages. When the voltage gets too low, it simply stops working correctly."
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5vczxd | Why do we have different countries with left handed drive and others on the opposite side? | Wouldn't it be a lot simpler / safer if we all drove on the same side? I drive left of the road. ( North America ) I'd like to drive in Japan one day but I think, It may be a bad idea because my mind might wonder to the wrong side of the road. Exactly when, why and who decides the steering wheel placement and which side of the road we drive on? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I can't speak for all the world, but Napoleon was left handed and made the French and any country he invaded ride on the right side of the road so that his sword arm is facing the oncoming rider, which is why continental Europe drive on the right and Britain on the left. Supposedly",
"There's not a lot of difference. People adjust to either way pretty fast. Given that, it's the same reason US doesn't use metric system: it might not be ideal, but it kinda works, and changing it is a huge pain in the ass.",
"Because countries can decide for themselves and they all think their way is the right way. I drove a bunch in England and you get used to it surprisingly quick. Also you probably don't need to drive in Japan, it has some of the best public transportation in the world.",
"Quite a few countries did switch from LHT to RHT in the early 1900s. As for why the remaining don't, I'd guess they don't have a compelling reason or just don't feel like going through the hassle. The why is quite complicated and many theories go back to what side of the road were used by carriages vs people walking etc. Back in the day it could vary from RHT to LHT within the same country, and obviously they eventually standardized with one or the other."
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5vd1ht | Why is there no thunder or lightning during winter? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Thunderstorms are formed when warm, humid air rises and cools. Since warm air is a prerequisite for a thunderstorm to form, it's not that surprising that thunderstorms are less common in the winter months.",
"There is. Thundersnow is the coolest shit in the world. Nothing compares to standing outside in driving snow, while lightning flashes and thunder booms around you. It's surreal.",
"It can happen but the conditions don't favor it. For the record though lightning during a snowstorm is one of the coolest fucking things I have ever seen. Every time a bolt would flash my entire field of vision would basically go neon blue for a second. 10 out of 10, would recommend.",
"There can certainly be lightning and thunder during snowstorms. It's called \"thundersnow\". It's very rare, but it does occur. URL_0",
"Lightning requires two components to form in a storm: ice crystals and an updraft. This is because as the ice crystals rub against each other (near the updraft) they build up a static charge within the cloud that eventually discharges as lightning. The amount of lightning therefore depends on just the strength of the updraft and the amount of ice crystals in the updraft. These requirements lead to a couple of interesting phenomena. 1. As mentioned in another comment, thundersnow occurs in convective snow bands (such as lake-effect snow) due to strong updrafts and plenty of ice crystals in the bands. 2. Tropical systems tend to have less lightning than mid-latitude storms because they have fewer ice crystals present in the updrafts (the freezing level is higher in altitude). 3. In normal (mid-latitude) storms, the water droplets freeze as they move up the updraft into the middle to upper part of the storm where they rub against the falling ice crystals to build up the charge. Sorry if my explanation is a little off. It's been quite a while since I took a course in this.",
"I have seen a snow thunder storm. The lightning was green and it was an intense experience.",
"It was 70 here in Iowa on Sunday (2/19). That night we had a nice thunderstorm. Thunderstorm during Winter.",
"Definitely location specific though. I grew up in southern Europe. Thunderstorms were common in winter and unheard of in summer.",
"Plenty of thunder snow here in New England. It is really an odd and cool experience each time I get to hear it.",
"Ever heard of thunder snow? Lived in Iowa most of my life and it's a real thing. When you hear thunder during a snow storm expect a lot of snow."
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5vd30v | How did Americans lose their British accent? | I know that the British came to North America, and then settled there. But how did they lose their accents? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I actually read somewhere that the American accent never changed. The British accent is the one that changed.",
"America is a melting pot. It is not merely a collection of English settlers. Many of the more unique features of American English can be traced back to pronunciations made by people who did not have English as a first language. Most famous is probably the influence of Yiddish on the New York City accent, but across the US the non-English speakers impacted the way English was spoken. In addition, there was already at that time significant variations in English pronunciation on the British Isles. West End Londoners (often the pronunciation we most readily associate with British English) were not a grouping that was greatly represented among immigrants. Most immigrants came from poorer areas, such as Ireland and Scotland. This has also left a mark on the pronunciation of American English.",
"Too lazy to look up source, but I actually believe that the Brit's changed their accent over time. Our current dialect sounds more like 1700's british than contemporary british accents. So we technically did not lose our british accents.",
"People from all over Europe went to North America because of all the potential new land was offering so accents like german, dutch, italian mixed. Also there was a ton of freedom because of all this mixing and matching.",
"Along the same lines, how did the \"southern accent\" come to be? As a southerner myself, I've always wondered this. I've heard that southern accents are the easiest to replicate for Brits because it is the most similar, but in practice, you don't hear any similarities in them. (I'm talking Tennessee/Kentucky/Georgia accent, not Louisiana Cajun)."
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5vd78s | If I swallowed a long piece of string, kept one end out of my mouth and waited long enough to pass the other end, what would happen if I pulled both ends really hard? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Assuming your stomach didn't simply digest the string, it would be pretty rough on you. Your digestive tract is extremely long, and it's all coiled up. Imagine taking a piece of coiled licorice candy except making it about nine meters in length (or about 26 feet) and coiling it up real nicely into the shape of a human torso. Now thread a piece of heavy-duty wire through it. And then pull it taut. It would just slice right through that soft candy as it straightens. Of course, human digestive tracts are tougher than licorice candy, and a string isn't as likely to tear through things as a heavy-duty wire would be, but it would be extremely abrasive at best.",
"Optimally, the string breaks. Sub-optimally, your GI tract is subjected to a sudden, forceful imperative to straighten, and the string either pulls your business out of place, perforates your intestines, or otherwise arranges your business in a less than preferred design."
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5vdibl | How did no one see the collapse of the housing market in 2008? This is a reference to the movie: The Big Short. | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They did, but there is something called groupthink where everyone in a group like say economists all believe the same thing so dissenting voices are drowned out by the majority. For more on groupthink - URL_0",
"It's not that no-one saw it coming, it was that it was making some people extremely rich. Basically, here's how it worked. You take a $100,000 mortgage from me. I can then sell your debt at a profit to someone else as a 'mortgage backed security'... essentially a bond worth your $100,000 debt plus the interest you're going to pay over the term. I make a profit immediately, and the person I sell it to gets an investment that will make them a profit over time as you pay it back with the interest. So, this is all well and good, but in order to get more mortgage-backed securities to sell, I start selling mortgages to people who are never going to be able to pay the loan back...after all, it doesn't matter to me, because the fact you can't pay is someone else's problem after I've sold them. Obviously, a $100,000 mortgage isn't worth $100,000 if the person actually responsible for providing that money is unable to, so pretty soon, there's a huge market for what is essentially worthless bits of paper. Then, when people start to default on those mortgages, everyone who owns those debts panics and starts trying to offload them, driving their worth down further. Tl;Dr : Because the banks in charge said 'Fuck the markets, because we can get really rich now.\"",
"You saw The Big Short, right? Because it tells, almost right off the bat, why no one saw it coming: No one actually studied the individual mortgages in the bundled assets that banks brought. If people had looked at the mortgages, they could have seen that if a number of the mortgages failed, the rest of them probably also would fail. Instead, banks assumed that if one mortgage fail, then it wouldn't increase the risk of the next failing. This assumed diversification of bundle meant it appeared safer than it actually was. To show this numerically, let's assume that we have a bundle of 2 mortgages, which pays $1 if at least one haven't failed. Each of them have a 10% risk of failing, meaning that, if they are independent, the bundle pays put 99% of the time. That means that it should cost $0.99. However, if we instead assume that if one fails, then the economic conditions is so bad the other also will fail. That means the bundle should cost $0.90. This mismatch between the market price and the actual value means that the bundle seems to safe, which means more banks will buy them. Of course, each of these bundles consists of 100s or 1000s of different mortgages, which makes it hard and inefficient for individual banks to access each mortgage and assess its risk level. Therefore, that was left to rating agencies, like S & P. They were supposed to assess each of these bundles. But, for some reason, they didn't, which meant banks got bad information, which meant that the market set the wrong price for the bundles, which created the potential for the bust",
"The fact banks were colluding with credit agencies like Ffitchs and Standard and Poors to rate what was essentially junk debt as good didn't help either",
"Plenty of people did see the bubble before hand, there was a lot of reporting on it, and plenty of research coming out of universities detailing the bubble, but there was a substantial majority that had a vested interest and a media outlet to seed their propaganda against descenters. The intelligent among them would want to ride the gravy train as far as they could stand before bailing out because risks was getting excessive. The fool hearty rode it too far and missed their chance to bail with their finances intact. The true idiots genuinely believed what they were saying, they fooled themselves with their own rhetoric.",
"There were some assumptions made because things had never happened before, and people were too lazy or apathetic to adjust the assumptions based on changes. For example, a lot of the risk modeling/ratings assumed that housing prices could never go down in a widespread manner. So the thinking was, that mortgage-backed securities were safe because even if one or two loans default there's no way a significant portion of the basket of mortgages will. But they didn't change their models based on the higher risk loans being underwritten, where people were no longer putting 10 or 20% down, were no longer being limited to mortgages of 3-4x their income, were no longer even having stated income or assets verified."
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5vdilj | Satellite TVs transmit terabytes of information everyday with 500+ channels and HD programming to millions of homes for very reasonable prices, why isn't the internet similarly available for public use? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Internet is two-way. Satellite TV can broadcast the signal to everyone at once, because everyone gets the same channels. With internet, everyone's computer is asking for a different thing.",
"A satellite sends the transmissin ONCE towards the Earth. You are equpped to receive it or not (this is why you could have illegal boxes), somewhat like radio. Internet is a direct connection to every single individual users. If you have a million users, you send that same data a million times. it thus take quite the infrastructure to keep a decent speed up, and in a way having a price barrier insures you dont flood your infrastructure and give everyone a crappy speed. Still, nowadays they should be able to do much better than they are, price-wise."
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5vdz30 | How does Facebook determine which people to show activity from on my news feed? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"That's part of their secret sauce and what makes Facebook what it is. That's kind of like asking how is Google so efficient at searching the internet. We can imagine Facebook looks at correlations, such as whether you have listed them as family in your profile, how many mutual friends you have, how often you like each other's posts, etc.. but the nitty gritty details of how it chooses to show content to you proprietary.",
"There are a few ways: First is if you have them listed to see first. In their profile you can pick see first, normal, or unfollow. Though it may put someone to see first based on my second point! Second, how much you interact with their posts. Liking, commenting, sharing, or even just viewing repeatedly makes Facebook give them more of your attention. Eventually worth enough people you'll see them first and others later. The app and web page likely both keep track of which posts you've seen and filters based on that too And lastly, suggestions based on what they know about you. Facebook logs details about posts and if they match your interests then it'll bump them up. It learns about you from what you have on your account and linked into it. Also they probably buy and sell info with other sites like Google to get more details. Word of note! Any site that lets you sign up for free and has info on you (even if just a name) will likely trade that info around."
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5ve3bi | Why do people get brain damage from inhaling certain gases when it goes to their lungs? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Your brain (and the rest of your body) requires a constant supply of oxygen. That's the purpose of red blood cells, to deliver oxygen to the entire body. It is not the gas itself that causes brain damage, but instead the lack of oxygen reaching the brain. The lungs get no oxygen, the blood is not oxygenated, and the brain begins to die.",
"The gasses go into the blood and get circulated around the body, including the brain. There's something called the blood-brain barrier, it's likely these substances are able to cross it. The brain is delicate and we can't really fix it like we can other organs. Any damage is notifiable and hard to treat making it more worthy of comment than other organ damage. Plus it's possible that just like alcohol is particularly bad for your liver the substances just so happen to be worse for the brain. Perhaps the brain contains substances that react with those you're inhaling.",
"I know someone who worked on a major study on the effects of inhaling solvents from pain and glue and similar. Solvents are very effective at breaking down fat, and our brains are largely composed of fat. Post-mortem look at the brain shows a significant reduction in brain mass. It is a very specific example, but goes to illustrate how different pollutants can damage the brain more than other parts of the body.",
"Usually, brain damage occurs from inhaling concentrated doses of non-oxygen gases because the inhalation of these gases eventually leads to the displacement of oxygen in your lungs (and by that extension, your blood stream). We are beings that rely on cellular respiration to sustain our lives (ELI5 of cellular respiration: we use oxygen and sugar to produce water, carbon dioxide and energy) so when we take oxygen out of our systems, were are essentially forcing our organs to stop making energy. In prolonged cases, the lack of energy leads to the death of cells in these organs. Brain cells don't really repair, if at all, so that is what makes brain damage a much bigger concern when you do go unconscious from inhaling gases."
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5ve50c | What would happen if you put a person in an oversized microwave and then turned it on? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They would die a horribly painful death. Microwave ovens broadcast waves of a frequency that excite water molecules. The increased vibration of the water molecules generates heat. The heating is generally not uniform as the wavelengths are longer than the size of the oven cavity. Standing wave patterns create the 'hot spots' that cause uneven heating. An oven big enough to fit a human being might be able to be configured for more even distribution of the microwaves across the cavity. But the density and moisture content differences in the human body would cause uneven heating anyway. Depending upon the power of the oven, a human being might live for several minutes, as their eyes, brain, veins and arteries, and internal organs heat. Water molecules would go from a liquid to gaseous state. Yep, steam would be generated within the body. Ouch. Source: worked at Pillsbury on various microwave foods for several years. Learned a lot about microwave technology.",
"They would die after about 2 minutes. Babies have survived being microwaved for 20 seconds. The pain is excruciating. The water within your individual cells boil, your eyes would explode, huge bubbles would form under your skin, extreme burns",
"Well, first and foremost, they would die. Microwaves work because the specific radiation they produce causes water molecules to vibrate _very_ fast. A result of this vibration is that they being to generate heat, which in turn warms up your food. Since people are about 60% water, the water inside us would react the exact same way - it would start to vibrate and heat up. Initially, this would just cause some cellular damage due to the vibration, but very quickly, that water would start to heat up to the point where every cell in your body would start to cook."
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5ve5pb | Why do insurance rates go up after a car accident? Isn't that like casinos raising their house edge because you won? | Having insurance is like paying early for damages you assume you will have, right? Like a bet. It's not like you stop paying insurance once your total payments exceed the coverage, so why do they get to ~~raisin~~ raise the cost? It's like you're betting, and when you happen to win the insurers just change the rules so they still win. | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Insurance is priced based on risk. If you live in an area with lots of tornadoes, you obviously will need to pay higher rates for that home insurance against tornadoes because the company is more likely to have to pay out your claim than if you lived elsewhere. If you are involved in an accident, you become more of a risk. It's not just that they're trying to recover their costs, but also that you've identified yourself as someone more likely to be involved in an accident, for whatever reason (maybe you suck at driving, maybe you live in an area with lots of sucky drivers, maybe you drive only on days where everyone sucks at driving, etc etc). The company can't get so detailed as to identify the reason exactly, but it knows that drivers who are in an accident tend to also be in other accidents. It goes away after awhile, though. 3 years, usually. The price drops as you get older, because older drivers tend to be safer (well older in the context from 18 vs 30).",
"It's more like how the bookies changes the odds after every race. If a horse that won every race suddenly loses one, you're not going to get the same odds on it. Since casinos operate under the assumption that winning is basically random, but bookies (like insurance) have the assumption that future performance is based upon current/past performance.",
"Casinos do change the odds - if a 3 to 1 horse wins a race, then the next race, the odds will lay at 2 to 1. They price based on the real-world data they have. The only things they don't change are the games of cards and dice, because those odds are fixed in and they don't change from game to game. Insurance companies work in the same way - your price is a measure of your own personal risk, and the odds that they'll have to assume that risk. It's why men pay more for car insurance than women, old people pay more for life and health insurance than young, and roofers pay more for workers' comp than librarians. If the risk they're taking changes, they have the right to change what they charge for it. It's just like taking a bet - no bookie wants to pay 50 to 1 odds on a likely winner, and no insurance carrier wants to take in a small premium from a driver with a known history of accidents."
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5ve76p | How does neoprene work? | I have a wet suit made of neoprene and it keeps me pretty warm, why is it such a great heat retainer? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Essentially what is going on, is that the wetsuit allows water in, and then retains a very thin layer of water against your skin. This water is heated by your natural body heat, essentially serving as a warm layer of insulation. That's why wetsuits often talk about their anti-flushing properties as selling points. If the water is continually flushed out and replaced with new, cooler water, then the desired warming effect is compromised. I'm sure someone else can give you a more scientific answer regarding the actual properties of the material itself, but that's the gist of how they work. Good question!",
"All the answers are correct. Neoprene is rubber filled with air bubbles (terrible heat conductor) and the water just inside the suit (wetsuit) insulates. Not super helpful, but this is why if you are diving, some divers will pee in their wetsuit (not nice if you rent). The pee gets trapped between the neoprene suit and your skin. Gives you a heat boost, but you are swimming in pee.",
"The neoprene is treated so that millions of tiny air bubbles are incorporated into the material. The air bubbles insulate you from the water, helping you stay warmer."
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5ve99b | If someone steps on a land mine today and that mine was laid in WW2 does that make them a WW2 casualty? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are various different casualty counts that use different definitions. However it is common to count civilian victims after the fighting is over as casualties in the war. This is for example the case with WW1 which have a lot of unexploded ordinance left over in areas of heavy fighting. There is also a lot of bombs from WW2 that hit softer ground and therefore failed to detonate and just got buried. Land mines however are more common from later wars.",
"Yes... And no. It depends I the parameters of the count. E.g. \"victims of WWII ordinances are WWII casualties\". In this case, yes. E.g. \"victims of WWII ordinances during the years 1939 - 1950 are WWII casualties\" in this case, no. Always read the small print. Like... Are people only counted once? Eg 95% of women would buy or product! (95% of a 20 person sample size) seriously, I once GENUINELY saw \"87% of women buy our shampoo\" (87% of 67 women). Yup... When reading \"facts\" read the small print."
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5vecc3 | Could a highly trained martial artist beat a chimp or other strong ape? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The difference is in the insertion points of their muscles. A chimp's biceps inserts halfway down its forearm where yours is just below the elbow. That gives it a lot more strength. A gorilla's glutes originate way up their back. The levers are just way longer. Then you have to think about this too: pain compliance is a big deal in a lot of martial arts. But these guys won't comply, so you have to go to what will debilitate or kill. And we're at a disadvantage there too. Wild animals will just fight harder if they're injured. What do they have to lose?"
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5vef13 | Why is it that salt consumption is often associated with water retention/weight gain but you're also not supposed to drink salt water when stranded at sea as it can cause dehydration? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Hi! 2nd year medical student here. Great question! The short answer is that the sea contains WAAAAAAY more salt than the salty foods that cause water retention. Water and salt are best friends. Wherever salt goes in the body, water will follow. This helps keeps our bodies in balance. When we eat a lot of salty foods, this salt gets reabsorbed by the kidneys, and as a result, we don't urinate as much. That water is reabsorbed to keep the water/salt balance in check. However, our kidneys are only so good. There's a maximum to the amount of \"bad stuff\" they can concentrate in our urine. Sea water contains, on average, about twice this amount. If you drink a liter of salt water, your body would have to spend at least 2 liters of water to get rid of all that salt. This leads to the dehydration. A couple swallows of sea water while you're at the beach is no big deal. You'll replenish the fluids later when you get thirsty. If you're stranded at sea, however, you have no way to replenish the fluids and should avoid drinking sea water. Hope that answers your question!",
"Ok so your cells retain sodium. Sodium and chloride are used for water concentrations in the cell. They make sure your cells are hydrated at the right amount. If you don't consume enough salt, your cells dehydrate causing them to shrink, if you consume more salt the cells swell (swollen feet and hands). So in order to prevent overswelling the body will pump out water and salt (pee), if you consume saltwater you're going to raise the amount of salt in your blood by a lot! Now this is going to have an opposite affect on the body. There will be so much solute (molecules and ions) not in your cells that water will pass through your cell membrane (diffuse) into your blood to equalize water osmolarity in the blood and cells. So your blood will have a lot of water in it now and your cells have now began to shrink. The kidneys will \"see\" all this water and quickly expel all the extra particles and water through urine (thanks to osmosis). So we have all that \"extra\" water and salt gone and your cells are at low water content and your blood is at normal. The water in the blood equalizes again to blow the cells back up. The lack of water in the blood causes you to become thirsty again. If you drink more saltwater this happens again. this whole process left you with a net loss of water making you more dehydrated. Edit: a word"
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5vel5i | Why is the same exact text message sometimes received twice when only sent once? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Phone: Please send this message and let me know that it's sent. Provider: I got the messag- a... it... ...ved. Phone: It's not properly sent? Let me send it again. Provider: It has been received! I got the message and it has been received! Phone: Two confirmations? I only care about one of them. Message sent. If there's disruptions in service, your phone will try to send the message again, causing a double transmission if both get through."
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5velz2 | Why isn't shooting straight into the air dangerous? | We see it all the time in movies and show where someone will shoot a gun straight into the air. Isn't this dangerous? Doesn't the bullet have to come down eventually? Couldn't this hurt someone? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It can be very dangerous and lethal. It all depends on how \"straight\" in the air it is shot. The Mythbusters proved that a bullet shot perfectly straight will come back down tumbling and slow -- non lethal. However, if you start to decrease that angle, the more likely the bullet will come down in a lethal (much faster) trajectory. You can find news stories of people being killed by bullets shot up in the air.",
"That's movie science. The same science where you can fire 900 shots at some bad guy out of a gun with a 15-round magazine. And yes, in reality, it is very dangerous.",
"Not only is it dangerous, if you're actually hit you stand a very good chance of being hit in the head which makes \"celebratory gunfire\" significantly more lethal than other types shootings. Here is a study on the issue from the 90's. URL_0",
"U/french_fries_R_lyfe is right. The bullet exits the gun incredibly fast straight up. As it travels it starts to slow down until it gets to its apex. Once at that point the bullet is moving at 0 m/s and accelerating at 0 m/s^2. So it starts to fall. Now we know it will be pulled at 9.8 m/s^2 down to earth. But it is not spinning anymore like it was out of the gun since it was essentially \"dropped\" from its apex. So it tumbles and runs into all the molecules in the air, known as air resistance. Since the bullet is so small the max speed it can reach is very low, because the amount of air slowing it down doesn't need to be very large as well. So it will hit the ground very slowly (in comparison to its original speed) The confusion in this thread is thanks to parabolas. If you shoot it in an arc the bullet never stops moving. It retains its spin as well. If it is spinning while traveling it has less air resistance. This means it can travel really fast and it will hit the ground going very fast",
"Interestingly enough there was a Mythbusters episode on this, #50 In short they found its non-lethal ONLY if fired 180 degrees from the center of gravity, then the bullet comes down on its side and air resistance slows it down to a non-lethal speed. Anything more/less then a few degrees of 180 of gravity and the bullet arcs in rainbow style fashion. With the tip of the bullet pointing down the air resistance is minimal and the bullet will easily reach speeds enough to kill. Given 99% of the time people are not going to shoot perfectly up what comes down will more then likely kill if someone's unlucky enough. Source: URL_0",
"Yes it does come down but not at the same velocity that it went up. If hit by a falling bullet, it'll hurt and leave a mark, but it's not likely to kill."
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5vem8j | Why do we get dizzy / lightheaded after breathing fast? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Your body is making CO2 at a certain rate. We transport CO2 in our blood in the form of HCO3-, which is an acid. Our body regulates our breathing to keep the CO2 within a certain range. So if we don't breathe enough, the HCO3- builds up, and our blood pH goes down (Respiratory Acidosis). On the other hand, if you breathe too quickly, then you're getting rid of more CO2 then you want, and our blood pH actually increases. Note that when we exercise, we make more CO2, which is why our brain starts directing us to breathe faster. Under normal circumstances, the concentration of CO2 won't change even with exercise This affects the concentration of ions in our brain as well, which lead to many of the symptoms seen with hyperventilating"
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5ver7j | What happens in your body at concerts when it feels like your heart is about to vibrate out of your chest when they hit super low bass notes? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Sound is effectively just waves of air moving at different speeds and sizes. While most of them are so small you can really only sense them with your ears, as you start to get really low, the waves start to get a lot bigger, to the point you can actually feel them. That feeling is the air physically vibrating your body, usually with what's called a ground sub. Some Front of House Engineers do this on purpose to get that \"concert feel\", and the wavelengths that do it best are actually below your threshold of hearing, in terms of pitch, but can be powerful enough to knock even a grown person over.",
"That is infrasonics which are frequencies that hit your body like percussion waves and they are low enough in frequency that you feel as much as hear. Although in a rock concert situation it's more about the power than simply being a low note. For instance firing a pistol also kicks you in the chest with the sound wave but that isn't an infrasonic sound, but it has infrasonics in it as it's noise IE a range of different frequencies. The lower the pitch the more energy it takes in order to make the sound travel. To put it another way, high frequency sound are like feathers. It doesn't take much to make them float through the air. Lower notes are like bricks, you can make them fly through the air but it needs a lot more power to do so, and if you catch one in the chest, you're going to feel it. Or to coin another analogy, when it comes to light you have infrared which are like the bass notes of light, and you have ultraviolet, which are like the high frequency sounds of light. While the high frequency can carry a lot of energy, like xrays and UV light, the lower frequencies can carry a lot of power, like getting burned from standing too close to a bon fire and the infrared radiation actually burns you from the light.",
"Sound is, quite simply, a wave of pressure traveling through a medium (typically through air or water). What you're feeling are very large (low-pitch bass) pressure waves flowing through the air and through you. Your chest has a lot of mass, therefore, will absorb a lot of the wave as it hits you compared to your ligaments. The more you absorb, the more you feel. These waves are literally jostling your insides!"
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5verwj | why in a lot of public buildings, there are fire cabinets where there used to be hoses but now they usually just put a fire extinguisher there and the hose is no longer present. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Occupant fire hoses are no longer required by many fire codes, mostly because they just aren't that useful. Since those hoses need to be maintained and replaced regularly when they are phased out of the code most owners will simply replace them with the extinguishers that are actually required by code."
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5vet7o | Why does background noise help humans sleep faster/better | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The brain craves sensory input to process, so when it''s completely quiet your brain starts straining to find information to process - either through your imagination or through the smallest little sounds it can pick up. White noise allows the brain to focus on something without actually generating much stimulation, thereby allowing you to get to sleep."
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5vevpv | How can an object accelerate whilst also remaining at a constant speed with centripetal force | A question similar to this appeared on one of my physics exams and I could not wrap my head around the answer | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Velocity isn't just speed. It is also direction. That is to say, velocity is a vector. Acceleration is a change in velocity. So a change of direction, even while maintaining a constant speed, is still a change of velocity and therefore an acceleration.",
"Acceleration is a change of velocity. Velocity is a vector quantity, meaning it has a magnitude and a direction, so a change in direction is a change in velocity, meaning acceleration. Centripetal force is a force acting towards the centre of a circle, which causes the. body to constantly change direction. Hope this helps!"
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5vexcr | What causes a apple to turn brown after being cut/bit. | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The acid in the apple juice reacts withe the newly available oxygen, causing a vegetable version of rust."
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5vf245 | Donated human blood only has a shelf life of about 21 days, what happens to the gallons of un-used human blood if it never finds a recipient? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Also a blood banker. Separated into it's components, some parts last 5 days, some last 42 days, some can be frozen for a year, some can be frozen for ten years and manufactured into other products. We're always looking at ways to extend shelf life. We're pretty crazy about inventory efficiency too, but expired product (usually only group AB red blood cells, or excess platelets which only last 5 days and are harder to manage) are biomedical waste or research material. Biomedical waste goes for incineration. (Edit: So, Group AB, please donate plasma and platelets if you can. Group O people, stick with the whole blood. That way, we can maximize the usefulness of your gift!) Edit, again: For all those who are asking \"I'm type (letter/Rh), what should I do?\" the answer to the question is always changing. Inventory fluctuates and we can get short on any group at any time, so ask your local blood bank, or answer the phone when they call. :) In my geographic area, we might collect about 300 units of blood in a day. Let's say 7 percent are O negative type, as is the case in North America. That's 21 units. A single major trauma or bleeding event can use 40 units of blood. (That's the extreme, though) Just some perspective.",
"Hi, phlebotomist at a blood bank. Our unused blood can be used for research and study at local hospitals and colleges. The excess beyond that that goes unused is medical waste. Please donate off and on every other year. If just ten more of the people that could donate did this, there would be absolutely no blood shortages.",
"it gets disposed of as medical waste. This is why you should not donate blood right after a natural disaster. There is too much blood being given at 1 time and we cannot use it all before it expires. You should donate blood regularly throughout the year instead.",
"Usually research or waste. Our university hospital gave us the expired blood to use in experiments at the forensics college. One time they only had expired red blood cells so we had to make minotaur blood by mixing in bovine plasma. Good times.",
"It's disposed of. According to one report it gets incinerated. The report states that only about 4% of donated blood (in Scotland in 2015) is destroyed due to expiring, although some more was lost because of mistakes and faults in handling it. If there is a surplus of a certain blood type, blood donation centres simply won't call in those donors as often to reduce the amount of blood that must be disposed of. This has been the case for AB+ women, because AB+ blood can only be transfused into other AB+ persons but AB+ recipients can take any of the common blood types. Plasma from AB women who have ever been pregnant can cause problems for the recipient too. URL_0",
"URL_0 ^ A pretty fascinating podcast episode from Radiolab that explores the world of blood donation, and how it's more like a big business than a charity.",
"URL_0 A pint of blood is worth several hundred dollars and usually doesn't make it to the shelf life. It gets sold to other blood banks across the region it was donated.",
"Also - not sure where you live, but in Canada donated RBCs are kept on SAGM preservative and are fridge stable for 42 days, not 21. Most blood that expires before being used get tossed in the garbage.",
"I read Jack Kevorkian's book for research on a paper about assisted suicide. In it he talks about having procured expired blood & using it to paint with. BTW, in an unrelated note, he wasn't right in the head.",
"Yeah. Ever since I donated the first time and they found out I had O- blood, they've stalked me like a crazy ex-girlfriend to do the red donation. They're lucky I came back after the first time though as they had a new nurse using the machine and she skipped a step or something because when the machine started returning the fluids my arm looked like a TB test gone horribly wrong. I'm still glad I go though.",
"I donate regularly to the American Red Cross. They email me a thank you after processing and testing my donation which tells the hospital and city the blood was used. Platelets are the most perishable but other components have a decent storage life. My blood usually ends up getting used in another city/state. The phlebotomists say that they have little waste since they buy and sell according to the needs of other cities once their own supplies are allocated. The blood could travel all across the US based upon need."
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5vf5wz | Why is the liquid level inside a straw is higher than the liquid level in the rest of the glass? | I'm going to include a photo to clear up confusion | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"This effect is called Capillary Action. It happens because water molecules are, in a sense, \"sticky\". They cling to themselves and other materials. Capillary Action occurs when the water wants to stick to the plastic of the straw more than to itself. It's more noticeable in a straw because the straw has a very high amount of surface area and a very small diameter. Basically, inside the straw there's a lot of surface for the water to cling to but not a lot of space inside so that the weight of the water can pull it back down. Capillary action can be seen on the side of the glass as well but since the glass is very wide there is much more water pulling back down than there is glass surface to pull up."
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5vfcg2 | When picking someone up (literally), why do people who are tensed up feel "heavier" than relaxed people? | I understand the the whole mass vs weight thing but what is the actual cause? Center of mass? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Grappler here. It's all about the other person's center of gravity. When you are under a person's center of gravity, even people who weigh quite a bit can feel light. When a person tenses, a lot of the time their muscles will expand or they will frame away from you. These actions push their center away from your's and they will feel relatively heavier.",
"Dead weight is much harder to move. If you are trying to pick someone up and they keep changing their centre of gravity that can be hard too. From a rescuing perspective, a conscious person is usually a lot easier to pick up and move than an unconscious dead weight.",
"Not sure what position the person is when you're picking them up. If a person is limp when you're moving/picking them up you don't have to move it all at once. If they're stiff as a board you're having to move all the weight at once. So unconscious patients can be easier to roll around than those who've had a stroke and are like a solid piece...if you do it properly. Talking about picking someone off the ground who's limp, you grab a \"part\" and secure it, grab another part, etc like picking up a bag of potatoes. Picking them up and they move as one solid object would be much more difficult as all the weight must be managed at once."
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5vfnr9 | Why are certain unit abbreviations capitalized (e.g. mL, dB) but not others (e.g. cm)? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"de1p9ns"
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"text": [
"The SI convention is that only those unit symbols that abbreviate the name of a person start with a capital letter. In many English-speaking countries, however, the most common shape of a handwritten Arabic digit 1 is just a vertical stroke; that is, it lacks the upstroke added in many other cultures. Therefore, the digit \"1\" may easily be confused with the letter \"l\". Further, on some typewriters, particularly older ones, the unshifted L key had to be used to type the numeral 1. Even in some computer typefaces, the two characters are barely distinguishable. This caused some concern, especially in the medical community. As a result, L (uppercase letter L) was adopted as an alternative symbol for litre in 1979."
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5vfolh | How does a Swiss bank account work? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"de1znd0"
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"text": [
"As others are pointing out they work just like any other bank. What you're *really* asking about is Swiss law governing banking privacy. Swiss banks have very strict disclosure laws making it very unlikely someone will learn about it, even in a criminal investigation. It's a serious offense for a Swiss banker to disclose information on a customer. So, if you're going to (safely) park some money you don't want anyone to find out about, a Swiss bank is about the best way to do it."
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5vftc7 | why antibiotics make you feel worse before they make you feel better. | Apologies if this has already been asked, but I'm feeling rotten with a double ear infection right now, and it's gotten worse since I started taking the antibiotics. Genuinely curious what the cause is :) | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"de1w8yo"
],
"text": [
"A few things can be happening: 1. The antibiotic takes a while to have its effect. So you're feeling worse now, but you would have been MUCH worse without the antibiotic. The infection is still going on a little bit before the antibiotic builds up enough concentration in your blood, to turn back the tides and help your body's immune system eliminate the bacteria causing the infection. 2. Your immune system is in the process of loading all its weapons and going to war, causing all your symptoms. It's not like the antibiotics are going to notify the immune system that they're there and are handling it, so it can chill. Your body is causing the typical fevers and pains in order to fight the infection regardless of antibiotics. 3. Some antibiotics have the effect of killing all bacteria in your body, including those in your intestines that help you with digestion. Making you feel crappy / diarrhea. Most doctors prescribe probiotics to counter this effect (probiotics being pills containing the digestive bacteria needed by your intestines). Basically, antibiotics aren't instant; you have to take them for a couple weeks, typically, and you're basically building up a certain concentration of them in your blood, and the effect of antibiotics is that they weaken the bacteria causing the infection, so your immune system can kill said bacteria a lot more easily."
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5vg1vq | Once you intake the required/suggested amount of daily nutrients, why are you still hungry? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"de1tkrr"
],
"text": [
"It has everything to do with instincts. Why we only *need* a certain amount of food, for 99.9% of humans existence there has been a scarcity of food. Therefor the body evolved to always want food when we can get it. In a world where there is food scarcity, it is much better to over eat when food is available. In the modern era with all the food available we could want, it causes a problem of overeating as every day we can eat more than what the body needs."
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5vg2yx | why hitting your funny bone feels so weird and different than hitting anything else. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"de1uk5u"
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"text": [
"> The ulnar nerve is a nerve that runs near the ulnar bone (upper arm bone). It is the largest unprotected nerve in the human body (meaning unprotected by muscle or bone), so injury is common. This nerve can cause an electric shock-like sensation by striking the...elbow. The ulnar nerve is trapped between the bone and the overlying skin at. URL_0 Hitting the funny bone is a unique sensation because it's the only (and easiest) place you can literally hit a nerve by accident."
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5vg6p1 | Why people's jaws chatter when they are cold? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"de1u123"
],
"text": [
"It's the same as shivering in general. It's your bodies way of trying to produce heat. The muscles use energy to shiver and that energy use produces heat. When it's your jaw muscles shivering your teeth chatter together."
],
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5vg7n8 | How does a pilot manage cruising altitude when local geography/elevation changes? | How would a pilot flying from Miami(elevation 5 feet) to Denver(elevation 5,400 feet) maintain a cruising altitude of 35,000 ft through varying geography of the American lower 48? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"de1u2uk",
"de1v7yg"
],
"text": [
"Cruising altitude is relative to sea level, which does not change. The plane measures it by air pressure, which gets thinner as you go higher, and doesn't really change whether you are flying over an ocean or a mountain.",
"Altitude is primarily measured by air pressure. You start with whatever the barometric pressure is at sea level, and using that as your calibration point, you then read the local barometric pressure. If it's lower then you are higher up. If it's greater then you are below sea level. Barometric pressure changes hour to hour as temperature and winds change so this is carefully tracked both on the ground and in the air. This is one of the reasons that local barometric pressure is advertised on most airport information stations. It helps the pilots set the altimeter. In larger aircraft and especially in military aircraft they will often have a radar which can also directly measure the distance to the ground. This is less useful flying at a cruising altitude though and more useful for landing on instruments, or flying nap of the earth under an enemy radar (if they don't have awacs lol) However there are also ground based radar stations and sometimes aerial radar like the aformentioned AWACS and these keep track of an aircrafts altitude, position, and heading and together with the local instruments in the aircraft it is trivial for a pilot to maintain a safe altitude and heading. For instance my local area is 800 feet above sea level on average, This is taken into account when setting the altimeter and barometric pressure and determining a safe flight altitude. Aircraft seldom fly close to the ground though other than take offs and landings. The FAA tends to frown on it outside of medical and military use. However shit happens, so you err on the side of caution and this is why all tall structures have lights on them, and power lines near any flight path, like a hospital heli pad will have those bright orange balloons strung along them, to help the pilots stay clear."
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5vg8u9 | Why is that computers connect to just one wifi connection and not multiple ones at the same time? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"de1uvhs",
"de1ui9c"
],
"text": [
"Wifi cards only have one tuner and transmitter, think of it like a standard radio. You cant tune to 2 stations at the same time, a transmitter can only transmit on one station at a time as well.",
"It only has one WiFi card. You should be able to connect to two networks if you have two cards. I think."
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5vgbr7 | What makes each cell in a fetus differentiate into different types of cells? | I read about 'cardiomyocytes', and I was wondering if the same kind of cell gets scattered will there be two hearts? What mechanism distributes the DNA of the parents? Thank you. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"de1yf3n"
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"text": [
"You've asked two questions here, I'll answer the second (and easier) one first. Gametes (sperm and eggs) are created by a process called meiosis. Basically a cell divides and, instead of getting its DNA being copied to each daughter cell, the DNA is instead split in two so that each daughter gets half. So for humans, each gamete gets 23 single chromosomes. So when a sperm cell finds an egg, it enters and the egg changes its outer layer to prevent other sperm cells from entering. The sperm cell inside is fully absorbed and its DNA is joined up with the DNA of the egg to form one complete set of chromosomes which is 23 pairs. Every cell that is produced by the egg inherits all 23 pairs of chromosomes **except** for the gametes that the egg itself produces in the case of females. So the mechanism that distributes the DNA of the parents happens right at fertilisation of the egg. Your other question is a bit harder to answer because we still are not completely certain what causes the cells to separate into layers, pre-organs and organs. There is certainly an extremely complicated system of DNA switching that causes certain portions to be turned on and off at certain times. The switching is probably regulated by methylation of the DNA which permanently alters gene function in certain cells. How that occurs is still an active area of research. However, it's likely that methylation causes cells to release chemicals or show proteins on their surface that cause them to clump with other cells of the same general type. Over time, the methylation of DNA makes cells more and more specialised and so they clump into to smaller and more specialised units. Moving back onto firmer ground, the cardiomyocetes are a highly specialised cell which has probably undergone multiple rounds of methylation. The began as the primitive streak in an embryo which steadily grew into the mesoderm. The mesoderm grew and differentiated into the gastric system and the heart, lungs, bones and many other internal organs. So cardiomyocetes don't get scattered because they can't be scattered. Only cells in the mesoderm ever go on to become heart cells. Even if one of the cells did happen to scatter somewhere else, it wouldn't become a heart because it wouldn't get the right signal from the surrounding cells to **tell** it to become a heart. If the pre-heart cells did get scattered, you'd probably end up with a dead embryo which would spontaneously abort. Source: I did developmental genetics at university a long time ago and haven't really kept up with the reading as it's not my area any more. Any errors are purely my own."
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5vgc97 | Why is there a num lock key on the keyboard? In what situation would you not want the number keys to work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"de1va2u"
],
"text": [
"In earlier days of computing, the NUM keys were also the ARROW keys and directional keys. The Num Lock was a necessary key to turn on and off the numerical vs. directional functions of the keyboard and is a feature that is still included to this day. Even my Razer Chroma has directional keys and other functions that work when Num Lock is off. Not all keyboards were made/designed with a seperate set of directional buttons or things like Home page down or page up."
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5vge87 | How can you "see" things with your eyes closed? | How is it possible for you to picture things in your head if you aren't actually seeing them? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"de1w2cj"
],
"text": [
"Your brain doesn't require the eyes to imagine objects or even \"see\" them. Your brain can recall and construct \"mental images\" based on things you have encountered or imagined. You aren't really seeing anything, simply recalling images or imagining images is one of the functions of the brain."
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5vgeel | Why do they only allow women in labor to eat ice chips but not drink water? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"de1vym5",
"de1vw0k",
"de1vzmt"
],
"text": [
"Safety. Allowing someone to drink water puts material in the stomach. Ice chips, allow you to get some fluid, but essentially in very small amounts only. In the case that labor goes awry and anestisia becomes necessary or required, or even surgery, its dangerous if a woman in labor can aspirate the water and inhale it from her stomach. It's a general surgical rule, and with many labors winding up in some form of surgical delivery its just a way to help prevent any potential health risks. Though it has been given the ok for small amounts of water to be ingested by this article [HERE]( URL_0 ) that by the advice of The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists it is ok to have small amouts of liquid water ingested to reduce thirst.",
"Basically because they do not want you to throw up or have a filled stomach in an event where the doctors would have to perform an emergency c-section.",
"People tend to drink water faster than they can eat ice chips so they mandate it to keep as little in your stomach as possible"
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5vgfjx | Why does every radio station seem like they go on commercial break at the same time? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"de1w608",
"de1w97w"
],
"text": [
"They often run breaks at neat round-number times. For example the station will air news and traffic reports on the hour, so they'll put an ad break just before that.",
"most radio stations are broadcast subsidiaries of the same company, clear channel. they have no reason to stagger their commercial breaks. competing radio stations will stagger their breaks differently to compete, so when you start dial surfing you'll find a station not on commercial break, but it's likely that all of the radio stations in your area are all owned by clear channel and they have no reason to do such a thing."
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5vgk9y | Unusually warm weather. | We've had some unusually warm days in the midwest US and in other parts of the country ranging up to 70F and a lot of my friends are saying it's due to global warming. It's supposed to drop back down to 30's this weekend so I feel like it's something temporary but more common of an occurance. I believe in the historical events and data backing global warming/cooling but is this a direct occurance of that or has this happened before? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"de1xhov"
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"text": [
"Global warming describes the overall average temperature rise of the planet, which is very gradual. The effects of global warming (as a whole) aren't felt through heat, but moreso through shifts in environmental patterns, such as oceanic current shifts and the rising of sea levels. Basically, no, heat waves and warmer-than-average temperatures shouldn't be attributed to global warming, which describes the large scale changes of the Earth's climate, not the small scale."
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5vgmjc | In medical terms, when they say someone has, "lost a lot of blood," what does "a lot" mean? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"de1zn2m",
"de2hf8l",
"de1ybfi"
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"text": [
"Try to picture 5 litres of blood. That's about 13 or so regular cans of Pepsi, and also roughly (give or take depending on gender/size/etc) the amount of blood in a person. Your average blood donation takes about 8% of that, so pretty much just one can of Pepsis worth. However... should you find yourself unlucky enough to lose more than 20% (...About 3 cans of Pepsi) they go into what is known as Hypovolemic shock. Its pretty nasty. So yeah, medically speaking, a fair representation of \"a lot\" would be near or greater than 20% of your blood, or roughly 2-3 cans of Pepsi's worth.",
"In medical terms, you enter a shock state after loosing 0.5l of blood. This is where medical personnel should start doing medical personnel things. A loss of about 2l of blood is usually fatal, the drastic drop in blood pressure leading to organ failure and death. While \"a lot\" is not a defined amount, I'd say it means anything from 0.5 to 2l of lost blood. Of course, these numbers are dependent on the patient's body mass. A child has less blood than a standard adult, and a standard adult has less blood than a massively obese person. As u/MirrorShieldMart/ pointed out, if you donate blood you give about 0.5l. This is the threshold of OK/start worrying. Source: I am a medic.",
"Enough comparable to their mass that it would be important to know that this amount of blood loss has been sustained. \"A lot\" is not a precise medical term. It just helps distinguish between someome who has lost a little bit of blood (such as from a shallow cut) compared to someone who has lost more."
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5vgmo6 | How do psychologists perform experiments on anything? How do they perform research on anything? And how do they deal with people with social anxiety? | Sorry that this is actually 3 questions. However, these are all things in which I have little to no knowledge in, so I'd to learn more through your explanations. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"de28ghj"
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"text": [
"Social anxiety is often treated by therapists using Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Usually, this involves helping individuals to identify and change faulty patterns of thinking, though can include exposure therapy whereby an individual is gradually exposed to feared stimuli."
],
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5vgrob | Why does water douse fire when Dihydrogen (H2) is extremely flammable, Oxygen (O) is a necessary fuel for fire, and Hydrogen Peroxide (H2O2) can essentially be used as rocket fuel? | Edit: Thanks for all of the answers guys! | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Fire is a chemical reaction (or rather, lots of them) that occur because oxygen would rather be stuck to the hydrogen and carbon in the wood than to itself (as O*_2_*). However, oxygen would prefer even more (or at least as much) to be stuck to hydrogen in a 1:2 ratio in water. It's already as happy as it's going to be, so you can't get energy out of it by getting it to change into some other fuel. Furthermore, water molecules are quite happy to be stuck loosely together: the hydrogens of one molecule are attracted to the oxygens of other molecules (not enough to make new chemical bonds, but still enough that water sticks together as a cohesive liquid). When you throw water on a fire it doesn't burn because there's nothing that the water would rather be. Then it sucks up heat (temperatures between two things always seek equilibrium) as it raises in temperature, ultimately boiling away. That boiling takes a ton of heat from the burning wood (or other fuel) because water is so fond of sticking together as a liquid. In order for the fuel to continue burning it needs access to oxygen to continue sticking atoms of carbon and hydrogen from the fuel onto oxygen atoms of the air. The dousing water isn't available oxygen, so that process gets interrupted. When the water is finally boiled off the fuel is hopefully cool enough that its desire to stick together is high enough to prevent the reaction from starting up again.",
"Because water is a bound molecule that would have to be separated for the oxygen to be free to be used in combustion. Salt is made of sodium (*highly* reactive with water) and chlorine (highly toxic alone) but it is perfectly safe to eat. It has different chemical properties in a compound than what it is made of elementally.",
"Fire is the result of oxygen combining rapidly with other chemicals & releasing a bunch of energy. Water is what you get **after** you burn hydrogen - that is, it has violently reacted with the hydrogen. It's basically the \"ash\" of the reaction. There's no more energy left to pull out to make more fire. Trying to look at the behavior of any chemical compound as simply being the sum of its parts is fundamentally wrong and not a line of thought worth pursuing. In the simplest case, both charcoal and diamonds are \"just carbon\" but, obviously, they're not the same. Table salt is sodium + chlorine, both of which are hazardous & highly reactive chemicals but, combined together, are perfectly stable. There's far more examples of things becoming completely different than there are of them staying the same."
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5vgwab | Why do tears come out while yawning when we are really tired? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"de23joa"
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"text": [
"When we open our mouths to yawn, the muscles around our eyes put pressure on our tear ducts; when the yawn is particularly wide, the pressure is great enough that our facial muscles literally 'squeeze' tears out of the ducts."
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5vh1fb | Why can saline be injected, but you're not supposed to drink it? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"de22lbe"
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"text": [
"\"Normal\" saline (NS) is 0.9% saline in water. This isn't a lot, but trust me, it tastes very salty :P NS is isotonic with the blood. Meaning, it has the same percentage of salt that the blood does. So when it's injected you're literally adding volume to the blood. However, the ocean (which is what I'm guessing you're referring to, water water everywhere but not a drop to drink) is 3.5% salt, which is nearly 4 times higher than NS. If you drink this, you have water in your intestines which has 4 times as much salt as your blood. So it will actually pull water out of your blood (osmosis), making you even more dehydrated."
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5vh2th | Why does every baby cry when they come out of the womb? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"de23wx1",
"de21pp0"
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"text": [
"my baby did not cry when she arrived. she just looked around for a while then went to sleep. shees a teenager now and she crys like all the time. ill take it.",
"Not every baby does. I delivered one that was eerily quiet, we thought there was something wrong. But he began breathing, moving fine and otherwise looked perfectly healthy. Don't get me wrong, he didn't look pleased that he was no longer in the womb, but he wasn't crying about it. But yeah, the shock to the senses from the dark, warm amniotic sac to the bright, cold delivery room probably frightens the hell out of them.",
"ITT: anecdotes of babies that didn't cry that don't answer this person's good question. OP's correct in assuming it's abnormal if a baby doesn't cry at birth; in fact the [strength of their cry is one of the criteria for how healthy we consider a newborn.]( URL_0 ) The reason: the womb is a liquid environment, and the baby needs to adjust to living in an air-breathing world. Crying is the best way to simultaneously: - open up the lungs as big as possible (they start collapsed) - expel any liquid in their mouth and windpipe so they don't choke - get attention. the baby is vulnerable and needs immediate protection. crying makes a mom instinctively hold the child - get warm. babies lose heat rapidly as birth water evaporates (like getting out of a bath still wet). again, crying makes a mom instinctively hold a baby to her, providing warmth and dryness - get warm part deux: crying itself is exercise for a newborn, which makes their body warmer and prevents them from overcooling",
"You're being ripped from the only place you've known. A place of warmth and comfort. Now it's cold and there's this thing called air and it's frighteningly bizarre and biting. And some dude (or dudette) with gloves on is grabbing your shit all over the place. You were still and always on this lil pillow of amniotic fluid and other womb stuff. Now you're being forced to move around against your will in all sorts of manners. On top of it all you have a lil tiny baby brain that can't recognize what's going on. And on a fundamental level of consciousness, even consciousness that isn't yet conscious of its own consciousness, new and unknown/foreign/indiscernible is flat out terrifying. And with your lil tiny baby brain it's like this - warm/still/comfort/known to movement/cold/unknown/shocking. You can pepper in all the science you want.. but I certainly believe there's some truth to this."
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5vh8s2 | What's the difference between development and production in programming? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"de22lya"
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"text": [
"Production are the servers that are actually running a business and dealing with customers and real data. Right now, you are on the the Reddit \"production\" server. While you're writing software, you need to go through various levels of testing and quality control before you decide that the software is ready to push up onto production servers. Various names for these systems include development, testing, QA, staging, etc. They're separated from the real users, real data & set up in such a way that bugs in the code you're working on won't bring the whole business down. *Ideally*, the only difference between dev and prod is that dev won't have access to all the prod data & services. In practice, this is hard to do. Having differences between dev & prod is something that often results in upgrades breaking live servers because developers weren't able to test for some condition or another."
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5vhefh | Why is it when we feel negative emotions, if we don't express them they get bottled up for later or feel like you carry a weight. | Some more explanation I guess would be why do we not just drop the feelings as humans/animals. I've always understood emotion to be an in-the-present kind of thing and while you can hold onto a feeling for quite a while. If we don't let negative emotions manifest themselves into our lives as actions/feelings or words then they feel like a very literal weight on your body. Part 2: Why does this not seem to happen with positive emotions, opposite depressions sounds like it would be awesome. Unbreakable kind of deal, one end of the spectrum and the other. edit: Don't know if I should use Biology or Chemistry flair, will use other. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"You can drop the feelings/negative emotions, you have to choose to and train yourself to do so. Bottling them up as you say means you aren't dealing with them internally and feel you need to express them. For example, your spouse has a friend and you feel jealous for *reasons*. You could let it build up in you until you scream and yell to get it out, or you could look at a realistic scenario, realize you have nothing to be jealous about, and handle the emotions appropriately. A lot of adulthood, if not a major portion of it, is learning how to handle emotions and outbursts. This isn't suppressing your emotions, this is learning to handle them in a mature fashion. Children have the luxury of just expressing any emotion through temper tantrums and yelling, and part of parenting is teaching them to handle emotional outbursts as they aren't constructive and learn how to handle emotions in positive ways. You can learn (or should learn) to handle negative emotions appropriately, and express positive emotions. You look over at your SO, and hug them, because you just can't help but think they're the most beautiful person in the world and you love them so much. Not a huge problem. Your SO walks in, you accuse them of cheating on you because you saw a text where they said \"hi\" to a coworker. Will cause a huge problem. Emotions are irrational things, and learning to handle them appropriately and situationally is an important gauge of maturity."
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5vhphm | how does the moon's gravity influence the Earth's tides? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Take a bowl that's half full of water, and swirl it slightly while holding it level. After a while of doing this, you'll get a slosh of water that travels around its edge. However the bowl itself doesn't slosh around and change its shape. This is because the water is liquid but the bowl is a solid. The water's molecules are free to move about and respond to the forces that are applied to them, however the bowl's molecules are locked in place next to each other. And the gravity between the earth and the moon is a force - although a pretty weak one - that can do the same. It pulls the air, the water, and the ground from the earth all toward the moon... but the locked-in-place ground can't really respond to that pull while the water can. And the more water that gets pulled, the greater the pulling pressure that's created, which is why you can see the tide in an ocean but not in a puddle. So you get a \"hump\" of water in the ocean, kind of like the slosh in the bowl, that follows the moon because gravity is pulling that water away from the earth. But you get a hump on the other side of the earth too.. because the gravity is pulling the entire earth's solid mass away from the water that's there. That's why we get two tides a day and not one."
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5vhtj3 | What would happen if a lot of people went into a single bank and asked to withdraw all their savings? | How would the bank be able to supply all this money? What countermeasures does the government/bank have? What is this happened all around the world (For example: there was a war) | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"This is known as a 'run on the bank'. It has happened before. Individual branches don't carry a lot of cash so once the branch runs out, it closes until more can be delivered. As long as the bank itself remains solvent everyone will eventually get their cash. Thing is, people generally only do this when there's a whiff that the bank has problems. In that case other banks would probably not be willing to lend that bank enough cash and it would go bankrupt. This has also happened and is why, in the US, we have the FDIC. This is the Federal Deposit Insurance Company. They insure regular bank accounts for up to $100 grand per person.",
"I would like to refer you to a series of youtube video's detailing the entire subject of Money: How it came to be what it is and WHY we 'need' it. Youtube search \"extra history money\"",
"Each bank has a federal requirement to have a very large amount of liquid cash on hand. It would take an unreasonable amount of people to do that, but as seen recently in India, it can happen."
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5vhxsa | what is cramp? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's when your muscle is tired and lacks electrolytes like magnesium or potassium (these are the most common) and it contracts involuntarily, Paralysing that muscle and giving you a quite considerable pain. This happens more frequently when you are \"not in shape\" and you exhaust a specific muscle a lot. Like going to swim after a long time or over-working a muscle at the gym that you never worked before. I'm not female but I've heard that girls get cramps in their abdomen during their period. This can be due to hormonal changes to the uterus or just involuntary contrations of the uterus to expel the blood. I'm a water polo player so I'm really used to cramps. I even got one yesterday at the gym (abdominal). So any doubt question me."
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5vi0h1 | Is it theoretically possible to have exactly the same child twice when you have enough children with a single woman? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's extremely unlikely. Just going by chromosomes, there are ~~23^2 (529)~~ 2^23 (8388608) possible gene combinations. But chromosomes don't get split up so cleanly; during meiosis, chromosomes commonly trade genes with their neighbor (so if you got genes AAaaA from your dad and BBbbB from your mom, you might pass on AAbaA to your kid) greatly increasing the number of combinations. There's also epigenetic factors - environmental factors and the mother's hormones control which genes get expressed and how much; so season, diet, and other factors affect your child (and one of those factors is how many children the mother has had). On the other hand, the chance of twins is about 1 in 30. The record for \"most children born to one couple\" [is 69]( URL_0 ), but they were all multiple births.",
"The most likely way for this to happen is having identical twins. But I assume you mean two identical children from different pregnancies. It's one of those things that's theoretically possible because by chance they could get the exact same combination of genes from each parent as a previous child. But it's so unlikely to happen it may never happen even once in the entire existence of humanity. You might have siblings of different ages who look almost identical though. They won't have the exact same genes though, they just happened to get many of the same ones that affect looks."
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5vi0m3 | Why is the majority of girls handwriting nicer looking than boys? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I am not sure I can tell you why, but it is definitely a relatively new thing. I am doing some work with a historian and she has a giant collection of documents from about 1600 up to the late 1800s all written by men (ship logs, manifests, trade and commerce and tax documents, etc.) and virtually all of it is more legible than anything I see from first year university students. That suggests some substantial change in how we teach penmanship which has been bad for men/boys but either beneficial or no change for girls and women. The theory that we teach handwriting when girls are developing fine motor skills while boys are still doing gross motor skills makes the most sense. Most guys I see can write legible math, numerals (1, 2, 3 etc.) and then math symbols are taught at a different time than cursive writing and reinforced differently, so it may be that time context and reinforcement are big factors and simply moving when joined up writing is taught would fix it. Though many of my students have told me they didn't learn cursive in school or their younger siblings aren't learning it.",
"I read somewhere, that girls tend to achieve fine motor control earlier than boys, so when they hit school age, girls tend to already be quite good with hand eye coordination and the like, while boys still struggle. Since you don't really practice neat writing after a certain age boys will mostly be stuck with a messy Handwriting. (Same is true for children with neurodevelopment disorders that delay the development of motorskills) On the other hand I guess it's also partly because you expect girls to be neater, so they are pushed more towards improving their handwriting. Edit: did a Google search on the motor skills development.. tho most non scientific sites agree with me, most research I found doesn't find a statistically significant difference between fine or gross motor skills in preschoolers. But from what people comment I'd say in personal experience it seems overwhelmingly that girls invest more time in their handwriting in a young age/consciously change their writing style/etc. Not sure, if its biological or societal.. tho I personally would lean towards the later (girls are pushed towards being neat and liking pretty things, while boys might get teased for valuing \"pretty things\". I mean, it might turn them gay, right? ;) )",
"I see all these comments suggesting biology as the driving cause, but I suspect social pressures are much more relevant. Personally, I was always one of the best artists in my relatively small school, particularly at the young age when we were learning to write. Nevertheless, my handwriting is ugly. That said, I can write neatly if context calls for it, and I suspect that's true for a lot of those with bad handwriting. We can write neatly, we just don't care to and haven't practiced doing so enough to do it expediently. I also have some objection to the premise. I graded papers for a class of 500+ for a couple years, and I found that I was not able to reliably guess a students gender based on their handwriting. Roughly 30% of my students were international though, but that just reinforces that any disparity is probably socially driven.",
"I don't know about all of you, but this is my story. I grew up in a European country that celebrated achievement, and you were 'cool' If you were achieving academically. Then I come to Australia (where they celebrate being as much of a useless dick as possible in school), and I kid you not one of the first things I remember at school was another student telling me 'wow look at your gay hand writing, you write like a girl'. And that folks is why this poor immigrants hand writing suffered, because apparently in Australia anyway, the nicer your cursive handwriting is as a dude, the more dick you suck.",
"No expert here, but my understanding is that girls achieve fine motor control -- like eye hand coordination -- earlier than boys do (boys achieve gross motor control -- like throwing and running -- earlier than girls.",
"I just love how everyone is just saying the same thing, even though a hundred people before them have already said it.",
"I haven't been able to find any research stating that they do even in fact have better handwriting. It seems mostly based off of anecdotal evidence and a general acceptance (neither of which are very scientific.) Moreover, taste is subjective. I've found a reference to one study that showed boys tending towards a different style of writing; in which case it's subjective as to which is nicer > In her book \"Handwriting in America: A Cultural History,\" Tamara P. Thornton noted a 1910 handwriting expert's study on identifying sex differences in penmanship, which concluded that confident, original script is interpreted as masculine, whereas neat, conventional and circular are considered feminine. As a result, contemporary studies find that people are pretty good (usually better than 60 percent) at guessing whether a handwriting sample came from a man or a woman. In fact, a 2005 study out of the University of Leicester on sex hormones and handwriting noted that biological sex is the only consistent correlate with handwriting ^^[[link]( URL_0 )] It is impossible to know if this is true, whether it is cultural, only in certain scripts, at what ages, etc.",
"Motor skills seem to be hammered home here. I don't buy it. It seems almost painfully obvious. Does anyone ask why girls clothes are usually nicer than boys? I don't mean brand name, cost comparisons. But, neater, more put together? Does anyone ask why girls pay more attention to their hair? Does anyone ask why girls play patty-cake type hand games that boys don't, in general, play? I'm sure they do, but not often, and not loudly. Because the answer is there, staring the questioner in the face. ***Because we raise them to be that way.*** I would venture forth a wild, speculative guess. Call me crazy if you please, good redditor. If we come into contact with an alien species where the males are the \"pretty\" gender, the \"neat\" gender, the \"feminine\" gender (by our standards), that uses written language, then the ***males*** will have prettier handwriting, regardless of the respective age ranges of motor skill development of the genders.",
"> According to [this research]( URL_1 ) it's biological. > > One possible answer I've found, but there was no source given, was that male brain develops slower than the female brain, and therefore when children learn to write boys' neural connections are less developed, which results in messier handwriting. Quote from [this redditor]( URL_0 )",
"people are mentioning possible biological relationships but i just don't see that being the reason. i think it's much more likely that it is taught- nurture over nature- and girls are expected to have nice, neat handwriting whereas boys are not. so long as it's legible, teachers and parents tend to let it go. girls on the other hand i think have a certain peer and self-pressure to do so early in childhood, to maintain their gender identity as acutely feminine, of which western society has deemed \"neatness\" and \"cuteness\" as positive feminine qualities. i'd be interested to see the difference in handwriting on average with non-cisgendered people to see if there's a difference. something wants me to assume that homosexual men that embrace the stereotypical feminine archetype probably on average have better handwriting than straight men also.",
"Part of it is a difference in fine motor versus gross motor development in boys and girls. However, this doesn't actually speak to root causes. In many cultures, boys are daily engaged in tasks that require and build fine-motor tasks from a young age. And, historically in Western cultures, boys would have been assisting in using and maintaining hand tools and hunting/fishing implements from a young age. I would argue that a significant factor is the latent gender-bias in elementary education. In the US, over 95% of pre-K and kindergarten teachers are women, and some 80% of elementary school teachers are women. Moreover, the school day and the types of activities that students undertake are geared toward girls. Boys are more likely to be disciplined, and are more likely to be coded with diagnosable behavior problems, like ADD. A result is that boys often feel alienated in school from an early age, while girls are more likely to build a relationship with their teachers. This problem is similar in many respects to gender bias in many STEM fields where there are relatively few female authority figures and role models, in which girls feel alienated. For students who perceive a relationship with their teachers, handwriting is ultimately a means for them to interact, even if asynchronously. For students who feel isolated from their teacher, handwriting is primarily significant to the writer; if the student can read what he wrote, then he perceives that he has succeeded.",
"As far as I am aware, girls tend to practice their writing in youth much more then boys do. This leads to prolonged handwriting improvement. Some other commenters suggested biological differences but I don't think the effect would be big enough.",
"I remember early in school when we practiced handwriting and all the guys would always race to see who could get it done faster. Even taking notes from slides etc was a race. We never really focused on writing neatly or legibly, we were concerned with competing and speed. I don't know if this applies for more than one classroom or not",
"Thank you all for the great explanations! I was just wondering this since my mom keep yelling at me to improve my damn writing but i just can't. It's annoying as all hell XD",
"I'm a guy. No matter how fast I can write, if I can push the speed up a bit and still write fairly legibly, I do it. Using this method, my writing will never be beautiful because I'll always rachet the speed up before I get there.",
"I want to say that girls are just expected to be 'neater,' and more 'disciplined,' than boys by parents or teachers, so they probably put more time/effort into practicing cursive/printing. The males I knew who had strict/rich parents also had nicer handwriting that me.",
"I'm talking out my butt a little bit here but in my life experience, women tend to care more about the aesthetics of what they do than men. You know all those couples stories about how the girlfriend gets the boyfriend to change some of his more slovenly habits like throwing laundry in random places or not hanging up coats? You know the old stories about women taking forty-five minutes to get dressed while the guy throws on a shirt and some pants and is ready to get going? I imagine it's pretty much the same with handwriting, one gender cares more about how it looks than the other does.",
"Just anecdotally, I had a male coworker with fine penmanship, while mine is terrible by comparison. I asked him once how he was able to write so nicely, and without looking up he said \"because I care.\" Fair enough.",
"What's your source that men have worse handwriting? I'm a teacher and I wouldn't say that's accurate, but I don't have any real data.",
"I find girls' writing to be extremely stubby and bubbly looking, as if they're trying to make their printing look cute or something.",
"Remember all those notes little girls were passing around in class? They were practicing...",
"Scientific theories aside, the majority of boys really don't give a shit about what their handwriting looks like. It's just a tool to write stuff down. Girls generally have a tendency to be neat and clean comparatively, and it shows not just in their dress and hair etc, but also in their handwriting.",
"The Boys wrists are always tired... You know what I'm saying ?",
"I don't buy this biological bs. Adult men used to have beautiful cursive handwriting back in the day, just like the women did (ex. The Declaration of Independence and Constitution). Handwriting fads have come and gone. The cultural expectation for boys to have need writing has subsided so the school requirement is no longer an expectation either. A shame really.",
"Honestly, I think it comes down to gender stereotypes. The stylization that gets the most complements is also considered a feminine style. I HAVE seen boys who write perfectly legible and stylized like women's handwriting, so it is by no means impossible. Think back to when you first learned to write. Didn't you have a rolemodel you followed after? I certainly tried my damnedest to mimick my mom's style, and would later tweek after either my friends styles or something on tv that I liked. In our very gender-cultured society, what motivation would a boy ever have to stylize his writing? He wants it to look rugged/sloppy, because the alternative would most likely lead to him getting teased for \"writing like a girl\" or even fuel rumors about being gay. It sounds overdramatic, but you also know it happens and probably witnessed it first hand.",
"I think the reason behind this is girls were taught to write legibly in cursive mid 20th century, since many jobs for them consisted in writing stuff by hand for others (in a similar way as the most proficient typists were women, they would simply train harder). As time went by, those features that made a good calligraphy were usually attributed to women, while more ugly scripting was usually attributed to men. This stereotype continues today and is easy to pass along, since remarks as \"your handwriting is girly/boy-like\" have a big effect on young people who feel the need to reinforce their gender identity.",
"For the same reason most boys are better at throwing and catching, practice. Our society encourages women to have fine motor skills, while boys are encourage to have explosive motor skills (there has to be a better term here). As a result, on average, girls get more practice at fine motor skills than boys.",
"I would argue that many girls might simply practice it more. I'm am a guy who writes all the time and my penmanship is legible and smooth and it doesn't look like a girl wrote it. Nice handwriting takes practice",
"Speaking purely from limited anecdotal experience. I have a 4 year old. He's in preschool. The classroom he's in has a bunch of activities the kids can choose from, each one part of a \"center.\" Every night at dinner, my wife and I ask him what centers he went to that day, and his answer is always the same; he went to block area, or science center, or Lego center. His friend are boys, so there's maybe some reinforcement among each other to choose those areas. But for whatever reason, he never chooses art center. When we ask him, he says the girls often choose art center, and he also says that the girls are friends with girls in the same way boys are friends with boys. We've noticed that his ability to stay within the lines when drawing is well behind the girls in the class, and his handwriting isn't as neat, either. Verbally, however, he's always been way ahead of other kids, and he was voted class president because, according to the teacher, he's the best in the class at talking to both the adults and the kids. And perhaps due to his focus on building things, he managed to solve a Perplexus Rookie at the age of 4. So, I don't think it's a developmental issue, but rather a choice of where he's decided to practice his talents. The question is; is he choosing to practice those talents he's naturally good at, or does he feel social pressure from the other boys to practice boy things which makes him more talented at those things.",
"Coming in to reiterate the societal piece here. The implications are far reaching when we subliminally teach young boys that they are supposed to fill certain roles. Girls get the same type of messaging. \"You throw like a girl.\" \"Girls are bad a driving.\" \"Men don't care about style.\" I used to have great handwriting, but I was teased, so I tried to make it worse. Anecdotal? Absolutely. Common? Absolutely.",
"Girl, here. Growing up I was always a little envious of my mother's penmanship. Mine is certainly legible, but when she wants to her lettering can look like a work of art. That said, she and my stepfather both use draftsman's lettering (all caps) when doing things like creating grocery lists and writing letters to teachers. I picked up on it pretty quickly when I started working in the same industry, so these days my draftsman's handwriting is neat as a pin, while my longhand still isn't pretty by any stretch of the imagination. On a personal note, I never quite got why other girls would fill their lettering with loops and swirls, sometimes dotting the \"i\"s with hearts or stars. Seemed like a waste of time to me, especially when it came to taking notes.",
"My wife and I flip the trend. Her handwriting is impossible to read. She has a hard time with it sometimes. Mine is super clean and tidy. Mind you, I hand write dozens of legally binding work permits, everyday, that 100% need to be legible, because I don't want to lose my job for \"authorizing\" someone to do something stupid.",
"[Well this particular article deals with preschool children,]( URL_0 ) but the intro and summation will give the background info that I'm getting at. Basically, girls develop the fine motor skills necessary for things like penmanship earlier, at an age when boys are developing their gross motor skills, such as running and throwing. This developmental difference corresponds to the time in children's lives when their learning writing in school. Boys catch up with girls, but by then they've already learned penmanship, resulting in set patterns, and gender differences in writing style.",
"Social norms. There is no social reward to be gained by a boy who writes neatly. In fact, teachers often subconsciously encourage gender stereotypes that allow for \"boys will be boys\" and \"girls need to be little ladies\" gendered expectations to become ingrained. A girl that with poor penmanship is going to get a lot of negative attention from peers and teachers that boys simply do not experience. Girls with excellent handwriting are often singled out and praised (social capital) in ways that boys are not.",
"Guys dress for utility while women dress for appearance. (Generalization, not absolute) Guys don't really care if their penmanship is pretty, generally. Women want their handwriting to be pretty and put in honest effort to make sure it is. However, I've met doctors of both sexes with terrible handwriting. My handwriting, and even worse my signature, are terrible. My wife's is better, but still not great, but she has admitted that her mother pressured her to practice so her love notes would be more appealing. We both hate handwriting. And I've met many men with beautiful handwriting, and women with atrocious handwriting. On average, girls are pressured by peers and parents more than men in this situation. My father just wanted me to write in all caps and make sure my lowercase L's didn't look like I's.",
"as a boy I always got told I had \"girly\" handwriting, I took it as a compliment because my penmanship was A1",
"It doesn't. That big loopy shit where all the vowels look the same, there's no difference in a b, h, or d, and it all runs together? Impossible to read. I'll take the scribbles and reduced eye strain.",
"A little switch for you; myself (m) can write leaps and bounds better than my sister. I recall my 1st grade teacher telling my mom that she would have to stop me from throwing around pages and pages of paper that I \"messed up\" on. Oddly enough my sister graduated high school like a 3.9gpa or something and 2.6 for me. So I guess that need for perfection was ground out of me by high school and I just became a failure with really good handwriting",
"Occupational therapist here. I work in preschool and early learning. My experience: Girls have somewhat of a developmental advantage. Whether this a function of biology or environment is up for debate. I suspect it is both. A few generalizations: Girls practice more. In general terms, they participate in more \"table top\" activities. This equates to more practice and more exposure. Girls are praised for their creative work. Boys are praised for their physical play. Tempermentally speaking, girls are better able to regulate their bodies and behaviour to be able to practice these skills.",
"I think you're all analyzing things well beyond necessity. I'd say the most realistic reasoning would be that boys are not often as interested in making things aesthetically pleasing. On average, girls and women have a tendency to lean towards having an interest in making things pretty. My handwriting looks terrible because I truly don't care. My wife's is beautiful and she spent months prior to our wedding penning her full name with my last name attached, attempting to make it as beautiful as possible. I'd say it's fundamental boy/girl generalizations at play.",
"This is an assumption based on anecdotes and observations, but I've known a lot of women who kept diaries. I've never known a man who kept a diary. I also recall many girls in school practicing their signature so that it could be pretty. I would imagine that girls want their diaries to look nice and neat, so they take their time writing in them instead of hurriedly writing whatever they need to. This would translate into their general writing habits. Most people don't really write. We have computers. We have recording devices built into our phones equipped with software that can transcribe speech.",
"Here's your answer: Boys develop gross motor skills first, while girls' cognitive thinking develops earlier. Hence, men were better hunters early, and why now they're generally better in sports that benefit from gross motor sports early. Girls' fine motor skills develop earlier, which is why they're generally better at anything that doesn't directly rely on strength and hand eye coordination. Not implying that either is better or worse, but the strength to swing a club, bat, or throw a football, comes later for girls until they begin to hit puberty, which we know is generally earlier than boys. Since women's cognitive thinking develops earlier, they socialize and grasp social behaviors earlier as well. Handwriting comes into play a more important role for them, as well as they are also (as some have already stated) encouraged/pressured to be neater. Boys are also socially discouraged from being neat or tidy. Impressing the opposite sex tends to come from displays of dominance and recklessness, rather than being dainty or delicate. So as boys' fine motor skills catch up with girls', there tends to be a social interference that curbs the improvement. As technology improves and continues to become more of the common avenue of communication, studies show handwriting for those born before the mid 1980's shows drastically more consistency and legibility to those born after. TLDR: Handwriting is probably going to get worse. Boys develop gross motor skills first, girls' fine motor skills and cognitive thinking develops first. Social cues play a part in both. Edit: Citation for those who don't believe me. Citation Provided URL_0 References U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans: Chapter 3: Active Children and Adolescents Infants and Children: Prenatal Through Middle Childhood, 6/e; Laura Berk Social Development: Gender Differences in Preschool Aggression During Free Play and Structured Interactions: An Observational Study"
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5vi7t3 | What do people mean when they say "Senator X voted for the war in Iraq"? | Congress hasn't declared war since 1942. What exactly was Congress voting for when they "voted for" the war in Iraq? Thanks! | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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5vi9uk | What will happen if brain transplants would work? Would the person be still himself even though he's in a new body? | Hey Reddit, I was really wondering last night, what would happen if we could transplant one's brain to another body? Would the person still be himself for the only difference his face and body? In the future could we possibly create robots and then implement our brain to them so we could become immortal? We can put our brain to robots and then it will be the same as being us... What do you think? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"This boggles down to, what are 'you' ? Ever asked yourself that?",
"Yes, you are your brain. Damage your brain in some way and \"you\" will change....or cease to exist.",
"Everything that makes you, you (Personality, memory, thoughts, muscle memory etc. ) is stored in the brain. Therefore, if a a brain transplant were to work- I would assume, you would still be \" you\" but in a different body. I'm not an expert though. This is an educated guess"
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5vii3p | Why countries with deficitary balance of payments try to devalue its currency to export more goods instead trying to strengthen the same currency to make imports cheaper? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Strengthening the currency can be done effectively in the short term, but not the long term. This is because it is done by central banks purchasing the domestic currency with reserves of foreign currency. This increases demand for your currency and therefore increases it's value, but eventually those reserves of foreign currencies run out. Also, the goal of devaluing your own currency isn't to change the prices of imports/exports per se, it's to change the 'real' (adjusted for exchange rate) value of those exports. Appreciating your own currency will make imports cheaper, which will mean that people will demand more of them and fewer of your exports will be demanded by the rest of the world. This is the opposite of what you want if you want to shift the balance of payments into surplus. You want to be making your own exports cheap whilst making imports more expensive. Remember, we're concerned with REAL values of the goods traded. You can't just make up their relative value.",
"Because strengthening a currency isn't an option. It's super easy to weaken it though. Strenghtening on the other hand would require a country to improve their perceived image. Like, ... requiring some actual good work. Unlike printing more money ..."
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5vii5r | If a cop with a warrant opens a chest to find another locked chest inside, does he need another warrant to open it? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Don't take anything you read on reddit as legal advice. Generally, if they have a warrant to search your house, they can pry open your locked chest if they find it in your house. If they find another chest inside, that one is covered as well. Of course, it all depends on the individual situation and the warrant in question.",
"It depends on the scope of the warrant, if they have a warrant for example to find a handgun they believe you have they may look any where specified on the warrant (ie home, vehicle, other structures on your property) in a space that could reasonably contain a handgun, generally speaking. Not a lawyer, simplified example, disclaimer etc etc.",
"A warrant is permission to search a location for an object. Both the object and the location must be defined in the document itself. Sometimes, during the search of the location for the object, they might come across another object of interest. That's permitted. They have permission to search inside the chest for a handgun. If they find another locked case inside the chest, they have permission to search it as long as it might contain the gun. If they find a tiny box that could not possibly contain a gun, they would not have permission to search that. The thing inside a thing problem makes more scenes when your not talking about a Russian nesting chest but rather a home with a locked chest inside it. The warrant covers the home and everything in it that might hide the object in question. A locked chest qualifies. Just because the chest is not explicitly stated in the warrant does not mean they can't search it. It was contained inside something that was explicitly stated in the warrant and it could contain the object in question so they're good to search it."
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5vikdi | What is the "sound" we hear in our heads when we stretch, and what is making it? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You guys hear a sound in your head when stretching? I've apparently been stretching wrong my entire life",
"Stretching causes the blood flow to increase and the rushing sound you hear is the sound of your blood passing through the arteries close to your ears.",
"IIRC it is caused by myographic vibrations created by the muscles. I read an instructable along time ago about a guy who created a sensor for the use in making prosthetics. [link here]( URL_0 ) You can also hear the sound being mentioned if you put your thumb in your ear and clench your fist. It sounds like a low rumble. Hope this helps even though I didnt ELI5 very well.",
"I'd bet it's your [tensor tympani]( URL_0 ), a tiny muscle in your inner ear. Also relevant: r/earrumblersassemble/",
"I didn't know this happened to other people, I thought I was just weird. I have a Eustachian tube issue and I thought it was due to that. Glad this is more common.",
"Same thing that let's some people make a rumbling sound in their ears that only they can hear. Ear Rumblers, assemble!"
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5viln8 | How or why does tooth pain feel more acute than other types of body pain? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In the core of each tooth is the pulp, living tissue with nerves just like anywhere else in the body. Surrounding the pulp is the dentin which is a rigid mineral substance, and on the outside the super-hard enamel. If attacked, irritated, or otherwise provoked, the pulp responds just like any other tissue in the body and we call that response inflammation. One aspect of inflammation is normally swelling as fluids and immune cells move into the affected tissue. The problem is that the dental pulp *can't* swell because it's trapped inside the solid dentin. So instead it sort of squashes, and the nerves in the pulp regard this as pain and severe pain at back. It also means the inflammation tends to do more damage to the pulp, causing even more pain and eventually killing it."
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5vitg8 | Why does stirring a hot drink cool it down if you are adding energy? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"You're losing far more heat to the outside atmosphere than the tiny amount you could add from the stirring."
],
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5viupn | How is world debt handled? | I remember reading somewhere that there were trillions of dollars loaned out to countries by the world bank. How do countries pay back so much money? Will all this debt ever disappear and how does this affect the economy? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Countries have vast resources at their hands. There should be no problems for a nation to increase their taxes a bit, reduce their expenses on infrastructure or army or in the worst case sell off state owned land or goods. The argue when a country have too much loans is that this have to be done in the best way for the people as possible. However there is quite easy to get trillions of dollars of valuables from a country and leave it in ruins and this have been done before. Contrary to popular ideas the national debt is usually a good thing if you can manage it. For example if a country loans a lot of money to invest in a good school system they will end up with a lot of debt but as soon as the kids grow up with a high education they can easily afford the extra taxes and then some extra. This is what the US did in the 60s and 70s to build their great economy. As to when the debt will disappear it is usually not in the best interest of the countries or the lenders to get rid of them as it is beneficial to both parties. Loans is an effective way to make sure money is distributed to where it does most good. If a country gets more money then it can effectively spend then it will pay off its debt and then start lending the money to countries that do need more money. The same with private citizens. If you think Bill Gates have his money in a bank vault like Scrooge McDuck then you are mistaken. As for the initial loans that gets taken up there is no hurries to pay them back as money can be more effectively spent elsewhere. When the loans come due it is often more effective to get new loans to pay for the old ones as long as you can manage them and pay down so much that the interest does not become crippling. It took England over 400 years to pay for the navy that Henry VII built for instance."
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5viwc3 | Why is it assumed that people have a Right to Privacy but is not considered one of the fundamental right? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Privacy protects go back a long way, but they aren't always expressed as clearly. The Romans had the concept of \"[actio iniuriarum]( URL_0 )\" which is about protecting a person from physical harm, but also protecting their dignity and reputation. The Romans also had very strong protections for the integrity of the home, which also dealt with privacy. (Although they still had a concept of a search warrant under the \"quaestio lance licioque\".) Finally the Romans had laws against reading a letter to someone else, or reading a private letter publicly (this was under \"actio furtl\" which came up in a famous case when Mark Antony published letters written by Cicero). Slaves could also be killed for repeating things they overheard. Part of the problem is that technology has changed. 100 years ago if we wanted to talk we'd have to be in the same place, but we could walk into the middle of a field and be sure that no one could overhear us. Now it's now possible to communicate long distances, but spying on someone has also gotten much easier. Today there are some laws that address privacy directly, such as the EU Convention on Human Rights, but many still classify it under protection from unreasonable search and seizure -- it's the same idea, but under a different name."
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5viwik | Why can almost everyone make certain body parts move (like arms, legs and fingers), while other movements can be very difficult or impossible for some, but easy for others (such as your ears, a single toe, your tongue)? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"It is all practice man. Some people may naturally develop the small ability to wiggle their ears or something like that but if you sit down and train your mussels to do a particular thing, they will learn to do it. For example when I was in elementary school I *really* wanted to be able to do the Spock thing (where he spreads his four fingers into a \"V\") but I just couldn't. So I spent a few months moving my fingers into that position using my other hand. One day I woke up and was able to do it. I followed the same pattern to learn how to wiggle my ears, nose, make my tongue touch my nose, and a couple of other things. Practice makes perfect!",
"From a genetic standpoint, being able to move arms, legs, and fingers seems a bit more important to survival than being able to wiggle your ears.",
"It's all about habit. That's why you take around 1 year just to learn how to stand on your foot. Habit is also called Muscle memory. That explains why Guitarists can have the required accuracy when placing the different fingers and the necessary strength to sometimes muffle the sound. Some people just use some specific muscles more than others and are more used to and get more control due to practice"
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5vj1rm | Is there some international governing body or some kind of system that keeps international civil rights in check and impose penalties (Re: Mexican teen killed by US border patrol agent) | Read about the US boarder patrol agent who shot a bullet on in the US and killed a Mexican teenager in Mexico. The family of the Mexican teen isn't able to bring the officer to justice. This also applies to victims of US drone strikes. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"de2ew32"
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"text": [
"No, there is no such body. \"Justice\" between nations is negotiated between countries and is enforced either by the consent of the involved parties or through warfare. Economic tactics and diplomacy can provide incentive but there is no international police who can go arrest people in other countries."
],
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5vj2yd | Why do animals like to be pet by humans? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Many mammals, especially the kind we interact with, are social creatures - the evolved to work in small family units to share in responsibilities like hunting, care for young, protection, and health. Part of health is grooming; keeping each other clean and free of disease. Petting is a form of grooming. Animals evolved to seek out grooming, as it is a social behavior beneficial to the survival of these animals.",
"In addition to what other commenters have said, I'll share this story. Me: My dad's pig is kind of like a dog. She likes to be scratched. Friend: Well, yeah. *I* like to be scratched! It feels good! Have you ever had someone scratch your back? It's great!",
"I'd attribute it to the calming effect. Even most humans get it when being patted, or when being snuggled by an animal. Cuddles and touches that are welcome release oxytocin (aka 'cuddle hormone'), which leads to the *fuzzy feels*.",
"the flipside of it is that humans breed pets that like to be petted. the ones that don't like to be petted and don't interact, aren't sought after . remember that pets are selectively bred by humans for thousands of years.",
"Cats like their smell on you. There are other reasons mentioned, but cats are pretty selfish."
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5vj4ql | The racehorses which always finish last - why do they still bother to compete if they know they'll always be the slowest? | The payout for them is also very high - if only because it's impossible for them to win. What's the theory behind entering the slowest horses? What's in it for the jockey's team? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I wouldn't say it's impossible. The \"long shot\" horses usually aren't really *that* off pace. You're unlikely to see a horse that's a legit 500:1 or 1000:1 odds, usually they're more like 30:1. These are still specially bred race horses, not some random mule. So why are they there? It may be an inexperienced horse or jockey getting some real race practice in. It may be a breeder advertising that the horse can keep pace even if it's unlikely to win. It may just be a horse with little race history so bettors default to the \"dark horse\" odds. The 30:1 horses still do win occasionally. The favorites get sick or run way off pace, horses stumble or get spooked, jockeys make mistakes. It's a highly random sport.",
"Even just entering some of these races will help out. Being in the Kentucky derby (even finishing last) is worth quite a bit to the horse owner. A large portion of their income is not from race winnings but from breeding rights. By having an official entry in a big race you've proved that your horse is within the top ten or so of the country, which is no small feat. Granted winning first place is worth more. Plus having your jockey and horse still 'practice' in these big races always helps and just keeping your name out there is good too. Also also who doesn't love a good race day in the owners' box?",
"Breeding rights man. The fastest horse in the world may be a boy, but to make a faster one it will need to bang the fastest lady horse. What better way to advertise the breeding of your horse than in a publicly recorded, heavily monitored official race. To post that last place time, the horse had to pass a physical, drug test, and have a verifiable pedigree. It establishes a history of the horse not just on a good day, but race day, showing it can put up that time on command. Also, Sanchez has been working really hard with this horse and says it has a real chance today. The bookies are giving it 500:1 odds and we're totally gonna get rich when it breaks a personal record.",
"First of all it's rare that a horse \"always loses.\" Most race horses, have a record of occasionally winning, or at least doing well enough to take home some prize money. Even horses that are sold off the track as riding horses specifically for being too slow usually have some starts and winnings. It's generally thought that any horse has some chance of winning. The losingest horse in racing history, Zippy Chippy, was banned, not for losing, but because he wouldn't break from the gate. When the other horses would run, he would just stand there. The Jockey Club eventually felt it was misrepresentation to allow people to bet on him. He became an outrider pony for the track, and later retired to be a spokeshorse for a thoroughbred retirement group. Because he was a bit of a fan favorite for his indomitable will not to run, he did some exhibitions after his ban. In a famous instance of slowness, Zippy lost a footrace with a minor league baseball player. Even with 100 starts and no wins, Zippy earned $30,000 in his racing career. 8 2nd place finishes, and 12 3rds.",
"For some jump races there is always the chance that most of the other horses fail to complete the course. See Foinavon in the Aintree Grand National. That race has had two 100/1 winners in the past 50 years.",
"> What's the theory behind entering the slowest horses? First, there are different distances and track types. If your horse came in last going sprint distances on dirt, you try mile races on dirt. Still comes in last, you go classic distances on dirt. Still comes in last, you go long distances on dirt. If all those fail, you try the same distances on grass/turf. There are different levels in horse racing, too. If the horse is always coming in last, they'll enter it in progressively lower and lower quality races. If they still come in last, they'll get sold to someone and hope their training is more suited to the style/temperament of the horse, then they try all of the above. So a horse can lose an awful lot of races and it's still valuable to see if they can win some other type of race. Jockeys make a fee based on the purse money that is won, so they're obviously going to try to get on winning horses. But only the most elite jockeys have that much of a choice in which horses they ride. Even if they're pretty sure the horse will lose, they'll try their best hoping to get paid. Top level jockeys will also ride \"bad horses\" because they have relationships with certain owners or trainers and they want to keep that relationship a happy one."
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5vjday | When I grab the metal door knob leading to my office in the morning for work, it tends to give me a little zap of static electricity. What is causing it to make an audible pop when I make contact with it? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"de2i3ie"
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"the same reason that lightning causes thunder. that zap of electricity causes air to heat up and expand. then when electricity is gone, the air cools and collapses, making a shockwave of sound."
],
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4
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5vjemt | How does GPS work in space? | The SpaceX delivery to the ISS was aborted today due to GPS errors in space. How does GPS work in space when GPS satellites and the Dragon delivery craft are both moving? I thought GPS location was calculated based on a stationary object on earth calculating its position relative to moving GPS satellites in space. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"de2i5ce"
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"text": [
"A moving object can still calculate its position relative to GPS satellites. The speed of the vehicle is negligible compared to the speed of the signals. Many receivers also keep track of a number of measurements over time, specifically to monitor their movement, and determine if they get a bad measurement. After all, many cars make use of GPS today, if one had to be stationary that would stink."
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5vjg0g | How does alcohol dehydrate you? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"You make a hormone called vasopressin. One of the functions of it is to maintain water in your body. Alcohol inhibits the production of it. As a result, your kidneys don't reabsorb as much water as they would otherwise, and instead you whizz it out."
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5vjgqm | when we're told governments are "printing more money" to boost spending, what is literally happening? And who is this newly printed money distributed to? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"It depends on the country. In a developed, properly managed country, like the US, what would actually happen is that the United States Federal Reserve, the big bank that loans out money to other banks, would lower their interest rate. This encourages regular banks to borrow money from them because they won't have to pay as much back to the Fed. In turn, banks will have more money to lend out, as mortgages, as loans to companies and individuals to build new businesses or develop new products, to invest in new things. To rein in spending, the Fed would increase its interest rate, which would have the opposite effect. The Chair of the Federal Reserve, who can change these interest rates, has perhaps the greatest influence on the US economy of anyone and is consequently one of the most powerful people in the world."
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5vjil6 | Why can we not spot our own mistakes when proof reading our own work? | When proof reading other people's work, I can easily spot mistakes. However, when re-reading my own work, I fail to notice if I have repeated words- or even left some out, unless someone else tells me otherwise. When I proof read, everything makes sense, and even if words are missing, I read it as if they are there. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"de2jb9z"
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"text": [
"Because you are still reading it as you wrote it in your mind, not as how it is on the paper. That's why common advice is to walk away from the writing for a bit when you're done, and re-read it with a fresh mind."
],
"score": [
10
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5vjjok | How does my cat know to wake me up exactly 25 minutes before my alarm goes off, regardless of what it is set for? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"de2k8md"
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"text": [
"It could be that after [x] amount of time asleep, your body is preparing to wake up (going into lighter sleep stages) and your cat hears the change in breathing. Whether my husband works days or nights our cat starts nuzzling him, whether or not an alarm is set."
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11
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5vjm8c | how do coin dispensing machines know the difference between $1, $5, $10 etc. dollar bills? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"de2qbv3",
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"text": [
"Paper money printed in the United States contains, in addition to a plethora of visible security features, some very elaborate methods to assist in automated denomination recognition. The primary method vending machines use to recognize the denomination of paper money is through a magnetic scan; paper currency is printed with magnetic ink, similar to the ink on the MICR line of a check, that makes it easily identifiable to machines with magnetic scanners. In addition, each denomination is marked with different fluorescent properties. Many vending machines and other machines that read paper currency use an ultraviolet light to scan the bill, read the fluorescent response and issue the appropriate credit. Read more: How Do Vending Machines Read Money? | URL_1 URL_0",
"There are bands of ink missing on the back of bills (if you look at them in IR light). The vending machines and coin dispensing machines work pretty much the same. As you insert a bill, the machine measures the brightness of reflected IR light, and can easily know which bill is being used based on how dark/light the bill gets. TL;DR The machines use IR light to detect the brightness of the bills; bills have different brightness"
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5vjmno | How do nature documentaries get such good sound? Do they use foley artists? | There's always a whole lot of behind-the-scenes fascination behind how nature documentaries get the "perfect shot", but none ever really address how they isolate the sound of whatever they're filming. Given that they typically use zoom lenses from long distances, in environments with lots of ambient noise, it seems like they must use some kind of foley artist. Does anyone know for sure? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"One legendary sound recorder for nature docs is Chris Watson. He used to be in Throbbing Gristle. Now he does the sound for David Attenborough. I once did a workshop in field recording with him. Getting sound to match nature documentaries is really an art all of it's own. They use a lot of tricks with different mics and setups but he tried not to fake sounds, they try and get them all in situ. For example, he told us about attaching contact mics, a type of microphone that picks up sound coursing through a solid object, to carcasses of animals and recording the sounds of vultures scraping off the flesh. Stuff like that..",
"I can't remember where I saw it but I remember reading that the sounds are usually recorded using captive animals and played on top of the footage. Can't be sure how accurate that is though.",
"Small time indie film maker here. I would imagine its very similar to setting up a film shoot in a small diner (or anywhere really). You scope out the spot. So for a lion documentary, you find a den where you know the lions will return. While they are gone, place microphones everywhere you can. Film crew sets up and lie in wait with telephoto lenses, and the microphones are recording all the time. Eventually, you strike gold when the animals return. Documentary takers don't just roam the wild hoping to find the animal they are looking for. They scope out the area, find the habitat, and setup.",
"Many of these are staged. So the spot where the animal lay is rigged with cameras/nearby microphobnes",
"They also can record using shotgun microphones that are kind of \"super directionnal\" microphones. Definition from Sennheiser: > \"Sometimes you cannot get closer to a sound than still pretty far away. A highly directional microphone captures it nonetheless. Perfectly clear, and in full detail. It is like building a sonic tunnel the sound is being pulled through toward the mic, protecting it from all the other unwanted noises so it doesn’t get lost in the din. As most audio professionals know Sennheiser shotgun microphones have always been extremely good at that.\""
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5vjnms | why don't we use a slingshot, like an aircraft carriers, to launch rockets and shuttles to space. Wouldn't that reduce the onboard fuel needs? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Keep in mind that the catapult system on an aircraft carrier launches aircraft horizontally, not vertically. I'll get in to why that's important in a second. The current (steam) system on a carrier is **HUGE**. The majority of it is housed below deck and is not visible from the outside, but believe me it's large. That entire system, as well as the aircraft's own thrust, is used for takeoff. Both the aircraft thrust and the catapult combined get a 66,000 Lb F/A-18F from 0 to 145 knots in a few hundred feet. While that seems like a lot, that only equates to about 2.5Gs. Remember the thing I said earlier about how the catapult launches aircraft horizontally? Well when you turn the catapult vertical, now you're working against gravity. So your effective acceleration for a 66,000 Lb object (that is producing up to 44,000 lb of thrust itself) has now reduced to 1.5Gs. Add that average rockets weight much, much, much more than an F/A-18F super hornet, and now you have to scale the catapult to a **MUCH** larger size. The bottom line, it's unfeasible. Rocket engines produce such a good specific thrust as it is, manufacturing and maintaining the size of catapult that would be needed is more work than it's worth. P.s. I apologize for using round numbers as opposed to specifics. I'm on mobile and it's difficult to cite references and specific numbers. Source: have ridden catapult before. Can confirm, is fun."
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5vjopq | Why is alternating more current efficient at long distance power transmission than DC? | I read other ELI5s regarding this and I keep hearing people reference P=IV as to why higher voltages and lower current for the same power is more efficient. What I don't understand is (conceptually) why V=IR doesn't seem add to diminishing losses simply because the current keeps reversing itself. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks! | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It actually isn't. Long distance transmission of electricity is more efficient for D.C. Than AC. The problem was that the voltage was more important than the type of current and in the old days there was not an efficient and cost effective way to change the voltage for DC whereas AC you could use transformers easily. Now that the technology exists to cost effectively change DC voltage for transmission there are efforts underway to switch over some major lines. I've also been told that you can't tap off DC at any point like you can AC hence the reason for it being used for major lines.",
"There is no difference in how efficient AC is to transmit vs DC. However, there *is* a difference in how efficient it is to transmit different voltages. Higher voltages are much more efficient, because they transmit the same amount of power with less current. And less current means more efficient. And it's very easy to change the voltage of AC power (both up and down) using a transformer, whereas changing the voltage of DC power is much harder. So the reason we transmit power as AC is because we can easily change it to high voltages for the transfer, and then back to lower voltages before it's used. And as for the \"current keeps reversing itself\" - that's not relevant at all."
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5vjpbl | Why aren't we decommissioning all or most of our nuclear weapons. Are we really expecting Russia might make a first strike? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> Are we really expecting Russia might make a first strike? Well, if you dismantle your nuclear weapons, you dismantle MAD. Now Russia doesn't even have to make a first strike. They can simply say \"We have all the nukes, you don't, do what we say or else.\" Equivalent strength is seen as a stabilizing factor, while unequal strength is seen as destabilizing.",
"The nukes aren't there as a counter strike because whether you set off your nukes or not, you're gonna get screwed anyways. The idea of nukes is that the other country that has nukes know that you have them as well. If they decided to nuke you, they would expect to be nuked therefore making them think twice about using it.",
"I really appreciate your optimistic view of the world! Why don't we though? Mutually assured destruction is the only reason we're not already dead. Let's say we both have $100. We both also have a gun pointed at the others face, because we want the $100 the other has. I can't shoot you, because if I do you'll shoot me and then neither of us gets $100. You say \"OK, we've been here a long time like this, I think we've reached a point where this is no longer needed.\" you take apart the gun and throw it aside. I say \"Oh, alright, well then give me your $100 dollars and I'll stop pointing this gun at you\" if you don't I shoot you in the leg \"give me your $100\" if you continue to not comply I'll continue shooting at you until you give in or I take the $100 off your corpse.",
"no no no, of course not. russia is smarter than that and would never launch a missile at us causing an all out war between all of the worlds most powerful nations. *but they might*",
"Retaining our system of protections is as much of a deterrent as it is an offensive move. Should we ever get rid of them other countries might be more willing to attack; knowing we don't have those protections.",
"Russia is not the only nuclear power. Nuclear arsenals are all about deterrence, MAD, and self determination. The three scary nuclear scenarios are India/Pakistan, Israel, and the Iran/terrorist/dirty bomb. USA (and the other \"traditional\" nuclear powers) can slightly control the first two, but the third is a complete wild card. Start I/II, SALT, etc. etc. are well meaning efforts to minimize nuclear arsenals, but really, when you can kill each other 40 times over, it's really just a PR maneuver when you reduce it to 20 or 15 times."
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5vjqun | When speaking, why do we automatically revert to "Uhh" and "Umm" when we stop midsentence trying to think of what to say next? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Different languages use different filler words, but they all utilize them to inform the listener that you're not finished speaking yet even though you're momentarily processing words. Public speakers try not to use them since the audience isn't expected to respond, but in a conversation the listener might mistakenly assume a pause means you're done.",
"It's a filler that gives indication to your speaking partner that you have not finished talking, but you need time to think about what to say next. It's a common feature in many languages, but the exact sounds are different in different languages."
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5vjwg4 | Is the drought in California ongoing, or has it ended? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Here's a good article in the LAT for you. \"Despite epic rain and snow, California keeps emergency drought restrictions in place.\" URL_0 Now it does sound dumb - how can California be in a drought if we just got all this rain - but keep in mind that it doesn't rain here in the summer. Like at all. That means you pretty much have to get a year's worth of rainfall (which is only 15 inches on average) between November and March. So I think that they want to wait and see what March brings before declaring the drought over because they probably won't see another raindrop after that for six months."
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5vk1p1 | Why does thousands of people shouting at 100 decibels sound a lot louder than one person shouting at 100 decibels? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Please elaborate on your question. When you say \"thousands of people shouting at 100db\", are you referring to each person shouting at 100db or the total being 100db? If each person shouts at 100db, then the total would not be 100db (which is why it would be louder than 1 person shouting at 100db) 1000 sources at 100db would result in 130db, assuming everyone makes the same sound"
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5vk43w | The differences between First, Second, Third, and Fourth Waves of Feminism | What makes these four incarnations of feminism different? How do each wave view what feminism is, and how do they differ in their approaches towards achieving equality and justice? I tried Wikipedia but the articles have too many words for my reptilian male mind to digest. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The way I keep it straight in my head: First wave is a woman's right to be a person. Owning property, getting divorced, voting, basically having an identity beyond being an extension of some man. Second wave is a woman's right to do whatever a man can. Have any job, hold positions of leadership, etc. Reproductive freedom and autonomy was a big part of it. Third wave is a women's right to be a woman. It started a deeper exploration of gender and acknowledged it was ok accept traditional female roles, especially with regard to parenthood, so long as it was a clear choice. It was also a broadening of the movement beyond its white middle class base. Fourth wave is the next wave, and not everyone agrees exactly what it is yet. The one unifying thread between the various definitions is the use of technology and social media to broaden the movement. It also tries to be more inclusive of transgender issues, which some factions of feminism have not fully embraced.",
"At the most basic level. First wave focused on legal issues, primarily on gaining women's suffrage and property rights. Basically, equal rights under the law. This kind of feminism happened in the late 1800's and early 1900's. Second wave was 1960's feminism and was mostly about sexuality, family, the workplace, reproductive rights, de facto inequalities, and official legal inequalities.[4] Second-wave feminism also drew attention to domestic violence and marital rape issues, establishment of rape crisis and battered women's shelters, and changes in custody and divorce law. If first wave was all about equal rights under the law, second wave was more about equal application of the laws and society's standards. Third wave started in the 90s and is a bit more complex. It still focused on the same issues as second wave, but it's approach differed. Wheres second wave would argue that women are just as good as men in all areas, third wave acknowledges that men and women might have different strengths but that both have the same value. For example. A second wave feminist might get upset at a women who chooses to satay home and raise children. She might accuse that women of being a traitor to her gender by agreeing to abide by the oppressive terms of the patriarchy. A third wave feminist would argue that each women should be able to choose her own path. First and second were about equal rights under the laws and societal ideas, third wave is about women choosing their path for themselves. If that path is being a stay at home wife and mother that's OK, it's the choice that's important. Fourth wave is VERY new and therefore not super well defined yet. Most people think it started in the mid 2000's and revolves around the internet and social media. It tends to focus on issues of consent, body acceptance, gender acceptance and sex work acceptance. For example, a second or third wave feminist would argue that being a prostitute is inherently oppressive wheres a fourth wave would say that a women can own her sexuality and do what she wants with it."
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5vkftr | How many earth-like planets can aliens see in our solar system using our technology? | For example if Aliens lived on a planet around Alpha Centauri, how much would they be able to tell about our planets? & nbsp; Would they think the probability of life on earth and mars (and venus) are pretty much the same? Or would they say that mars is "probably" just a rock and earth has water and atmosphere? How many of our planets could they detect? Pluto < 3 ? Could they detect any of our signals (like radio) and know that there must be life? & nbsp; Edit: Assuming human-like aliens, no livin gas monsters Edit: Thank you guys! | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"On one hand, they would probably have trouble seeing Earth, since we have several gas giants on the outer edge of our solar system; most Human technologies for detecting planets has to do with gravity's effects, and having large gas giants can obscure the smaller gravity wells of the inner planets. But, if we were a human-like alien, on an Earth-like planet, with Earth-like technologies looking at Earth's solar system from light-years away, and weren't put off by Jupiter and Saturn, they would see three earth-like planets in the habitable zone: Mars, Earth, and Venus. There's a slight possibility that their math may be inconclusive and detect a 4th planet just inside Jupiter's orbit or mis-measure Mars' size and orbit, due to the asteroid belt, but the asteroid belt doesn't have much mass (less than the moon) so it might not be an issue."
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5vkhgs | How do you tie your shoes? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"More information about tying shoelaces than you could ever want. URL_0 Take a look at the Standard and Two Loop knots.",
"At this point it will all boil down to an ah-ha moment. Unless you have some kind of dexterity impairment, something isn't clicking in your head about what has to be done to make a bow. Not a big deal, you just need to watch how it's done, either video or live and practice it yourself. You will mess up, a lot. But with some dedication you'll get a moment where you'll go \"oohhhh, that's it\". Here's the thing with the bow, it's just a double knot. the first part is crossing one lace under the other and tightening it, the basic knot. Well the bow is the same thing, but ends are looped so you can pull them out. Watch some videos on it and practice it but with the mindset of figuring out what's going on. Then you can move on to all sorts of other knots.",
"Animated Knots by Grog has a page on the [Shoelace Bow]( URL_0 ). It's a series of still images that you can move through as fast or slow as you like. One problem, though, is that there are several different methods of tying a shoelace bow that seem to have no relationship to each other. So make sure you stick with one method while you're learning. Or make a clean cutover once you've given up on a particular method."
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5vkmxx | Why can't we just point SETI resources at the new planets NASA discovered to see if they have intelligent life? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They're too far away for that. All we can do is try figure out whether their atmospheres are similar to Earth's and so infer possible intelligence."
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5vko83 | How do some medicines cause weight gain if you eat and exercise the same while taking them? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It affects your sense of hunger and satiety, making you more likely to eat more. Yes, if you hold everything constant, you're not going to gain weight (well, you still might - some medications make you retain water).",
"If a medication changes the way your hormones work, then this can decrease what is known as your basal metabolic rate. This is basically how hard all of your cells are working when you're just resting. If a medication decreases your basal metabolic rate, then you will use a lot less of the energy that you eat. But you will likely also feel tired, lethargic and not be able to think as fast as a result. It is as simple as calories in vs calories out, but the calories out is *much* more dependent on your basal metabolic rate than it is on how much exercise you do. So medications or diseases that disrupt this can have profound effects on weight gain/loss. There are other factors such as some medications which cause more glucose to be turned into fat and less to be used for energy (such as some diabetes medications, which is a problem since you don't want diabetes patients to get even fatter), and also medications that increase or decrease your appetite or desire/ability to do exercise. Also, some medications don't change the total amount of fat, but cause fat to be redistributed from your limbs to your torso ('central adiposity')."
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5vkp0q | What exactly is, and the significance of, NASA's announcement today? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"NASA announced today the discovery of a small star system with \"Goldilocks zone\" planets orbiting the star. By this, I mean that all 7 planets are approximately the right distance away from the star to have liquid water or water ice and habitable temperatures on the surface. Additionally, the small size of the star system means that all 7 planets are very close together. In theory, this would be an ideal location to send a colony ship, and the interstellar colonists would have their pick of close worlds to explore. In the next year or so, this doesn't mean much to us. In roughly a year, we'll launch the James Webb space telescope, which will be powerful enough to get us much more data on the planets, including their atmospheric make-up. Long term, we should be able to at least get a probe to one of the world's by 2150 or so. They're only about 40 light-years away, which is practically local in the scale of interstellar travel.",
"The main reason is this: Astronomers are _really_ interested in learning about other planets and especially earthlike planets. Specifically, is Earth a one-off oddball or are there lots of earths out there? And is _life_ rare or common? At the present time, we can't find out much about planets in other solar systems. We can get estimates of how big they are and how far they are from their star, but that doesn't tell us much at all. Earth, Venus, Mars...from that kind of data you couldn't tell that one had life and which one it was. You can't even tell the difference between an airless rock like Mercury and a planet like Venus with a super thick atmosphere. You can only get the vaguest of ideas what other planets are like. But...if you can get an idea of the atmosphere of a planet, suddenly you can learn a whole lot more! Can this planet hold on to air or has it lost it all. Does it have a CO2 dominated atmosphere, or is there oxygen. Is there methane? Etc. Planets bearing life should pop right out because they have mixes of gasses that shouldn't coexist, like oxygen and methane. But you can also get some idea about the geology and composition of a planet. How do we do this? If a planet passes in front of a star, the star's light shines through the atmosphere. The atmosphere leaves an imprint on the light (you can think of it as the color of the atmosphere changing the color of the starlight) and this spectrum change can be measured. That will tell us what the atmosphere is made of. And that's the reason these planets are exciting. They are some of the closest planets known that are potentially earthlike _and_ pass in front of their star. These are the best chance yet we have to measure the atmosphere of planets...and not only that, but earthlike planets...and not only that, but there's a whole passel (7, with 3 in the habitable zone) of worlds to look at which means the odds of at least one of them showing something weird and interesting are higher. There's very good odds that we'll get a look at their atmospheric data within a couple of years, and if life is very common we might even see signs of it there! If you ask me that's pretty cool. **TL; DR:** Unless a Mars rover stumbles over a fossil in the next few months, this offers one of the best chances so far of spotting signs of life in the universe in the very near future. It's not certain at all that life will be there, but it's one of our first chances to really look.",
"This is only just the newest of NASA's great discoveries. They have an amazing track record of coming up with brilliant discoveries every February. I'm sure it's the result of having cleared their heads over the Christmas break, and nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that the federal budget usually gets submitted in the start of March.",
"In the near term? Not much. We have no way to reach those planets and none of our current telescopes have the resolution to get a good picture of them. In the longer term it's more evidence that virtually every star seems to have a planetary system and they're close enough that near-future telescopes can attempt to measure their atmospheric composition."
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5vktb2 | Where did the folder name "DCIM" come from for the names of the folders made by digital cameras? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"DCIM stands for (D)igital (C)amera (Im)ages. It's the name for the file folder digital cameras should store images, specified by the Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association, which created the book of standards for digital camera file systems (called the Design rule for Camera File system). The DCIM folder is supposed to be the top folder. Each camera is supposed to have subfolders that start with three numbers and then up to five letters for the name of the manufacturer. So an iPhone might save pictures in DCIM/100APPLE. In your example, I'm guessing XPBH is an abbreviation for the camera maker. This is done so that you can keep images taken on different cameras separated in different folders within the DCIM directory.",
"It stands for Digital Camera IMages. It is part of the Design rule for Camera File system (DCF), which defines a standardize way for cameras to access memory cards. Directories have the format 999XXXXX, and most device models will use a preferred directory name. Files within the directory use the format XXXX9999, which again might be specific to the device.",
"i'm not sure about 100XPBH, but DCIM means digital camera images. the 100XPBH could have something to do with the type of camera."
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5vkuwv | Why is impossible to find student films starring actors that are famous now (Jennifer Lawrence, George Clooney, Chris Pratt, etc...) but weren't back then? Did their PR delete everything they did when they were students or did they get big roles without previous experience? | Edit: I'm assuming that if someone directs a shortfilm at their film school, he/she would save a copy for themselves at least. Years later, if they see that their student actor is now a big celebrity, wouldn't they upload it? At least to brag about it? I mean, I'm not talking about student films from the 70's or 80's. Jennifer Lawrence could have done student films/amateurs shorts around 2005. How come there is none? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Most student films are not widely distributed. Nowadays something shown at a film festival or the like may be published on the Internet, but in the past you brought a copy of the film (that is, the actual film roll), played it on the projector, and took it with you. There wouldn't be many copies in existence.",
"If they're a really good actor when they're young, they're nailing auditions and booking real gigs instead of acting in student films. Also, student directors cast student actors. The common thread here is that they are all students, i.e. they're all at college to study film/theater/acting etc. None of the actors you mentioned formally studied film or theater at a university because they were all already working actors by traditional college age. I mean, shit, Jennifer Lawrence landed a TV show when she was 16 and was nominated for her first Oscar for a film she made when she was 19. Why would she act in a student film?!"
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5vkzcl | Why is way harder to find species where females have to impress males for matting? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Because growing a baby intrinsically requires more resources than providing sperm, therefore more care must be taken in selecting a mate. Waste a bit of sperm on a bad genetic partner? No big deal. Waste a pregnancy on one? Big deal.",
"1 male can impregnate many females. 1 female can only be impregnated by 1 male. For the survival of the species, the best individu should pass on his genes. Females have to be selective in their choice of partner, otherwise they will have offsprings with poorer genes. Since they can procreate a limited number of time, the selection of good mating parter become even more important. If it was the other way around, males with poor genes would have as much chances than males with good genes to mate with a female."
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5vl34c | What is a fed rate hike and why should I care? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"The Federal Reserve sets a \"banking interest rate\" (before someone yells at me, I'm simplifying it here). That banking interest rate affects how banks and big money does business which each other, but it also affects consumers. If you have a credit card, open up your credit card agreement envelope, and look at your APR (the interest you pay on your credit card). It will usually say \"Prime Rate + 15/20/25%\". That means that your consumer credit, consumer auto loans, consumer mortgages are influenced by whatever the Fed is doing. A \"rate hike\" means that interest rates across the economy are about to increase. That makes it more expensive to borrow in order to consume stuff, limiting your ability to consume stuff. Even if you are personally not really interested in getting a loan, it still affects other people and businesses, and a rate hike usually slows down production in the economy. Another point is that after the recent recession a few years ago, the Federal Reserve reduced their interest rate tremendously (to effectively 0%), attempting to force the economy to start moving and spending money again. Now they feel that the recession has finally been dealt with, and they can stop slamming on the gas pedal, pull back, increase rates, and let the economy move on on its own."
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5vl5ao | Why did we assign AM and PM to the 12th hour in the way that we did? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"AM and PM stand for *ante meridiem* and *post meridiem*, meaning before noon and after noon, respectively. 12 AM is before the noon of that day, and 12 PM is after the noon of that day.",
"A lot of countries, plus the US military, use a 24 hour clock to avoid any confusion. midnight is 0000. 5am is 0500. 2pm is 1400. etc, etc. AM/PM are latin for before midday and after midday. So it makes sense that way.",
"Well, AM stands for \"Ante Meridiem\", which is Latin for \"before noon\". PM stands for \"Post Meridiem\", which means \"after noon\". I like to think of them as \"At Morning\" and \"Past Morning\", because I'm weird."
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15,
13,
4
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"text_urls": [
[],
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} | [
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| [
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5vl7ic | How would NASA detect water on an expoplanet? | I read that NASA currently has no detection of water on the 7 habitable planets they just discovered. By "currently", does that mean they have the technology to detect it? How would you go about that from so far away? Thanks | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"de2xuvb"
],
"text": [
"If you can image the planets directly in the infrared spectrum then water should be fairly obvious. Water absorbs a large amount of incoming infrared light at very specific wavelengths so it's easy to spot *if* you can get an IR spectrum. I'm assuming these planets haven't been directly imaged but rather inferred from their gravitational pull, so there's no way to tell right now. Our current generation of infrared telescopes don't have the resolution and filtering (the nearby star's light is overwhelming) required to actually see the planets."
],
"score": [
9
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5vla8q | Why does spilled petrol look like a rainbow but not spilled water? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"de2zqex",
"de2zs7f"
],
"text": [
"If you have thin film of transparent material the light reflect on both top and bottom surfaces of this film the additional distance the light that reflect on the bottom of the film makes difference in the phase of the light wave function. As the phase of wave functions of the same light are shifted now, they start to interference and change the white light to colored light. The angle of light to surface determines the distance that is traveled in the film. Different distance means different shift of the phase. Different points in the surface have different distance from your eye the angle of the light that hits your eye is then also different.",
"It occurs only when the oil is a thin film (on the order of microns thick) on top of some water or some other liquid. The light hits the top of the thin film and some light bounces off and some light passes through. The light that goes through is going through a liquid with a different refractive index than the air it came from. The light then reaches the next layer of liquid and some light reflects and some light passes through. All of this simply to say; of the two different times the light reflects it is reflecting at slightly different times the light interferes with itself and produces the pretty rainbow. That is as simple as I can make it. To dive into the details check out the link. URL_0"
],
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"text_urls": [
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"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin-film_interference"
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|
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