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5vubz7 | If a country is at war and another government blows up your property, what is your remedy? | If your country is at war and your property... say your business like a power plant or a warehouse that stores guns is blown up by the opposing government army, do you just take the loss? Or is there some type of remedy for that and that is the risk for being involved in that type of business? And now that I am writing this I'm wondering is there insurance for this? lol | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There is war insurance, yes, and it's the kind of thing you'd want if you have big-ticket assets. There is also terrorism insurance (now)."
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5vucp9 | Could two different passwords have the same hash? Would this seriously affect password security? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Yes, this is called a \"hash collision.\" How common collisions are depend on the algorithm. With typical algorithms it's quite unlikely that two users would actually pick passwords that end up with the same hash. The real problem with collisions is that it makes it much easier to crack passwords: there are multiple correct solutions that correspond to a stolen hash, instead of just one. Hashing algorithms where collisions are relatively frequent are not safe for use in password security."
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5vuvec | What are the differences between these drugs? | Crack vs Cocaine? Pot vs Weed vs Marijuana? Ecstasy vs LSD? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Cocaine is a refined drug from the Coca plant. Crack is cocaine prepared so it is in a rock/solid form, easier for smoking, since smoking drugs gets it in your system much more quickly. Pot/Weed/Marijuana are the same thing. Ecstacy is a drug that causes euphoria, general pleasant feeling, and makes all touch and physical sensations more intense. LSD/Acid is a drug that induces strong visual hallucinations."
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5vuvom | Why do computers slow down significantly over a few years compared to when it was purchased if hardly anything has been downloaded? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They do and they don't. They do in the sense that if you use a computer enough you will eventually create loads of temp files, startup programs, etc. This causes things to slow down as the computer has more to load. A fresh install of the operating system can fix this if that's the issue. They don't as in its a perception thing. You may use other devices and computers that come out with newer better hardware. Then you go back to the old computer and it may feel slow to what you're used to. There are other things such as driver support ending so they stop optimizing certain things. Another thing is as features get added to programs it may take more processing power to run those features.",
"As a rule, the hardware will always run at exactly same speed, so if the computer is slower its must be because its being asked to do more in software. There are a few exceptions to that rule, where failing hardware can in fact slow down a computer but not cause it to crash or report errors, but they're uncommon to say the least. Now as to what additional tasks the computer is doing in software that would cause it to be slower, you'd have to know the specific system to answer. But even if you didn't explicitly download something, one of your apps or even the OS itself could have added a hundreds of megabytes of software to the hard drive since modern systems pretty much update themselves all the time now."
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5vuw1d | How can someone survive an amputation but die when their artery gets cut? | In example a person gets their leg blown off and survives vs a person gets their artery cut by shrapnel and dies. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Dunno why people are comparing sterile surgical amputations to shrapnel injuries during battle. Many times, getting your leg \"blown off\" will result in death due to exsanguination, however, blood loss from blown off limbs can almost always be stopped with a tourniquet if there is someone conscious around to apply it (even the patient). Likewise, if the shrapnel hits an artery in the leg, you can use a tourniquet above the injury to stop the bleeding until surgery. However, shrapnel that hits somewhere other than the limbs cannot be helped by a tourniquet. These patients require immediate surgery to stop the bleed in order to survive, or an excellent field medic that can locate and ligate the artery before the patient bleeds out. Technology is improving though, there now exists syringes filled with tiny sponges that contain clotting factors that swell up and help stop a bleeding artery even if you can't locate it. You just inject the sponges into the wound and it is often effective in controlling the bleeding until the patient can reach definitive care.",
"You have a ton of arteries. If you block one off, the blood will re-route via other paths. If you cut it open and leave it, it'll continue to get blood flow, which will flow out on to the ground and you will die. Amputations are done in a controlled manner, clamping off important vessels as you go so blood gets re-routed."
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5vuyu7 | what would the surface of gaseous planets be like? | How would it differ from that of terrestrial planets? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"We'll take Jupiter for example, the upper layers of Jupiter's atmosphere are basically giant clouds of gas. There is no surface to land on so you'd just fall into the planet. As you fall deeper and deeper the gas becomes more dense and the temperature rises. Normally you'd pretty much cook to death before you got very deep but we'll say that you've got some kind of futuristic suit that can handle the heat. At this point pretty much all from the sun is blocked by the atmosphere above you, but that's ok because it's now so hot that the atmosphere itself is glowing. Falling further, you get to a point that the atmospheric density is enough that you stop falling because you're essentially lighter than the surrounding air, but luckily you've brought your depleted uranium undies so you keep falling. Eventually (1000 km down) you hit the closest thing that can be called the \"surface\" a liquid metallic hydrogen ocean. The pressure here is approximately 3 million times that of Earth's atmosphere. Below the liquid hydrogen it's possible that there's a solid rocky or metallic hydrogen core but it isn't yet possible to know for sure.",
"From what I understand, there's no distinct \"surface\". The transition from the atmosphere to the \"planet\" proper is not at all the abrupt one that Earth has. An object would go from falling/flying to sinking/swimming to eventually the gas being so thick that it'd be tangible almost in the sense that we think of solids here."
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5vuzsu | why does the max volume on my device vary so much based on what it is playing? | For instance between one youtube video and another, the max volume can be very quiet or decently loud. Why can't the quiet video sound just as loud? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It is entirely dependent on the volume level used when mastering the video/song/etc. Some use a standard 'volume'. This is why all songs on iTunes are almost identical volume when they play at the same level on your phone. However, YouTube doesn't require this and as such some videos published retain the low 'master' volume used originally in the editing software. A good example of someone abusing this principle is the obnoxious vines that master the volume of a vine initially low so you turn your device up - then increase the master volume to make it seem extremely loud all the sudden on the device."
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5vv2vg | Why do we need cream and moisturizers to hydrate our skin, why can't we just drink more water or just put water on our skin? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because the outer layer of skin is actually dead skin about to be sloughed off. Drinking more water does increase moisture levels in the skin but depending on environmental conditions, sometimes this isn't enough. Think of a windy, dry day - that little extra moisture is guaranteed to be evaporated off before both feet exit the door. Most healthy skin deals with this in a smart way. It creates a thin layer of oil to cover the skin, creating an 'evaporation barrier'. However, some people have drier skin and need extra moisture. Here's the thing: almost no moisturizer directly \"wets\" the skin. Its job is to coat the skin with an occlusive substance that will help the skin retain its natural water and keep it from evaporating."
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5vv3my | Why were nuclear physicists in the 50s-60s concerned about lighting the atmosphere on fire when testing nukes? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The concern was if the nuclear bomb had enough energy to cause the nitrogen in the air we breath to start undergoing a nuclear FUSION chain reaction (similar to the sun). There were calculations done which determined that while this happened a little bit, there wasn't enough energy to cause it to \"ignite\" and become self sustaining. It would die off very shortly after the bomb blew up. The calculation that disproved this was classified at the time, so when it was ruled that the bomb was safe there were a lot of naysayers because they never got to see the calculation. The calculations are public now with virtually no redaction. I just can't remember how I found it : )",
"To clarify, they were worried about igniting a _nuclear_ chain reaction of the atmosphere, not a regular chemical reaction fire. If a regular chemical fire of the atmosphere were thermodynamically favorable, it would have happened long ago (or really, the atmosphere would never have formed in its current state)."
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5vv5x3 | How does (1/2)! = (√π/2) | How are you able to derive PI from 1/2 factorial? | Mathematics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There's something called [the gamma function]( URL_0 ) which extends the idea of factorials to things over than whole positive numbers. I can't think of a way to ELI5-ify the answer beyond \"If you run the math, that's what you get\"."
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5vv6bg | What is the significance of Pi (3.14) in real life applications? | Mathematics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"One example I can immediately recall off the top of my head is my friends father, who is a farmer, used the wheels of his harvester as quick measurements. He painted a white line on the tire and counted how many rotations it made across a portion of field he wanted to measure out for the season. He had his son, my friend, count how many times the white line passed then did some quick calculating to find the area of the land. He then based his purchases off of those calculations. Sorry if that wasn't the best written piece, I'm on mobile. Hope I could help!",
"It's hugely significant. It comes up in any calculation involving geometry of circles. Off the top of my head: say you own a sheet metal plant and a client orders a shipment of metal disks. How much do you charge them for materials if you can't calculate the area of each circular piece?"
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5vv8j8 | How does Sweden get things done if they have 6 hour work days, 25 vacation days per year, etc? | I live in Canada, and in order for construction crews to get their work done they usually work 10-12 hour days 6 days a week during the spring, summer and early fall. How does Sweden manage to build and maintain infrastructure if they can only make their employees work 6 hour days? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's been shown that the longer and harder someone is made to work, the less work they actually get *done,* because they get tired and work slower, get sick more easily, miss days, etc. If you let people rest more often and take time off, they become far more productive.",
"We don't . It's 8 hours office time here for the most. Then you have other proffesions with different shift as in Canada.",
"It comes down to efficiency, if you overwork your workers productivity goes down. Having the most time doesn't always mean being most productive. Giving them less work hours allows them to rest and keeps them motivated."
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5vvfgu | How does the heart receives blod for its cells, I know it is a pump, and it seems inneficient to use the one it is pumping | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The heart pumps blood out to the aorta. From there, some of the blood actually routes back to the heart via 3 major arteries. If any of these 3 get blocked, that is a heart attack. I'm not sure what you mean by inefficient to use the one it's pumping"
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5vvg3e | How does getting rid of Net Neutrality improve competition in a way that benefits the consumer? | I've been seeing this argument from the dawn of time and never understood it. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Getting rid of Net Neutrality does NOT benefit the consumer. CGP Grey have made a 3½ minute video about it, that is vary easy to understand. URL_0",
"This question cannot be answered because the premise is false. It does not improve competition in a way that benefits the consumer.",
"Lets say you watch pay for a subscription to stream movies on website A, but website A is lacking in the anime department. You figure there are a lot of people like you, so you make your own website, B, that for a fee has all the anime you could ever want. You negotiate with the providers that own the rights to the anime, make an experience that's easy to use/find titles, buy a domain, advertise, you're set! Except...how do people get to your site? The internet. Under net neutrality, the internet provider *has* to treat websites the same (load them all the same rate, etc.), so both website A and B load just as fast (way oversimplifying, there is some nuance with back end servers and all that), so in theory, all the anime fans can say \"hey B is super great it has all the anime that I was missing with A!\" This then would cause A to realize that B is taking customers from them because they don't have anime, and A adds anime titles to compete for those customers back. Launches a big advertising campaign, the works. B obviously doesn't want to fall behind, so it adds live streaming of *new* anime as it airs in Japan for diehard fans. And back and forth, constantly competing for customers in an arms race. Customer wins here because no matter which option they choose, the other will always be trying to improve to get that customer. Now, the scenario without net neutrality: Internet providers become virtual gatekeepers. They *can* treat websites differently, and say \"hey, A is willing to pay us $1M per year so we load their website at full speed, we'll do that.\" Meanwhile, B is trying to gain traction and make money, and can't afford to pay $1M to Big Internet. So what happens? Big Internet says \"bummer...you're on our 'so slow dial up would've been a better choice but it'll still load eventually' speed if you don't pay up.\" And Big Internet isn't a bad guy for doing this! Yes, its totally exploiting their position of power, but literally *every* company would do this, simple economics. If a company *can* and *will* pay for preferential treatment, profit off of it. So then, what happens in the long run? Customers think B sucks. They say \"it loads so slow!\" or \"Who cares if its a live stream if I can't get it to open before next week?\" and they abandon the site. A then gets all the traffic and, yay A will keep catering to these customers! Right? Wrong. Now that customers essentially don't have a choice (site that actually loads, vs one that's slower than Verizon to adopt unlimited data), A has no incentive to improve its selection. They essentially become a monopoly which, like Big Internet, can do things that make sense economically, but are overall dick moves. The idea with net neutrality is that it protects the \"little guys.\" And what might be \"little\" now may not be in a few years. Amazon? Started as a book store. Now it sells everything. But if there were another, richer book website when Amazon started up (call it \"Nile\") and net neutrality weren't in place, Amazon never would've gotten off the ground and we'd probably have a mediocre Nile experience with books at overall meh prices. Getting rid of net neutrality **doesn't** improve competition. It hinders it. Those arguments are propaganda by Big Internet that want to line their pockets more. They'll say things like \"net neutrality forces us to give bad service\" and all that, which simply isn't true. What ***is*** true is that ***without*** net neutrality, they could give the best service only to the highest bidders, leaving new sites in the dust without a chance to ever compete. **TL;DR:** The only people saying getting rid of net neutrality is a net positive for the consumer are part of Big Internet (and the politicians they fund). It's like TurboTax saying a complicated tax code is good for US Citizens, when in reality it's good only for them.",
"It does not benefit the consumer. It arguably hurts companies creating content. It does, however, benefit ISPs--and it does so bigly. This is worth writing or calling your members of congress (State AND National).",
"Getting rid of net neutrality benefits the large actors with big bank accounts. This will only be detrimental to consumers, and the development of internet as a whole."
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5vvhk5 | why does spaghetti sauce stain certain plastic containers so badly? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Plastic containers are to various extents permeable. Spag sauce is oily and deeply pigmented. Warming oils makes them less viscous, making them more easily penetrate the porous plastic, staining it. This process is enhanced by the significant volume of pigment. Since the pigment is easily seen, even small amounts are visible. To shift the stain you'll need patience, washing soap and more heat. Seal your spag sauce in glass containers and never have this problem again.",
"Lycopene is water-insoluble pigment (particle) becoming trapped in pores. Can remove with mild abrasive like baking soda paste, or discolor with *very* diluted bleach soak.",
"Most dishwasher manuals state not to rinse dishes with spaghetti sauce on them before washing as the water rinse will set the sauce in the pores of the dish, whereas the washing soda in the dishwasher would scrub it off before it can sink in."
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5vvjam | The difference between the Secretary of the Treasury and the Treasurer of the US? | Also, are there any situations where there seem to be 2 similar titles in other departments of the US government | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The secretary of the treasury is a member of the cabinet and advises the president on economic issues and plays a major role in deciding economic and tax policies. The treasurer oversees the U.S. Mint, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, and Fort Knox and may also be an adviser to the secretary."
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5vvjwz | How come when you first learn a word, you begin to hear it everywhere? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's a cognitive bias known as the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, or frequency illusion. Look it up if you like.",
"Wont be able to explain it like the others will, but you are now more aware of that word and can pick it out of sentences better. Just like if you went out and bought a new car, you will start to notice that car more on the because you own it, and are now more aware of it.",
"The other day I heard \"nascent\" on the radio and honestly I wasn't sure what it meant. Funny thing, I heard it on the radio as I headed to work. So I'm at work... I record executive presentations. The presenter used the word nascent in his presentation!! Weird coincidence, but honestly, as someone who prides myself as a lifelong learner I will become familiar with the word and use it in my own vocabulary."
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5vvqm2 | How exactly does a prism separate the different wavelengths of white light? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A prism simply bends the light (refraction). A normal white light consists of all colours of the rainbow each colour of light has a different wavelength and each wavelength of light bends at a different angle than the other. Hence the different wavelength come out at different angles out of the prism glass and land at different positions on the screen or your eye making you see the colours separately",
"Imagine the white light as if it were a car driving down a straight road. The air is analogous to the the pavement and the plastic in the prism will be analogous to the dirt to the side of the road. While driving down the road, if the two right wheels of the car veer off in the dirt, they will be traveling slower than the two wheels still on the pavement, thus causing the car to slightly turn right. So as two of the lights \"wheels\" enter the plastic it will bend(turn) slightly. The different wavelengths of light will be effected differently. The shorter the wavelengths(blue light), the more particles the light will interact with, causing it to bend more. The longer the wave lengths(red light), the less particles the light will encounter. And after all of that, ladies and gentlemen, you have a rainbow.",
"Imagine a row of soldiers marching together on concrete towards a sandy beach. Once they step foot on the sand they can't march as fast, so the ones already on the sand are slower than the ones still on concrete. If each row hits the sand at an angle, the row would start to \"point\" more toward the beach after they get onto the sand because they got there at different times. That's what they mean by light \"bending\". Here's a visual: URL_0 If multiple rows went in, each one with deterrent boots that slowed down different amounts, they would point I different directions after getting into the sand. Similar to how each color with different wavelengths slows down friending on its refractive index."
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5vvrit | What's going on when wild animals are being friendly to humans? | I've seen videos of humans that have raise wild animals since they were young and they hold a close relationship that the wild animal doesn't attack them. They're always show playing and hugging with each other. Then you hear of stories like the lady whose chimp attacked her and destroyed her face. What's going on in the wild animal's mind that makes them not attack a human. And, in the case of the chimp lady, what makes that wild animal snap and attack. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Imprinting, the animal is not raised in the wild and does not initially associate human beings, especially the person who hand raised them as it's surrogate—as bad. They view humans as safe and good because the care taker is human and interacts with other humans safely. Imprinting meanings they form a trusting/emotional bond with another species. Otherwise, in the wild, they are taught to avoid humans as the only thing they see of us is that we are all dangerous, savage, murdering habitat destroyers and monsters. They learn that humans should be avoided at all costs because their survival depends on it. Because we kind of are like that, collectively. Typically the people who raise wild animals and rehabilitate them are the exception to humanities massive suckage—not the rule. They have to *intentionally* urge the animal to not imprint so they can survive amongst other predators or other human beings who are not safe and are 100% murdering assholes. Once we raise a wild animal we have to destroy the bond we form with it so they can survive. It's very painful. Some don't un-imprint. They are then unable to survive in the wild and become a non-releasable educational animal that teaches other human beings about their own ignorance. If I were a wild animal I'd avoid people and have a decent excuse. I am a human and people still don't understand my excuse to avoid them and why I am on the animal's side. Idk why people don't understand how awful they are."
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5vw95s | Given the massive increase in automation over the last two centuries, why aren't most people working drastically fewer hours? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because most people don't own the means of production and do not get to choose whether they work less for the same output or work the same for more output. For example, if you owned a patent that allowed you produce 10 widgets per day in 7 hours whereas everyone else in the world required 8 hours, your production would still be competitive working less than others. But if your employer owns the patent, he could tell you to keep you working the same amount of time but produce more, and keep the profits of the increased production for himself.",
"Because having a bunch of machines that let us do more stuff in an hour doesn't suddenly make us want less stuff. We want more stuff, and are willing to continue working a lot to get it. Sure, we could not work a lot and get all the things there were to get 150 years ago. But now there's all this new stuff, and it's pretty great, so we want to get it."
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5vw9ff | Why do people who say they are against "big government" fight for so many federal restrictions (marijuana, immigration, LBGT rights, abortion, etc.)? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Mostly because they're concerned about big government meddling in their own lives but are happy for it to meddle in the lives of people they disagree with. It's basically just selfishness. You very rarely see people advocating for government intervention to stop themselves doing something harmful or wrong, only because they think *other people* should be stopped from doing things.",
"It involves a number of issues: 1. Negative vs. Positive rights. Consider LGBT rights. A 'negative right' would be that the government cannot jail you for engaging in LGBT conduct. A 'positive right' would be that the government can fine/jail others for refusing to employ you on that basis. Conservatives tend to emphasize negative rights - prohibitions on what government is allowed to do - rather than positive rights - obligations the government has towards its citizenry. 2. Proper role of government. Contrast the left-leaning hippie who complains about the 'military-industrial complex' vs. the economic conservative who complains about the Department of Education. In our hippie's mind, the military is not the proper role of government (or, at least, not to the extent of strategic bombers and super-carriers). In our conservative's mind, micro-managing education is not the reason we have a federal government. 3. The 'deep state'. This has come into the news recently, but the expansive federal bureaucracy is viewed as problematic by many because it plays a significant policy role that isn't really compatible with a free society. To understand this from a non-conservative position, consider how - in some places - the police will arrest you for sodomy (more particularly, MSM sexual activity) despite the fact that all such laws were invalidated by the Supreme Court. They know that, technically, it's not illegal. But by arresting you anyway, they can use the coercive power of government without any real redress by the citizenry to enact a preferred policy of their own. The \"dear colleague\" letter about college sexual assault investigations is an example from the other side, where unelected bureaucrats simply decided that they wanted to change the rules and did so based on the implicit coercive power of their office. 4. Federalism. As originally formed, the federal government was distinctly different from the states. For example, think of a standard homeowner's association rule about cutting your grass. At the level of a homeowner's association, few people would quibble about a rule requiring that you properly maintain your law. But most people - even 'big government liberals' would likely balk at a federal law requiring regularly mowing your lawn. Whether or not you mow your lawn affects your neighbors. It does not affect someone across the country, so it isn't the proper subject for federal legislation. You should also spend some time trying to get at the real - rather than straw man - reasons people believe what they do about these issues. What you're almost certainly doing is thinking about why *you* believe what you do and then just blindly applying your own assumptions to what other people think. But very often, those other people are approaching the issue from a completely different direction and based on philosophical notions that may be alien to you.",
"Many people hold wholly separate but rigidly defined ideological beliefs and they believe THEY are right. Thus each person wants either what's best for themselves or believes that they know what is best. Both of which when generalized are objectively wrong."
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5vwc6i | What would happen if you gave antidepressants to a person without depression? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I almost removed the post because it is posing a hypothetical, however since this is a hypothetical that actually happens, why not discuss. Most anti depressents fall into a class of drugs called SSRI's or Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors. They do exactly what the name suggests, they slow down or inhibit, the re-uptake or absorption / recycling of serotonin. Serotonin is a neurochemical responsible for the neuron to neuron conduction of signals. The signals are electrical, but the transmission is done chemically and the serotonin controls the rate of this transmission. What is supposed to happen is an impulse is transmitted between two neurons at the synapse, serotonin is used, and then it is reabsorbed to prepare for the next impulse. The theory of SSRI's effect on depression is that depression is caused by lower impulse rates which inhibit communication within the brain. That the conduction of signals from neuron to neuron is not working at the level of a healthy brain. You might say it's running too slow, or not responsive enough to the communication that jumps around between different lobes of the brain. So they have these drugs and they inhibit the uptake of serotonin and this leads to higher levels of serotonin, which in turn facilitates easier neuron to neuron transmission across the synapses. In other words it sort of speeds up or facilitates better neuron to neuron conduction. It doesn't make you think faster exactly, but instead allows the communication in the brain to work faster and be more responsive rather than isolated and sluggish as in the depressed brain. So if you gave an SSRI to someone who's brain was not in a physical state of depression, it would have the same action as if used on a depressed brain. It would facilitate faster neural signalling. What this would mean for the person taking the pill is much the same as what it would mean for a depressed person taking it. Sexual side effects, changes in mood, altered perception, strange thoughts, changes in sleep patterns, drug use, and personality. The same effects for all. But in a depressed mind, these side effects are less damaging than the depression itself, so it's a good trade off. If someone is really depressed, and in danger of hurting themselves or someone else, the SSRI's along with mood stabilizers like Lithium or alprazolam can keep them stable until they can get past the crisis. They can work very well in short term therapy. In the long term people can develop resistance, and find they have to adjust dosage and maybe even try other SSRI's in order to keep getting the therapeutic effects. For this reason drugs are usually prescribed along with therapy in order to help a person through the crisis, and give them some stability to start coming to terms with it or fixing the root cause if there is one. I am not a doctor and this is not medical advice. I do have experience with this though.",
"while I can't give any scientific reasoning, I can tell you personally that they definitely have a big effect on my emotions. I don't have depression but I do get bad migraines and a certain antidepressant is the only thing that I have been prescribed that help at all. I am typically a happy and positive person, I enjoy everything about my life. When I take antidepressants, that essentially goes to shit. I become moody, highly overemotional, and experience many 'down days' at times which aren't unlike classic symptoms of depression where nothing can improve my mood.",
"Not all depression is equal. I have bipolar disorder, and while depression is part of it, it is not the same disorder as standard (unipolar) depression. Bipolar is alternating episodes of depression and mania. Giving someone with bipolar an SSRI often actually triggers mania: > The symptoms of mania include: elevated mood, inflated self-esteem, decreased need for sleep, racing thoughts, difficulty maintaining attention, increase in goal-directed activity, and excessive involvement in pleasurable activities. These manic symptoms significantly impact a person's daily living. > URL_0 & URL_1 A lot of people with bipolar are diagnosed when they having a depressive episode, and you can't tell the difference from regular depression, so that's what you assume is going on. So you take antidepressants and you get better! In fact, you feel great! SO awesome. Very productive! I'm amazing, I'm going to change the world, who needs to sleep, isn't everything FANTASTIC?! Hypomania, the more common lesser form of mania (vs say, psychotic mania), can often be sustainable for quite a while. I was diagnosed with bipolar after being depressed, taking Prozac, and *going out of my mind*, absolutely off the deep end, hypomanic. But I thought it was great! I was super happy! I mean, my life was falling apart because I was batshit crazy, impulsive, delusional and scared people. But hey, I wasn't depressed, so the drugs were working!! It took almost a year to figure it out and change to suitable medication. So yeah, that can happen when someone who is not actually depressed (although exhibits symptoms indistinguishable from depression) takes an SSRI. It made me TOO happy. Basically, too *everything*. Too much energy, too many impulses, you're gonna have a bad time.",
"For fucks sake stop with the anecdotes and speculation. The placebo effect is damn powerful. My research focuses on antidepressant use and I've taken classes under the first researchers who determined serotonin was even used in the brain. Whenever we use antidepressants in research we need control groups. With lab animals, this means routinely giving antidepressants to non-depressed subjects. Studies in mice show increased resilience to stress and increased exploratory behavior. In some studies it also increases anxiety. I'm on my phone right now but if this post gets enough attention I'll dig up sources later. And to all who say it doesn't matter if it works in mice, we discover all our drugs this way, 90% of the time it works 100% of the time. It's also been shown to improve outcomes with stroke patients, people with nerve damage, head injury, people with chronic fatigue, and anxiety.",
"The person will probably not notice an improved mood but they will still experience side effects. The most common one that people complain about is sexual dysfunction.",
"Hi. Long time user of antidepressants here. To truly ELI5: Taking antidepressants (SSRI) has an effect kind of like focusing a camera. There is a \"sweet spot\" where everything is in focus (not depressed). If the serotonin levels are above or below that depression occurs. Antidepressants boost the effect of the serotonin present. If it's already at the correct level, it may be pushed beyond the sweet spot and cause problems. Therefore, if a person who didn't need antidepressants took them, it may cause depression. Of course, the real world is not so clean cut and actual effects and side effects will vary from person to person.",
"I can only provide an anecdotal experience. I took Wellbutrin (Xyban) to quit smoking while not depressed. It made me very forgetful - in fact, made me forget smoking. My body in very real terms told me when it was time to stop taking it, about a month after I quit smoking. It stuck for 10 years, until I needed to take antidepressants to treat actual real depression. Within thirty days I had an uncontrollable desire to smoke again.",
"You ever play a skateboarding video game or some game that challenges you to keep a marker centered on a curved line? Thats probably the best visualization for depression and antidepressants. Some antidepressants push left to right, some go right to left and the goal is to keep the marker at that highest point, in the center. If someone without depression uses an antidepressant it will shift the marker off center and cause side effects that are very similar to depression.",
"Antidepressants don't give you a +10 to Happiness on some sliding scale of Depressed to Happy. When your brain chemicals are all fucky in a particular way, it un-fucks them. When they're already fine, it has different effect, most likely making you moody or depressed yourself.",
"Antidepressants are just used for depression - can also treat anxiety disorder, OCD, PTSD, chronic nerve pain, and even bedwetting The increase in serotonin levels can be useful for a range of problems",
"This may not answer what you're really asking, but many antidepressants are used to treat conditions other than depression. They can be used as anti seizure medication, pain killer, sleep aid, treatments for other mental health problems and even smoking cessation aid. It just depends on what the intended effect of the antidepressant is.",
"This will probably be deleted for anecdotal, but when I finally faced up to the diagnosis and started on my meds (mirtazipine... Might be spelt wrong) other people noticed a change but all I noticed was how fucking groggy I felt. It didn't do shit that first night but the next day I was wiped out. I don't get high any more but you know that rat shit cobwebs feeling you have for a morning after you've been lighting up ounces for days? That's how I felt the next day until like 2 hours before I had to take the next one. EDIT: anti depressants take several weeks to \"kick in\" this is just a recounting of my first pill"
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5vwcl0 | Can you make puns in sign language? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"By the narrowest possible definition: no, because puns rely on the similarity of *sounds*, and sign languages don't use sounds. But, since I work in the realm of language and linguistics, your question interested me to the point that I had to google this one -- I wanted to know the answer too. I don't normally do this, but I can't do better than to link to [this Quora thread]( URL_0 ) which is answered by a professor of Deaf Studies. In short, some signs in ASL (one of many sign languages) are based on English puns (he gives the example of \"El Paso\", signed as \"L-pass-O\"). But there are some examples, according to him, of signers playing around with the language of ASL: his example is that the little finger is commonly used in signs that denote things that are small or thin, so a signer might sign \"understand\" but using the little finger instead of the index finger to mean \"I kinda understand, but I'm finding it really difficult.\""
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5vwe8s | If our telescopes are powerful enough to find new planets 40 light years away, why can't they see if there is life on them? | Cant the telescopes be able to zoom on to the ground on the planets an see what is moving on them? ps I think this is a physics question but not sure. an astro-physics question | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"These telescopes can't actually see the planets, they can only detect the slight dimming of the stars as planets pass in front of them. It's a pretty impressive feat but it's not enough to tell us what they actually look like (beyond basic info about size etc).",
"These satellites look like little more than dots. Most of out data comes from spectrum analysis and watching them cross in front of their star."
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5vwhel | what did CloudBleed take or break, and how is it used maliciously? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"For some domains (for example URL_1 ) Cloudflare sits between you and the actual website. This way they can prevent websites from attacks and also make sure the website loads fast on your laptop, because they always have a server nearby. The problem is that Cloudflare made a mistake in their code, which meant that private communication that should have stayed between you and the website you were visiting was shown to others. This only happened with a small percentage of traffic to Cloudflare, but since it is used so much, it could leak private information of up to 200.000 requests per day. This private information was shown to random other people connecting to Cloudflare, also to crawlers from searchengines like google. Crawlers store what they find on the internet so people can search through it. And that is how they found out. A guy at Google noticed all this private info and notified Cloudflare. Cloudflare fixed the problem in a few hours. Even though the leak is fixed you should still change your passwords, because Cloudflare was leaking for more than 5 months and searchengines or other people may have stored your password and other private that you've sent to these compromised websites. ~~By the way: URL_0 wasn't effected. So you only need to change that if you used it's password elsewhere. In which case you should change it, never re-use passwords.~~ Reddit _has_ used Cloudflare until October 2016, so it is recommended to also change your Reddit password.",
"I have a basic understanding of the interworkings of this, but I do want to preface this by saying that I am no expert, this is not my field of expertise, etc. The following is how I understand it, and I welcome anyone to correct me where I am wrong. This is also as best of a ELI5 I can give, so will be oversimplifying some aspects. Here is how I understand it: Let's say I am running a server (point C) that serves my website, not using cloudflare, and I have my own tls certificate that encrypts communication between it and you (point A). Anyone snooping on you only sees gibberish that only my server knows how to decrypt, use, and then send back the encrypted response that still looks like gibberish to anyone snooping, but now you know how to decrypt and use. It's a direct connection between point A and C. Now down the road I decide to start using cloudflare, which becomes point B, and uses their own encryption certificate, and also adds an extra layer of caching. For the caching side, you request a page from my site, my server does all the computations to figure out what should be sent back, and then sends it. The next 50 people after you are trying to access the same page, so instead of my server doing the same computations 50 more times to send it back to each of those people, cloudflare saves what it sent to you, and then sends that same thing to them instead of asking my server to do the work. So when you made your first request to my server, instead of calling it directly from point A to point C, and using my servers tls certificate to encrypt our communication, you are now calling from point A to point B using cloudflare's tls certificate. Being that cloudflare's and my server's encryption keys are different, cloudflair can't just volley that information to my server. Cloudflair has to decrypt what you sent it, and then use my server's tls certificate to encrypt communication between point B and point C. All in all, should work great right? All communication is still gibberish no matter where someone is trying to intercept it. A to B is encrypted, B to C is encrypted, and the same on the way back from C to B to A. The problem is when that after that encrypted communication from A to B is sent, B (Cloudflare) has to decrypt it and then it gets encrypted again using a different cert to go from B to C. While it's at B after being decrypted and in plain text, it is stored in B's memory. Well B's memory was leaking out like a water sprinkler. B isn't only caching my site, but hundreds of thousand other sites, ready to send it back to all of the other users asking for websites that are using cloudflare. So that sensitive information that you knew was encrypted, and sent to my site proxied through cloudflare, is now leaking into the cached pages being sent back to everyone else. This data doesn't just appear somewhere on the page inside of the browser, so the person looking at the page has no idea that they were just given this information they didn't ask for. But if you go digging through the raw data that was sent, then you can see it if you know what you are looking for. This in itself is already a security risk, then you have web crawlers. Search engines, like Google, send \"robots\" to look through your pages and cache the data on their end. This is how you can see a snippet of a website's content in googles search results page right below the link to go there. Well google actually caches the entire data of the page, so if your sensitive data that you sent to my server was then water sprinkled on all of these other pages cached at cloudflare's level, and google's robot crawler was then sent that data and cached it on googles end, anyone can see it by looking at google's cached version of that data. The scary part of this all is that there is no way of telling who was sent the cached versions of other sites that your information was water sprinkled onto. There is no way of knowing how many web crawlers there are out there, who owns them, whether they still have all of that data saved somewhere that they can now go back and analyze since this has been made public, even after cloudflare fixed the issue to plug the water sprinkler. This is why, especially for the ones that use the same password for everything, you need to change passwords for anything and everything related with the internet. This really is no joke, is probably the biggest security hole in the history of the internet, and should not be taken lightly. The water has already been sprayed and the sprinkler can't suck it back in, all anyone can do is hope their information has evaporated before someone has the chance to play in it."
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5vwk9u | What's the real difference between bottled water and tap water? | Bottled water gives me the worst stomach pains and makes me sick. Tap water never does this. Isn't water just water? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Water is indeed not just water. I don't know much about the regulations in other countries, but here in The Netherlands bottled water is of a lower quality than tap water. Before water comes out of the faucet it'll get 'cleaned'. They remove a lot of particles in different ways. The water used for tap water can be from the surface, but can also be from deep in the ground. The water from deep in the ground needs less filtering, this is why bottled water is usually made from this water. The tap water here is way cheaper because if the government funds it. The tap water would be way more expensive than bottled water. If you would drink pure water, you would die because of what is called reverse osmosis. Osmosis is a process happening in your kidneys. The salt in your blood goes through a membrane to your urine. This happens because the salt level in your blood is higher than in your urine. If you drink pure water the salt level in your blood goes down and the salt from your urine goes back. And you'll poison yourself.",
"The main difference, speaking broadly across all brands (at least in the US), the primary difference is one is in a bottle. To be a little more specific, bottled water *can* have different water sources depending on brand but a lot of US bottled water is actually municipal treated water (tap water) that has been bottled in a factory for sale. Sometimes they do additional purification, although this is not required or universally true. Sometimes they do add trace ingredients (minerals and such) supposedly for taste, but in blind taste tests the vast majority of people can't tell the difference between bottled water and tap water so that's a bit dubious in my eyes. The biggest difference in my opinion actually boils down to regulation. In the US, tap water is regulated by the EPA, whereas bottled water is regulated by the FDA. The EPA has a lot of tight regulations and often has dedicated individuals responsible for regular inspections and testing of tap water, whereas the FDA doesn't really dedicate anyone specifically to bottled water. Ultimately, the difference between tap water and bottled water overall is fairly minimal, however bottled water quality is probably more uniform across the country than tap water. The tap water in some areas will be significantly better or worse (or simply different depending on the method of treatment). Depending on where you live the tap water or the bottled water could end up being a little bit better - I grew up in Oregon and I always thought bottled water tasted far worse, but after traveling around (especially up and down the East coast) there are definitely areas where I'd consider the tap water worse than bottled water. tl;dr: Speaking generally there's no fundamental difference, and some bottled water is in fact just tap water. Depending on the quality of tap water in your area the bottled water could be better, worse, or roughly on par. YMMV."
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5vwmbt | Why do some people have higher pain tolerance than others? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Pain starts at the nociceptors (sensory pain receptors of your central nervous system). They're everywhere: skin, organs, bones.. In order for the nociceptor to send a signal to your spine, it has to be stimulated enough before the nociceptor reaches a threshold and fires an electric pulse to the brain. * The stimulus threshold is different for everyone * The stimulus threshold can change over time, affecting the sensitivity over time. Muay Thay practitioners kick trees in training in order to desensitize their nociceptors and to harden their shins. Remember that painful pimple on your forehead? That's because inflamed tissue is far more sensitive to pain than non-inflamed tissue. When the electric pulse reaches the brain: * You register it. It's up to you whether you decide to cry * You're already exposed to pain for a while and over time the brain just filters a part of the pain, making it more bearable * Pain can activate some pathways in the brains that causes release of certain chemicals that reduce pain sensation"
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5vx2zl | Potentially Stupid Question - How do the immensely wealthy and billionaires of the world actually pay for things? Where is the "money" portion coming from? | To my understanding, the wealth of a many of billionaires comes in the form of things like property, bonds, or stock, and that they generally don't have $500 million - several billion dollars sitting in a vault somewhere. So how do many of them actually pay for things? Where is the actual "cash" portion - the form that officially settles the price/debt - coming from? I imagine that they have some money that is held in accounts and that they can use this to pay for things that aren't astronomically priced, but how do they go about buying a piece of real estate that is worth $100 million dollars or how do they end up paying off a property tax that is in excess of $1 million? Do they just sell stock as needed? (Which I also imagine would have an effect on the price because $100 million worth of stock just was sold off.) | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> Do they just sell stock as needed? Yes, basically that. They wouldn't sell it all from the same company to limit the impact though, as their wealth is distributed among many different things."
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5vxcv6 | What are ACH transactions, and how is it a bad system? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I wouldn't call it a bad system, just an outdated one. ACH is the system that US banks use to transfer money to each other. The system is run by the Federal Reserve Bank. When you request to send funds to an account at another bank, your bank sends the cash to the Fed, and the Fed then sends the funds to the receiving bank. People don't like the system because: - The Fed acts as a middleman, so there is a lack of privacy in the transaction. - The transfer isn't instantaneous. There are strides being made to speed up the process, but it can still take up to a day for the Fed to move funds. - Its a legacy system developed forty plus years ago."
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5vxfck | Why do animals have such short lives compared to humans? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Animals that have long lives often have natural defenses that enable them to make use of long lives. That is to say, the thing that often kills them is old age. As a result, natural selection favors living longer and staying fertile longer, because that's more potential time for reproduction. So many of the animals that live long, you'll find, tend to be things with protective shells, or the power of flight (where flying predators are less prevalent) or enormous size (making them hard for predators to bring down). For many animals, a longer life span simply confers no particular advantage. Squirrels, for instance, don't live all that long. But on the other hand, squirrels often die from misadventure. They're hit by a car, they're eaten by a cat. They fall from a tree. They can live 20 years if you take care of them, but in the wild many die before they're 10. So 'being able to live to 90' wouldn't do much to enhance breeding, if none of them actually *do.* As such, there is not a strong selective pressure rewarding 'able to live to 90' to make it dominant. On the other hand, the giant tortoise had (humans have bolluxed this part up now) no natural predators. If they make it to adulthood, they tended to live until they die of old age. So living 100 years and reproducing longer, provides more opportunities to reproduce than living to 20.",
"You mean like giant tortoises, which live to be over 150? Or deep sea perch that can live to be over 140? Or Glass Sponges that live to be over 10,000 years old?",
"I think OP is asking why the natural life of many animals is much shorter than a human. So an appropriate answer would leave out predators, healthcare, etc. and consider ideal conditions. For example why does a dog live 10-15 years and we live 70-100 years? Obviously even with no predators and proper care dogs don't live to be as old as the oldest humans. Surely there's a biological answer that involves natural aging processes of each animal.",
"Hey gang. Has no one considered average heart rate of animal vs average life span. A small animals heart beats at far high rate compared to that of a resting human heart of that of large whale."
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5vxh8o | CNN reporter Chris Cuomo said on air that its illegal for a citizen to study wikileak emails, is this true? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> CNN reporter Chris Cuomo said on air that its illegal for a citizen to study wikileak emails, is this true? Nope.",
"to answer your question \"can the media lie about something like that with no repercussion and with the law behind them?\" Google and read about Yellow journalism Yellow journalism, or the yellow press, is a type of journalism that presents little or no legitimate well-researched news and instead uses eye-catching headlines to sell more newspapers. Techniques may include exaggerations of news events, scandal-mongering, or sensationalism. Yellow journalism has been around since the printing press was invented. Some argue that the American Revolution wouldn't have even happened with out a little Yellow journalism on the part of the colonists. This is why you as a an inquisitive and fact seeking individual must fact check and back stop facts yourself. I have had several debates with friends over how even Reddit is a form of Yellow journalism which it is in some cases but subs like this help to keep the Yellow at bay. BUT.... fact check, fact check, fact check.",
"Bullshit. So is he saying he isn't a citizen? He's either blowing his own trumpet of self-importance, or he doesn't want anyone to fact check what he's saying. Either way he's being a bit of a dick.",
"Chris Cuomo is a citizen, he's not a gov'mt employee or authorized to see top-secret material, so if he's allowed to see them then so are we. That said, Wikileaks is very likely breaking some laws just by publishing the emails, but once they're published we're allowed to view them. Edit: To answer your \"follow up question,\" the media is allowed to say whatever it likes. It's in their best interest to keep people from seeking out the information on their own, because then we have to rely on the media to tell us everything.",
"[This is a good article with examples from court cases.]( URL_0 ). Basically the media and private citizens have the same first amendment protection. > The . . . question is whether the application of these statutes [that purport to ban distributing illegally obtained material, even when one wasn’t involved in the distribution,] in such circumstances violates the First Amendment. [Footnote: In answering this question, we draw no distinction between the media respondents and Yocum.] To answer your other question about whether it's illegal or not (which the above quote talks about as well) > Now, while knowingly possessing tangible stolen property would often be a crime for both the media and others, possessing copies of illegally leaked materials is generally not treated the same way. See Pearson v. Dodd, 410 F.2d 701 (D.C. Cir. 1969).",
"Having been a reporter myself for many years, let me tell you there is absolutely no difference between a reporter and an average citizen except one writes the news and the other reads it. That, and the fact that many media personalities are arrogant narcissists who think people should hang on every word they say or write. You want to be a media personality?...(wave hands magically)...Poof, you're a media personality. The media is the Internet. Now go do what many don't. Learn the difference between libel and honest reporting, and concern yourself with facts, not bias nor clickability.",
"In reference to your follow up question, the answer is yes the can lie with no repercussions. The only recourse that the public has is to stop watching and hope that forces them to be more honest, but I seriously doubt losing viewers will cause them to be more honest.",
"There is no penalty for reading classified information if you come about it legally. The illegal part is distributing it. Once its in the public sphere its over.",
"It's illegal to possess or distribute classified information. But things on the cache of your web browser are not considered as being on your possession. This is because, otherwise if someone sends you a link to child porn and you open it, you would be f***ed.",
"no..he said that was the government's position..did you even look at the clip?",
"It's not true. Some speculated that he said that because he was a Hillary Clinton supporter and was trying to help kill the story and prevent it from propagating. Others believe he was just misinformed.",
"Wait are we pretending that Chris Cuomo is a legal authority on anything?",
"Its not true and when I saw/heard him say it, it was a tipping point for me. I don't watch CNN anymore.",
"It was more of an intimation that you shouldn't study them rather than a statement, but his attempt at deceiving the audience is plain to see.",
"Look at it this way,; one of the fundamentals of the American government is freedom of information and speech. Not only is it legal to look at them, it's your right to. If the gov. ever tried to change that, you should be very concerned...we all should.",
"> he actually said its illegal to posses them but then went on to say that everything you learn about them you learn through us, so the implication is still the same. No it isn't. The documents were illegal to possess, so he was contextualizing why CNN could broadcast them under the first amendment, then plugging the channel like someone who works for them would.",
"Depends on the citizen. I work for the federal government and I can be subjected to penalties including termination or incarceration for looking at Wikileaks. I'm even required to report it to security if anyone I know tries to show me something from Wikileaks. And no, that doesn't include anyone from Reddit, I just won't be trusting any links that are posted to this thread.",
"While the emails were obtained illegally, no, it is not illegal to view or even possess the leaked emails. The media lies all the time, either outright or by omission. The only time they will ever be held accountable is in cases of libel/slander, but reporting something they know to be false isn't a crime, tabloids have been doing it for years, just look at Weekly World News. False reporting should hurt their credibility though in an ideal world, but sadly if they get caught in a lie they can simply say they had bad sources or something like that and the majority of people will believe them."
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5vxipn | How is Iron Crotch Kung Fu possible? | Just watched the video below and I am mind boggled. Firstly why any one would do this but more so how can they do it. Is it as simple as just training yourself to ignore the pain? Wouldn't this still be causing severe trauma? URL_0 | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Aside from the obvious pain tolerance and suchlike, there is also the pubic bone to consider. Most \"Iron\" training systems in martial arts are about conditioning the bones to withstand impacts that would, under normal circumstances, break them. The way this is done is by causing microfractures in the bone (s) desired through various methods over a period of time. My old master used to caution us to practice at least one to two hours a day for at least a three month period before trying anything that could potentially break the bone we trained. Along this process one typically develops a tolerance for the pain, and I'm honestly not quite sure how that happens, as I only learned how to whack nerves to create openings, cause damage or otherwise incapacitate.",
"I think \"why?\" should be the first question we ask them!",
"As for \"Why\" I can't tell you. Maybe they got kicked in the nuts once and wanted it to never hurt again. Or maybe they think it's cool to be that kind of tough. Unless it's faked and punches are pulled, it almost certainly causes trauma, but I suppose it cuts down on the condom budget. After awhile it'll just be entirely scrambled eggs and hamburger down there, with little more damage that can be done. The real show is that they can will away the pain. Your mind is what listens to nerve sensors and reports/remembers the pain. With enough training you can train your body to acknowledge the pain but not freak out about it and go fetal.",
"You guys do know that testicles can fit inside a human body for better protection, right? They aren't actually getting hit in the nuts at all."
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5vxj0i | Why do we find comfort in hugs/cuddles/human contact? | When people try to console people who are sad or emotional, why do hugs tend to work- or at least help slightly? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because we are [social animals.]( URL_0 ) Tens of thousands of years ago our ancestors found there was a distinct survival advantage in working together in familial groups. As such, we gradually augmented our existing survival attributes with social behaviours that would cause us to stay together when under stress. Facial expressions, grooming each others fur, crying, touching, vocalisations etc. All of these things help communicate individual feelings and establish social structures. When you are being hugged or touched, your brain is rewarding you for taking part in actions that will improve your overall survival chances by releasing Oxytocin to calm your nervous system. Remember, you are a product of a very, VERY long and unbroken chain of surviving organisms, stretching back millions of years. The actions that kept you alive were rewarded with *pleasure* hormones (eating, drinking, bonding, fucking, hugging etc). The actions that reduced your chances are either not rewarded at all, or marked by an unpleasant sensation we call *pain*. This is why most people get lonely when away from other people. You're reducing your survival chances and so your body is trying to compel you to return to your kind. And hugging feels so good because you're being rewarded for bonding with said kind.",
"There's juice in your brain and it tastes good to your brain but your brain can't drink it without a straw. A hug or cuddles is like a straw and your brain gets the happy juice and makes you happy",
"Evolution. Hugs cause our brain to release a chemical called oxytocin, otherwise known as the \"cuddle chemical\" because of the way it makes us feel. There's no way for us to be *sure* of the reasons for this reaction (it'd be like asking: \"Why do we have ten toes?\"), but we have some pretty good guesses. The pleasure we get encouraged us (as early humans) to be social, which as SovietWomble says, likely boosted our chances for survival enough that the trait won out. About a week ago scientists reported that dogs have the same chemical release when we pet them: our touch makes them feel good. Apparently, when they stare happily at us, they're trying to provoke that feeling within us.",
"The reason it helps me so much is probably because my sadness stems from feeling lonely. I'm 25 years old, kind, intelligent, relatively attractive, and make friends easily, but I've never cuddled with anyone before. The only hugs I've had are the quick \"haven't seen you in a while friend\" hugs, but damn... best feeling in the world to me. I guess I'm not sure exactly how to answer your question, but I can definitely confirm that it works. If I had to choose between $100K, and cuddling with someone who actually wanted to/wasn't paid to, I'd go with the latter, zero hesitation. Sorry for the depressing comment by the way. Great question though!",
"Remember, some people don't take comfort in those things. Some will go out of their way to avoid them...",
"Putting aside the social contact, many mammals (including humans) also like the sensation of being squeezed. I recommend Temple Grandin book \"Animals in Translation\". She tells a story about building a [\"hug box\"]( URL_0 ) as a teenager and how the sensation of being squeezed was a huge stress relief. This is used on horses and cows, too, because it helps keep the animal calm while they have to get shots.",
"On top of all the other good answers, I would add that being touched is like an anchor in time. As you get older you spend more and more time thinking about the past, worrying about the future. A hug pulls you back into the present moment and holds you there.",
"I have a followup question. Why do these things do nothing at all for me, even from people I love? When I'm sick/hurt/upset, I just want to be alone. But I really do just want to be alone. I've tried the talk/hug it out approach, and it invariably makes me feel worse.",
"To piggy back on all of these great answers ELI5: Why does even slightly touching people make me feel uncomfortable at times? Sometimes I can be physical and get the \"happy juice\" as explained in the top comment and feel \"normal,\" but sometimes I go out of my way not to touch people, or find a way to get out of hugs and such. Why the change day to day with the same people?",
"It releases endorphins? Touch is paramount to healthy psychological development, and probably not just in Homo sapiens. Look no further than shitty third world orphanages for examples.",
"Not related...but goddamn. This question hit me in the feels. I've honestly considered going to a hooker and seeing if I can pay her $20 for a hug on the sidewalk. Fuck man.",
"Interestingly, for those with greater sensory needs, \"squeezes\" on their joints and large muscle groups is like a 10 on a hug scale."
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5vxlez | If everyone saved their income at rates they 'should' (10-20% minimum) would it cause an economic depression? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Nah, I don't think it would be enough to cause an economic depression. To quote from a Mr. Money Mustache (Early retirement blogger) article: \"Newspaper reporters often repeat the phrase that consumers are the engine of economic growth in the United States. They say it so often that most people believe it, as witnessed by the quotes above. But when you read books written by economists (who in general know more about economics than newspaper reporters), they tell you that consumers are not the engine of economic growth. They are actually the caboose. What is the engine of growth, then? It is the savers and investors. Only by sacrificing current consumption, can people put money into banks or share offerings, which end up in the hands of new and existing businesses who can then use that money to create new technology, factories, or human capital, allowing them to increase their productivity. Capital creates productivity, and productivity is the driver of our standard of living.\" He has a lot more detail in the article, but that's the jist of it. [Whole article]( URL_0 )",
"A lot of confusion in this thread - and not just here, you see it in a lot of \"economic\" journalism - between the drivers of short-term economic fluctuations (booms, busts, recessions) and the drivers of long-term growth. The economy has a certain level of potential output: that is what would be produced if all workers were fully employed (except those who are temporarily out of a job because they're looking for work), all factories produced at full capacity, all service businesses provided as much service as they can etc. This grows (we think) more or less steadily over time as workers enter the workforce, factories are constructed etc. Sometimes the economy is below potential (as signified, for example, by a high rate of unemployment). Sometimes, more rarely, it's above (this can cause inflation). If people suddenly stop spending as much, and save more, this will reduce GDP, because whatever they would have spent it on won't get made or sold. If spending falls enough, we might have a recession. But it shouldn't affect potential output. Eventually the economy should adjust (e.g. from a fall in prices) and we'll get back to potential, even at the higher level of savings. And more savings should, eventually, lead to higher growth, because there will be more resources available for investment - new factories, new software, etc - which will support a higher level of potential output. So the answer to your question is, yes, in the short term, there would be a recession, but if the overall level of savings increases this should support faster growth in the long term. Of course this is a very simple model (it's the starting point for most economists, not the end point). In an open economy, you'd have to think about the impact on the exchange rate, capital flows, global demand. And a prolonged recession can hurt potential output as people lose skills, and the capital stock deteriorates. But distinguishing short-term fluctuations from long-term potential is a good way to start thinking about it.",
"You put savings for emergencies and retirements under the same category but they have massively different impact on the economy. When you save money for emergencies you put the money away in a safe savings account where they can be quickly retrieved when needed. This means that the wealth you have created will not be contributing to the economy very much as the bank need to keep the money on hand and not take any risks with them. But it is only recommended that you save about 2-6 months worth of expenses for emergencies which in the grand scheme of things is not that much. Retirement on the other hand is quite different kind of savings. When you put money in a retirement fund you tell the bank to try to make them grow as much as possible as you do not need any of it until decades later. So the bank will make money the best way they can by investing the money. And since you do not need the money for a long time they can do pretty risky investments at that. This will give the economy a boost.",
"Not inherently no. See, if they're \"saving\" it, they're really just giving it to someone else to lump together and invest elsewhere. If the guy you give your money to spends it by cutting loans to others, it is still circulating around the economy. It's also important to note that actually saving tin-can style, and not spending any excess money both personally and professionally doesn't depress the economy, it just slows it. If you want to hurt an economy, cut the amount of cash flowing into the borders of it.",
"there's a difference between \"saving money\" and \"putting it under the pillow\". if you put your money under the pillow, you withdraw it from the economic circle. the money lies around and isn't invested in anything. but if you're saving it in the normal way (i.e. put it in your bank account), it doesn't leave the circle, because the bank now has more deposits that it can use to create new loans that enter the economy. > wouldn't we see a decline in consumer spending considering that the u.s. have been consuming more than they produce since the '70s, that wouldn't be a bad thing."
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5vxmkw | what is the reasoning behind repealing the nutritional standards for school lunches? | I recently saw that the US House of Representatives considering repealing the nutritional requirements for school lunches. It looks to be called the "No Hungry Kids Act" (part of H.R. 610). & nbsp; Can anyone tell me how this would be beneficial to anyone? I'm genuinely curious if there's a good reason to repeal these requirements because off the top of my head, it seems like a pretty bad move. & nbsp; [Link to the bill]( URL_0 ) | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Schools ended up losing a lot of revenue because kids didn't like the new food options. It also doesn't take into account size. So for example, if you're a 225 pound senior football player you don't want a school lunch designed to be healthy and satisfying for a 100 pound freshman female. Many people want to allow the school districts and their school board/community to determine the type of school lunches that are served rather than have it come from the federal government. But, the federal government tied school funding to enabling their standards so they are forced to comply or lose federal funding. The idea would be to not take away federal funding if a school district wants to create their own lunch program that works better for their community.",
"This seems to be a common misunderstanding of conservative principles. Often when conservatives argue against regulations like these, it isnt that they dont agree with the spirit of it, in this case kids eating healthy. Its that they oppose the federal government micromanaging decisions that are not its job to make under the constitution. Why cant state or local governments decide on nutritional standards just as easily? States are the ones in charge of running schools.",
"Kids weren't eating the food that met the new nutritional standards -- a lot of it was going into the trash. And, kids were packing their own food from home that was even less healthy than what schools were serving before the new standards. Kids were posting pictures all over twitter of the gross food that they were being served to meet those standards and there was a big backlash over federal meddling in the contents of school lunches.",
"It's also important to note that in my previous 225 pound football player vs the 100 pound female... many kids are on free or reduced lunch and the school lunch program is their only source for lunch. If you give a big athlete a lunch designed for a 100 pound female he is going to get hungry/tired during the day and not be able to focus or pay attention as well during class. Many kids simply need more food and more calories and many of the federal lunch program lunches are super small.",
"It's cheaper? That seems to be a valid reason in some people's mind"
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5vxqam | Why will my phone's autocorrect suddenly replace real, properly spelled words with some other word? | Shouldn't they just correct mistakes? How does it determine what to change? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Based on the context of your typing, the autocorrect thinks that you're supposed to say something else - a word that probably most users say in that context.",
"In that scenario it's being predictive - Basically, if I type out \"Let's go to the\" and then type \"male\", it's more likely based on either a phrase list and/or a massive amount of compiled analytics on text usage that I actually meant \"mall\", even though \"male\" is a correctly spelled word."
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5vxrvv | Why is seemingly every TV's volume unbearably loud at like 30/100? What is the last 70% for? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"many people have many needs. not every TV is placed in a bedroom or a living room. most are, but people have different uses for TVs. a bar, a school, small auditorium, office etc where they'd need for it to be louder"
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5vxzpe | The Cloudflare incident and what I, a consumer, need to do about it. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Cloudflare is a company that provides a service to websites that help improve security and performance for those sites. A big service they provide is DDOS protection. They act as a proxy between the user and the website servers, so a lot of data passes through Cloudflare. Cloudflare had a bug that allowed for certain HTML data to cause Cloudflare to leak sensitive information about the web site. This information could allow information such as passwords to be leaked to a hacker. Users should try to change their passwords on any site that uses Cloudflare and look out for emails from websites warning them to change passwords.",
"Repost from another thread about the bug: ## Quick overview of the bug itself Let's imagine I operate a website that uses one of cloudflare's affected services. You request a webpage from my website. Cloudflare grabs the page from my servers, does its magic on it, and sends you the actual page contents. Now, imagine there's another page that also uses those cloudflare services, and the code for that other page is broken in some very specific ways. Somebody else requests a page for that site, and, when cloudflare tries to apply its magic to the broken page, it fails. The problem is, the cloudflare service needs some memory to work with to do its magic. Sometimes, the memory that it used to do magic on my page when it's serving your request gets reused when trying to handle the broken page. When the bug gets triggered, it doesn't actually put the right things in that memory, so the memory still contains the stuff that was used on your request. Then the service sends the contents of that memory to the second guy, as if everything had gone right. Result: The guy requesting stuff from the broken page gets data that was meant for you. Cases have been found in the wild where this \"data\" included passwords, authentication tokens, private messages, and more. When I say \"the guy requesting stuff from the broken page\" that actually includes google, bing, duckduckgo, and other search engines that have crawlers exploring the web repeatedly. As a result, some of those secrets ended up in search results, visible to the whole world. At least Google has since purged as many of those as it could find, I can only assume others have too, but it's unsafe to assume all those things are gone. The issue has also been around since mid-late 2016, as I understand it. ## What it means for you If you're a user of any affected cloudflare-using website, your credentials might've been compromised. Some fine folks are collating a [list of affected websites]( URL_0 ), you might want to force logout and change passwords on all of those."
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5vy2tb | Are animals able to distinguish their own siblings if they grew up together, got separated (i.e. zoo or adoption), and if they're reunited in adulthood? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"My dog lived for her first 6 months with her sister who she was identical to. They were very fond of each other. We had other dogs and plenty of mirrors but when we adopted her she would sometimes catch sight of herself in the mirror and immediately drop her ears and start wagging her tail the way she does when she greets dogs and people she likes. When she realised it was the mirror she would just sit and stare in to it and I am sure she saw her sister in her own reflection and missed and mourned her. We arranged for them to meet about eight months later and she recognised her.",
"I know that cats will not. Siblings who have been separated for any extended period of time treat each other as rivals.",
"My dog was separated since he was ~2 months old and it's been 7 years since he last saw his siblings. The other day my gf was out with him and stumbled upon another owner with the same breed. They started talking and it turned out that the dogs were siblings. All My gf had to say about the reaction was that our dog was very playful with his brother and didn't get jealous when My gf went to pet the other dog. Usually when he sees other dogs he gets a little aggressive and assertive and he is also very jealous so I don't know perhaps, but then again it could also be that he just happened to like this dog which is about 1/25 dogs he walks by.",
"Do a Google search for reunited elephants. There was a great story about a pair of elephants who were reunited after years apart. They clearly knew each other.",
"My Border Collie met her sister after several months. No indication beyond being another dog to play with.",
"For dogs, I'm fairly certain they don't recognize each other as siblings, and I don't think that's anything that matters to them anyway... but they definitely recognize the familiarity if you've brought the siblings around each other. I know if a female dog is in heat, her brother will mount her just the same, but I don't think that's what you're asking right? I think is more the familiarity/family bond?",
"I know there are some breeds of rats that are able to distinguish their relatives based on their smell.",
"I had 2 cats for a while and one got locked outside accidentally and essentially ran away for a few days. when I found him and got him home, my other cat acted like he was a strange cat for a day or so. So maybe she didn't recognize him... or maybe she was just hoping she was rid of him... who knows... cats!",
"My dog and his brother see each other about once every six months. They were both raised at our home, and separated at 10 weeks. When they see each other, they immediately go side by side like chariot horses and will do everything together. They stick next to each other like glue even on hikes. They do not seem to recognize their sister from the same litter.",
"I know that Elephants know and I know that allot of species of bird find back the same mates every breeding season. And I know that Horses and cows and dogs don't know. Hyenas know who the pups of the alpha female are, and these pups have a higher rank in their group than other pups. And these pups will become the new alpha females like a royal blood line. It must be relevant to their survival or else this trait would not be copied successfully into future generations. So this would most likely occur in more intelligent creatures that live in family groups. Humans however do not conclude that they are family by smell or behaviour clues, but they have language, genetic testing and pictures etc. So even if we conclude that elephants remain to know their relatives, we cannot know for sure what tips them off.",
"[Here's a great video about two elephants reunited after 20 years apart.]( URL_0 ) Keep watching. The reunion takes place toward the end, but it's definitely worth watching from the beginning. You won't be disappointed.",
"I think it depends on how young they were when they were separated and how long they were separated for. We got my old dog when she was 2 months old and when she was about 1 year old we ran into her sister at a park. They played nicely together but they clearly did not recognize each other."
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5vyb95 | what exactly is that "new car smell" and why can't it be duplicated? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They're various types of petroleum-based solvent used in plastics and vinyls on the inside of the car. For a while they give off a gas that you can smell. It could be duplicated but it shouldn't be, because it's basically huffing glue. Nothing to worry about in tiny doses but not something you should be actively seeking.",
"Out-gassing of the materials used in the manufacturing of car. Plastics are breathing. Also, nobody has spilled anything in it yet.",
"You can get air freshener scents in new car. I don't know if it's as bad chemically as the source of the original odor. URL_0"
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5vybi4 | Why are the titles for movies and such are different outside the US? | Aside from copyright being the obvious reason, why are the titles for movies and such different outside of the US? Such as Zootopia being called Zootropolis in the UK and Crazy Animal City in China, or Where's Waldo being called Where's Wally outside the US. Along with adding to the title like The Peanuts Movie being call Snoopy & Charlie Brown: The Peanuts Movie in the UK. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Disney said they released *Zootopia* in the UK as *Zootropolis* in order to give the movie \"a unique title that works for UK audiences,\" which isn't really much of a reason. However, it may have something to do with a zoo being built in Denmark called \"Zootopia\": it's not opened yet, but it seems they have registered \"Zootopia\" as a trademark in some European countries, including the UK, for the purposes of selling merchandise, and so Disney thought it wise to avoid a possible trademark dispute. As for *Crazy Animal City*, my guess is that this is a word-for-word translation of the Chinese title. The Chinese language doesn't make it easy to invent new words, and the best you can usually do is to put two or three existing words together in new ways. *Where's Wally?* was actually the original title for that series of books -- it's from Britain. Wally, short for Wallace, is not a common name, but also not unheard of; it's also, in British English, a playful word for somebody who's a bit of an idiot, but not really an insult. His name was localised in many other countries (he's Holger in Denmark, Charlie in France and Efi in Israel, for example), and it seems the American publishers decided that \"Waldo\" had a similar slightly comical ring to it as \"Wally\" did for British readers. There are many reasons titles can be changed: cultural issues, trademark disputes (seldom copyright, though, since titles aren't subject to copyright law), confusion with other similarly-named things. The American movie *Neighbors* was released in other English-speaking countries as *Bad Neighbours* to avoid confusion with a long-running Australian soap opera called *Neighbours*, which had been a big hit in the UK as well. *Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone* was published in the US as *...and the Sorcerer's Stone* because the publishers thought that American children would find the original title too boring. An interesting case was a track by the Monkees, inspired by their visit to Britain, originally called *Randy Scouse Git* -- a phrase they'd heard on a TV show when they were there. That phrase, though, is British slang for \"horny jerk from Liverpool\", so when the single was released in the UK (in 1967), they were told they would have to use an alternate title -- and so it was released there as *Alternate Title*. There's also a rare case of a change of title that actually improved on the original. The movie *The Internship*, a comedy about a couple of inept interns at Google, when translated into German, was given the title * URL_0 * -- a pun on the German word \"Praktikum\", which means \"apprenticeship\".",
"sometimes, culture has to do with it. WWE has an event called Elimination Chamber. it's not called that in Germany for obvious reasons. it's called No Escape"
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5vycg0 | why are some people so freakin passionate about politics ? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It is extremely important to the lives of many people. It can literally be a matter of life and death."
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5vyhc0 | How can you calculate a day for a planet if it is tidally locked? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If a planet is tidally locked, then it always faces the sun with the same face. So if you define a day as the amount of time it takes the planet to make one rotation about its axis, it would be equal to its year. If you define a day as the time between one sunup and the next, it doesn't have them.",
"There are two kinds of days: * sidereal - the amount of time it takes for the planet to rotate 360^o * solar - the amount of time from solar noon one day to solar noon the next For a tidally locked planet, the sidereal day is equal to its year. The solar day is infinite.",
"A day is the time it takes for a planet to spin around its axis. An object is tidally locked when the rate it spins about its axis is the same as the rate which it orbits around the parent object. So for a planet 1 day would be 1 year when it is tidally locked. & nbsp; You could use a different definition based on time as well."
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5vyhzs | "Cloudflare Reverse Proxies are Dumping Uninitialized Memory" effects on normal, every day Internet users | Web security gurus, please explain: URL_0 | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"## Quick overview of the bug itself Let's imagine I operate a website that uses one of cloudflare's affected services. You request a webpage from my website. Cloudflare grabs the page from my servers, does its magic on it, and sends you the actual page contents. Now, imagine there's another page that also uses those cloudflare services, and the code for that other page is broken in some very specific ways. Somebody else requests a page for that site, and, when cloudflare tries to apply its magic to the broken page, it fails. The problem is, the cloudflare service needs some memory to work with to do its magic. Sometimes, the memory that it used to do magic on my page when it's serving your request gets reused when trying to handle the broken page. When the bug gets triggered, it doesn't actually put the right things in that memory, so the memory still contains the stuff that was used on your request. Then the service sends the contents of that memory to the second guy, as if everything had gone right. Result: The guy requesting stuff from the broken page gets data that was meant for you. Cases have been found in the wild where this \"data\" included passwords, authentication tokens, private messages, and more. When I say \"the guy requesting stuff from the broken page\" that actually includes google, bing, duckduckgo, and other search engines that have crawlers exploring the web repeatedly. As a result, some of those secrets ended up in search results, visible to the whole world. At least Google has since purged as many of those as it could find, I can only assume others have too, but it's unsafe to assume all those things are gone. The issue has also been around since mid-late 2016, as I understand it. ## What it means for you If you're a user of any affected cloudflare-using website, your credentials might've been compromised. Some fine folks are collating a [list of affected websites]( URL_0 ), you might want to force logout and change passwords on all of those."
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5vyj3p | The difference between RFID and NFC | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"NFC stands for \"near field communication\" and basically uses a passive magnefic coil on the physical application end of things. Your phone can use induction to get information from the NFC coil. Basically it involves two magnetic coils getting close enough to each other that they can send information to each other. RFID stands for \"radio frequency identification\" and uses radio waves to transmit information. A passive RFID tag would use energy from the radio wave to power itself while an active tag would have a power supply of some sort. Basically it uses radio waves to get information from programmed tags or devices. It doesn't need to be very close to the object either."
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5vyk5t | how do parasites ingested orally survive the digestion process? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Usually they come in as eggs, protected in an acid-resistant \"shell\" that doesn't open until the exterior conditions are less agressive. Then the hatchling latches onto the walls of the lower digestive system and does its thing. If you were a real weirdo and ate an adult tapeworm it wouldn't survive."
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5vyk9h | How does the Monte-Carlo method work? | Mathematics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Let's say you have a white piece of paper and a black marker, and you color some areas of the paper black. You ask me to figure out what fraction of the paper is colored black. Let's say I already know the area of the paper and that this doesn't change. One way to figure this out would be to precisely measure, using geometric techniques, the area of the black regions. But, this may be very difficult if the shapes you drew aren't nice. For example, if you drew a bunch of perfect circles, that's not too hard to figure out, but if you scribbled a bunch, that's a lot harder to do. Monte Carlo methods are a family of techniques to estimate unknown quantities using randomness. I can estimate the proportion of the paper you colored by throwing a bunch of darts at it and counting the ratio of darts that landed on black points to the total number I threw. The estimate becomes more precise as I throw more darts, and as long as my darts are hitting points on the paper truly randomly, I can confidently estimate to arbitrary precision by throwing enough darts."
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5vykxr | why do bats hang upside down. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Hanging from the ceiling provides a more optimal position to escape harm should a predator or some other danger come along, as they can simply drop and spread their wings to be airborne instead of needing time to take off from the ground. Also, the ceiling of a cave is less likely to encounter predators than the floor, so sleeping while hanging from the ceiling keeps them safer.",
"Interesting fact about bats: their feet being closed is the \"resting state\" for the feet, meaning the bat doesn't have to exert any energy to keep itself from falling."
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5vyv59 | How big of a role do "big-label" producers like The Chainsmokers have in the production of their music? Do they singlehandedly produce everything by themselves or do they use outside sources? If so, how big of a team do they have working for them? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They make most, if not all of their song by themselves. They have record labels such as Sony Music and Columbia Records but the actual music is made by them. URL_0 Here's a video of them making Roses."
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5vyvbc | Why is it called alcoholics anonymous if every meeting starts by introducing yourself? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"All they share is there first/given name, and no one even verifies that. No last/family names are given, no roll call is taken, etc. To further provide anonymity you promise, verbally or implied by attendance, that nothing said while at a meeting will leave the meeting. The point of not giving last/family names is that even if someone did want to share, all they have is \"Some dude named therap321 said...\" The point of introducing yourself is to make the group feel inclusive. While you are there \"anonymously\", knowing each other's names and situation gives a sense of belonging.",
"The idea is that your attendance at the meeting is anonymous, that is, those at the meeting will keep the information of other attendees anonymous. This way, attendees can be free to talk about information without worry that anything they say, including their attendance, will not be known by anyone outside the meeting. This way, a powerful Senator can feel safe to attend an AA meeting, without his attendance being leaked to the public. If his attendance was known, it would hurt his career and social life, discouraging future attendance and preventing him from effectively treating his alcoholism.",
"The anonymity refers to there being no \"face\" of AA aside from the founders Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob who are now dead as well as the protection you have from having your attendance at meetings revealed to the outside world. You'll hear people use their first and last names in meetings sometimes to acknowledge that they do not feel the need to hide their identity from their recovering alcoholic peers. The general code of behavior by honor system is that what is said in a meeting stays in that meeting, and AA does not share its members names with any outside organization. Although these rules are still adhered to, the \"anonymous\" idea was much more important in the 1930s when alcoholism was heavily stigmatized and considered an issue of poor willpower or bad character. Hope that helps, feel free to ask any questions.",
"All the answers below are correct, but I thought I would expand on it. At our meetings, the chair always begins with a few words about anonymity. It's usually the following: anonymity serves two different yet equally vital functions: • At the personal level, anonymity provides protection for all members from identification as alcoholics, a safeguard often of special importance to newcomers. • At the public level of press, radio, TV, films and other media technologies such as the Internet, anonymity stresses the equality in the Fellowship of all members by putting the brake on those who might otherwise exploit their A.A. affiliation to achieve recognition, power, or personal gain. It should be clear from all this that my first name is not actually Frank.",
"Lots of good answers, but I don't think anyone really hit the key. The \"Anonymous\" part of AA doesn't necessarily refer to being anonymous within the meeting, it's about being anonymous outside. Out and around you don't acknowledge people you see in meetings, unless you're already friends. In fact, there are code words to scope out if you're talking to someone that's in AA. Do you know Bill? **It's about a secret understanding. For many people, they could lose their jobs, they could lose family, etc if people knew about their alcoholism. AA is about being a safe place that no one *else* will know about.**",
"It's supposed to be a place you are safe to talk about your addiction that won't affect your life outside of AA. You don't disclose the names of anyone else in AA, and you don't tell people what was said by others at meetings. You respect and protect each other's anonymity.",
"Yeah, some people say their first and last names. Some use their first only. Some give fake names. I've was a groomsmen in an AA friend's wedding, and I didn't know his last name until I saw it on the program.",
"I also want to add that when introducing yourself as an alcoholic, it's taking ownership and recognition of your disease. They say the first step is admitting you have a problem, the actual first step is We admitted we were powerless over alcohol–that our lives had become unmanageable. Whether you choose to do the steps or not, taking the first one is crucial to the recovery process. For this reason it's important that you aren't just a regular person at a meeting, you are a person with a crippling disease and are there for self help.",
"You do not have to speak up, introduce yourself, raise your hand, stay for the full meeting, read aloud, or even pay attention. There are no rules except don't show up drunk/high and don't cause problems/be disruptive. I've seen guys with their eyes closed for entire meetings. Not sure if they were sleeping or just listening. Any and all participation is 100% voluntary. No signups, no fees demanded. I have a lot of issues with AA, but the anonymity and non-compliance nature is really cool.",
"Anonymous to outsiders. You don't point to someone in public and say \"haven't seen you at the AA meeting lately!\"",
"Usually it's something like, \"Hi, my name is Bob.\" and it's not like they check for ID or anything. You don't have to sign up, or pay, or give any real details. You just have to show up.",
"Great answers and wanted to add what I've learned from being in AA for the past 2 years. Tradition Twelve states that “Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our traditions, ever reminding us to place principles before personalities.” So anyone who walks into an AA meeting is the same, regardless of age, gender, income, race. We are there for 1 purpose. We check ourselves at the door.",
"It used to be called Alcoholics Synonymous and people would start the meetings by saying \"Hi i'm bob and i'm an alcoholic......a drunk....a lush...a boozehound....an alkie....\"",
"I wanted to add a little bit to what has already been said about anonymity. Not only does it establish an anonymous facet to individuals to protect their identity while being a part of the program, but also encompasses the spiritual principal of selflessness. Like helping other alcoholics with their problems. You can apply anonymity here in a way many don't realise. Basically you're helping someone with the intent to actually help them, not with the intent of having an attitude such as \"I'm u/mdiddyoien and I helped so and so get sober and they have been sober for X amount of time. Look at how great I am.\" By taking yourself out of the equation with the sole intent to help others you are applying the spirituality of anonymity. Same applies with being of service within the program such as making coffee let's say. You're not doing it to make yourself look good or identify yourself as \"u/mdiddyoien the guy who makes coffee\", you do it to help the program as a whole. This goes higher up the ladder as you get into service tiers on the local and regional levels. Anonymity is applied here both on the level of spirituality and in the general sense that has been discussed by first name last initial. This is so (using random names and hypothetical situations here) Dave K. who has been sober for 15 years and is the secretary at regional committees, and Phil W. Who just walked in with 1 day sober and needs help are both on equal level - recovering alcoholics. Also just to note, my experience is first hand from attending Narcotics Anonymous (8+ years clean) so the verbiage might sound different to someone experienced in Alcoholics Anonymous but I feel like the meaning is the same. TLDR; being anonymous isn't only about being safe within a meeting, but it's also a principal you can apply to be more selfless.",
"So a couple of structural and historical notes about AA that are pertinent to the question: AA relies on something known as the [disease theory of alcoholism]( URL_1 ). Basically, it says that alcoholism is a permanent condition, that cannot be cured, only managed. While the idea of alcoholism as a disease is amply supported by medical science (it is accepted by the AMA as both a medical and psychological condition), the concept of the 'incurable disease' began in the 1920s and 1930s, and is essentially a holdover from the temperance movement. There have been additions since, but it is in substance no different from when it was first proposed during the years after WWI. As such, this viewpoint is controversial, both because it denies the possibility of a cure (which offends many medical professionals and researchers), and because it denies the possibility of free will (which offends the more religiously-inclined). It is made more controversial by the closely-related [12-step program]( URL_0 ), which requires 'submission to a higher power' as a step. Specifically, the higher power is the Christian God (for most programs; others do exist that are more relaxed on this point). This is problematic both because it pushes a specific religion and because it conflates religion and disease. On a purely cultural level, the origins of the 'anonymous' movement (AA, NA, etc) lie in [evangelical Christian prayer meetings]( URL_2 ). The referring to participants by first name, the welcoming tone, the focus on spirituality, prayer, and support are all aspects that share much with the worship services of groups such as the Quakers (who were famously pro-temperance for centuries). And even those Anonymous groups who have abandoned the more overt trappings of organized religion are still necessarily influenced by it, because they are now organized in direct reaction to it. Note: lest I be confused with a critic of AA, I am not. I'm purely noting that it has a complex history, which still influences the structure and nature of meetings today.",
"When I went to my first AA meeting there was another guy there (that I barely knew) that I worked with. We exchanged a simple nod and that was the end of it. I think it's just the understanding of the stigma of being an alcoholic. It's a drug like cocain or heroin. In that nod, we immediately understood each other.",
"Lots of good answers. One key point no one has mentioned is that the founders specifically didn't want anyone to be the public face of AA. At the time, there are other groups also focused on abstaining from drinking. Teetotalers, religious groups, etc. Some of them were very preachy and had very public leaders pushing their ideas. If a public figure in one of those groups had a subsequent relapse and was seen drunk, it completely undermined the credibility of that group. It would potentially even discourage others struggling with alcohol from trying to recover by joining that group. AA Didn't want to risk the integrity and viability of the entire organization on one person's level of success. So they made a founding principle that every member maintained anonymity at the level of public media, meaning press, radio, TV, film etc. They also absolutely didn't want a single strong personality to be the \"owner\" of their organization. They relied heavily on the concept of a \"group conscience\", and if one public figure came forward as the leader, that person could then try to redefine the entire organization according to that one person's vision and opinions. The alternative to that sole leader concept is the big book and the founding principles (all jointly authored and revised many times), and that content is universal. But every meeting is really its own self-contained unit, and can be run wildly differently from another meeting. Which is why meetings in one state or city might look nothing like meetings in another state or city. It's all defined by the group conscience. Which basically means whoever is actually coming to the meeting gets to vote on changes and define their own format.",
"I want to add that the anonymous also mean that you can be a doctor, lawyer, carpenter ,candlestick maker or cook. Age , race, sex, creed , religion or lack of . It's not who you ( the anonymous part) are but what you want to do about your problem and how can we help.",
"Because what you hear and who you see at a meeting stays at the meeting, it's one of the understandings of the AA community. Everyone comes as they are, everyone who attends attends because they want to stop the damage that alcohol or drugs is doing to them, there's no place for ego's at AA."
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5vywsu | What exactly would happen should a nuclear missile be detonated? | Whenever I hear or read about nuclear bombs, I just picture a scene from fallout or that cutaway from spongebomb with the huge mushroom-cloud in the ocean. Aside from vaporizing whatever it hits, what exactly are it's other effects? What does it do to surrounding areas, and the atmosphere, and places on the other side of the world, etc? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> What does it do to surrounding areas A massive blast wave slams into the surrounding area mowing things down just like a truck or a regular explosion would, until the force of the wave dissipates. > and the atmosphere, Initially, the atmosphere gets pushed away. Far away creating a vacuum. Think about dropping a tennis ball in a puddle. Waves of the air rush away from the blast area, and then shortly after there's a massive rush of the atmosphere returning to the vacuum resulting in a second blast wave going the other way. > and places on the other side of the world Pretty much nothing. In fact if you detonated a 100Mt nuke, it would would only have an immediate effect of 3rd degree burns up to 74 kilometers away. But if you were in a different time zone, initially it might feel like a bit of wind. When you include fallout, however, what occurs will be radioactive material being dusted all over. The bigger the blast, the more dust, the more wind, the further the dust goes. For the most part as long as you're a time zone away, you have nothing to worry about. But based on the natural wind cycle of the world, it is possible this dust could reach past several time zones. Reaching half way across the world is not likely though. In a real situation though. If the USA launched a nuclear weapon and detonated it over Russia, the USA nuke would have zero effect on the US. However, it's all the nukes that Russia retaliates with that would have an affect on USA. The nuclear bomb, a single nuclear bomb, isn't the world ending monster that people think it is. It's the fact that there's thousands of them and combined they have the power to irradiate the planet.",
"They also leave radioactive material behind. However, if detonated in the air (such as the two used in WWII), the radiation disperses fairly quickly. But if detonated at ground level ~~(the so-called dirty bomb)~~, the radiation can mix with dirt and cause it to linger longer. Edit: Wrong term, but there rest remains the same.",
"There are three basic mechanisms of injury for the bomb. The first is the concussive blast itself. This is what creates big mushroom cloud you see. It sends out a huge shockwave that blows everything apart for kilometers around. The second effect is heat. It's like when you open a hot oven and get a blast of hot air in your face. Except this time the temperature is so hot that buildings catch fire. The last effect is radiation. Particles go zipping through people's bodies, damaging their cells and DNA in the process. They might not become ill right away, but they will be. That's kind of it for the immediate area. Otherwise the big concern is that the plume of explodey dust is full of radioactive particles, and these particles will be carried about by the wind and cause illnesses and long-term health problems far from the blast site."
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5vz4sg | How does McDonald's sell 10 chicken nuggets for $4.49, and still sell 20 for $5.00? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The 20-pack is the regular price and the 10-pack is inflated, they don't want to sell you a 10-pack for 2.50.",
"A prime example is at the movie theaters: Small popcorn: $5.00 Medium Popcorn: $8.50 Large Popcorn: $9.00 you feel like you're getting a bargain by buying the large vs the medium when its only a 50c difference.",
"Its a method to discourage you from buying that item by offering two alternatives: add a fries and drink for $1-2 more, or add more nuggets for another $0.50. For those who choose neither, or are using a coupon on the single item, oh well. It's a variation on a common marketing trick. Offer an unappealing item next to a handful of more appealing items.",
"An answer I haven't seen below (sorry if I missed it!) is that the actual cost of the ingredients is an almost insignificant part of the cost to McD in providing you with that box of \"food\". I don't actually have figures, but the ingredients probably cost pennies, while the wages of the server, the cost of heating / cleaning / renting space for the outlet, the cost of running the fryer, the air conditioning / ventilation, insurance, etc all cost the same whether they sell you a box of 10 or a box of 20, and surely outweigh the cost of the ingredients. The profit margin probably isn't anywhere near as different as you might imagine, given the odd prices. That and all the other reasons people correctly pointed out :-P I've heard (no source for this) that giving you a cup *for* soda costs them more than filling it *with* soda. Remember what you're buying isn't the ingredients, but the convenience of having them provided to you in their \"ready to consume\" form at a time of your choosing. The same is true of all retail...",
"As others have said, it's just forced inflation to make the customer think they got a good deal. I used to work at McDonald's ~5 years ago and they put up a sign to discourage employees from wasting food that stated the price it cost McDonald's for each item that was wasted. I case you were wondering each nugget only costs them $0.06. So no matter the price they are still profiting heavily.",
"Burger King is the opposite. $1.49 for 10, $4.99 for 20. I asked the cashier does anyone order 20 instead of two 10's? She said, \"You'd be surprised.\"",
"The expensive part is getting you into the restaurant in the first place instead of any one of many alternatives. Once you're there buying food, anything they can do to get you to spend a little more is profit. The extra 10 nuggets probably cost 45 cents. That's a nickel they bank on each upsize. Times a million orders worldwide a day, it adds up.",
"Aside from the marketing aspect of pricing thing to where they give the best sales and profit numbers.... They can price them the same because they cost the company similar amounts. Very little of the cost for < 20 nuggets is the actual food. Most of it is processing, packing, freezing, transporting while frozen, warehousing, transporting again, storing, cooking, repacking for retail, and wrapping it up for the customer. The cost for the other tasks is much higher than the cost of the food. Since the work is the same, the costs should be similar. Why people buy the 10 instead of 20 when they're roughly the same price, or why people eat McChicken at all, are more difficult philosophy questions.",
"Double your order for 50 cents, or get a small pop, people go for that?",
"I went to McDonalds last year to get nuggets. It was $4.99 for a 20 piece and $5.00 for 10. I expected them to try and explain why Chewbacca lives on Endor next.",
"The marketing thing makes sense where you think you're getting a good deal, but as a Canadian that just raises my next question: Why are nuggets so expensive in Canada? Our 6 piece is like $4.49, 6 piece meal $6.49, but then our 10 piece is almost double that. A 20 piece is like $15 no joke.",
"What matters to McDonalds is not how much it costs to produce these things, but instead how much you're willing to pay for them. They must've found that 10 is a pretty good number for most people and people think it's worth slightly under $5 for that amount of food. The same research would have shown that 20 is way more than what most people want, so people won't pay double or even 50% more for 20. So they made it basically the same price rather than lose the rare \"lots of chicken\" customers to their competitors or to grocery stores or something. As long as they can turn more of a profit by getting you to buy the item than if you didn't buy the item, they don't care what the exact markup or if it scales nicely with their other prices."
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5vz5dg | What happens to people who have been falsely accused of a crime and spent +10 years in jail? | I have been reading old news articles about people who were accused of crimes they did not do but I never see what happens to them after they're released. For example, if X accused Y of a crime and Y was sent to jail, spent time there then everyone found out X lied, does something happen to X? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It depends on which jurisdiction imprisoned them. In Texas, you get $80,000 for each year spent in prison, financial counseling, and tuition assistance. Under federal law, you can get up to $50,000 per year or $100,000 per year if you were on death row. Some states don't give you anything."
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5vz9fn | How are some substances like Fentanyl and Cyanide so dangerous even in really small amounts? | I heard about something called VFX(?) on the radio and how a salt grain sized amount could kill you. How does something so small affect the body in such a drastic manner? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Ok, so there are a few things mixed up here and I'm going to try to sort it out. Fentanyl is a pharmaceutical, a drug, in the same class as morphine, opium, and heroin. It's a synthetic version of that family of compounds, and it's *very* *very* strong. It's not toxic per se, but outside of its original intended use in a clinical setting, it can be very dangerous. Opiates lower your brains ability to regulate its own breathing, and the dose an addict wants to get high, and the dose that kills them, is *so very close*. That's why fentanyl is dangerous. Cyanide is a poison, which can take many forms (salts, gas, liquid, etc), but always has the same essential mode of action. In your blood, your erythrocytes (red blood cells) carry oxygen around your body using an iron-bearing molecule called Hemoglobin. Cyanide binds to that *very* strongly and won't move, and when it's bound to your cells, you can't carry oxygen. As a result you asphyxiate (your tissues die from lack of oxygen). Cyanide was used by the Nazis in the form of Zyclon-B in the gas chambers, and used in judicial executions in the US gas chambers as well. \"VFX\" means Visual Effects, but what you probably heard was \"VX\" which is a nerve agent, like Sarin, Soman, and Tabun, commonly referred to as \"Nerve Gas\", although in its normal state it's an oily liquid. It's one of the most, if not the most dangerous substances humans have ever created, and it exists with the sole purpose to kill people (although anything with nerves is in trouble). I believe you heard about this because of the North Korean Kim Jong-Nam who was assassinated using this chemical agent, in Malaysia. URL_0 In your body, your nerves communicate by releasing chemicals called neurotransmitters. Other nerves have bodies which receive them, and when enough are received it trigger that nerve's firing, and subsequent release of more neurotransmitters. Cascades of these actions allow us to move, breath, our heart to beat, and all of the other necessary elements of our lives. One of the key molecules involved in the classes of muscles central to our breathing, digestion, and more is Acetylcholinesterase or \"AChE\". This is an enzyme, which breaks up Acetylcholine. Without it, ACh would build up and your nerves would be unable to fire. VX blocks that enzyme, causing the synaptic cleft (space between your nerve cells) to flood with ACh. As a result the signals your brains sends to critical organs like your diaphragm (which lets you breath) no longer get through. You salivate, you tear, you urinate and defecate, and you have terrible bowel distress. Most critically though, you stop breathing and die... the symptoms I listed are just the side effects of the central killing mechanism."
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5vzc9e | Why is there so much footage of nuclear bomb tests, etc. from years ago, but no recent or modern footage now? Has the world stopped testing or is it just now made public? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Most testing moved underground, literally. Specially constructed facilities that sort of resembled bomb shelters, but in reverse, and deep underground. The footage from those is sort of a \"dark place, really dark, blindlingly bright, camera destroyed\". The tapes you are talking about were cameras spaced out from \"nearby\" to \"far away\" where the camera might not be destroyed, or at least the camera could get several seconds to a few minutes of footage before being knocked over.",
"The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty bans tests. Over 150 nations have signed this treaty. URL_0",
"There is a test ban treaty that prohibits above-ground testing. This treaty was passed in 1963. Underground testing is still okay. Obviously, regimes like North Korea do not observe the treaty.",
"Some countries have continued testing, India, Pakistan, and North Korea are the most recent that come to my mind. Their tests were done underground. You can't hide a nuclear \"test shot\" on Earth. The seismic effects are telltale and can be measured all over the world."
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5vzgb5 | If someone wipes their hard drive, how do computer forensic people know what they did? | E.g. in the Waymo v. Otto lawsuit, the guy wiped his hard drive. So how did they figure out all the stuff he did? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"there's a few ways. 1. wiping your hard drive doesn't actually wipe the contents. for example, OS's operate in a similar fashion to the dewey decimal system. the OS stores a table of pointers, that point to where the actual data resides. if you wipe this table, all the data is still there, but it can be freely overwritten at any time. 2. if you actually over write the data stored. due to the propeties of magnetism and such, even if you overwrite a location, you can still guess the data that was there because of lingering magnetic fields.",
"For most operating systems, deleting files actually does not remove them from the hard drive. When you delete the file, the first character of the file name is replaced with the \"~\" character. This hides the file from the directory structure. Much like erasing a building on a street map does not remove the building. More advanced removal involves writing a pattern of characters over the \"blank,\" area of the hard drive. Even this process is not a full proof method of deletion, because advanced low level recovery can read the slight differences in the layer of magnetic material of the platter (think of it as a CD but magnetic like a tape.) The second method is costly and often incomplete but can recover significant amounts of data. The last method is retrieving data from Off-site storage. Many programs provide cloud based storage. Occasionally people will think they have removed a file but there is a remotely stored copy."
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5vzhgz | how do traffic lights know when to change? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It depends on the lights. There are a wide variety of control mechanisms for traffic lights, so I'll try to break them down and list their pros and cons, and where they're more commonly used. I should clarify that my experience of traffic systems is UK based, and while much of this is international, regional differences will exist. First off, I'm going to explain some common terms, which will make this conversation easier. To do so, I'm going to take a sample junction in London, which is a simple crossroads with a \"scramble\" style pedestrian crossing. Stages are they different steps a set of lights can go through. This junction has three stages, 1-3, plus an \"all red\" stage, 0. The traffic light controller can send the junction to any of these stages. Phases are individual traffic movements. In the above example, you have phase A for the traffic coming from the South arm of the junction, B for the North, C for the West, D for the East. E is the standard pedestrian crossings, and phase F denotes the diagonal \"scramble\" movements. Phase G is used to refer to the all red stage, although really there are no phases active at all. Intergreen times are the time gaps between two stages. For example, when you go from stage 3 to stage 1, you have to wait for the lights to go amber, then red, then amber again before the lights on A and B are green, and the stage is considered to have started. I'm mainly mentioning this because it's important to remember that the timings below include their intergreen times as well. So, the different forms of control. Fixed Time: This is the simplest form of traffic control. The controller will just go through all the numbered stages, in order, regardless of any other considerations, on a set schedule. On the above sight, for example, it might look something like this: Stage 1 for 30 seconds Stage 2 for 14 seconds Stage 3 for 16 seconds This would cycle every 60 seconds, and keep doing that forever. It's not very efficient, so it's rarely used as a primary control method. It's sometimes used for temporary signals during roadworks, though, or as an emergency fallback if your primary control method fails. Vehicle Activated: Vehicle Activated control is quite common on less frequently used junctions. Essentially, the junction will sit at its \"rest\" state until a detector at the junction detects a vehicle on one of the other arms. In our example above, the site would sit on stage 1 as standard. Then if a vehicle approached on phase D, it would be detected, and the system would change to stage 3 for a while until that vehicle had passed. There's usually a minimum time the site will have to spend back on stage 1 before it could be pulled away again. V.A. works pretty well on sites with low traffic volumes - particularly when one of the arms has very low usage and you don't want to give it time unless it's necessary. It's still pretty inefficient for busy junctions, though. UTC: UTC, or Urban Traffic Control, is how the most important sites in London, and a lot of other cities around the world, are controlled. Every site has a comms connection (usually ADSL these days) to a central control server. This server monitors all the sites, and sends out commands based on the way it wants the site to work. UTC allows a lot of flexibility, but it generally operates on a similar cycle to Fixed Time, except for a few factors. Firstly, stages can be demand dependent. Most pedestrian stages work this way - when someone pushes the wait button, the controller will tell the central server a demand has been placed. Then, when the pedestrian stage's time comes up, it will be instructed to call it. If there's no demand, it will stay on the old stage, avoiding unnecessary calls to stages that aren't needed. Secondly, the timing of the cycles can be varied. This is usually done based on the time of day, to give important trunk roads more time during peak hours. At midnight, for example, the cycle time of our junction might be 42 seconds. This is very short, and means that the side roads and the pedestrian stage gets a lot of the time, but means shorter waits for each stage. at 8:30 am, though, the cycle time might be 72 seconds. That extra time will go almost entirely on the main North-South road, allowing it to get that busy commuter traffic through. The side road and the pedestrians will have a longer wait, but it's more efficient in terms of getting large volumes of traffic through the junction. SCOOT: This isn't really a separate form of control so much as an extra system run on UTC sites. It stands for Split Cycle Offset Optimisation Technique, so called because it optimises the junction based on Split, Cycle time and Offset. It does this based on SCOOT loops, detectors placed in the road that measure how much traffic is coming into and going out of the junction. The cycle time, as already covered above, is how long it takes for the whole system to cycle through its different stages. the split is the amount of that cycle time associated with each stage. It's used on busy intersections where all the roads could be busy, to identify which arms of the junctions have the biggest queues, and give them the extra time they need to clear traffic there. The offset is only used for sites that are linked in SCOOT corridors. The idea is to link the sites together so that their green lights line up with traffic flow - the so-called Green Wave effect that means that the lights change just as you're getting to each junction. It's very hard to get this right, especially if traffic is moving in both directions, but if you're able to do it it saves a huge amount of wasted time coming to a stop and then starting again. CLF: CLF, or Cableless Link Facility, is the system that UTC sites use when they lose communications with the main server, either because the comms line breaks or because the server isn't responding. It uses estimates of cycle times and splits for the junction based on time of day and day of week - obviously not as effective as live control, but better than nothing."
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5vzih8 | We're increasing our coal production in the U.S. but coal use is lowering in favor of alternate energy. Where's the excess coal going? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A lot of it is going to China and India, then to other countries with emerging economies. Coal is still the cheapest way to create lots of energy on demand.",
"Coal is dug out of the ground a short time before it is used. When the rate of use decreases, they adjust by digging a bit less each day, leaving it in the ground for possible future use."
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5vzq6h | why does rubbing a sore muscle hurt, and then feel better? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Basically, it's the called the gate control theory of pain. Rubbing the painful area causes sensory neurons (known as A-Beta Neurons) to activate a particular neuron (known as an interneuron) which stops activity of another neuron (known as a projection neuron), which is responsible for transmitting the pain sensation to the brain.",
"Depends on whether it's sore from exercise or it's just tight from overuse/lack of stretching. If it's sore from exercise, /u/medstudent2302 's answer is right. If it's tight, pressing on the muscle tissue causes a pain reaction which makes the surrounding muscle fibers tense up automatically to \"protect\" what your body is considering \"damaged\" tissue. However, if you continue to press on this area, eventually those muscle fibers will relax, which also causes the tight muscles to relax, relieving the pain. A similar method is used to get rid of knots, except instead of rubbing/rolling the muscle, you apply constant pressure to the knot for around 60 seconds, until the knot relaxes. Source: was a XC/Track athlete from middle school through college. Lots of leg tightness/knots."
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5vzw0f | How are White House news agencies chosen? | How do news agencies gain access to White House press briefings? Does the White House just choose which news agencies can attend and is only kept in check by public outrage if it kicked an agency like CNN out? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Yes the White House chooses. They control the meeting 100%. They don't have to hold press briefings but they choose to. The staff chooses who can attend."
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5vzw9i | How did " 's " come to mean possession when used at the end of a noun? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In Old English, a suffix of 'es' was the most common way of forming the genitive case of masculine and neuter nouns. As Old English transformed into Middle English and then Modern English, the language simplified, and most of the case endings were dropped and replaced with phrases using prepositions (eg to, by, on etc), However this one remained and was extended to cover all nouns both singular and plural. The pronunciation of this ending also gradually changed so the e was silent, and the habit arose of writing the word with an apostrophe instead of an 'e'.",
"Pretty much all the Germanic languages use \"s\" as an indicator of possession. This likely comes from the extensive case system of Proto-Germanic. The apostrophe s is a remnant of the Genitive case, which can still be found in German."
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5w01c9 | What does 'turtles all the way down' mean scientifically? | I read about the meaning but it was a little too esoteric for me to understand. i get that it poses the question (humoroungsly) that if the crust of the Earth was on the back of a giant turtle, what would hold up the turtle holding up the Earth? And the logical conclusion is that another turtle is holding up the turtle and so forth. Hence it's 'turtles all the way down'. What I don't understand it's significance to cosmology. What does it allude to, if anything? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The ideas is that you introduce something to your proposed explanation that does not actually bring you any closer to explaining things. By claiming that the world rests on the back of a turtle you only move the problem a layer down because you now have to explain what the turtle rests on and an infinite number of turtles is not really a satisfactory explanation. There is in religious philosophy the idea of a prime mover (i.e. God) who certain people argue must exist because all this must have come from somewhere. This makes certain other people ask the obvious question where the prime mover is supposed to have come from then.",
"Turtles all the way down is meant as an allegory to infinite regress. For example: * What created the universe? * The Big Bang. * What created the Big Bang? * God did. * What created God? * The creator of God did. * What created the creator of God? * etc. Infinite regress: [turtles all the way down]( URL_0 )."
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5w01ey | Why do so many people have seafood/shellfish allergies, yet red meat/ poultry allergies are so unheard of? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Most seafood allergies are a reaction to proteins in the fish or other seafood. We have much more in common with poultry and beef than we do with fish. We share a lot of the same proteins so an allergic reaction to one of those would have killed you because you're made of it. So we are more likely to have a reaction to fish than other meat because we have less in common with it so there are more things you could potentially react to. Another factor is cooking. Heating breaks down protein that in its uncooked form could trigger a reaction. You wouldn't consider eating a raw burger or chicken breast but sushi is commonplace. This is also why you hear more red meat allergies than poultry. No one wants undercooked chicken but a rare steak is usually preferred.",
"My daughter is allergic to any mammal meat - beef, pork, lamb. Probably whale too. It's called Alpha-GAL and a person gets it from a tick bite.",
"Shellfish share similar proteins with cockroaches, and these are the proteins that people are allergic to when they have a shellfish allergy (this is also why shrimp are called the cockroaches of the sea). There are theories that people who have been exposed to cockroaches will be more likely to develop shellfish allergies. This explains why there are Jewish people, who have never eaten shellfish, that are allergic to shellfish."
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5w033s | The Bill of Rights | As I read the bill of rights, my 5 year old mind seems to begin to see a pattern where each amendment is intended to restrict the government, and protect individual rights. Yet people tell me the 2nd amendments was meant to give rights to government militias, not individual people. Can someone explain why of all the amendments, some people claim the 2nd does not follow the theme the rest of the amendments in the Bill of Rights seem to be painting? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"As a baseline, consider that the Founders didn't conceive of the Constitution or the Bill of Rights as granting our civil rights; rather, there are fundamental rights that all people are born with by virtue of their humanity. The right to speak your mind, to worship as you wish, to peaceably assemble, to be free from unwarranted government searches. With the Second Amendment, there is a question as to the nature of the right we are born with. Is it *my* right to own any gun I wish? Or is it the *people's* right to collectively protect themselves? The Second Amendment is different from the others: > A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. There isn't generally in the other Amendments an explanation of why the right is being protected, or a clause that arguably conditions the right to a particular type of body. The First Amendment, for instance, says: > Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press Imagine it read: > A professional press being necessary to the operation of a free state, the right of the people to speak freely shall not be infringed If this were the formulation, you might question whether it referred to an inherent individual right to speak freely, or a right held by the people as a group to operate professional news organizations. In *Heller*, the Supreme Court determined for the first time that there was a personal right to gun ownership. That's pretty recent for a fundamental right, so the question hasn't really been fully settled as a society yet.",
"Are you asking about the intent of the whole Bill of Rights, or specifically about the Second Amendment? The whole thing was meant to limit the powers of government. But the exact meaning of the \"well regulated militia\" in the Second Amendment has been the subject of endless debate, and can never be determined with absolute certainty. It was sloppy, or politically motivated unclear, writing."
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5w0930 | Why does rubbing alcohol, vinegar, etc have expiry dates? How can they go bad? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The FDA requires expiry dates on nearly everything aside from alcohol and cosmetics. The manufacturers have to put something, so they generally choose a date a few years out, that they are willing to guarantee the product will meet or exceed that date. URL_0"
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5w096i | How does GAP insurance work for a vehicle on finance? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Let's say you buy a car for $20,000. Since you bought the car, it has depreciated. It's now worth only $15,000, but you still owe $18,000 on the loan. If you total your car, the insurance company will only pay you the $15,000 that the car is worth, and you still owe the lender $3,000. GAP insurance will pay for the \"gap\" between what you owe, and what the car is worth. It pays for that $3,000 you still owe.",
"When you buy a new car and take it off the lot it instantly is worth less than it was before you bought it. If you owe more money than the car is worth and you get into an accident you'll be given less money by your insurance provider than would be required to pay off your loan. Gap insurance is insurance that will pay the difference between what you owe and what the car is worth in the event that the car is totaled and you owe more on the vehicle than it is worth. In this way you won't have to pay out of pocket to finish paying off a totaled car. Generally speaking it's a bad idea to ever owe more on a vehicle than it is worth. Your down payment should be enough to cover the difference or you should purchase a more affordable vehicle. The reason this can happen is fairly simple. When you purchase a vehicle with a loan the car ends up being more expensive than the negotiated price because there is interest on the loan. Once you take the car off the lot it's worth ~20% less and on top of that you likely have a ~1-10% interest rate on your loan. If you take the car off the lot and instantly get into a car accident totaling the vehicle your insurance company will give you the dollar amount for what the vehicle is worth used. They won't take into account the interest that you owe or that you just paid a premium for a new vehicle."
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5w0c1o | Why do websites make you have a complicated password when most account breaches come from a hack and not just guessing? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When people hack sites for passwords, they usually get a list of the hashed passwords. That means when you put in your password, the site can check if it's the same password you signed up with but it doesn't know what the password is. It's like a one-way secret message. The way hackers figure out passwords is they know common hashing techniques and they guess common passwords using those techniques. Since \"password123\" is a common password, they'll put that in the hash, see what comes out, and match that output to the stolen list of hashed passwords they got. If they can't guess your password to input, then they won't be able to know what it is. Complex passwords make it harder to guess the hashed passwords once they're stolen. The biggest factors for making a password hard to guess are the total numbers of characters you can use and the length. So forcing you to have three special characters and two capitals and a number doesn't really help, but allowing you to use any character and requiring your password to be long does help. In other words, \"a%6L7\" looks like a more securepassword than\"!XthisismypasswordforthissiteX!\", but the latter is actually more secure since it's longer and can possibly use just as many symbols. Longer passwords are harder to guess because the possible combinations of guesses increase quickly as you add additional characters.",
"This is like asking \"why do we have locks on the door, when burglars often break a window?\" They break the window -- which makes their crime harder -- *because* the door is locked.",
"You complex password isn't just for breaches. A couple of years back a ton of naked pictures of celebreties was stolen off of iCloud, this hack was done because of social engineering (figuring out their login) and weak passwords (using brute force to gain access). If your password is a word or simple, it will take fewer guesses. If a hacker knows your login and wants to get *your* password, they will usually start with a dictionary attack (lists of common word and combinations); by requiring your password to be at least 8 characters with numbers, the amount of guesses needed goes way way up - if you have 4 characters and numbers it's 4^37, if you have 8 it's 8^37 (not counting symbols etc), that's hours vs. billions of years of computing. Now when a breach happens, complex passwords are still your friend *if* the website did their homework. *A lot* of people use the same username and password on all their accounts; facebook, linkedin, twitter, pornhub etc. and this is where complexity starts to matter. They now have most of your credentials, they know what email you sign in with and they know the hash of your password for *this* website. Now most website worth their salt will have a custom way of salting their passwords, however the hacker just gained access to everything, which probably includes the source code for the login, they can now start to figure out your password, which probably gains login to everything. If your password is complex and the salt is correctly made, it will still take billions of years to brute force the hash. So the reason why they require you to make it complex is for your own good. We *know* our websites are susceptible to attacks, it's simply impossible to make anything hacker proof, short of disconnecting it from the internet, turn it off and bury it in 10 ft. of concrete in the Mariana Trench. You *have* to assume that you have a data leak at some point, having good policies for password and other sensitive data will mitigate the fallout.",
"> most account breaches come from a hack and not just guessing? This is a direct result of those websites making users have complex passwords. If password were easy to guess then that's what the attackers would do.",
"Most account breaches come from guessing, you just never hear about them because they often go unnoticed. Think of a snoopy family member or \"friend\" trying to see what you've been up to. If you use an uncomplicated password, they can probably guess it, and they'll probably never tell you they logged into your account without permission. Also, dictionary attacks on websites that don't have password restrictions can also fly under the radar unless the website publicly discloses that accounts were compromised. Which isn't likely; if they don't give a fuck about your password strength, they probably don't give a fuck about who is using your account. Finally, there are many security reasons for password restrictions. Passwords are often stored as hashes which, if stolen, can be brute forced if the attacker knows how the hashes are generated. The more complicated the password, the longer it takes to brute force it. A good password with special characters can take a single computer upwards of billions of years to brute force, whereas bad passwords with only lower case letters can be forced in milliseconds.",
"The breaches you *hear* about come from hacks, because those are breaches that involve thousands and thousands of accounts all at once and make the news. When Bob from Idaho's account gets broken into because it has a weak password, it's not going to make the news.",
"Incompetent and/or uneducated developers genuinely believing they are helping you. Aware that security is an issue but unaware of why, they instead choosing to solve the \"how\" by thinking like a human instead of a computer. Oh, and just because it's not here yet: mandatory relevant [XKCD]( URL_0 ) Edit: It's just a comic, dammit! Not an example of \"how to do securityz\". Sheesh.",
"It is because of this thing security researchers called \"social engineering\". Passwords are like locks - at best they are a deterrent against unauthorized access. The harder the lock is to crack, the less inclined a thief will be to break in. A lot of hackers can engineer or \"guess\" a password by looking at social aspects of your life. The harder you make it for them to \"guess\" your password, the harder they have to try to hack into your account. At one point they will just give up because it is not worth the effort.",
"Because if you didn't have complex passwords most breaches would come from guessing. (...?)",
"Because if the site didn't require you to make a complex password, the hacks would be even more frequent and would be from guessing.",
"Like you’re five: Your password is like the code on a safe. When someone hacks a site, they steal everyone’s safes, but they still need to break the code. These are very good safes that cannot be physically broken and can be secured with very long codes. But if you choose a simple code, the thieves have your information almost the moment they escape with the physical safe.",
"Irony is that by enforcing certain password characteristics (min/max length, must contain at least one of X), the site is actually making your password easier to guess for the hakers...",
"most hacks involve guessing. Ok so breakdown on how passwords are stored: If whoever is storing the password for your account isn't a toolbag, they don't ever actually store your password. Instead they feed your password to a hash function and then store what that outputs, and then whenever you input your password, they just feed it back through the function again and check to see if it matches what they have stored. May need to explain what a hash function is so let's detour for a minute. A hash function will take some input of any length and it will output something of a fixed length (usually quite long), the input should always map to exactly the same output ever time and it should do so in a way that's quite easy to do, but very very very hard to undo. For example: using the md5 hash (which isn't one that should ever be used for storing passwords) feeding it \"password\" outputs 5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99, \"password1235483\" outputs c048f211d0c6e9dcd83316b042a6723c and and mashing on my keyboard for a hundered chracters or so produces bae019d234e18408edd8b82c9437fecf So this means that if a site is compromised and someone makes off with whatever database they're storing the hashed passwords in, they'd stuck trying figure out what the hell the hashed passwords are. In general this is accomplished via a lookup table which looks kinda like this 286755fad04869ca523320acce0dc6a4=password 10b222970537b97919db36ec757370d2=password1 7576f3a00f6de47b0c72c5baf2d505b0=password123 f2c93f0625019e5461379cd1a4ed1b16=p455w0rd and so on. Then you compare the hashed passwords that were stolen with the known ones and see what matches. Infact because computers are good at what they do, you can just find the hash for basically every combination of characters under a certain size. there's only a few billion passwords with 6 characters or fewer, and it would not take a computer very long to build a database of the hashes for every single one of those passwords. And it also doesn't take a computer very long to check the a bunch of stolen passwords against that list. If you have a weak password, they're going to find it real quick. If you've something much longer and more complex, then it's probably not sitting in some lookup table. Infact, hashing in general isn't the only thing that happens to a password. Instead what they really really should be doing is a salt+hash method. which means instead of feeding just your password to the hash function, they feed it and some other randomly generated \"password\" (the salt) to it. In a simple case this could be something like yourpassword64sdf55c4c1w34372654263r4236r623r23r423564415... where yourpassword is what it says it is and then the random stuff afterwards is the salt. Done right this has two advantages. The first is if two people use the same password there will be different salts used and so the hashed passwords will be different. The second is that it makes lookup tables much less useful, and forces anyone wanting to figure the password out to fall back on brute force guessing. And while a weak password is a little better off in this case, it still won't take very long for a computer to run through a bunch of really common passwords and eventually find yours."
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5w0dbe | If the Sun suddenly disappeared, how long would it take for all life to end and what would it look like? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Potentially, for decades or even centuries. The effects of a disappearing sun would hit us in about 8 minutes. After that everything goes dark except for stars and artificial light. It also gets quite cold. By a week, the global average surface temperature would drop under 0° F or -17° C. Since there is no photosynthesis, plants would die, herbivores die, and then carnivores. We could still survive though. Plants can be grown with artificial light we gain from light-independant energy. The places that wil stay *warm* longest will be the oceans. Because the surface will freeze, the oceans will be insulated for a very long time, possibly millions of years. So big submarines or underwater complexes, powered by oil or better torrents could keep us alive for quite awhile. Though most humans would probably die first. Another place would be Iceland. Iceland has a lot of geothermal energy sources which don't depend on the sun. That would also solve the heating problem. You should just better start building your bunker soon. You won't get much done in the one week of total chaos while society breaks down. Edit: This is if the Sun suddenly disappears without a trace. For the case that it explodes, dies, or flies away, /u/TheB3stEv3r has the correct user name. Also, I was just referring to human life. For all life, /u/Redshift2k5 rightly said that some ~~micro~~organisms deep in the oceans or the Earth's crust would most likely survive for millions of years.",
"This isn't an easy question because it would depend on what happened to the sun. Here are a few possible cases and explanations: Case 1: Supernova. About eight minutes. We would all be burnt to a crisp. And assuming we could survive the heat, the radiation from losing the ozone layer would kill everyone pretty quickly. Case 2: The sun is somehow 'turned off' like a light. We wouldnt notice anything for ablut 8 minutes when it would suddenly be dark. The earth would be able to retain enough heat to sustain life for a few days. Maybe some people could survive a few more by going to extreme lengths, but the temperature would soon be unhospitable to life. It might be possible for microorganisms nearest the core and deep near thermal vents in the deep ocean to survive this at least for a while. Case 3: The sun is suddenly gone. This is the most unpredictable case. The earth is moving extremely quickly around the sun, held there by gravity. Now if the sun vanished, so does that gravity keeping us from being slingshotted into space. Assuming we didn't collide with another planet or sufficiently large asteroid which would rather immediately cause mass extinction, the results would be the same as Case 2.",
"It depends. It'd take 8 or so minutes before we knew about it. Up to that point we would still be orbiting the \"sun\" as usual. Once it ceases to exist, and assuming we wouldn't be on collision course with any of the other planets, then we'd just fly off in a straight line into space. With no sun to keep us warm, we'd start to get cold. It's probably take about a week before the surface becomes uninhabitable, but a bit more time before anything like the oceans freezing over starts happening. In theory, if someone had a bunker full of other power sources, a place to grow food and some supplies then they could survive for quite a while, but eventually they're run out of something they need and die.",
"All life wouldn't end. There's life down at deep sea hydrothermal vents living off energy and sulfur from the vent without any help from the sun, and lithotrophs slowly nibbling on rocks miles below the surface.",
"There's some good answers here regarding what happens on Earth as a result of no light or heat, but there's a much larger problem: gravity. If the Sun suddenly disappears, Earth is no longer in its orbit. Not such a big deal: we cannot leave the Habitable Zone where liquid water happens if said Zone no longer exists. The cold is still a problem. The real worry for me is what happens to the minor bodies: asteroids and comets. For the most part, asteroids hang out in the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter. This is, however, a simplification. There's quite a few asteroids closer to the Sun. There's also a bunch in gravitationally stable points on Jupiter's orbit (they're called Greeks and Trojans) [A wildly simplified picture] ( URL_0 ). There's also a bunch of comets that have no particularly defined region; they're just kind of all over the place. Asteroids are mostly in the same plane as the rest of the solar system (the ecliptic), but comets can be far above or below that plane at any given moment. Gravity keeps all of these things in orbit around the Sub. Gravitational effects travel at the Speed of Light. If the Sun magically winks or of existence, none of these things are bound to their orbits anymore, and they'll start zipping off at a tangent to their orbit as soon as those effects reach them. This means Mercury starts wandering off in 3.2 minutes. Venus at 6. Earth at 8.3 and so on. Here's something else: things close to the Sun move faster, because the gravity pulls them really hard. In the case of comets, they get super-quick and come around the other side with enough force to fling them billions of miles before they run out of steam and are pulled back again. So the things closest to the Sun are moving the fastest. And they're also the ones that will be affected by the Sun's disappearance first. Space is big, and the Earth is relatively not big, so we're not a huge target. But we are suddenly talking about a bunch of stuff shooting all over the place at very high speeds. Things that were in stable orbits to never hit Earth are no longer in those orbits, and neither is Earth. And they're not easily predicted either, because any time they get close enough to another object, both paths will be altered slightly be gravity. That's bad enough for the stuff near the Sun. Wait until it hits the Asteroid Belt. Jupiter is 40 light minutes from the Sun. That means that in less than an hour, our neighborhood of space has become an utter chaos of ballistics. In less than 6 hours, the effects reach the Kuiper Belt, where there's a lot of stuff that's a lot bigger. Now, none of the stuff in our neighborhood is huge, except the planets. In diameter, Ceres is a bit smaller than Texas, and that's by far the biggest asteroid. Many more are the size of a skyscraper or a few city blocks. But when these things are traveling at, usually, well over 40,000 miles per hour, they carry a big punch. Destruction of the dinosaurs at Chicxulub? Asteroid the size of San Francisco. Something the size of comet 67P (downtown LA)? There goes North America. Stuff the size of your house? Goodbye most of a city. Ceres or Vesta? Repave the planet with a new crust. If the Sun disappears, we're looking at a brief but intense bombardment that could destroy huge portions of this planet's surface. Or none of them could hit us, and we have exactly the same scenario as everyone else is saying.",
"Vsauce did a video on this topic, might be a good answer to this question. URL_0"
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5w0nch | What does 'remastered' mean in terms of music recording? | Especially with older artists and bands, the word 'remastered' seems to come up a lot. Since I find this term to be a bit vague, could someone explain what this means? What is changed in a remastered recording, and how is it done? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It can mean a variety of things depending on who is doing it. Remastering an album in a general sense means that the tracks are adjusted from the ground up. Cleaning up background noise, adding or subtracting particular effects, maybe even re-recording certain sections in some cases. It can be a good thing or a bad thing, because in some cases, certain dynamic contrasts and effects make the songs sound less full or interesting compared to the original tracks.",
"The process of mastering is when you take the final, mixed stereo mix down of a track, and make EQ, spacial and dynamic adjustments on the track as a whole, basically. Remastering is usually when a producer/engineer/mastering guy has access to the stem tracks and, as mentioned before, to clean up individual tracks (ei, guitar, drums, vocals) and reapply compression, EQ's and things like that. This can be controversial because albums that had a distinctive tone will sometimes be remastered with the trends and habits of the modern era, which can totally change the song in a way that maybe the original artist didn't want. That is, some people think its unnecessary meddling that only done so the label can milk more money out of an album that isn't hot anymore. TL;DR, they go back and usually get the original recordings, clean them up, and make them sound like they were recorded, mixed and mastered now, rather than then, sometimes to preserve old tracks, other times to make more money off of a new version.",
"Lets say you want to make a complex picture. It is so complex that you decide to build it piece by piece. You take 16 pieces of square paper and you draw part of the image on each piece and then you lay them out in a 4x4 grid. It looks great and if you want to change or edit something you might just change 1 of the 16 little pieces. No need to redo the whole thing! Now you want to share this with your friends. You want them to have a copy but you can't have it be in 16 pieces. So you pull out your Iphone3 which is brand new and best at the time (~2009) and you take a photo of your art. It looks good! It might not be perfect like your real life vision but it is impressive. Then you print and sell or give the image to your friends. I see it and buy a copy and I'm happy with it. FFW several years. You now have an Iphone7. You notice how great the pictures are on the phone. So you decide to pull out your old original 16 piece drawing and you take a photo only now with the Iphone7. This is the \"remaster\". You send that to me and it looks great! It looks so good it's like something I didn't imagine even possible back when the Iphone3 was the best phone camera... because it wasn't possible. ... Although tbh aracAKFU I've looked at the original of your art up on my wall for so long It's kinda grown on me. I like the grain in the darks and the sort of crusty look it had better than the new \"remaster\" With music it is kinda sorta like that but with audio.",
"Well, you know how a song/album is mixed and mastered before being released? Basically someone is redoing that, often with better technology at their disposal. While I agree with previous posts that it can be a marketing ploy, it is super nice on old recordings and things that weren't recorded well in the first place. A lot of that stuff is all trebled out and the drums are tinny as fuck. Like the early Dinosaur Jr. and Meat Puppet album remasters, Green River remaster, The Stooges. I remember listening to these albums and thinking \"Fuck, this is brilliant music, but the recording is so bad it is hard to listen to.\" Like if you put on a great play but have no budget. No costumes, lighting, props. No matter how good the script and acting are, the audience won't become fully engrossed. It takes away from the play. And I understand the integrity argument. If someone redid bass-work to \"improve\" a Who album, I would poop in my undies. I just disagree in many instances. While it is often done poorly, and for the wrong reasons, it can also be used for good. Remastering has saved many great albums from drifting into obscurity because of poor recording quality. At least that's my opinion.",
"Music that is mastered for compact cassette or vinyl has limitations on frequency response, dynamic range and/or stereo width. Mastering engineers would've processed the audio to work within the limitations of those medium. Digital has fewer limitations, so the music can be remastered without having to work within the limitations of the target media."
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5w0nir | Why would a nuclear war be the end of the world? | Perhaps I'm being naive but I'm aware of hundreds of nuclear tests that went on in the Nevada desert/atolls etc. as well as many other nation's tests. Why would an all-out nuclear war be any different? You hear of the creation of a nuclear winter/doomsday scenarios etc. Thanks | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"People do exaggerate the effect of nuclear bombs sometimes. You are correct. A few bombs would not end the world. Although they could kill millions of humans. At the same time, thousands of bombs blown up in a short period of time above ground is different than a few hundreds of bombs over decades with many of them underground. Kicking up large amounts of dust is a big deal though. In the past things like volcanoes and asteroid strikes have darkened the sky for years or decades and it's been a big deal. Mix in radioactivity to the dust and it's a huge big deal.",
"> Why would an all-out nuclear war be any different? 1. A much greater concentration of nuclear fallout. Setting off one or two weapons a year in underground tests produces almost no nuclear fallout. Setting off a thousand weapons in counter-force ground bursts is going to throw a huge amount of radioactive debris into the air all at once. 2. Firestorms. Put simply, the desert doesn't burn, but cities and forests do. A major nuclear exchange would result in massive firestorms. The \"Nuclear Winter\" theory says that the amount of smoke and soot produced by major cities and huge swaths of land burning out of control for weeks or months would cause a catastrophic cooling effect."
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5w0o3m | How are we able to download files for a game but be unable to view code? | Obviously people want their code to be a secret but I'm curious otherwise | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Code written in programming languages is for humans, and it gets turned into machine code before it can be executed by computers. Machine code is what the computer actually runs. When you download a file, you are not downloading the source code. What you download is the compiled version of the code which is in machine code. Generally it is pretty hard to go from machine code to source code (decompile). You lose information as you go from source code to machine code, and it isn't possible to regain all the lost information going in reverse. For one thing you lose all the comments in the original source code. That's what it means for a software to be 'open source'. The company publishes the source code publicly. There are no secrets.",
"In the same way you can buy food but can't tell exactly what went In the the making / making process of the food, even though you have the food in front of you!",
"You can view the code. It'll usually be in files marked .exe or .dll if it's a Windows program. This is not source code, though, this is executable machine code. You can look at the raw binary with a hex editor, or you can use a program called a disassembler which will attempt to translate the machine code into assembly code (but this translation isn't always straightforward, as it can be difficult to determine what is code and what is data, and where instructions begin and end). It isn't necessary to have the source to run the program, so many developers do not distribute the source code for their programs at all. If source code is available, it is usually distributed seperately, as not all users will want it.",
"PHP developer here (not quite games but it could be used for browser based games in theory). Similar to how a game engine such as Unity or Game Maker Studio or Unreal Engine allow game developers to write code and export it, usually into an .exe file. I program my code in a language called PHP and I can write a code such as < ?php echo \"Hello, World!\"; ? > which runs through something called a compiler on the web server, and than relates that information in the form of HTML and what the user would see is simply the text \"Hello, World!\". If you wanted to take it a step further, you could right click using Google Chrome and click \"View Source\" and you might see something similar to < p > Hello, World! < /p > which is actually HTML (compiled code). If I were to do something more complex such as < ?php $x=5; echo $x+$x; ? > the user would see the number \"10\" in plain-text in the browser, again, they could take it a step further and right click > view source > and they would see something like < p > 10 < /p > in the form of HTML but they would have no idea what the logic was that caused the browser to choose that number when on the server side of things, it's clear that this is the variable $x = 5 (basically just the number 5) added to itself to get the number 10 (5 + 5 = 10), but the user is unable to see this as my \"Developer code (PHP/Server side)\" is hidden from the user. This is the same reason that you can visit Facebook and read and update and share posts but you can't just right click > view source > copy > paste and basically create your own Facebook, user's don't have direct access to the server side code (PHP, sometimes different languages for different sites), what they see is the final compiled code, usually HTML, CSS, JavaScript. These same principals can be applied to game engines compiling their code into a user-version which cannot be viewed the same way in a \"human friendly way\"."
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5w0qdc | Why does a warm water salt wash help oral and dental injuries heal quicker? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Salt water is good for killing germs, and if it's warm then it moves into the injury site faster to pull bad stuff out as it draws out water from the tissue."
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5w0ran | What goes on inside a person's body that forces them to be in a coma? What's preventing them from simply waking up? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Though a coma outwardly resembles sleep, it’s actually extremely different. Coma is when the general state of the brain is submerged into a severe depression level of consciousness. Sleeping has highly organized and complex electrical brain activity. A coma has slow electrical brain activity. Unlike sleep which can easily be reversed, no matter how much the patient is stimulated, he is incapable of becoming fully alert.",
"To add to what /u/lazyjonesnightmare said, a lot of the time comas aren't natural; they're medically induced to allow the body and brain to recover from an injury or disease. They can take you out of it at any time but it can be necessary for a complete recovery.",
"My wife has been in a coma for 2 years, so I can tell you what I learnt from the experience. It is not medically induced, and her mid brain is damaged. Technically, I am told, it means that she is not conscious, but if we tell her a sad story, she cries almost all the time. Her reflexes are working as spinal cord controls it, so if you pinch her leg or arm, she pulls it. How I understand it, is like it is having a panic attack, where you try to move, and you see the danger in front of you but you are just froze there. Also, I think of it as an erection, since erection is reflexive and it is almost impossible to have an erection whenever you want without tricking your reflexes. You are trying everything but you just can't make those muscles move. I guess for my wife, it is like that for all parts of her body.",
"How do you explain how people in comas can hear conversations?"
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5w0we1 | Why any country would ever need more nukes than can destroy the surface of our planet (as many have already)? Aside from fighting aliens, obviously. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> Why any country would ever need more nukes than can destroy the surface of our planet (as many have already)? What we already have isn't anywhere near what would be needed to destroy the surface of the planet. The earth is REALLY big, like 510,000,000 km^2 worth of surface area. A 1 MT bomb (which is larger than the majority of the worlds nuclear weapons) might have non-trivial effects (i.e. light to moderate damage to buildings, give an exposed person a burn) over an area of about 1200 km^2. So if you do the math you'd need almost half a million of those bombs to even have that moderate effect over the surface of the earth. The total world stockpile of nuclear weapons is about 15,000.",
"MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction. Let's only focus on the US and Russia. Both sides only having 1 nuke isn't a big enough deterrent against going to war with each other. So you loose a single city from a enemy nuke, big deal. Having 10 nukes gives the enemy a chance to destroy some of them, either through hitting your silos in a first strike attack, or from missile defense. But having thousands of nukes means the enemy cannot possibly destroy them all, and it means enough nukes let over to completely destroy the other side. We wouldn't just launch one nuke at Moscow, it would be more like 10-15 nukes at Moscow, and that's a conservative estimate. Just to be sure we destroy it.",
"Redundancy. In a theoretical attack, some nukes might malfunction. Some might be preemptively destroyed by the enemy. Some operators might refuse to launch. You need redundancy for MAD to actually work."
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5w0xc7 | What colours are beyond infrared and ultraviolet? | What colours could potentially exist when you keep going further along the colour spectrum? I imagine there could possibly be an infinite amount of colours, like there could be an infinite amount of radio frequencies. | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Colour only makes sense as a quality which our brains interpret. One cannot *imagine* a new colour, although some people and animals might be able to perceive more colours owing to things such as having more colour light receptors or other physical adaptions. In terms of the electromagnetic spectrum, the limits are essentially infinite. You could make arguments for the longest wavelength radio wave having a wavelength on the order of the Observable Universe and highest energy gamma ray having a wavelength just small enough such that the energy concentration does not spontaneously form a black hole.",
"\"Color\" is just how our human brains interpret different wavelengths of light within the visible spectrum. Light outside that spectrum is invisible to humans, so by definition it has no color.",
"You'll get to a point where Wifi, Radiosignals and X-Ray are colors. If you're okay with that, I can't see any boundaries whatsoever. Be creative with names but don't expect to actually see them since our eyes can't perceive these wavelength. That's why we have names for the colors but not far beyond.",
"> infinite amount of colours, like there could be an infinite amount of radio frequencies. Well, visible light and radio waves are the same thing: they're both forms of electromagnetic radiation. Radio waves are just a different color of light. So what exists when you go along the colour spectrum? Go up in frequency (shorter wavelength) and you go visible > ultraviolet > X-rays > gamma rays, going down in frequency it goes optical > infrared > microwaves > radio waves. [Here's a neat chart]( URL_0 ) This should make intuitive sense if you think of examples of how we utilize some of these things. For instance, when you take an x-ray, you use film. It's essentially a camera, it just uses a 'color' of light that goes through people instead of bouncing off of them. We get images from microwave, x-ray, and radio telescopes. We then change those into images that look like they could be made with visible light. We're just taking some color of radio wave or microwaves or whatever and turning it into some visible color for color in the image.",
"Light and radio waves are both electromagnetic radiation. So are x-rays and gamma rays. Infrared and ultraviolet have wavelengths outside our visual range and in the psychological sense they have no color. Sometimes we use the term \"color\" to refer to invisible colors. There is an infinite number of visible colors, but you can only distinguish maybe 200 wavelengths or \"spectral colors\". With different combinations of spectral colors, you can see maybe 10,000,000 colors"
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5w0y1s | why are fevers helpful? | I mean, aren't fevers meant to kill bacteria (or viruses I forget) but why can they raise your body temperature to fatal levels over something like a flu? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A fever is the body's attempt to kill intruders(bacteria, viruses, etc) by making the conditions inside your body less ideal for said intruders. Unfortunately, your body also happens to be in your body so you suffer the effects of the raised body temperature such as sweating. A really high fever is the body saying \"I'll kill this intruder or I'll die trying.\" Fevers don't outright kill intruders, but they do weaken them which helps your immune system fend them off. The reason you don't feel great when you have a fever is two fold: A) Your body is diverting all of it's energy to fighting whatever bug you have which means taking away energy from other places B) The biological processes in our bodies are suited to work best at body temperature. When that temperature is too high then those processes don't work as well."
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5w0zdm | Why is AM/PM system still in use in some areas? | I admit seeing it used anywhere always confuses me nicely. And it seems to still be surprisingly common... | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because it's still an effective way to tell time? That's like asking why the 24 hour military clock is still used....because it still fucking tells time.",
"Why wouldn't it be? What's wrong with that system? Where is it no longer used then?",
"What's the deal with analog clocks/watches and 24-hour time? Don't you have to do the same mental conversion from 12 to 24 hours?"
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5w0zdw | What's the difference between Diet Coke & Coke Zero? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Back when diet sodas were introduced, they were kind of terrible. So bad, in fact, the Coke didn't want to tarnish the brand of their regular soda. Instead they created a new brand, marketed mostly towards women, called Tab. That was their marketing plan, and they stuck with it for nearly 20 years. Upstart Pepsi took a different approach. Their soda's consistency and flavor lent itself to artificial sweeteners a little better, so they were able to formulate a diet version that was slightly less terrible. The marketed it under the Pepsi brand, and it slowly grew to dominate the diet market. By the early 1980s, Coke had had enough, and decided it was time for their own Coke brand diet soda. But the same factors that made Diet Pepsi successful worked against them...try as they might, they just couldn't make the Coke recipe work with the sweeteners of the day. They stopped trying, and invented a completely new recipe (one many say was more like Pepsi), and marketed that as Diet Coke. It was wildly successful, and very quickly started to take market share away from Diet Pepsi. In fact, Diet Coke was a bit too successful. A few years later, facing stiff competition from Pepsi in their regular cola line, Coke abandoned their nearly century old recipe, creating a regular version of Diet Coke, which tested better than the old Coke or Pepsi. When they didn't anticipate was the extreme nostalgia for the original Coke, and \"New Coke\" went down as one of the biggest marketing blunders in history. Coke eventually was forced to reintroduce the original as Coca-Cola Classic, the public never acquired a taste for New Coke, and it was eventually phased out. Finally, in 2005, with new sweeteners available to them, Coke took another swing at a diet version of the original formula, and came up with Coke Zero. Claiming it was \"indistinguishable\" from regular Coke, it has largely been marketed towards men, and has gained a significant share of the diet soda market. So to recap: * Diet Coke = Diet New Coke before New Coke existed * Coke Zero = Diet Old Coke Hope that clears things up.",
"They use different artificial sweeteners and have different flavorings. Diet Coke was designed as a sugar free soda with a unique taste. Coke Zero was designed specifically to taste like 'regular' Coke.",
"The main chemical difference between Coke Zero and Diet Coke is that Coke Zero has about half the artificial sweetener aspartame but has the artificial sweetener ace-k (acesulfame potassium)."
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5w11jg | Why do some people prefer sleeping on their sides while others prefer sleeping on their stomach or back? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"People are different. I for one sleep on my sides and my back. I prefer to sleep on my back because I have lots of lower back problems and it alleviates issues I have with that, but during the night I have to switch to my side at times because my arms go numb from the pressure on my spine. There's too many different reasons to list why some prefer one way or another, it's all personal preference."
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5w13kh | If a postal worker sorting mail sees mail addressed to himself, can he take it, or does it legally have to be delivered to his mailbox? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I am a mailman. I know the guy that delivers to my house. He's handed me some of my mail before. Mailmen have 2 main types of mail. Sorted letters and unsorted letters/magazines/whatever. When you're in the office you sort all of the loose mail into a case. When you're on the street you're putting the presorted and self sorted stuff into the boxes. The majority of mail is presorted, so you'd be at your box anyways before you saw it.",
"If it is addressed properly to him he can have management OK taking it without placing it in the box. Many postal workers live in the zip code they work in, they often take their mail and parcels home so their carrier doesn't have to make that stop on their route. Postmaster here....",
"Used to get a manager to put his signature on envelope, just to make sure you were not stealing someone's mail"
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5w1689 | Why is 'attempted' murder a different charge to murder? | If the intent was to kill, why is the charge different because it didn't work out as intended? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"To keep more victims alive. Let's say we are alone, I get mad at you, and bash you in the head with a baseball bat, knocking you unconscious. That's attempted murder, and I am looking at serious jail time if I am caught. One of the best ways to not get caught is to make sure there are no surviving witnesses. If the punishment for murder and attempted murder is the same, I have little incentive to let you live, and a pretty good reason to let you, or help you, die. But if attempted murder is a lesser crime, it is more in my interest if you survive. This is the same reason that other serious crimes where the victim is the best witness, like kidnapping and rape, also have lesser sentences than murder.",
"In the US criminal justice system, your punishment is determined by two different factors, the damage you caused, and your intentions. This is why vehicular manslaughter carries a stiffer sentence then DUI.",
"Because... Well it's a completely different thing. Intent is every bit as evil as succeeding, but the punishment should fit the deed because every case is circumstantially different. Where one person may have gone through with murdering someone without a shred of remorse, another may have wanted to and started to, but then their conscience stopped them before following through. The penal system is (albeit poorly) designed to rehabilitate offenders, so, again, the punishment is designed to fit the crime."
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5w1bgo | Why is 'chlorine hair' after swimming not fixable with anything less than shampoo. For instance you could rinse your head under the shower for ten minutes, and it still doesn't get rid of the effect. | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because \"chlorine hair\" is caused by the removal by oxidation of much of the surface oils present on your hair that make it smooth and shiny. Without that oil, the hair cuticle on one strand of hair can lock into the scales of the cuticle on the next strand of hair and it all winds up sticking together in clumps. In order to fix 'chlorine hair', you have to replace the lubricating surface layer that your hair lost in the pool with something similar. Like hair conditioner. Or conditioning agents from shampoo."
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5w1gug | What happens when the Semiconductor Fabrication Process gets to 1nm or lower? | I see that with each new lineup of CPUs, the "nm" gets lower and lower. I see the same thing with Nvdia's GPU. Basically, what happens when it gets to 1nm? Will it go lower? Why do they have to go in order? Why can't they skip straight to 1nm? It's it a technological limitation or is it a financial motive? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I doubt that semiconductor fabrication as we know it will get to 1nm. Silicon atoms themselves are about 2nm in diameter, and the materials used to make the gate dielectric are generally on that order or a bit larger. Plus there are great difficulties in actually forming transistors that small. Even 7 nm is pretty hellishly difficult. Why didn't we just skip to the smallest possible size years ago? Because it takes a great deal of research and engineering work in a variety of disciplines to \"shrink\" transistors. At each increment we've learned things that we didn't know before, and each one was a very difficult process taking years and years of work and lots and lots of money. Trying to jump ahead too far would be an enormous investment and would likely not be successful. And even a giant like Intel doesn't do all of the work on their own. They rely on a variety of outside vendors to do some of the work. You'd have to not only commit your own company's future to a very risky proposition, you'd also have to convince a bunch of other companies to do the same. What happens after Moore's Law hits the wall? Semiconductors can still do a lot of innovation. One of the big ones going on now is finding ways to connect multiple chips together without long conductors between them. That can offer nice improvements in performance and/or size. If you were to take something like a cell phone and figure out how much of the volume is actually semiconductors, I suspect you'd find that it is rather small. We waste a lot of space with packaging, interconnect, decoupling capacitors, etc. There are also things that can be done to make transistors a bit faster and lower power without shrinking them. Ultimately, we need a replacement for semiconductor/transistor technology as we know it. Quantum computing, biological computing, etc. Want to be the next Bill Gates? Come up with the successor to integrated circuits, which have driven our technological explosion for over a half century."
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5w1gvf | Why do some people cause interference with radios? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Everybody causes interference with the radio waves, Your body is mostly salty water which absorbs radio waves pretty well. Nobody emits interference. Your cell phone could cause interference with radios. Even though the phone uses frequencies far higher than the radio, it can overwhelm poorly shielded circuits."
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5w1i3k | Why does the public not get to vote on things such as the development of nuclear weapons? | It seems like nobody is 'pro-nuke' - so why do we do it? If you asked the president; 'would you really push the button knowing you will wipe out the majority of life on earth?' Would he honestly say yes? I don't understand it. It scares me. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I am assuming you are talking about the USA. The USA is what is called a Representative Democracy. As such the citizens don't get to vote on the laws within the country. Instead the citizens elect representatives who then get to vote on the laws. In the US that is the House of Representative and the Senate. If you are Anti-Nuke and want the government to dismantle the current stockpile of weapons, you need to contact your representative and let them know that is what you want. And if they don't vote that way, when they are up for re-election you vote for someone else who will.",
"We do vote on it just not directly. If you live in a democratic country with nukes, how you vote in elections influences policy. You say nobody is pro-nuke but that's not entirely true. It's like saying nobody is pro-tax. Who wants to pay more taxes? Most people realize there is a becessity for taxes. While it is true that nobody really wants a nuclear war, it's also true that nobody really wants only 1 country to have nukes. Since nuclear weapons are a fact of life many countries will build them simply as a deterrent. i.e. don't attack us or we will nuke your capital.",
"Nukes are a deterrent weapon. It's similar to acting tough so that nobody messes with you, even if deep inside you're a sweetheart. If you asked (any) President he would say \"Yes I will push the button\" because that's an image that he must project at all times. But pushing the button is not the first action that's taken. There's a long process of escalation that starts with diplomatic talks; look at the [Cuban Missile Crysis]( URL_0 ) to see an example of this process. It's like the military having tanks; as a civilian you have a reasonable expectation that they won't be used against you, even though they exist and are ready to go at a moment's notice, and are quite deadly."
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5w1khf | What is the point of XML? | I have a great understanding of database systems, HTML and CSS but I after reading for hours and even watching videos I cant see why anyone would ever use this. It does not seem an appropriate or efficient way to deal with data. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"XML is a well defined, general purpose, data transfer language that's designed to facilitate the transfer of data from one system to another in a standard way. Before XML was a thing, every program had its own protocol so you'd have to write new parsers for data import or interchange between every system. XML is basically HTML intended to be used for machine-readable data. It's not intended to be efficient from a CPU or space perspective. It's intended to be a single, easy to work with standard so that all systems can transfer data between each other using a standard XML parser to interpret the data - it's efficient in terms of *programmer time*. Whether it's actually effective at this is a matter of debate.",
"XML allows you to define complex data sets, including metadata and relationships, in a plain text format without the need for a database. Now adays JSON tends to be the road more traveled because it's easier to interpret and traverse in a program, but XML still has its place, if for no other reason then it would take a lot of effort to rewrite all those systems that used it previously."
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5w1kvw | How can I have such large and diverse active and passive vocabularies, including quite a bit of etymological knowledge, and yet when I'm asked to define something I look like a deer in headlights? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There's a big difference between being good with words and having the talents required to write dictionaries.",
"So much of our vocabulary depends on *context* rather than strict definitions. It's likely that you don't actually know the definition for most of the words that you use, but you understand how to use them correctly anyhow. Kids don't learn to speak by memorising a dictionary, they learn by listening to the adults around them and copying that behaviour as best they can."
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5w1ldx | How did fungi develop antibiotics fast enough to kill bacteria? And why couldn't bacteria just develop faster to overcome the antibiotics fungi made, therefore becoming resistant? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Many bacteria HAVE evolved to become resistant to penicillin due to its widespread use as an antibiotic when it was first discovered. From what I understand, it might be opposite of what you think. Bacteria have poor DNA repair mechanisms due to their rapid generation time, so they often accumulate mutations. A random mutation leading to antibiotic resistance and selection quickly allows a bacteria population to become resistant to an antibiotic. On the other hand, fungi are eukaryotes (like humans) with better DNA repair mechanisms than bacteria so they don't develop mutations as rapidly. Seeing as how bacteria are growing resistant to penicillin, it would probably take longer for the fungi to adapt to the situation and counteract. > Fungi and Bacteria are mortal enemies. In many cases, that is not correct. There are various symbiotic relationships where bacteria live within fungi. In return, the bacteria aid with metabolism and help provide nutrients."
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5w1q9z | Why do most video games take 5-10 seconds to reload the level after I die? Surely all that needs to be "reset" is the player character if all the resources were already loaded? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Depends on if the system has the memory to store the initial level state in memory while the user plays. Restarting a level may also require running a script to initialize the physics, object locations, NPC behavior, etc. Game designers may also just get lazy and totally reload the level to avoid any possible bugs with trying to reinitialize the level state.",
"Indie game dev here - so I'm not a professional/industry voice on this. In my games - to be super careful I when I load a game I make sure that everything else is destroyed/cleaned up so that there's no chance of it interfering with the loaded game. This means that whatever is stored gets wiped away, and everything begins anew. Its often easier to be over zealous than to try to be hyper efficient. In my case loading takes less than 10ish seconds anyway. Sorry temporary universe inhabitants - but my players want less crashes.",
"Some games optimize levels by only loading things close to you. Skyrim, for example, would be impossible to run if it had everything loaded at the same time. So if you die away from the spawn point, the game has to unload everything close to you and reload the spawn area back in before plopping you into the game again. That is only one of the reasons, along with resetting variables, respawning dead enemies and all many other game dependant things. Since most of these can contain reading from files (e.g. saves), it can be considerably longer than expected since file I/O is really slow compared to RAM."
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5w1tvi | How come some people's belly button stay as an "outty?" | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"It is the cause of an umbilical hernia and has nothing to do with how the cord is cut or clamped"
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5w1xog | Why do tv networks have to be on differently #d channels based on your location? | Feels like every city/state has ESPN on a different channel. What's the deal? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Originally, television was actually broadcast through the air on radio frequencies. Different channels were assigned to stations in different cities to reduce interference in places that could receive signals from more than one city. So Washington had stations on 4, 5, 7, and 9; Baltimore on channels 2, 11, and 13. If you're asking about cable, it's mainly just that there's no standardization, so the local cable company puts it where they want it. In short, each cable operator places services wherever they find it convenient. Generally, the calculation is no more complex than \"we're adding another cooking channel. What's the first vacant number? Well, is there one closer to the other cooking channels?\""
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5w2355 | How does Microsoft mass produce Windows os cds? With no blank copies? | also this could be any company that sells software on any type storage device. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"The advantage of CD's is that you can manufacture them with the data already on it without having to produce it then write the data, since CD's work with pits for data you can simply stamp the CD with the data which essentially stores all the information onto the cd in one swift action"
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5w26cc | When is it best to rely on a particular type of mean over the others? | The three means: Arithmetic mean, geometric mean, and harmonic mean Please explain like I'm five. I'm serious. Don't use too many complicated terms or formulae. If I wanted that, I could just use Google. I know how to perform each type, but I have no idea what to look for when deciding which one gives the most accurate average. Thanks. | Mathematics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You might find this previous post helpful in describing them: URL_0 > which one gives the most accurate average. I would be careful about using the word \"accurate\". They're all accurate, in a sense- if you plug in numbers, you'll get the right output. The difference is, some of them describe certain physical processes that you're interested in. It's hard to give an exact rule for every case, but crudely: Arththmetic mean is just your normal average. If you're not sure which one to use, it's probably this one, or a weighted average, which is a variant. Geometric mean for growth rates/exponents Harmonic mean basically never, but it does come up in circuits with resistors/capacitors, and speeds over a distance .basically, look for that distinctive 1/(1/a+1/b) looking formulas, where you're doing a bunch of ratios. But really, you're almost never going to use the second two unless you have a very specific job where you'll know. As a physics grad student,i can't recall ever really needing them."
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5w26w3 | When things like video games, Pro sports worship, and TV are accused of zombifying people and helping the elite keep the masses complacent, why is music never included in this criticism? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Probably because it has been around a lot longer and is seen as different. Listening to music can also be a very passive activity and can be done while doing other things and doesn't require engagement unless you are watching it performed live."
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5w27f1 | Why does the content I actually want to watch constantly buffer but the ads play perfectly? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I'm not an expert, but I always figured that the video ads where essentially queued up, like ready to go regardless of what video you chose the and was prepared to play before you clicked it",
"One of them usually makes the company money, so they'll invest QoS dollars to make sure it plays and thus not break contract with advertisers. The other is just content."
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5w27n4 | Why do certain drugs (e.g. meth and heroin) make it seem like the user has aged decades in a short amount of time? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I love this part: Unqualified claim to be a medical doctor here. Further unsubstantiated claim to treat these specific patients routinely. Yet more outrageous claim to have specialized knowledge in this particular aspect of the problem and thus I am the sole perfect person to answer your question. Like you're 5 years old, I don't know. Here is my $0.02... There are the direct effects and the indirect effects of the drugs. The direct effects are the ones that cause damage to systems, organs, tissues and cells. The indirect effects are those that affect the whole human due to the behavior people engage in when they are high or trying to get high. Direct effects of meth depend on how you use the drug. Snorting will lead to a bunch of problems with drying out your nose and throat, the muscles involved will get contracted and long term it causes erosion of the tissues. This leads to lesions of all sorts forming. Swallowing meth is probably the least damaging, but still over time will cause havoc in the mouth and throat. Smoking will cause lung damage and the traditional \"meth mouth\" by altering bacteria in the mouth and causing a drying effect which ruins enamel and causes teeth to decay faster. The worst is shooting it directly into the bloodstream with a needle in a vein. This allows bacteria and other infectious things into the blood directly and causes abscesses and infection. The infections can range from simple to complex and routinely kills patients. Kidneys and livers fail all the time due to dehydration, toxic levels of crap for the liver to filter out and hepatitis is rampant. Meth causes people to clench their muscles a lot and that causes little bits of muscle to die and the debris goes into the blood and can cause kidneys to fail trying to filter it out. Shooting is also the most potent way to get high and is a bad sign. Shooters have a hard time staying sober. The effect of the drug in your bloodstream is that it reaches a lot of the cells in your body to some degree and each type of cell has it own reaction depending on if it can make use of the meth molecule. There are between 10 and 17 known and theorized receptors for the meth molecule and the density of the receptors on different cell types is an ongoing investigation. For the 5 year old it will suffice to say it causes a lot of trouble that becomes damage in the way the cells function over time. The damage accumulates and expands. Blood vessels constrict, causing decreased flow to and from tissues. Brain cells obviously let meth in, and in different areas of the brain, and at different rates with different effects. A common phenomenon is called de-arborization where the little connections between neurons in key areas of the brain get clipped due to the toxic effects of meth. Sort of like trimming the branches of a tree. This leads to all sorts of damage but is mostly seen as early dementia. Also there is neuron death which affects the ability to regulate mood. Meth has a large effect on dopamine in the brain (and everywhere else too) which causes people to hear voices, feel pleasure, get paranoid, want more. Meth does affect connective tissue and causes fibroblasts (a cell that builds collagen and the matrix that it lives in in skin) to be more inefficient. Repair occurs slowly and healing takes longer. This will make it look like the patient is aging faster. The indirect effects are all the bad things people do to get high. The latest story I heard from a meth using patient was that he was in a month long detox program (his 14th program over 10 years) and he and 2 people he met in the program decided to leave the program early. The patient called a friend he knew in high school and convinced the naive guy that he had graduated from the program and needed a ride. The friend picks up the 3 addicts and they go to his house with him and steal his car, his portable electronics and drive to a casino in the desert to get meth after selling the stuff at pawn shop or on the street. They stripped the car of stereo and battery, took a shit in the backseat and broke the key off in the ignition. Meth is very cheap and you can get really high for about $10-30 a day, but over time people wind up selling their bodies to get money. They \"hustle\" and hustle means a lot of things and they are all bad. The effect of having sex with strangers for meth money is a lot of exposure to STDs and violence. The \"holed up in a motel being raped for 3 days\" stories I have heard are in the high 30s. Both men and women prostitute themselves to either gender for meth or money. They don't bathe, they stay high for months, they don't eat, they live in squalor or on the streets. It is a very rough living and it erodes their humanity. What they do eat is sporadic and usually just caffeine, fat and sugar. They don't drink enough water ever. All that hard living, bad diet, damage to body and soul shows up on their skin. They get skinny, their muscles waste away, they pick at their skin and get scabs, sometimes they get horrific acne. It all ages them rapidly. Opiates are another story, but kind of the same. I am feeling a little slimy talking about these things because there is a cost to hearing all these stories and it is that you carry the stories and horrors around in your head forever. Suffice it to say there are similar effects from using heroin. Just different specifics. If you really want to know just ask. I'm going to go shower now and go to bed.",
"Lots of super sciencey answers here but let me give you a response from an experienced polysubstance addict. 1. You don't eat. Why waste money on food when I can just buy more dope and the food tastes shitty anyways. Also any calories you do consume are used to repair the massive damage you're doing to your nervous system. 2. You don't sleep. Fuck sleep. 3. You neither drink water nor brush your teeth. Dehydration is a biatch. 4. Intravenous drug use puts a lot of nasty byproducts directly in your blood. Lots of strain on kidneys. 5. You will invariably do stupid shit to obtain bruises, cuts, and rashes bc you're fucked up a lot. 6. You don't eat, sleep, or take care of yourself, and you're injecting god-knows-what straight into ya blood! As a note, this applies to people in heavy active addiction, the ones you see and say \"Damn they are on drugs\" Trust me, there are shitloads of people around you every day that smoke meth in the morning and do a shot of heroin at night but you will never know because they have made decisions to take care of their bodies so they don't become that stigma. Source: still maintaining a 9-5 while smoking meth and shooting heroin daily after 4 years, never once been piss tested.",
"- Meth abuse causes the destruction of tissues and blood vessels, inhibiting the body's ability to repair itself. - Acne appears, sores take longer to heal, and the skin loses its luster and elasticity, making the user appear years, even decades older. - Poor diet, tooth grinding and oral hygiene results in tooth decay and loss. - \"Meth mouth\" is characterized by broken, discolored and rotting teeth. - The drug causes the salivary glands to dry out, which allows the mouth's acids to eat away at the tooth enamel, causing cavities. - Teeth are further damaged when users obsessively grind their teeth, binge on sugary food and drinks, and neglect to brush or floss for long periods of time. [SOURCE]( URL_0 )",
"There is a prescription medicine called desoxyn, *in which the active ingredient is methamphetamine*, [here are some reviews from several patients on the drug]( URL_0 ) (it is usually reserved for patients who other medications do not work for them). Most prescription users of the drug, experience little to no consequences, on the other hand they actually experience very positive effects towards their conditions. Here is another example of it's medicinal use: [The neuroprotective potential of low-dose methamphetamine in preclinical models of stroke and traumatic brain injury]( URL_1 ) The risks associated with methamphetamine abuse come more from the **dosage** used (several hundred milligrams are consumed in recreational users vs. 5-30mg in prescribed dosages), the **route of administration** (abusers smoke the drug, prescription users take it orally), staying up for several days on the drug causes **sleep deprivation** that comes with it's own set of effects, and individuals with methamphetamine use problems **disregard personal health and hygiene** (i.e. stop brushing teeth, showering,etc). **Those factors alone without the methamphetamine would still induce many of the issues associated with methamphetamine abuse.** The fact that the drug is prescribed and a safe, useful medicine for some; supports the fact that *we need legitimate drug education globally to prevent the abuse of these drugs and promote safe usage to avoid serious consequences in drug users.*",
"I know there are more technical things than this but addicts I've known stop eating properly, forget basic hygiene like brushing teeth regularly, don't drink enough water if any and don't sleep. Even if you don't use drugs the above will make you look like shit.",
"Actual ELI5: Mommy told you not to stay up late watching TV, but you do anyway. TV is great, why stop for bedtime? You watch one show, then another...and another and another. You're thirsty, but you don't want to miss the best part that's coming up. You're sleepy, but you want to see what's on next. Your eyes are dry as a bone from staring at the screen. You finally fall asleep in the early morning and awake a few short hours later to your mom telling you you're late for school. Your eyes are red with bags under them, your mouth is dry, and your tum-tum is growling because you have to skip breakfast in order to get to school. Everyone at school says you look like shit.",
"Because people that do meth or crack are dehydrated and they completely lose their appetite. Malnutrition and Dehydration lead to that older look, but you can find responsible meth users who don't look like they've aged because they don't use meth all the time and they still eat",
"I think it is important to distinguish between meth and heroin here. People can fuck up their lives by using either drug sure. But methamphetamine is actually neurotoxic while heroin is not. This means heroin use won't actually damage the cells in your body like methamphetamine can. Long term use of meth is almost guaranteed to cause cell death, and likely affect your cognitive well being permanently. Heroin is not neurotoxic like methamphetamine though. To link in with what one of the top comments in this thread said, most of the negative effects of heroin use on one's body are going to be indirect. E.g. through neglect of one's hygiene and well being due to an overwhelming need to use and reuse heroin at the cost of taking care of oneself. That is to say, the serious addict hardly worries about such sober mundanities as eating properly, drinking enough water and brushing his/her teeth etc.",
"You end up not taking care of yourself. Try bathing sporadically (at best), making hygiene a tertiary concern, skip grooming and teeth brushing, add a fucked up sleep schedule and see how you look after a few months. NOTE: above description fits meth users more than heroin users",
"I have a PhD in neuroscience and have spent my career studying substance abuse disorder in animal models. One method used in my graduate school lab was whole-cell patch-clamping. Basically, you use a glass pipette tip to \"patch\" onto the membrane of a cell so that you can manipulate and record its electrical activity. Suffice it to say patching onto cells from adult rats that have self-administered a good deal of meth is challenging. The cell membranes lose their elasticity, which is only usually seen in animals twice as old.",
"Part of it is the drugs, but mostly it is the lifestyle. You want to be high all the time, more than you want to eat, be warm, sleep, or be clean. You can't keep a job, so you have no money, yet you need your fix. So you engage in risky behavior, like theft and prostitution, and probably wind up taking more than a few beatings in the process. You don't have health care, so any conditions you might have go untreated. That's enough to age anyone, apart from what the drugs do. Also, there is some selection bias going on. When you see those before and after pictures, you see the absolutely nicest before and the most wretched after they could find. If there still isn't much different, it doesn't make the cut.",
"Ever stay up all weekend eating junk food on a netflicks marathon? You're not your most beautiful come Monday. Or every get so stressed out about an exam you pull an all nighter chugging Red Bull and walk out the the exam like a dead-eyed zombie? Well, let's talk about when your entire life is that feeling, x100. Your skin is an organ. On top of that, it can be kind of a fickle organ. Don't drink enough water? Dry and patchy skin. Don't eat enough vitamins and minerals? Bad skin coloration and health. In short, when you put good things in your body, your skin reflects that overall health. Also, it's a reflector of the inside parts. So if your liver is failing, you body won't prioritize not having wrinkles and acne! Drugs, particularly heroin and meth, are chemicals that are not meant for ingestion. On top of that, they are often cut with things you REALLY don't want to ingest. This is obviously going to make your fickle skin unhappy. Combine that with a general lack of healthy food, clean water, skin care, restful sleep, etc and addicts skin can become very unhealthy. NOW mix all of that with unclean needles causing skin irritation and infection and well ... you get \"that\" look Source: I work with addicts on a daily basis. Not all of them are prostitutes- in fact, I would argue the \"new cocaine addict\" is an upper-middle-class suburban white girl around 22 whose parents give her money because they don't know what to do. This idea only \"true addicts\" are homeless robbers is kind of racist, really outdated, and very much inaccurate.",
"Child of a meth user here. My mom was a full blown addict from 97 or 98 until about 2005 and then occasional usage until 2007. I was 13 when she finally quit. We moved 15 time in that time frame, lost electric more times than I can remember, most of my childhood memories are of talking to my mom through a closed bedroom door, we didn't live in squalor bc well when she was high she cleaned like no other. Oh she is now in the process of getting all of her teeth pulled to get dentures put in as they've been rotting out of her head for years. She doesn't look like she has meth mouth as it was the back ones going first.",
"Top comment is great, but I try to explain it like you're five: So imagine the human body is car. It needs fuel to run properly. There is normal fuel and there is really powerful fuel. Now the car runs perfectly using normal fuel, but you can also use the powerful fuel to always run your car at maximum speed. Unfortunately, always running at maximum speed lets your tires wear out a lot faster. So using the powerful fuel can make your car run on maximum speed, but you will need to change your tires in a very short time, because they will wear out so quick. Unfortunately, you have only one set of tires for your own car, that you can't replace, so it doesn't make sense to go at maximum speed all the time.",
"meth and heroin are very, very different drugs. heroin does not cause apparent aging from its direct effects and some people use it for years without other people knowing.",
"This really only applies to meth. Opiates like heroin don't change you mentally or physically, besides addiction and mild inflammation in the user if abusing the drug. (Also potentially OD'ing is the biggest risk here) However, like other people have stated, being an addict is usually associated with being homeless and doing anything for the drug therefore looking like shit in the process. There are people that pass you every day doing these drugs all the time that don't look the part because they can afford the addiction. (This is true for drugs that don't change your physical appearance by *just simply using them*. Meth, when abused will make you look like you do meth no matter what you do.)",
"Meth and heroin actually open up time portals to the distant future where every need is taken for. The problem is that most addicts will return to the past to get more meth and heroin but then get stuck back here, since it's rather tricky to open time portals. They haven't really aged decades in a short amount of time, it took decades for them to age decades, but to our perspective it seems like very little time has past since they were looking younger.",
"Meth user here. It's because we don't eat and stay up for days. The skinnier face? Haven't eaten in 3 days. The eyes? Haven't slept in 5 days. Once a user is off their drug of choice, they look their age in about a month.",
"Personal Opinion: I was a meth addict for a year in high school and I look the exact same. No I wasn't snorting everyday but it was more like maybe once a week? Meth's properties do the \"aging effect\" after it's constantly used for a period of time. This is also in conjunction with the lack of eating or drinking for a long time. I'm not sure the length but I'd imagine over a few years. P.S. For anyone wondering, I'm clean now and have been for well over a few years now :)",
"There is a term one of my old AA buddies used to use- *Accelerated Decrepidation*. Why do addicts age faster? They be livin too fast!",
"Sleep deprevation, malnutrition, and dehydration. It would be the same for anyone experiencing these things. What's the mystery here?",
"Cannabis is worse. My friend smoked it once, turned his teeth green! It is, the Devils Lettuce my friends.",
"Interestingly a similar combination of symptoms is sometimes seen after chemo as well as radiation exposure. It is said that taking samples of bone marrow, important tissues (eg liver, etc) could one day allow the damage to be repaired as would doing a \"Before\" ultra high resolution MRI scan.",
"The top comment makes no difference between heroin and meth, but they are like day and night. Heroin has health related risks, extreme constipation, atem depression and cut product. The substance itself is not damaging to the body! The rest of the risks are related to how you consume it. Needles and smoking both damage the body and can lead to more health problems.",
"Heroin doesn't do that. In my experience, unless the person is getting weathered by other things such as homelessness, heroin seems like it has anti-aging effects to be honest.",
"How will my body turn out if I am a millionaire meth user? ie. I don't have to do stupid shit to get high, and I will continue on my diet of lobster and kobe beef?",
"I miss the time when ELI5 was actually about writing an answer so short and easy that a five year old could get it. You know, like the name of the sub says. I mean, if I wanted a long answer, like the top comment in this thread, I would just google the question myself. Just try reading the top comment to a five year old and see if they're still interested after the first paragraph. This sub has lost its intent.",
"Others have said it, but I'll rehash: **Meth:** primary issues are lack of sleep due to the amphetamine effects, malnutrition from not eating - and lastly - in my personal opinion the worst - dehydration from not drinking water. Not sleeping for days on end is dangerous and auditory/visual hallucinations creep after a few days. However, the dehydration will make everything exponentially worse. **Another** major issue is the psychological issues meth use presents. You pick at your skin and see acne that's not there, the scars and marks from this are one of the longest lasting effects of meth use. Lastly, meth in high dosages is neurotoxic and can damage your dopaminergic system. IIRC the neurotoxicity damages the reuptake of dopamine. **Heroin:** completely different beast. As many have said, it's not detrimental or \"toxic\" directly like meth is. It's not tricking your blood brain barrier -- you have opioid receptors throughout your body. You still eat, drink water, and god damn do you sleep. I actually agree with one dude on here, long term \"strictly heroin\" (not meth combo) addicts tend to retain a youthful appearance. You're not outside getting battered with UV rays, you're mainly nodded out sleeping or hunting your next high. withdrawal sucks but not particularly dangerous to your body. Heroin users can also be pickers, but nowhere NEAR on the level of meth. The main danger of heroin use is obviously OD, but right up there is abscesses from IV drug use. When you burn out your veins, you start missing. Bacteria festers under the skin and causes abscesses. If you don't get them lanced or get antibiotics you can go septic etc. I also have a theory that IVDU end up bolstering their immune system due to introducing and having to beat all kinds of nasty bacteria thrown directly into their body/bloodstream -- but obviously at a cost. With either, aside from the skin scarring and cognitive \"damage\" long term meth users can incur - when you get sober and healthy you can generally look amazing and whatnot within a month or two. It's a trip.",
"Because the pictures you see are of broken people that are entered into the criminal or medical system due to overuse of drugs and generally horrible lifestyles. A person whose breakfast includes heroin since ten years back, who earns $500k a year won't go pose for some drug addict photoshoot.",
"IMHO, the response to \"Krokodil\" and its effects are just the product of poor marketing & branding. Of course a drug named Krokodil is a horror show! Who are the ad wizards that came up with this one, right?!! But if it was named SnuggleyCat, Fluffykins, NewbornBabySmellTinyBabySloth? Hell, i might give it a go.... Heard of that new street drug Cuddle-Puppers? No? Shits great!",
"As a former addict, heroin doesn't necessarily make you look older. You're just so lethargic you look like hell most of the time. That with eating sugar and cigarettes as a diet makes you look bad too. But opiates overall don't make you age much. Sometimes the opposite happens and it slows it down. Sometimes. Meth and other stimulates definitely do age you. Crazy bad for your body, but I can't say why as well as others. But I wanted to clarify about opiates",
"As a dentist, I've treated several recovering meth users and heroin users. The \"meth mouth\" with the black decay next to the gums occurs with both of these drugs within a matter of months sometimes. Dry mouth is the biggest culprit along with sugary foods and lack of any regular hygiene. There has been some investigation into the chemicals in the drugs themselves causing the distinctive decay. The other cases where I see rapid decay similar to meth mouth are uncontrolled diabetics. I'm sure hard drugs destroy the immune system much like having diabetes can. The only cases that did not involve extracting the teeth and dentures were young patients in some sort of strict drug rehab program. Imagine looking forward to going to the dentist because it's the only time you're allowed out of your court-mandated drug facility. Take home message: Drugs are bad, mkay.",
"Well, my bigger concern is... Why don't we have drugs with the opposite effect?",
"Honestly the malnutrition and dehydration are the 2 buggest factors, you've probably met a lot of users and didn't knowing because they take care of themself",
"This is not a chemistry question, it's a physics one. The drugs allow them to time travel into the future but they still stay here. They will also die faster.",
"Médico AND failed 3rd yr dentist here. Meth is a stimulant similar to adrenaline and shuts down your body's salivia production. Users end up with severe dry mouth to the point that the gums and tongue start to deteriorate. This leads to more gum and tooth disease. Before you know it, boom no teeth.",
"Not sure for heroin, but for meth the high pH of the drug within the body causes the body to liquefy the muscle tissues, and pulls calcium from bone and teeth to keep the blood pH values within a safe range for the body. So the skinny look and meth mouth (rotten teeth) is caused by the body dissolving itself to stay alive. This means the damage is permanent since the tissues have dissolved. Please, don't ever do meth. Source: managed low income housing and witnessed the scourge of chemical drugs in our society.",
"A small addition to all the wonderful responses so far is that the drug is obviously not good for your body; healthy people don't \"age\" quickly because it normally takes a long time for the body to naturally mature and as a result, somewhat deteriorate (things like wrinkles and baggy skin and such are due to the respective types of skin cells not being able to fully do their respective jobs, so the result is the altered physical appearance). Drugs however, since they're toxic to the body, interfere with the natural processes of the body's cells causing some of the same symptoms and physical appearances associated with normal aging without actually aging at all."
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5w29rs | Why is it that toothpaste always comes out of the tube with that perfect striped pattern? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"URL_0 This is what a tube looks like on the inside. When its pushed out, an small amount of each stripe is pushed out in a similar ratio.",
"The toothpaste is put into the tube in a specific way before it is sealed. You could actually mix the paste inside the tube, but you'd have to really try doing it by squeezing all over the tube repeatedly.",
"It's late and I'm on mobile so I don't have all the links handy, but this is an interesting phenomenon. Toothpaste has an extreme viscosity (can't remember if high or low) which means it mounds very well. Think of the difference between olive oil and peanut butter. You can make peanut butter create a mound, but olive oil (or water, or cola) will always be flat on the surface. An interesting effect of this is that if behaves like a solid. So when you squeeze the tube of toothpaste you get what is called a shearing effect, which goes beyond my understanding to explain well. If you search for \"viscosity\" and \"shearing effect\" you'll get some more well cited and explained information that should help you understand better. The jist of it is that toothpaste behaves like a solid that is mashed, rather than a liquid which mixes."
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5w2bai | What does the recently proposed House Bill 610 mean for public education? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"One thing it means is that Federal nutrition guidelines for school lunches will be tossed out. States will then be able to determine for themselves what constitutes an appropriate school lunch."
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5w2f7t | How a lava lamp works | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's got this wax inside that gets less dense as it heats up. So it sinks to the bottom of the lamp near where the bulb is, heats up, then floats back up to the top, where it cools off, and comes back down."
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5w2fdx | What constitutes a Roman numeral in a chemical formula? | For example, MnS is manganese (IV) sulphide, but how would I know what Roman numeral to add in something like tin oxide? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You have to look at the oxidation state of the metal in the compound (a number like +1, +2, etc.). If it's always a certain value, like sodium for example, then you don't need a Roman numeral. Otherwise, the numeral just corresponds to the oxidation number, so in your example manganese would have an oxidation number of +4. P.S. I think you meant MnS. Mg = magnesium. ;)"
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