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5wbgh1 | Why do nightlights have a motion sensor as well? Is there a point to these? | Just something I realized whilst turning on my light in the bathroom today and the switch is next to a plug in night light. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Sure it's a motion sensor, and not a light sensor? I know many nightlights have light sensors so they switch on in the absence of other light."
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5wbi51 | Shouldn't large corporations in the US be in favor of socialized healthcare since it shifts they health care burden from them to government? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When employees depend on their employer to provide healthcare then they are much more likely to stay in a terrible job with abusive management. It's the same with foreign employees with a corporate sponsored work visa. Those employees will get kicked out of the country of they lose their job for whatever reason. That's why big corporations are always pushing for more H-1B visas (in addition to pushing down salaries for highly trained personnel).",
"What happens right now is BigCo pays its workers partially in cash and partially in health benefits. It doesn't need to pay taxes on those health benefits, so the same money paid in health benefits is far cheaper for the company than it would be in salary. If you remove the option of providing benefits, all you do is shift the salary portion upwards. After the stickiness settled out, BigCo would be spending the same on its employees and its employees would be making a higher salary (but almost certainly getting this additional money and more taxed away to pay for universal benefits). However, the issue isn't really BigCo. It's SmallCo. Let's say you're a senior partner in a 50-person law firm. Your firm offers excellent health benefits. More importantly, you *personally* have decision authority over those benefits. What that means is that when your child gets sick with a nigh-unto-incurable conditions, you have enormous clout with the insurance company. If they're not willing to cover the care or they're hassling you over bills, you can threaten to take your business - and the business of the other 49 people in your law firm - elsewhere. In contrast, that same senior partner in a universal health care world has no clout whatsoever. They're still making the same six-figure-plus salary, they still belong to the same golf club, but now the people making decisions about their health care aren't returning their phone calls. The same happens with unions. Many unions control the health care for their members. If you create a government universal health care plan, they suddenly lose control over their health care. And this is literally a life-and-death issue. People outside of these sorts of arrangements (unions, professional middle class) don't have much power over their health care under any scheme, so it doesn't matter very much to them. The tremendously wealthy and influential - CEOs and Senators - have control no matter what. But the middle class goes from having decent, responsive medical care to being treated like indigents.",
"The corporations never had to deal with the healthcare burden. The people did, and the corporations are making money by having the people pay for healthcare. As such, they don't want the governement to interfere.",
"Because private healthcare generates profit. Think about it- if it's really a \"burden\" why would any company do it? Cause insurers in fact make stupid amounts of money!",
"Under the current system they pay for their own employees. Under that system they pay for everybody. Now sure the cost is spread around with everybody pitching in, but the US has a progressive tax system, meaning the large US corporation will be paying disproportionally compared to everyone else.",
"Aaand who are going to pay taxes to make it happen? Why pay for everyone if you can pay for your workers only?",
"To a certain degree, socialized anything has a stigma attached to it. Market-based systems developed organically (for most consumer transactions, health care included), and those market systems had to work through some wrinkles to work. Because of that, in most cases they work reasonably well, and help allocate goods and services in a relatively efficient way. In a few cases, various governments tried socializing some services. Those socialized services didn't work out well initially--and of course they didn't, the market based systems took time to get right too--which has attached a stigma to any new initiative that hopes to socialize something. People see the problems that have been created by socialized systems, but not the solutions that they've provided. The problem in healthcare is that it doesn't lend itself to a fair market transaction. If you're dying of a disease, and only one person can cure that disease, that supplier can charge you whatever you're willing to pay. If you have a gun shot wound, and you need treatment right now, you're not going to shop from surgeon to surgeon to get the best price. On the other side, the moral issues in healthcare can be really tricky. If I have a disease that can be treated, but at a very high cost, at what point is the cost of my treatment too great of a burden to inflict upon society? How does my role in society impact that determination? If I'm a skilled surgeon, should society be willing to tolerate more expensive treatment than if I'm a used car salesman? Who makes that call? I interned for a family court judge for a semester some years ago. Those judges make really difficult decisions that have a significant impact on kids lives. The emotional baggage clearly weighed on the judges I interacted with. Can you imagine asking someone to be a judge on a panel determining (in essence) who lives and who dies? The emotional burden would be enormous. All that being said, I'm the odd person who is right-of-center politically, but believes a single-payer system is the right healthcare solution.",
"this is a problem of agency. Most of the employees of most large corporations *should* be in favor of this, but since many of them get health insurance through work, they don't think that they would benefit (not realizing that they *should* be demanding substantially higher wages when their employers no longer need to pay for their health insurance, which would more than offset their personal increase in taxes, if any). High ranking, highly paid executives who have a lot of influence on corporate policy and lobbying not only have health insurance through work, they also make so much more money than average that they would personally lose out by having to pay higher taxes.",
"Large corporations aren't in favour of anything only people form opinions. I guess logically what you mean to ask is why aren't share holders or CEOs of corporations in favour of socialized medicine. Well first I'm not convinced that they aren't. Single payer health care is a pretty popular idea, even in America. But there are some pretty strong arguments against state monopoly health insurance or whatever implementation of socialized medicine you favour. After all, not many people are in favour of socialized automobile industries. Or socialized food, or socialized housing. Very few people any more are in favour of total socialism. And all of the arguments these people might present against total socialism or socialism in the automobile industry are powerful cases against socialized medicine as well. Markets work much better than government monopolies. In Canada, where we have socialized medicine, the government routinely rations care. If you are waiting a year or two years for your operation this can mean that you are crippled for life, or worse that you die. A lot of times these specialized operations have to be contracted out to American hospitals as well. If you bring the cost down to the end user down to zero, the quantity demanded goes up significantly. Some people rush to the doctor for every little thing because it's free so why not. What you are sure is the sniffles COULD be some deadly disease. So this drives up the cost to the taxpayer."
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5wbkl6 | Why is fighting allowed in North American professional hockey? Is it just for show, is it planned? What benefit does a player get out of fighting when they could easily be injured as a result? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Technically speaking, fighting isn't allowed in pro hockey, there are rules against it and players who engage in a fight are assigned penalties. There's kind of an unspoken code among hockey players though that dictates when it's appropriate to pick a fight with someone. Generally fighters (or enforcers or goons as they're sometimes called) only fight other fighters. Both players need to consent to the fight, either verbally or by physically fighting back and the fight stops when one player falls to the ice. You don't often see a skilled goal scorer getting into fights, but there are a few who'll drop the gloves if they need to. An enforcer will usually start a fight with an opposing player if they've done something nasty to one of their teammates like lay on a dirty hit that might have injured them. The referees can't catch everything that happens on the ice and losing your star player for a couple of weeks to an injury is far worse than taking a 5 minute penalty for beating a guy up. It also sends the message that if you want to play rough with our best players, you have to pay the price. Since fights are for the most part consensual and players assume a certain amount of risk when playing hockey it's very, very rare that any kind of criminal charges get laid against fighters. The only times that it's happened are in cases when one player sucker punches another or decides to use their stick as a weapon.",
"Fighting is allowed because most of the injuries aren't too severe, and it's become part of the sport. When two players go at it, the sticks get tossed away (so no one is assaulting anyone with a blunt weapon) the gloves come off (so when they punch each other in the face they feel it just as much in their knuckles as the opponent does in the face) and the skates stay on the ice (so no one is getting a skate stabbed into their femoral artery). Balancing on skates while fighting, there is an upper limit to just how hard you can punch a guy without risking a spill yourself, and while there are a number of very dramatic looking injuries (like the occasional tooth getting knocked out, or split brows bringing that bright red blood splatter on the ice) it's rare that someone is in real peril from a fight; for instance (per wikipedia: URL_0 ) during the period of 2000-2009, only one guy died as a result of a hockey fight, and that was because he fell over and hit his head on the ice, while more guys died from medical complications during training. The fights are not \"planned\" in a wrestling sense, nor are they just for show. No one is sitting with a clipboard and a radio telling the players when they're scheduled to have a punch-out. Fistfighting serves as a form of deterrence against opposition actions that are either frowned upon but not strictly against the rules, or against fowl play that is pulled off while the refs are looking elsewhere. Say for instance someone decides to use their stick to trip an opponent; even if the ref misses it, the other team knows damn well what they did, and he's going to be in less of a hurry to repeat that stunt if he knows that one or more guys on the team ( URL_1 ) are ready to eat the penalty time in order to retaliate. As far as the risk/reward ratio, the risk is that one of your players ends up in a penalty box or with an injury that requires medical attention, versus the reward that the other team isn't going to screw with your players (especially important players) unless they're ready to taste some blood in exchange.",
"I think it's important to distinguish between \"allowed\" and \"managed\". The officials don't interfere until someone falls. Otherwise they'd be getting between two giant, strong men who are swinging at each other. After it's broken up, penalties are assigned.",
"Skates have to stay on the ice. Just ask H. Gilmore: holds record for most time spent in the penalty box and the only guy to ever take off his skate and try to stab somebody IIRC.",
"Fights are \"tolerated\" in hockey because it puts asses in seats. Period. If the league really wanted to get rid of fighting, all they'd need to do is change the penalty from 5 minutes to 5 games. But they don't because the fans love it.",
"I'm a hockey fights nerd, and ex hockey player (not NHL) who played the enforcer role (in the 80's)... Hockey is different today. Intimidation was a huge part of the game (less and less so since the mid to late 90's, and probably even before that). Take 2 teams: Team A is significantly more skilled/talented. More often than not they are going to beat Team B... Team B knows they are significantly less skilled... They have little chance of winning if it's just based on skill. However Team B realizes that Team A with its skilled players (skill players are normally smaller) can be intimidated (or let's say they hope they can be intimidated) to the point where their skill advantage is nullified. Team A will employ players to protect their skilled players. Team B will employ players to attempt to intimidate them. It becomes an arms race of sorts. Fighting is less and less relevant in today's game. It probably serves little purpose except for allowing players to unleash some frustration without swinging a hockey stick at someone's head. Now it's more tradition; the day is coming when it's eliminated but I don't think anyone in a position to make that change wants to do so because there will be severe backlash from a significant segment of NHL fans. I'm not sure where I stand. I think it's time for it to go, but a part of me hates myself for saying that.",
"The reason fighting exists in hockey is to curb escalation. People get hit pretty hard in the sport and a fight will stop two players from taking dirty hits on each other",
"This might be buried but let me try to shed some light with a counter example. Late 90s I'm watching playoff football, I can't remember the teams but I want to say Pittsburgh and San Diego? Anyway, one team had an amazing running back, foundation of the offense and every time he had a run the other team was going after his legs; twisting, falling on his ankles, shitty stuff. The refs were calling it though and by halftime they (the team attacking dudes legs) were losing and the announcers were all over the penalty yards stat: \"200yds in penalties! (or whatever it was) that's not how you win at football!\" So about a third of the way through the third the RB in question goes down to a leg injury and the team becomes one dimensional on offense. Other team just Ts off on the blitz. 3 and out. 3 and out. 3 and out. \"Dirty\" team goes on to win. Penalties don't mean shit if you can get the best player off the field. Good luck with that shit in hockey.",
"It's barely tolerated nowadays. Look up 90s brawls with dudes like Stu Grimson and Marty McSorley swinging at each other until their whole equipment fell off.",
"I'd rather see controlled fighting in hockey conspired to the mass brawls you see in basketball and baseball.",
"I don't understand the explanations being given. You have a goon fight another goon because someone from the second goon's team committed some infraction. If the individual committing the infraction doesn't fight (and suffer the consequences of the infraction), what purpose does it serve? Must be that the offender doesn't want to see his own team's goon get beat up? But what if his team's goon is a better fighter? Then he can act with impunity.",
"All I know is that, this is the reason I have become an ice hockey fan. Go rockem sockem .",
"Yes, I did. Liked the rivalry. Didn't like that fighting needed to be in every game. Too much hype by the press and fans.",
"Just adding one point I've yet to see mentioned: the odds of either player being seriously hurt are very low. In addition to the previously mentioned fact that they ditch their gloves/sticks, there's also the matter of the fights taking place on an ice rink. Newton's 3rd law ensures that any attempt to punch forward will result in the puncher sliding backwards, which effectively cuts their striking power in half. They could brace their feet using the edges of their skates, but that leaves them in a poor position for throwing effective punches. Tl;dr it looks like they're hitting each other a lot harder than they are."
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5wblb2 | How does a human develop a phobia? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Phobia development is (as with all psychopathology) immensely complex, and can occur in a variety of ways. Most theories stem from a behavioral perspective, which focuses on how an individual has learned to associate a phobic stimulus (e.g. being in a basement) as predictive of a negative experience (e.g. being assaulted). So, keeping with the basement example, a person simply going down into their basement should be neutral (i.e. we don't naturally acquire a fear of basements). Now, if on one of those occasions that person goes down into their basement and is then attacked by a robber, that person would have a natural terror response to being attacked. Depending on a host of factors (e.g. how the person processes trauma, how many stressful life events they've experienced, genetic factors), that person may then develop an association between the basement (neutral) and being attacked (terror). Thus, if they strongly associate that terror with the basement, they may feel anxious about the possibility of entering a basement (and the possibility of being attacked), and may react with fear/terror when presented with a basement situation (regardless of being attacked). An additional possibility follows from a \"see, think, do\" model (i.e. vicarious conditioning). Essentially, if I were to **see** a person (especially someone I know or admire) scream and run away in response to a non-venomous spider, I may begin to **think** about that observation (*wow they were scared, spiders must be very dangerous*) and thus **do** or mimic what I witnessed (e.g. scream or run away the next time I see a spider). Speaking of spiders, evolutionary psychologists have posited that we are more likely to develop phobias for things that have been historically relevant and threatening to our evolutionary ancestors (e.g. spiders, snakes, heights, dark environments, etc.). Lastly, there are of course major cognitive factors, like catastrophizing, that can occur independently from learned experiences and influence development (e.g. if I were to believe that an unkilled/captured spider would crawl into my ear while I sleep and kill me or my family)."
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5wbo6s | Why do belly buttons look different? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The belly button is a healed scar from the umbilical cord that supplies the fetus in utero. A few weeks after birth, the stump falls off and the scar heals up. While the process is similar in each person, there is no uniform rule to how the scar has to heal, so they all look a little different. In addition, the belly button is a common site of hernias, which can further alter the appearance."
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5wbs5a | Is there something that prevents auto manufacturers from releasing a new model with the same name as each others'? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Having to fight a lawsuit. Why spend money when you can just come up with diff name.",
"Tesla just went through this trying to name the the model 3 the model E, another car company already had the name and ruined his plan to have his first 3 cars the model S, model X, and model E. I'm sure you can guess why, even though they were out of order.",
"Yes. Product names can be registered with the governments and are protected by trademark laws. Once a company establishes a trademark, they can sue any other company that tries to use that trademark in a similar way. If Honda tried to name a car \"Fiesta\", Ford would sue, and they would win, and Honda would have to change the name. However if another company tried to use \"Fiesta\" in a way that no reasonable consumer would confuse it with the Ford Fiesta, like as the name for a line of party hats, then Ford would not win."
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5wbspz | Why hasn't anyone made women's pants that have functional pockets? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"My view on this has always been that women's jeans are designed without pockets to help sell other products. If they have no storage built into their clothing they will have to buy an accessory such as a handbag or backpack which allows a company to have a larger variety of products.",
"People do. For example, there's a store not far from my house that sells hard hats, jeans, traffic vests, etc that are affordable and rugged. I'm told that their womens' jeans have pockets that are like normal pockets, because everything in the store is designed for cheap utility. In general, women are taught to shop at stores that sell fashionable clothing. Fashionable clothing is not intended to be practical. But if you go shopping for women's clothing at places construction workers might shop, you'll find (again, I'm told by a woman I know) more practical women's clothing.",
"This is largely a 'missed opportunity' in the market. Companies haven't yet mastered the pant that is loose enough to fit iphones and keys that's also structured enough to have a lean aesthetic look. They'd probably cost a fortune to design (find the right fabric mix) and manufacture. Also, they typically carry purses that negate the need for functionality."
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5wbt04 | How does /r/SubredditSimulator work? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Subreddit Simulator uses markov chains to generate text. You can think of markov chains as an algorithm that stochastically (so randomly) pick words from some source. The likelyhood of it picking a word depends on how often that word is used in that context. So they feed text from some subreddit into the markov chain to generate posts."
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5wbvxu | why and how do our voices change to much higher and likely to break when we're about to cry? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The voice can be used in different ways. One of the most important aspects of that is how your vocal cords vibrate. The vocal cords, basically two folds of mucous membrane (hence the official name \"vocal folds\") in your larynx. There are muscles to push them together, and combined with air pressure coming from below, they vibrate, that creates sound and that sound gets amplified by the shape of your throat, mouth, tongue etc., through resonance. In normal speaking, the vocal folds vibrate over their full length and with their full mass ( URL_1 ). This gives the most resonant, \"fullest\" sound and also lends itself more easily to a deeper pitch. When you're anxious or about to cry, the muscles in and near the larynx tend to tense up (feels like your throat closes up a little) and \"block\" this full vibration from happening, either by making the vocal folds too stiff or by obstructing the air flow above the vocal folds so that the air \"piles up\". Either way, you end up with a less resonant voice. If less of the mass of the vocal folds is involved in the vibration, you get a higher pitch by default (an extreme version of that is called falsetto, seen here: URL_0 ). When the vocal folds are not able to move freely due to excess tension or air turbulence, more air pressure is needed for the voice to still work properly. If the air pressure goes below that baseline, the voice breaks."
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5wbxh1 | How do we calculate the world's population from 100s of years ago? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Countries have had Census programs since the Egyptian empire. Taking the averages of those, and applying it to other areas with assumed similar population density, allows for a fairly accurate prediction."
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5wbyl5 | If programs/software is created in such a way that it's not possible for them to be hacked , how do they actually end up being hacked? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It is not possible to make something that cannot be hacked. Just like everything else, if humans can build it then humans can unbuild it.",
"It's very, very difficult to be sure that a program is completely secure, unless it's a very simple one. If we take a very simple model of programming, it's basically that you have an input, you process it and do something or output something as a result. Of course there are many, many different possible inputs and you can't write separate code for every single possibility, so what you do is you make assumptions about the structure of your input and write code based on these assumptions. For anything reasonably complex, there are easily dozens of these assumptions in each module, and there can easily be hundreds or thousands of modules. \"Hacking\" basically works by finding assumptions in the code that are actually false, and then providing inputs that violate the assumptions, and getting the program into a state that the developer did not expect to be possible. Some of these states then allow you to do things that the program normally stops from happening. Hardening your code against attacks means you have to second-guess your assumptions and build in checks to catch out all the ways you can think of to break your assumptions. Since you're not always aware of all of the things you're assuming, nor of all of the consequences of those assumptions, it's almost unavoidable that a dedicated attacker will still be able to find something, maybe by combining two or three seemingly unimportant assumptions and creatively mangling the input(s) so that the effects build up. As the various components of your program get more, and the interactions between become more complicated, it's basically impossible to be fully aware of all of the details. Perhaps some of the components from third parties that you are using have weaknesses in them that you don't know about... then chances are your program can be compromised, too. It's a lot of work to stay on top of all of that! Creating software that minimizes the possibility of attacks takes a lot of discipline and experience, and even then there are no guarantees."
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5wc09e | Why has there been a prevalence in pedophiles being part of the Catholic Church? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Pedophilia is no more prevalent in the Catholic Church than in wider society. However, the Catholic Church combined two dangerous attributes: 1. Offered programs with minimal supervision that afforded direct involvement with children. 2. Had an institutional bent towards secrecy and hiding mistakes. Bear in mind that the scandal was never that there were pedophiles in the Catholic Church. The scandal was that the Catholic Church concealed those pedophiles and didn't institute measures to protect children from people they knew shouldn't be in such positions.",
"(1) Pedophiles are attracted to occupations which put them into positions of power and give them access to children. (2) The Catholic Church is one of the few employers who will actively protect those pedophiles from law enforcement if and when they get caught.",
"Active pedophiles (many/most pedophiles are passive, i.e. do not want to act on their sexual attraction) tend to seek environments that enable them to act without discovery. They tend to (consciously or subconsciously) choose jobs or hobbies that give them: - access to kids - where they can groom the kids over time - roles that makes the kids look up to them (a power that they abuse to have sex, and to cover up their crime) - where they enjoy the trust of the community (if a kid talks they are less likely to be believed) The church provides them exactly this, as do many other positions e.g. boy/girl scouts, coaches, etc.",
"The problem hasn't been pedophilia, its been homosexual sexual assault of a minor. The vast majority(over 90%) of the accusations have been by men who were 13-17 when it happened. Proper definitions of words matter. A pedophile is someone who is attracted to a prepubescent child, not a young man. Do some reading, most pedophiles lose interest when the child is 11-12 years old. George Weigel, a devout Catholic, did an honest and in-depth examination of the issue in 2002. The book he wrote about his results is called \"The Courage To Be Catholic: Crisis, Reform, and the Future of the Church.\" Pope John Paul II started really dealing with the issue in the late 80s, early 90s but it was so entrenched, they are still weeding out the offenders. In the US, the majority of the accusations took place in the 1930s-70s. while an occasional abuse does currently happen from time to time, it is absolutely nowhere as often as it was in the past. In MN, i think we have had a couple of accusations where the crime had happened within the last 20 years. In past centuries, almost any single Catholic man could become a priest. In the past 30 years, the process has become extremely more selective, with many backaround checks, criminal record checks, mental health checks and many interviews of friends and family members before someone is even accepted to join the seminary."
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5wc0ke | Why does glass break when one hits a certain note and volume? | I've only seen it happen a few times in "live action" movies and shows, and a bunch of times in cartoons, but I've never known if it can actually happen or why it does. | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Imagine a kid on a swing. You go up behind them and give them a gentle push, in response to which they swing back and forth gently. Then you try giving them a bigger and bigger push and they swing higher, but eventually you realize that pushing them too hard will just shove them off the swing. Instead, you look at giving them a bunch of little pushes. You notice that when you just pull them back and let them go they swing back and forth at, let's say, a 2 second period (1 second swinging forward, 1 second backwards). You try pushing them every 1 second and notice that that doesn't work well at all: you're pushing forward just as they're coming back from your last push. You try pushing every 1.5 seconds and it works OK for the first couple of pushes, but you quickly find that you're pushing on them as they're still swinging back. Finally, you try pushing them every 2 seconds—whenever they're at the back of their swing. This allows all of your little pushes to add up and they can swing higher and higher, but for a given push strength there's always a maximum height they get to—whatever height makes it so that they lose as much energy in a swing as they gain from your push. This is a simple description of resonance: some things have a frequency they like to oscillate at and if you give them a bit of a push with that same period (or an even multiple of it) then you can get much larger motion than you'd get with one push alone. For a piece of glassware that frequency happens to be in the few hundred hertz (oscillations per second) range, which is also the range that the human voice can reach. If you sing with exactly that note and with a loud enough volume then the little pushes from the sound you're generating will add up until the glass breaks.",
"It does, the mythbusters have tested this under optimal conditions. All crystals have a natural resonance frequency. When this frequency is induced across the crystal, it will resonate at this frequency and create what is known as a standing wave. Physics of standing waves aside, if you create this frequency at an amplitude (volume) with enough energy to exceed the glass's strength, it will shatter because the standing wave created on the surface of the glass will cause the surface to flex."
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5wc2d9 | What would happen to feet propped on an airbag if it deploys? | On a regular basis, I notice passengers in other cars propping their feet on the airbag. It seems like an inherently horrible idea. I imagine bones snapping in many places, but what might exactly happen to someone who has their feet propped on an airbag, if it deployed in an accident? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"de8w4gl",
"de8w828"
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"text": [
"Legs would be blown into the windshield. [Here] ( URL_0 ) is a youtube video showing exactly what would happen.",
"Their knees would most probably go through their face. there is quite a force, an explosion actually, it has been known to kill babies and youngsters."
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5wc4cc | Why is it easier to remember things when you copy them down versus read them? | I've tried to find sources, but all of them are about typing vs handwriting... | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"de9470z"
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"text": [
"Reading and moving your hands requires two separate parts of your brain. When you do both for the same task, you are creating stronger pathways in your brain making it easier to recall the information later. I learned this from a presentation on how to give good power point presentations by Melissa Marshall from Penn State. She has actually researched the concepts behind how people learn from presentations and surprise 99% of people do power-point the wrong way. Check her stuff out."
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5wc4tq | Why are you more tired after sitting in bed all day? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"de8xddz"
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"text": [
"It's because physical inactivity causes the lymph circulation to slow down. Lymph is a fluid that circulates through the lymphatic system, carrying proteins, fats, bacteria and other stuff around our bodies. It refreshes the tissues, thus improving their functionality. Unlike the cardiovascular system, the lymphatic system has no pump (heart) to push the lymph through the system. Instead, it is moved by the contraction and relaxation of muscle tissue, and therefore requires physical activity to properly function."
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15
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5wc5jg | Why does nail polish last the longest on the big toe versus the rest of your fingers/toes when applied at the same time? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"de8yaja"
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"text": [
"Not completely sure, just throwing an idea out there. Your big toe has the largest surface area compared to the rest of your toes, so the nail polish will last longer. The smaller toes have less nail polish, so the nail polish will last shorter."
],
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5
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5wc5p0 | When will driverless cars be widely available? What is the status of their technological development and legal roadblocks? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"de8x86c"
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"text": [
"They are currently in the middle of safety testing in several States. They will likely be street legal within 5, but will require driver's licenses still. It will probably be 10-20 years for it to allow people without licenses to ride in one solo."
],
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3
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5wc9c7 | Why are retail stores closing? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"de95nu2",
"de8xnt6",
"de8xn3z"
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"text": [
"Another factor is the \"hollowing out of the middle class\": almost none of the economic growth of the past 40 years has gone to the large middle portion of the US population. Most of the benefits have gone to the top 10% and especially the top 1/100 of 1%, and these are not the people who do most of the shopping at JCPenney or Family Christian or the other chains you see closing stores. Tiffany and Porsche are doing just fine. In short: when government economic and tax policies economically hurt the great majority of your customers for decades, they have less money to buy your stuff.",
"Because more and more people just like me HATE going to big box retail stores... I can get everything I need on Amazon for the same price as local AND its delivered to my door... I still do go to my local stores when possible...",
"inefficient supply chain, less selection than websites, general growing antisocial behavior of shoppers to let products come to them in the mail rather than go out into crowds."
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5wc9n4 | How are 3D movies filmed? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"de8zutd"
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"text": [
"Most of the time, they have a special camera with two lenses that it records simultaneously (one for the left eye, one for the right). Some films that wanted to add 3D as a gimmick were shot in 2D and then modified in post-production to add 3Ds (where artists modified the original shot to create a left and right eye version)."
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5wcbmf | why are some flavors exclusive to textures and some are not? | Example: fish flavored marshmallows vs. vanilla flavored marshmallows. But also chocolate milk vs. solid milk | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"de8yuvz"
],
"text": [
"I don't necessarily have an answer for you, but it did remind me of an experience I had. My wife *loves* garlic. It's nearly a fetish. She has similar feelings about ice cream. One of us made a joke about garlic flavored ice cream and the quest was on.. she found a garlic ice cream recipe online and crafted it with care. The next day we sampled it.. I'm fairly certain it was the most vomit inducing ice cream ever created. EVER. Just.. awful. If it were thawed, I'm sure it would have been a great alfredo sauce. Eating it frozen was terrible, though. I guess my brain was expecting sweet and when it received something VERY different, had a very adverse reaction. :-) The good part: we now have a shared reference for how something might taste. \"Is it worse than garlic ice cream? No? Ok, I'll try it\""
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5wcffl | Is the housing market in the same state it was in 10 years ago? Houses are selling for 15-30k more than their comps and more than they are worth. Are we on the edge of a bubble bust again? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"de92s00",
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"text": [
"> selling for ...more than they are worth Can you clarify this? How do you know they are not worth what other people are willing to pay?",
"At any given time there are going to be bubbles in some localized markets, it's just the nature of markets that aren't perfectly liquid. That said, the bubble that popped in 2007 was a bit unique. Leading up to the crash you had banks writing mortgages to people who had no real means of making the payments. Banks took massive losses, and regulators placed additional requirements on the banks to close the big holes in the system. So for the most part, people who are getting mortgages now are getting mortgages they can afford to pay. So crazy lending practices aren't driving prices higher this time around. There are some other factors that drive prices up, some that are fairly natural, some not. A) Jobs are consolidating somewhat around a number of metropolitan areas, and smaller towns and cities are shrinking. While there's plenty of land available in rural Iowa, there isn't much undeveloped land around San Francisco. There are way more people that want to live and work in the Bay Area than there is land available, so housing prices are out of control there. Some tech companies are expanding their operations in other cities (like Austin, TX), or opening offices in exurbs of other cities, luring staff with the promise of more reasonable real estate, less traffic, etc. Over time, that might alleviate some pressure on the markets, but it will be years (if ever) before that makes a meaningful difference. B) Zoning laws introduce inefficiency into the housing market. If you own a single family home in a hot urban market, the most effective use of that plot of land might be to knock down the house (and ideally some adjacent houses) to build a apartment or condo building that could house many more people per sq acre of land. Local zoning laws often prohibit this from happening. Plenty of those zoning laws exist for good reasons, but they undermine the ability of the market to utilize a scarce resource (land) in the most economically efficient way. C) Interest rates have been low, and have stayed low for the last several years. In recent months, the markets' forward-looking expectation of interest rates have increased. Close watchers of the federal open market committee--which has significant influence on interest rates in the US--predict 2-3 increases this year. That would drive mortgage rates higher, which drives mortgage payments higher. Obviously a 5% mortgage costs more per month than a 4% mortgage. So people who have been waiting on the sideline have been rushing into the market while interest rates are still low. To the extent that there's a bubble in the market, this is probably it."
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5wcgq5 | Do people with eyes that point in different directions have wide angle vision? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"de935uf"
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"text": [
"Technically yes, but it's uselessly blurry, because their eyes are pointing in different directions..."
],
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5wci3x | Why is it easier to cross your eyes than it is for them to look opposite directions? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"de8zm2k"
],
"text": [
"Focusing on something that is close to you automatically causes your eyes to cross, so it's a normal action that your body does a lot, both automatically and on purpose. However, even when focusing on a point that is infinitely far away, your eyes would never need to look further apart than parallel to each other, so going past that is never an action your body learns automatically as you go through your life."
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5wcm2p | just finished up some cleaning and realized I have no idea what "dust" really is | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"de90ksz",
"de9qls1"
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"text": [
"Dust is a lot of dead skin cells, actually. That and hair and fluff from clothing + outdoor particulates. But yep, you're cleaning up your own skin.",
"Fibers, pollen, mites, hair, and dander. Dander are bits of dead skin cells, fingernails, etc. Our skin protects itself with layers of dead skin cells. When you get scratched and the scratch looks white, this is because it scraped dead skin cells off like a white powder. The skin keeps producing new cells continuously, and shedding the dead ones. Some of this dead skin dust is washed off during bathing, but most of it flakes off as you move, becoming air borne and becoming the base of the bedroom food chain. Dust mites feed on your dead skin, other things feed on the dust mites, and everything gets recycled. The rest of it comes from bits of fiber from clothing, pollen and dirt blown on the wind, hair from your body, head, and pets, and it settles in places where the air slows down and is seldom disturbed. Basically when you dust a room, you're removing your skin. If that seems yucky, it beats breathing in your dead skin, or other peoples dead skin. And we breath in dust mites and swallow them all the time but nobody minds. The clean world exists only in your mind :) Don't worry, clean what you can, let the rest sort itself out."
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5wcrkj | What is it like to smell? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"It's pretty much impossible to explain what it feels like, but the basic idea is that you have receptors that respond to the presence of various chemicals, more strongly to some of them than to others. Things have a smell because of trace amounts of chemicals circulating in the air, and getting picked up by these receptors. You could say it works like a combination of hearing (transmission via air) and tasting (biochemical receptors). The way the sensation works is closer to tasting, I guess, but there are way more smells than tastes. Because air carries these chemicals around, how far away you can smell things depends on airflow/wind, the concentration of the chemical at the source, and how easily your receptors can detect the chemical in question. For instance, smell receptors are *extremely* sensitive to the stuff they mix into domestic gas, ethyl mercaptan, basically one milligram per tonne of air can be smelled. Spill a barrel of that stuff somewhere and chances are people will notice tens of kilometers away (subject to wind direction). Many everyday things carry just a few meters or less, though.",
"Taste is akin to touch; it happens in a very specific location, and only in direct contact. You 'feel taste' with the specific part of your tongue that the thing is touching. But smell is more like hearing; you don't really 'feel sound' with your ears, it's just something happening outside you. In the same way you don't really 'feel smell' in your nose - your brain maps the sensation to the outside world. The quality of the sensation itself is perhaps closest to taste; we use it as a much more detailed sense of taste, in fact. When people get a cold and temporarily can't smell much, they complain that they can't taste anything. Which they can, it's just they've lost a good 80% of the bandwidth they're used to. So yeah... taste-hearing is probably the best analogy I can give you. As for how far away... it depends on the smell. Again like hearing, some things carry more than others. A cardboard box has a distinct smell, ferinstance, but unless you're in a room full of them, you have to stick your nose right in it and sniff to pick it up. On the other hand, some smells you can pick up from across the room or across a whole building, even if they're quite faint. If someone's reheating a dried-fish curry in the common-room microwave in my building, the whole floor will know about it, at the very least. The scent of wattle (acacia) blossom is famous for its ability to carry; despite being only slightly noticeable even close up... on a warm summer night, you can sometimes still notice it half a mile away. Also, we adapt to constant smells quite rapidly; we can sit at home all day and not notice anything, go out to the shops and when we come back realize that ew, the garbage needs taking out; the smell built up slowly from a low level, so we adapted without even noticing. Coming in from outside, however... ewww!",
"It's not easy to explain. I'd say the closest thing to it is taste. It's like tasting something in your nose, and it can actually affect how you taste food. As for range, it really depends. If you're outside with a breeze, you can smell something pretty far away (like a fire a few miles off) but if you're inside, it's usually just the immediate vicinity",
"I was once reading a forum post for the game Mass Effect, in which someone was discussing a quote from the game, talking about biotic powers: *\"it would be like explaining colour to a creature without eyes\".* And the forum poster was saying that it's completely possible to do that, by just explaining that certain objects can be differentiated from each other by the visible light they reflect in their environment. And that over the course of your life, you become familiar with the amount of light each item gives off and how it should behave. And can even feel uneasy when you detect a type of light that isn't expected for the object, or that possibility indicates danger. It is similarly the case with smell. Just as objects reflect visible light, they also give off a detectable scent into the air. Some objects more then others. And over the course of your life, you become familiar to how things should smell. And can immediately tell when something isn't right (food not smelling the way it should because it was turned), or that possibility indicates danger (the smell of natural gas or other flammable material). To smell is almost like detecting a different type of light."
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5wcsw9 | What are hiccups and do they serve any purpose? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Alright, I might be wrong, but I actually read an article about this, so bear with me. From what I've read, hiccups are an extremely old reaction we have from before we were land based organisms. Basically, every so often, usually after drinking a lot of something or swallowing to much air, our brain decides that we are missing our gills (which we don't have anymore) and so we begin hiccuping as a reflex. Obviously, this means that they have no purpose. At all. Source: URL_0"
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5wcu6z | How fast do you regain blood lost and what are the downside of having less blood in the body? | When taking blood samples, how fast do you regain the blood lost? Does the speed depend on the amount and most important, does this have any effect on the body, beside the possibility of being dizzy right after? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"All of the components of the blood are replaced at different speeds. It takes about 4-6 weeks to completely replace the red blood cells, which are the oxygen-carrying components of the blood. Drawing a bit of blood does not really have a major effect on the body because it's a small proportion compared to the overall amount of blood cells in the body. The dizziness you feel afterwards is mostly from the more rapid decrease in body fluid and sugar levels, which gets replaced within 24 hours.",
"Having less blood in your body shouldn't be a big issue unless it's more than a liter. In order to keep the vital organs working (brain/kidneys), the blood pressure has to be higher than a certain level. If not, those organs shut down. The blood pressure depends on how much the heart can pump blood in one minute, which is usually 5 litres per minute. But if you lose blood, there's less blood available for the heart to pump blood around **per beat** . In order to keep the output stable the heart has to increase the number of times it had to pump per minute, and it has to pump the blood with more force to reach a blood pressure that's high enough. Conclusion: the heart has to work overtime. Blood loss also had major implications in terms of thermoregulation. Less blood will diminish your ability to redirect blood to the skin. Skin blood flow is important because blood flow to the skin enables the blood to exchange energy in terms of heat loss, and enables sweating which is also very important for heat loss. The downside is this process extracts blood from the central circulation to the remote areas of the body (limbs/skin), causing a drop in blood pressure and you don't want that. So the body chooses maintaining blood pressure management over thermoregulation, making the body much more susceptible to overheating."
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5wcwgs | Why do towels smell after being used for some time even though we only dry ourselves AFTER showering? | Isn't the shower supposed to help us remove the smell from our bodies? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"de92xxs",
"de93rir"
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"text": [
"While drying you slough off dead and dying skin cells loosened by the wash. these combined with the steamy warmth of your bathroom allows bacteria to grow. They die and their corpses rot. And that stinks.",
"The thing most people tend to forget is that there is always a bunch of nasty bacteria in the air all the time, looking for a warm damp place to sit down and reproduce. Towels tend to fit the bill. So it's not germs from your body but rather germs in the air that happen to be able to reproduce well inside a warm damp towel. If you were to immediately stick your towel inside the dryer and dry it completely right after your shower, it wouldn't smell the way a normal towel does."
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5wd162 | what happens if you're a company that paid for an ad on tv, and your ad doesn't play entirely or gets cut off? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"The station gives you a \"make-good\" and airs spots correctly to replace those that get cut off.",
"Depends on the exact agreement between the company and the tv station, if the tv station broke the contract then the company can sue the tv station and ask for its money back, if they can't find any other agreement.",
"Generally the cost of these placements is grossly inflated anyway. When I've placed an ad that doesn't run it gets interrupted / cut off, I've usually received compensation in terms of additional media placements, added value and perhaps credits towards my next campaign. Something like super bowl is different though because it's a one-off annual event and not like you can run it again next week in the same spot so I'd guess they have a ton of precautions in place.",
"You may have seen what appears to be commercials getting cutoff on TV. Sometimes this is attributed to local networks running their own commercials over the national commercials and the timing is slightly off.",
"A company I used to work for once bought ad space on a popular morning TV program for a one off ad. The host of the show actually mocked the product which was being advertised. She even said \"Wow! What a great product!!!\" in an extremely sarcastic tone. I thought that it was pretty funny but the company directors obviously didn't. I wonder what actions they ended up taking."
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5wd60o | Why can thunder be slow and rolling when the lightning which produced it is extremely quick? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"de95n01"
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"text": [
"When lightning strikes it heats the air so fast it creates a big sound wave. That wave moves out from the Strike at the speed of sound 700ish mph. As it moves out it bounces off stuff like buildings, hills, trees etc. those bounces go in every which direction and can bounce back and forth. If you are a long way away, you might first hear the initial wave, then the bouncing waves from all the stuff the sound hit on its way to you."
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5wd6xn | Why do the ice cream machines in fast-food restaurants stop working so often? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"de95bvh"
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"text": [
"\"It's down\" usually pertains to the fact it's being cleaned. It takes time to clean them, your dealing with milk and if that goes bad in the machine... Fryers are grease and everything you throw on them either burns up or sterilizes, plus they take like 5 minutes to clean vs. 3 hours for the ice cream machine to run a full cleaning cycle."
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5wd7sp | Is canned tuna "cooked," and if so, how? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"foodeducate: URL_1 \"1. After the tuna is caught, head and tail are removed and the fish is gutted 2. It is then pre-cooked in a steam oven for 2-4 hours depending on its size. 3. The fish is then cooled. 4. The cooked fish is boned and fileted. 5. Each 6 ounce portion is placed in a can with a liquid medium (usually water or vegetable oil). 6. The can is vacuum sealed 7. Another cooking session then takes place (called retort cooking) - the sealed can is heated for a few more hours, to kill off any potential bacteria. 8. The can is then decorated with a brand label and sent off to your friendly neighborhood supermarket.\" And just some stuff to fuel nightmares.... URL_0",
"It is pressure cooked in the can. [Inside]( URL_0 ) the Bumble Bee canning plant."
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"http://www.fooducate.com/app#!page=post&id=57A33C48-AF5B-9C8E-4EB1-816E643119A6"
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5wd8f8 | why isn't it that people start their own one person insurance companies with their savings as payout money, and only insure themselves to avoid paying premiums? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"If you have $3,000 in savings, it's not going to do much when you need life-saving heart surgery that costs $700,000, or when your toaster burns down an apartment building causing $350,000 in damages. \"Paying yourself\" the monthly premiums isn't going to do anything either. If you do have a lot of money on hand, you don't necessarily need insurance, but very few have that much liquid capital.",
"To be an insurance company you need enough liquid money to pay out if needed. So if you manage to crash your car into ten other cars, killing two and onwards into a building the insurance company will have to pay out the money in cash very soon. Most people do not have that much cash laying around. Even if they have that much money it is likely not in cash and would take a few days or weeks to sell the stocks and bonds to get the cash. So if you want to be self insured you need to have a lot of money. Then you need to keep the money in a savings account where it will not get much interest compared to where you want to keep the money. And thirdly you need to increase the amount of money available all the time to keep up with inflation. So it would quite likely be cheaper to just pay the premiums and invest your money properly.",
"Well that's basically not having insurance. Which plenty of people do, either by choice or because they can't afford insurance premiums. However, the point of insurance is to have something that can pay out more than your own assets if, by sharing the risk with other people. Now if you're considering situations where you have an *obligation* to have insurance, for example in many places you have to have car insurance if you have a car, and you're thinking \"well why don't I just make my own company\", well rest assured that the government and the courts have thought of that clever loophole and closed it. Your car insurance will have to come from a company that meets a whole load of laws and regulations and *you* cannot practically meet those same regulations yourself. In fact in the UK you technically don't need car insurance to have a car, there is an alternative: deposit *£500,000* in cash in a special account, to be used to pay any claim that might arise. Clearly only the super-rich have this option, and the value chosen points to just how much damage you could cause with your car in the worst case scenario. (Which is probably giving someone an injury that means they need 24/7 care for life.)"
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5wd990 | If a civilization relied on the sun to tell time, what did they do on a very cloudy day? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Until the modern age(locomotive trains, and telegraphs), knowing precisely what time it was, was not very important. Only when communication and travel between groups of people in different places became the norm, did accurate timekeeping matter.",
"There are on simple clock namely the [Water clock]( URL_0 ) that have been used since ancient time. You have to set it with sundial. It can also easy be used in conjugation with a sundial because it can be use at night",
"In almost every case: they went about their business without knowing or caring exactly what time it is. Specific time of day was not important information in most older civilizations.",
"Until modernity telling time was not really necessary. You dealt in generalities. Dawn, mid morning, noon, afternoon, dusk, midnight. That is about it.",
"When the sun was obscured, and the sky was cloudy or hazy enough that the sun could not be directly observed they could still see dawn and sunset. The rest was educated guesses and use of other items like hourglasses. Basically the clearer the sky, the more accurate they could tell time at that moment but even so it was in more general \"noon, after noon, early evening, sunset, evening\" sort of way. Rather than by the hour. A sundial can provide time to the minute if it is large enough, but cultures at that time did not hustle and bustle enough to break the day up into minute by minute planning. Some activities did require a more granular (smaller spaced measurement) way to measure time and so they quite literally used grains. The smaller the grains of hourglass sand or more granular it was, the more accurately it could measure time. Very fine sand could measure seconds. Coarse sand in an hourglass could measure minutes and hours. So you might time when to start work for the day, by sunrise, when to take a break when the sun reached it's zenith at noon, and quitting time, when the sun began to set. But if you needed to bake bread, or time something with some accuracy, you'd break out the hour glass, water clock, or any of the other time keeping devices of antiquity."
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5wdccx | Energy transfers from the hand to pluck a guitar string. This energy is then transferred into vibration which travels through the air to our ears. Energy doesn't die, so where does the energy go once it's hit our ears? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I'm not an expert in acoustics or physics by any means, but I would think most of the energy dissipates exponentially in the soundwaves, as they are going out in a complete sphere from where the sound originates, so the energy hitting your eardrum is just a tiny fraction of what was put into the guitar string. But then the eardrum vibrates and the bones connected to the eardrum move and the electrical impulses go into your brain and the cochlea absorbs some and your skull absorbs some.",
"There's virtually no energy in sound. It will be converted to heat but there will be so little heat, and so widely spread, that it will be almost unmeasurable. Consider a 100W audio amplifier. The electronics of a hi-fi amp will be less than 50% efficient so less than 50W of sound energy will leave the speakers. This can still be a very loud sound. Compare this to the amount of heat given off by a 50W light bulb.",
"That very small amount of energy is absorbed and dispersed. Your ear drum is sensitive enough to changes in pressure that you interpret as sound, but the vast majority of those vibrations are absorbed by both the surrounding air and the surfaces it comes in contact with. Think of a heater you may have in your home: if you're near the heater, you feel and absorb some of that heat. The farther away you are, the less you feel because more and more of that heat is absorbed and distributed to the surrounding air and the various surfaces in your home. Get far enough away and its imperceptible.",
"A lot of the answers here focus on how little of the original energy of the pluck make it to the eardrum and into the nerves. This is true, but kind of ignores the question of what happens to the rest of it. Sound waves are just vibrations within the air (ussually) or other material along which the sound transmits. Heat is another type of vibration in molecules. The only difference is that a sound wave is the majority of molecules vibrating together in an overall sinusoidal pattern, while heat is the random movement of molecules. This is why you can't \"hear\" heat, since it doesn't really cause your eardrum to move in any particular direction, instead just giving random impacts all along the contact area with the air. When sound hits a surface, some of the energy is reflected (echos) and some of it is absorbed and transmitted, but the longer you follow these pathways, the more these patterns will overlaps each other and just look like random noise, which is what we feel as heat. As other posters have also identified it takes comparatively little energy in a cohesive wave to be audible when it hits our ear drum and a comparative lot of energy to actually raise temperature in an object. That's why our ears don't catch on fire when we listen to a guitar being plucked. TL:DR; the noise dissipates as heat, but the temperature impact is negligible in most cases."
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5wdemg | Why are the inner four planets so different in size, composition, density than the 4 outer planets? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Basically because the four gas giant planets captured all the smaller, rocky objects as moons. Jupiter and Saturn, for example, have a couple moons that are about the same size as the planet Mercury, and made of similar stuff. The four gas giants all have dozens of moons. Those moons could have become planets on their own, but they instead became captured in the gravitational pull of the gas giants, and so became moons. The definition of \"planet\" requires that the object has cleared its orbit of any other objects.",
"The more massive an atom is, the more it weighs, and the more it weighs the more gravity it exherts on everything around it. Gravity caused the gas and dust that formed our solar system to coalesce into big balls of rock and gas and they started smashing into each other getting larger and larger until they started becoming the sun and the planets. In much the same way that oil floats on water because it's not as dense, the gas floated outwards from the center of our early solar system, while the heavy stuff like metal and rock was drawn towards the center around the sun. The heavier the material, the more it got dragged towards the sun, the lighter it was, the less it got dragged in. When these rings of gas and dust started forming planets, the heaviest elements were already in towards the center, and so they formed the dense rock and metal rich inner planets. The lighter gases that were farther away formed the less dense gas giants and icy comets and moons of the outer solar system. Gravity is responsible for rock being in the middle, gas being at the edges, and the big cloud of gas and dust that was floating in space coming together and falling in to itself to form planets, moons, and a star. 1. Details: Most solar systems form from the left over remnants of super novas and planetary nebula's, such as when a star throws off it's outer atmosphere or explodes. The gas spreads out over a very large distance, but it is not perfectly evenly distributed. There are areas of higher density, which over time will tend to attract into themselves kind of like lumps forming in the gassy soup that our solar system formed from. As the gas began to coalesce into balls of denser gas, gravity began making the surround gas 'fall' into these balls, making them grow in size and mass until gravity became so high it began compacting this gas and dust into planetoids. Now the important thing her is that this gas and dust was made of all of the elements that make up the periodic table. Some of it was iron, most of it was hydrogen and helium, very little of it was uranium etc. We know that iron weighs less than oxygen, therefor the heavier the elements were, the more pull they exerted. This caused the distribution of elements to follow gravity. The heavier elements tended to form in the center of the newly developing solar system. Iron, nickle, silicon, and other heavy metals formed the sun and the inner planets. And the lighter elements like nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, argon, formed the outer planets. Form a planet out of metal and silica and you get rocky metal rich terrestrial planets like the Earth, Mars, and Venus. Form them of mostly metal, and you get Mercury. As you head out towards the gas giants, you find less metal and rock, and more gas and ice. Now our sun is mostly composed of hydrogen, which is the lightest gas so how did it all get in the center if the lighter stuff stayed towards the outside right? The answer is there is more in our sun than hydrogen. And most of the mass of our solar system formed in the center, pulling everything in to it, which is why the sun is the largest thing in the solar system. It makes up most of the mass of our solar system, with the remaining planets adding up to just a few % of the total. The sun grew so large, and so heavy, that it switched on and started fusing hydrogen atoms together into helium, and it became a sun instead of just a really big gas giant. Jupiter didn't have enough mass for this to happen and so it's a gas giant. Regardless of whether it's gas, rock, or metal, most of the mass of the stuff that formed our solar system drew inwards towards the center and became the sun. The remaining materials were unable to fall in towards the sun because of their orbital motion, and so they instead coalesced into the balls of debris that formed the remaining planets. The distribution of elements then extended outwards from the sun starting with heavy metals (Mercury), then metal and rock (Earth and Venus), then mostly rock (Mars), then the gas giants, and finally at the outer edges the ice planets. Remember that most of the water on Earth came here from comets that came from the outer solar system, because the oxygen and hydrogen that make it up were in greater abundance out in the fringes than in the interior."
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5wdgqe | How do animals know not to look at a solar eclipse? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"To start with, there is nothing more dangerous about a solar eclipse than just looking at the sun normally. Animals know not to look at the sun, therefore a solar eclipse is not concern for them. They just want look at it. Humans are told not to look directly at a solar eclipse because looking at the sun is dangerous, and we find a solar eclipse interesting, so people want to look at it.",
"as far as i know; its a non issue. Its not that they know not to look at it, its that they wouldnt really be looking at it anyway. What use does a wolf have for stargazing? they just know how bright it is.",
"They don't really know that. However, animals don't have nearly the intellectual capacity of humans, and they just aren't that fascinated by odd-looking things in the sky, so they don't stare."
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5wdhlh | Why when we become conscious of out breathing do we need to do it manually, while other times we seem to not even need to think about it? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because you're 'overriding' the automatic system in your brains that regulates your breathing pattern. Breathing has 2 components: autonomic control and plain physics. The autonomic control center regulates your breathing frequency/intensity depending on CO2 levels in your blood by stimulating your breathing muscles in a very efficient way, taking maximum advantage of the physics of airflow. When you're breathing manually, you interrupt the respiratory center and you have to force the breathing muscles to contract by yourself",
"Now I am just concentrating on breathing and can't focus on work. Whew, Thanks! I thought I had ADHD!"
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5wdhup | why do meats turn brown when they cook? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"That's called the [Maillard reaction] ( URL_0 ).",
"There are many reasons that meat can turn brown. Cooking meat at a high temperature browns meat because of the maillard reaction. As meat ages it turns brown from oxidation. The oxidation process is a result of the bound iron molecule in myoglobin going from the ferrous to ferric form. This produces what is called metmyoglobin. Metmyoglobin is the cause of the characteristic brown coloration of meat that occurs as it ages."
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5wdnci | What is IBM Watson? | I've seen it involved in a whole bunch of stuff, and I think it's some attempt at AI, but I don't know more than that. What's the big deal? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It is a brand name that IBM is applying to a large number of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and pattern recognition technologies -- including the software, hardware, and services involved in doing so. Originally, it was announced as the machine that could be humans an Jeopardy, but it's really a big collection of technologies.",
"Watson is an AI designed by IBM to play Jeopardy!. Jeopardy is a notoriously difficult game for AIs, because Jeopordy! poses the challenges as answers, from which one must derive the question. Watson was really good at it and won. Watson is still important because extrapolating questions from answers is not an easy task, but it is applicable for a lot of different fields. For instance, Watson has been used for medical diagnoses due to its ability at linking queries and answers."
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5wdopl | How do the heart rate monitors that clip on to your finger also find oxygen levels? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"One side of the clip has a light and the other has a sensor. When you clip it on your finger, it shines both red visible light and infrared light through you finger and it hits the detector. oxygenated blood and deoxygenated blood absorb different amounts of infrared and visible light, so by comparing the amounts that the sensor detects to the amount that was emitted, it can tell how much of your blood is oxygenated and how much isn't.",
"Everyone's explanation pretty much covers how these work except that these devices CANNOT actually tell how much oxygen specifically is bound. As in, they cannot differentiate whether carbon monoxide is bound to your hemoglobin or if oxygen is bound.",
"Hi, I am an anaesthetist. I am very happy to see a question I am qualified to answer. The principles behind pulse oximetry are some of the required knowledge for basic anaesthetic trainees. As has been outlined, the pulse oximeter uses two wavelengths of light: 660nm (red light) and 940nm (infrared light). These lights correspond to the maximum absorption by deoxygenated haemoglobin and oxygenated haemoglobin respectively. This light shines through a finger, toe, lip, ear (and sometimes hands and feet for neonates) and is picked up by a detector on the contralateral side of the probe. The ratio between the two wavelengths that is transmitted gives an R value (Red/Infared) which corresponds to an oxygen saturation. An R value of 1 is equal to roughly 80% SpO2. Oxygenated blood absorbs more infrared light and deoxygenated blood absorbs more red light. I hope that explanation helps a bit. [Here]( URL_0 ) and [Here]( URL_1 ) are a couple of articles that explains the science and limitations of oximetry in more detail. Thanks for letting me answer. Edit: fixed a link",
"The instrument that reads the oxygen levels of your blood (referred to as SpO2) is called a pulse oximeter. It shines different wavelengths of light (usually IR and red) through your finger to find how oxygenated your blood is. How does it do this? Hemaglobin, which is the protein in your red blood cells that binds oxygen and takes it to your cells, can absorb light (like most materials). How much light it can absorb depends on the wavelength of light shining on it and whether the hemaglobin is holding oxygen or not. A sensor on the other side of your finger (a fancy lil thing called a photodiode) will detect how much light makes it through your finger. Plug these absorption values into an equation and you can figure out how much of your hemaglobin has oxygen in it. Hopefully if you're healthy it will be between 95-100%, although 100% SpO2 is not that common.",
"Respiratory Therapist here The pulse oximeter has an infrared sensor attached that can pick up how saturated your oxy-hemeglobin is. So if you are anemic and satting low you may be oxygenating fine but you may be hypoxic by medical definition because your blood can't carry as much O2. My teacher told me think of blood as trucks and your hemeglobin as it's tailgate. With that being said a normal number is 92-100, less than 89 call 911, or under medical prescription apply oxygen. This also explains why carbon monoxide poisoning your O2 levels appear normal, the carbon monoxide binds to hemoglobin easier effectively \"knocking\" the o2 molecules off and kicking them out.",
"Biomedical engineer. Everyone correctly describes that light of 2 specific wavelengths is shone through the finger. The amount of light absorbed by deoxy and oxygenated blood is different. The relationship between the amount of absorbance is measured and this provides the oxygen saturation levels. However, the amount of light absorbance isn't directly related to the O2 level. Instead, there have been data tables created that relate the O2 levels to the light absorbance... this was done EMPIRICALLY, i.e. by experiment, and not by theory. So the device is just correlating the light information to pre-programmed data table relationships. The relationship breaks down somewhere around 80% and below, and thus the pulse oximeter can no longer properly measure oxygen levels below this percentage. Regardless, the device would have started beeping an alert by then anyway. This is as I recall, please add any detAils if I missed any...",
"They work on the principle of spectrophotometry. Hemoglobin is the protein that carries oxygen through your blood and hemoglobin is a different color when it's bound to O2. The sensor simply emits light at a certain wavelength and the amount that passes through is dependent on how much hemoglobin bound to oxygen is in your blood. The colors they emit are red (absorbed by deoxygenated blood) and infrared (absorbed by oxygenated blood). The machine then does a calculation to result in a percentage.",
"A question I can easily answer! It is very simple, all objects, including your body, absorb light. The way that we can measure hemoglobin saturation levels is by simply literally shining light on tissue and then seeing how much gets reflected. After this we just measure the ratio of one color to the other one and we get your oxygen levels! :D TL;DR We shine light, light strikes tissue and some of it comes back. We measure the ratio of light wavelengths that come back. EDIT: Something cool that I think is worth mentioning is that literally any camera can be used to do this! You do not need a highly specialized medical equipment to find out oxygen levels. Any device with a camera can be utilized. That is why you get nowadays apps within cellphones that offer to measure stuff like this. Those cellphones either include an additional sensor/light apparatus to specifically do this, or they simply use your cellphone camera to do it.",
"Some people have described a device that has an emitter on one side of the finger and a phototransistor on the opposite side. This is valid, but it need not be the case. Upping the LED power we can place all the components on the same side, as sport watches do to monitor heart rate. Also, the wavelengths used can be pretty common. Red and green light offer a good enough contrast. Plethysmography is easy enough; the heart rate is easily found. But oximetry is tricky, as another user pointed out. As is known, hemoglobin has a different saturation of color if the iron atom is bonded to two oxygens or three (that's how oxygen transport happens). Pulsing rapidly at different times the red and green LEDs we measure different amounts of reflected light on the phototransistor. We don't need the full spectrum, just two well selected slivers. We work out the oxygen, as it was pointed out, from am empirically built table. On the x axis we plug the ratio of green vs red reflection, and on the vertical we read the O2 saturation. The problem is, the result does not correlate very well at first to the real value obtained by puncturing the finger and actually measuring the blood. The reason for the discrepancy, in my experience, was not related to the table itself, but to problems with the DC part of the measurement. This means: the base level of light received varies greatly from person to person and also depends on how snug is the sensor to the skin. Funnily enough, skin color itself was not relevant, but people seem to have a great range of different vascularization degrees from one spot to the next and from one person to the next. So the biggest challenge was removing the base level both before the ADC and later by software using adaptive moving averages. Source: I have designed and sent to the market such a medical device. Also: Yes, I talk to my 5 year old like this. I withhold no information from her. The conversations just get longer, and we both enjoy it on several levels."
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5wdql9 | Why do obese people's legs remain under developed? | In weight training it is said that to build muscles you need to carry weights. Why do obese people's legs remain under developed? even if majority of them are top heavy all their lives the legs remain under developed (not like professional weight lifters legs)? Sorry for bad English. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Well first, not all obese people have underdeveloped legs. If an overweight person is active and heavy, chances are they kick like a horse. Their core might be better developed than you'd think as well, since a lot of abdominal muscles act to keep the torso in line and that becomes more difficult when reacting to shifting weight. I know several people who, due to thyroid problems are quite overweight, but are in much better shape than I am, Second, if an obese person has underdeveloped musculature, it is because they are sedentary. This can be caused by a lot of factors. A lot of people develop joint problems in their knees and ankles when they gain weight that make it difficult or painful to walk. The subset of obese people who are depressed will avoid activity because that's one of the things depression does to a person. Type 2 diabetes can result in bloodflow and nerve problems in the peripheries like hands or feet that make it difficult to move.",
"Their legs will have adapted to carry the increased load despite it not being visible due to being hidden beneath fat.",
"Not sure what you mean. Heavy people who aren't wheelchair-bound typically have some great calves.",
"Part of their obesity is due to lack of activity. You won't gain anything from sitting down with 300 lbs.",
"They are well developed, just buried under fat. They also aren't as well developed as a lifter, though. They don't do as many 'reps' (if you call standing up a rep) and they use a much more limited range of motion."
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5wdray | How do stores like Dollar Tree stay in business? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They sell things for more than they cost. And sometimes they sell at a loss to get you in the stores and buy things with a larger profit margin.",
"Because the stuff they sell is cheap junk that costs them next to nothing. Their stores aren't fancy, and they don't spend a lot of money on advertising. Then they pay their employees minimum wage, and only have a small number of people working at a time",
"Employees: Minimum wage, understaff by design Inventory: Inexpensive, bulk discounts, overstock discounts, and near-expiration discounts Location: Only set up stores where rent is very cheap. Usually in lower income areas, which consequently, is where most of their customers are"
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5wdwvc | What is the psychology behind having an imaginary friend? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Forgive me, for I'm not an expert, nor do I have any qualifications that would be considered remotely Psychological, but I would think it has something to do with Love. Or more specifically, it's a coping mechanism. We all want to be verified in life. We all want to experience something with someone else, to make sure your not dreaming, in a candid sense. Did you see that shooting star? Did you hear that? Or was it just me? With others around, you have a sense of place and value. Biologically, and mentally, we're pre-disposed to exist collectively - it's an evolutionary advantage. Besides, life is far too difficult to go it alone, and sometimes we all need to ask for help. I would argue that perhaps as a child, and even though you ultimately know you need all the help you can get, it's hard to see life from someone elses point of view and accept assistance. You start to form opinions and develop your subjectivity, alongside other people who often don't think like you. When the world starts to *conflict*, one way to cope is to create a vision of someone who is always there and is always ready to agree with you. Someone who appreciates your existance. 'Adults' do it all the time, but in a less obvious, more dilute way. The personification of even inanimate objects is akin to imaginary friends. A car that someone loves, which they talk too and often touch, caress, feel? ...I once watched a documentary of people who have very *intimate* relationships with architechtural structures. It's much the same, but as an adult, it's much more difficult to bring their imaginary love into the real world, without attributing it to something physical. Pets provide a much needed companion or love. But it's fine if you own a dog and treat it like a human being by naming it - that's not an imaginary friend at all! (That's not exactly what I mean to all the dog lovers! I totally understand that pets have a genuine compassion for their owners and the domestication of animals has been happeneing for long enough that breeds become integral to even our own species survival). Were all just looking for that somewhat 'perfect relationship' and as a child, and having a much stronger ability to believe, thoughts, ideas and even friends, can often manifest, much more clearly, into reality."
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5wdyjh | How does a Queen of England choose her King? | In queen Victoria's case, her father died and she became queen. So, how does that queen choose her King? And when she marries does she remain the queen of England or does her husband take over the throne as King? I'm sorry. I'm asking because I don't know. Currently watching ' Victoria ' on Masterpiece. Really loving this show. I have also seen 'Tudors'. Have a nice day. :) | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When there is a Queen on the ruling throne, there is no King. Her spouse will have another, lower title (like Victoria's husband Prince Albert (\"His Royal Highess the Prince Consort\"), or Elizabeth II's husband Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh). She may marry anyone she chooses, but in reality will tend to choose someone of noble heritage. When she dies, he is not her heir, because he is not a descendant of a former King or Queen. The throne passes to one of her descendants unless she has none, in which case to a sibling or another relative.",
"There are two types of queens: queens regnant and queens consort. The wife of the king is the queen (consort). Queen Victoria was a queen regnant, meaning she was queen in her own right. Only wives derive their titles and status from their husbands, eg when Miss Jones marries Mr Smith, she becomes Mrs Smith. If Miss Jones married the Duke of Somewhere, she would become the Duchess of Somewhere. If Mr Smith married Her Majesty the Queen, he would remain Mr Smith (but would almost certainly be bestowed a title)."
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5we060 | Why laser pointers are dangerous to Pilots but not flashlights? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Lasers are pointing all of their energy in a single direction, so that energy stays concentrated further. So by the time it gets to a target, there is still enough concentration to do damage. Flashlights spread their beam in a wider cone, so as that come gets bigger and bigger each square inch of beam becomes weaker and weaker. By the tone a normal flashlight gets to airplane height it is too diluted to make a big difference."
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5we0uy | Why do companies continue to build brick and mortar facilities rather than create virtual offices? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Workplace psychology is complex, but it's generally accepted that social interaction in the workplace is vital, especially *in person* interaction. There are neurological processes at work when engaging in things like eye contact that simply don't happen when trying to communicate over IM or email. There are of course practical benefits as well. Getting everyone working together is much, much easier when everyone is present in person. I honestly don't mind meetings, even large ones, but even small conference calls drive me fucking crazy and I ignore convoluted email chains unless they're addressed specifically to me. Every project that I've worked on, and every project manager that I've talked to is in agreement that managing remote teams is extremely challenging. Sometimes a manager needs everyone's undivided attention for 5-10 minutes in order to address a new development; this cannot be effectively done when everyone is working from home just doing their own things. Keeping tabs on employees to prevent shirking is easier as well. In some cases, an office is essential to protecting trade secrets and intellectual property. That's not to say that common offices are perfect. There is a near infinite supply of office grievances including loud coworkers, background noise, distractions, long commutes, and general dullness. Working remotely is a solution to many of these problems, but it is not the only solution. There's a whole field of study regarding creating healthy workplace environments that often gets overlooked."
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5we9gb | How do we "see" our memories? | When you close your eyes and picture a beach and you can sort of see the beach in black and white and it seems to be underlying your current vision - how does that work? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Hmm this is facinating already. I see my memories in colors. Same when I mentally picture or visualize imagined/self-created landscape, imagery or scenarios in my head. I'm also able to do this outside my \"eye range\". I can distance my own being from the equation completely and project myself into an imagined world outside my field of vision, even with my eyes open. I actually very often seem detached and \"gone/non-present\" in real life situations (told by friends and coworkers) because I excessively daydream and run hypothetical imaginary scenarios in my head. This makes me wonder if every person has a unique experience with memory, dreams and imagination. I always thought this was a universal experience mostly tied to genetic limitations. I wish I could elaborate this further but english isn't my native language and I feel as if I can't describe this better due to the complexity."
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5wef2m | A lot of celebrities that aren't nominated for anything still get to go to the Oscars. How do they decide of the non-nominees who goes and who doesn't? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Last year's winners (for the big categories) are invited to present their award this year. The Academy invites other A-list people to present or sit in the audience for ratings and prestige, especially if they had a movie this year. Studios get a certain number of seats that they can give to anyone, obviously executives and actors they're promoting are often selected. The Academy members (over 6k) have a lottery to determine which of them gets tickets. Then of course all the nominees and presenters get a +1, and they'll often be dating celebrities."
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5wemcp | why you can't stream the oscars live online. Wouldn't ABC want as many people as possible watching? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They do, but a big part of the Academy Awards are the commercials. Some of those are nationwide and they would play on the online broadcast, but a large chunk are also local, based on where you live, and also based on the cable/tv provider you have, and if you watch online those commercials either go to the wrong demographic or don't get watched at all, and the people who paid for the commercials don't get the business from the ads. When money gets involved, people stop messing around."
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5wersu | How come state capitals in the US are usually not the state's largest or most important cities? | I'm from Brasil and that's pretty weird to me. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Many U.S. States were sparsely populated when they became States, so it was not clear which would be the leading city. Often something near the geographic center was chosen. Since cities close to shipping ports tended to become the largest and most important cities -- and large bodies of water are rarely in the center of a state -- this led to a mismatch.",
"> I'm from Brasil and that's pretty weird to me. Considering the capital of Brasil is neither the biggest nor most important city in the country, and was in fact founded in the 1960s *specifically* to be the capital, I'm not sure how you can find US state capitals to be weird! US state capitals were usually funded many, many years ago when the states and cities were nowhere near as developed as they are now. Capitals might've been at a strategic location at the time, or the larger/more important cities didn't even exist yet. Sometimes state capitals were decided for political reasons, too.",
"Well, I'm from Illinois and the biggest reason the capitol is in Springfield rather than Chicago is because the rest of the state wants to have more of a say in how things get done. While the physical location of the capitol building may not seem like it matters, in the 19th century the physical location would allow locals a lot of pull in state government. Also, oftentimes the city that's more economically important or larger may not have been when the state was incorporated. However, I know that the \"let's not give those guys from the huge city all the power\" argument is often true (Pennsylvania, New York, Illinois)."
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5westq | Equally Attracted/Repelled Magnets | If a magnet were between 2 other magnets and they were some how equally attracted/repelled at the same time, what would happen? Diagram : [+ / -] [- / +] [+ / -] Or [- / +] [+ / -] [- / +] | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If there magnets are perfectly aligned, you can represent this as three equal and compressed springs lined up next to each other. Each will expand and the two outer springs will be pushed farther away from the center spring until they no longer exert a force on one another that is greater than the force of friction. Similarly, equal magnets confined in a channel will displace until the magnetic force is weaker than the friction of the magnet in its channel."
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5weys4 | Can the high heart rate multiple times per day induced by furious masturbation be a viable healthy alternative to the high heart rate experienced by exercise? If not, why not? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Most simply, yes. Your \"furious masturbation\" would essentially be the same as a 20(?) minute unilateral arm workout at the gym. Try switching hands every time to balance things out. Possibly while squatting as well to work more body parts."
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5wf1j3 | Why can almost everyone empathize with physical pain (like watching a horror movie and cringing at someone having there arm sawed off) but not emotional pain or mental instability? | I mean it's not like they have experienced what having their arm sawed off feels like. It seems people are less able to understand how someone feels when it comes to being clinically depressed. Edit: damn English, *their | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Everyone has hurt themselves, most people have broken a bone, many have had some kind of semi-serious soft tissue injury. I don't think anyone can truly understand what it is like to have a mental illness - most of which cause thoughts and feelings in a way, and to an extent, that normal functioning people don't get. Everyone's point of view comes from the context of the way their own brain works, and if they've never suffered depression or had their heart broken...they have no idea how to empathize with the feeling they've never had.",
"Well, to the contrary, most people *can* empathize with emotional pain. This is why people cry during rom-coms or dramas during peak emotional moments. Even the most hardened of \"macho men\" will get misty eyes and feel the pang of sympathetic emotional pain when watching a loved one grieve or go through distress. The difference is that people who have not been properly educated, and who do not suffer from clinical depression, *are not able to understand that clinical depression is wholly different from healthy sadness*. So, example: a man who has never been clinically depressed, and never had any education regarding mental ilnesses, loses his wife. He is very sad for a month or so. After that month, he develops resiliency to the stimuli, and begins to emotionally recover. That man might look at another man, a man who is wealthy, has no dead family members, and on the surface has an excellent life, but has clinical depression, and think, *if I could lose my wife, surely this man who has everything has no reason to be sad*. Think about it in comparison to sensitivity to pain. Let's say you get a small little nick on your arm. You have a normal level of pain sensitivity, so although it stings for a moment, you shrug it off and keep going. Now let's say, hypothetically, someone else has a genetic mutation that makes them *extremely* vulnerable to pain. They have almost no endorphins, and every tiny cut feels like their arm is being torn off. If you saw that person get the same tiny little cut that you just received, and they were crying hysterically, clutching their arm, rolling on the ground, unable to move for weeks; you would probably think they were faking, or doing it for attention. Keep in mind, *you have no idea that this genetic mutation exists*. It is not a problem of empathy; it is a problem of ignorance."
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5wf6rp | Why do employers use those "strongly disagree - strongly agree" type surveys with repetitive, reworded questions in applications and what do the results show? | I've been applying for a bunch of jobs recently and have encountered a number of employers who use those lengthy surveys with questions like "I enjoy projects that require little thought" and give you the options Completely Agree/Strongly Agree/Agree/Neutral/Disagree/Strongly Disagree/Completely Disagree and then about 15 questions later will ask "I do not enjoy projects that require little thought." Are they trying to see if we're paying attention and remain consistent? And what do the result of these questionnaires look like to an employer? Is there an algorithm that just tells employers "nope not this one" or do employers read the answers themselves? Thanks in advance for any answers! :) | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It actually is helpful! It A) makes sure you are reading the question and B) makes sure that they get the answer to the question they asked. For example, \"I am not satisfied with my job\", \"I am satisfied with my job\" and \"I am happy with my job\" all sound really similar but there is error that comes from the subtle way people interpret these questions differently that these scores typically get averaged out as a general score on that criteria. As for whether they fully read it: that depends on the employer. The Likert Scale (strongly disagree, disagree, etc) is usually converted into numbers so organizations can quickly calculate averages/standard deviations, etc. Good organizations usually do look at both these results and long answer responses. As for what you can get out of them: I'd recommend browsing the website O*Net. It's a site that compiles information on different occupations: from the tasks performed to qualities about the worker (what personality they have, their interests, skills, etc). Source: Student in Industrial-Organizational Psychology (the branch of psychology that studies the workplace and also invented the multiple choice exam.)",
"Coming from large corporations, I'm familiar with numerous instances of these tests as means to weed out people who would pose a risk in the roles they are applying. Basically the premise is that someone who is too intelligent or prone to excessive rationalizations will likely steal from the employer or devise ways to \"equalize\" situations where they may feel disadvantaged. For example, simple retail will have questions that include hypotheticals about what the employee would do if the employee saw a co worker eating a candy bar that was stolen. Or what the employee would do if the rear door were not locked during close. Or questions about someone stealing from petty cash to pay for a sick family member before payday. The questions by themselves aren't rocket science... the vast majority of people pass without thinking about it. Typically, it's the people that over think the questions and start to indicate a pattern of forming rationalizations that pose a risk and may not be hired. The test is by no means random... throughout the test you'll have to prove basic reading comprehension, math skills, and simple problem solving. But there will need to be a mix of questions (some seemingly useless) so the taker doesn't feel like they're being interrogated and will approach the test more at ease. TL;DR... if you see a question that reads \"I have never stolen anything in my life.\" Answer \"Strongly Agree\" even if you remember stealing a cookie from your grandma when you were 11.",
"Okay, there are a lot of things going on in this ELI5. I'll try to tackle them as best I can. Last question first: Do employers read the answers themselves? Only under highly specific conditions. In the case of pre-employment screening instruments (those pesky surveys), the goal is to collect as much quantitative data as possible as quickly as possible and subject it to some voodoo/statistical analysis on the back-end. If someone had to read long-form answers, we just added to the opportunity cost of the instrument, thereby decreasing its overall value to the organization. It's better to just look at an up-down based on the numbers. This is easily obtained from a Likert (pronounced LICK-urt not LI-kert) scale (multiple points expressing strength of feeling on a scale from negative to positive). What do the results look like? It depends on the provider. Typically, there will be a raw score for the candidate. This will be compared to a pre-determined scale indicating suitability. Robustly designed instruments will have a window where ideal candidates fall; outliers are unsuitable because they represent extremes of the measured constructs (too much of a good thing is a bad thing). Again, depending on who built the instrument, there could be a stoplight system, positioning on an ICC (check out Item Response Theory if you want to suffer), a flat number, or (really) anything else. All that really matters is the score's relation to the ideal candidate zone; everything else is there to make it look pretty to whomever the target audience is. What's up with all these extremely similar items (questions)? There are a number of reasons for odd items. First, some items are completely unscored; they are deliberately inserted to check for faking behaviors or offer some sort of \"break\" from the mind-numbing drudgery that is filling out these instruments, or some other thing that the instrument designer had in mind. Some items, like the negative item you mentioned above, are there for control purposes; they exist to check on something called \"reliability;\" that is, how well does the instrument measure specific constructs internal to itself (without reference to some external standard), over time and between respondents. This is done for a variety of reasons. For example, reliability is a legal standard and negative-items are a good way to avoid the problems associated with reliability of parallel forms (two instruments asking the same things to different groups of people) by building in the ability to split-half reliability (compare functionally identical items). So, yes, it is about consistency, but mainly consistency of the instrument. Of course, if your answers are inconsistent, it should throw a flag to the backend voodoo/statistics which indicates faking. Finally, I'll answer a question that you didn't ask but that is on most folks minds: how do I \"beat\" this? Don't; don't even try. You'll get advice from various sources talking about how such-and-such tactic is a surefire way to beat the system. Surprise: It's not. Building a psychometric instrument is a precise science and fairly complicated. We have developed ways to check faking behavior; they get included on well-constructed instruments. A good instrument is \"valid,\" that is, it predicts, to some degree, some thing (here, a psychometric construct). One of the easiest ways to do this is to give the instrument to your folks internally, see how they answer, and build your scales off that. You know what the internet cannot help you fake? If you said the specific scores internal to a specific organization's existing workforce, you are correct. Did you want to answer in a specific way, every time? Bad idea; doing so will place you in a weird place on the scales - one that you probably don't want to be on. Most importantly for you, psychometric instruments are meant to check whether or not you \"fit.\" If you fake (and don't get caught), the chances of ending up in a position or organization where you do not \"fit\" increases substantially. That is a bad result for the employer and a bad result for the employee.",
"A critical note here, often tests seem randomly chosen, with no clear idea of what the test should measure and if those traits or states found are actually in any way predictive for performance. As a psychologist I'm bothered by this lack of thinking about the goals of the questionnaire. As a human being I'm just pissed about the time wasted by people filling in these tests.",
"> Are they trying to see if we're paying attention and remain consistent? Attention, no. Consistent, yes. Imagine if there was something like your example \"I enjoy projects that require little thought\" and only one question. Imagine if the particular wording made me give it completely agree, when in general I completely disagree. Because of there is only one question, it's more opportunity for an odd interpretation or mistake to completely change the outcome."
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5wff08 | Why do so many people automatically assume that you believe you're superior to them when you merely have a large vocabulary? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The point of language is communication. It doesn't do any good to you to display your vocabulary in front of an audience that can't understand half of it. You might sound pretentious. Especially if the audience doesn't care about learning new words."
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5wfiiy | Do worms travel with a single orientation? Do they have a "belly" side that they usually travel facing down with? Or do they just move without caring about their rotation? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They have a \"belly\" (abdominal) and a back (dorsal). They are not symmetrical inside. The neural system is the top side, the digestive system is the bottom side. And they aware of which side is up and down.",
"Not all \"worms\" have the same body plan. Segmented worms, earthworms for example, are bilaterally symmetrical, and have a dorsal (upper) and ventral (lower) side. These characteristics are shared with all segmented creatures, ranging from earthworms to insects to vertebrates. Note: tapeworms, although \"segmented,\" are not members of these groups. As pointed out in the thread above, creatures with dorsal/ventral body plans are \"aware\" of their physical orientation.",
"So if you turn a worm on its dorsal side will they first rotate before crawling away? I think it is time for a science experiment."
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5wfsqf | The difference between Triglyceride, HDL and LDL. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Triglyceride is the fat (strictly speaking it's three fatty acid molecules linked together by a glycerol molecule) which is carried in your blood in a 'bag' made of either HDL or LDL cholesterol. The bag is made of HDL if it's moving from your body to your liver, i.e. taking fat to be 'burned' and LDL if it's the bag taking fat from your liver to your body's fat cells to be stored. (very simplified). In certain circumstances the liver can \"panic\" and desperately produce partially empty bags made of VLDL, which is spikey and more likely to get \"caught\" in your blood vessels and cause clots. VLDL is the only actually \"bad\" cholesterol. High or low HDL or LDL are just indicators of which way the fat is flowing."
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5wftga | Do ships still use constellations for orientation? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"No, they use GPS. However celestial navigation is still taught to be used as a fallback, in case the more modern systems fail for any reason.",
"As Schnutzel said, ships don't use constellations anymore. GPS systems, which is when satellites figure out exactly where you are using the speed of light and clocks(!), are much easier to use and give better results. However, some spacecraft don't use GPS. Instead, they have special cameras on them that find stars. The stars tell the spacecraft which way it's pointing. So *space* ships use constellations for orientation, which is pretty cool!"
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5wfvso | The sensation of "too quiet" | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Just spitballing, but human brains filter a huge amount of information all the time, to include ambient noise. We usually don't think about it because it isn't relevant to any of the decisions our brains think we're going to need to make soon. The sudden absence of noise, however, is unusual. It breaks the pattern, and our brains tend to notice that. They also tend to jump to conclusions about what the pattern break means. Specifically in the case of silence, your brain is probably reverting to a fight or flight response. Sudden silence might mean that there is imminent danger in the form of a predator that everything around you has noticed (and is hiding from). Your brain assumes the worst, so it starts raising your hackles. It makes you hyper alert so that you can run like hell if need be.",
"Most quiet environments are not silent. A forest will have birds, rustling leaves, perhaps running water. A modern building will have several different fans, creaking wood, perhaps a ticking clock. When something is \"too quiet\", your brain is alerting you that some of the sounds it normally filters out are gone.",
"I'm assuming you mean the ringing sound you hear in otherwise complete silence. If that is what you mean, you have tinnitus. The ringing is only a symptom though, and not the disease itself."
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5wg1yg | How do gemologists tell lab-grown gems from natural gems when the crystal structure is the same? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Naturally formed gems are not perfect. They have atoms of other elements dispersed within their crystal structure. When a gem is grown in the lab, it is usually 100% pure. There are no imperfections, (or nearly none). So when a gemologist observes the crystal structure, and they see no impurities, it is almost certainly lab grown."
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5wgblj | How does a rice cooker know that the rice inside it is cooked? | Usually, i cook long grained white rice in our rice cooker and it takes about 10 minutes to cook. But recently, we switched to brown rice and its cooking time is longer, i think like 25 minutes. edit: thank you for all the answers guys! | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Once the rice cooker's thermal sensor detects the pot going above 212 degrees, the water has all been absorbed. At that point, the rice is done. To prevent the rice from cooking any further, the sensor automatically trips the shut-off switch for the heating mechanism.",
"It isn't timer based. The temperature can't rise above the boiling point as long as there is liquid water present. Once all the water gets absorbed by the rice, the temperature quickly rises and the cooker turns off.",
"/u/unicoitn was correct, but I figured I'd elaborate some. Rice cookers change to keep warm once a certain temperature is reached. That temperature can ONLY be reached once the water has boiled away. So adding more water keeps the rice cooker on for longer.",
"I have owned a number of rice cookers over the years, and in my opinion, based on direct observation, there is a thermostat in the rice cooker that shuts off at a predetermined temp. The cooking time is dependent on how much WATER to rice ratio you start with. Brown rice needs more water and has a longer cooking time."
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5wgizw | How does a bail-in work? | As an alternative to bail-outs, governments are trying to implement a system of bail-ins under the Dodd Frank Act. How would this work? What are the implications? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A bail out is when external money is used (usually by the government, vis-a-vis taxpayers) to add cash to the bank to maintain its operations and not go bankrupt. A bail *in* is when those funds are sourced *internally.* For example, in Cyprus (where bail ins occurred), people who had deposits over the insurance threshold had that excess balance taken out of their account, and had stock issued to them in return. It would likely work similarly here. A couple things to point out: 1. This almost certainly wouldn't apply to extremely large, \"too big to fail\" banks. 2. The logic behind this is \"would you rather lose a little money to possibly save the whole bank, or all your money is the bank goes bankrupt?\" Most people would prefer the first option generally. 3. Banks are heavily regulated, and a *reserve* portion of their deposits must be held in cash, completely. This means that they money is off-limits to just about everything else, which poses a problem if the bank needs cash. So, by changing the cash in the vault from a \"deposit\" to \"paid in capital (for stock),\" the bank lessens their reserve requirement AND gets cash up front. 4. People would probably freaking hate this if it were to happen."
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5wgj3e | Why do some people like a certain taste/smell while others don't like it (or even hate it)? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"That's a product of education, upbringing, customs, flavors and food you are familiar with... Also perseverance. Have you hear that \"tonic water is an acquired taste\"? You have to keep drinking it until you taste other things that the initial bitterness and end up liking it. And there are certain tastes that can only be noticed by the bearers of a certain gene. URL_0"
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5wgkdy | Why is styrofoam so "magnetic"? | I was breaking up some styrofoam blocks this weekend and the question hit me as the little pieces that flew off would somehow cling to me or anything it got even remotely close too. Why does it do that? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's not magnetism, but electrostatics. Same effect as rubbing a balloon on your hair and then having it stick to a wall. When you rub things together electrons can come off thing one and end up on thing two. Both things now have an equal and opposite charge. If you rapidly separate them (styrofoam flying off), they retain the charge. The tiny charged styrofoam particle now lands on your clothing, a dielectric material, that will polarize. If the styrofoam is negatively charged, electrons of your shirt will move away from the styrofoam, leaving behind the positively charged nuclei. Now your shirt has a surface positive charge that attracts the negative charge of the styrofoam and the styrofoam sticks."
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5wgpn3 | Why is water required for life to exist on different planets? | Can some crazy organism that we cannot comprehend not survive on sulfuric acid or just sunlight / heat? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's not that we can't comprehend organisms that don't require water to survive. It's more that we have limited resources when it comes to searching the sky for planets. Scientists choose to focus on planets with a climate they *know* can support life, rather than focusing on planets have an atmosphere that *might* support some sort of life that we haven't actually seen proof of being possible.",
"Maybe they can but it is easier to look for the conditions we know are compatible with life rather than unknown ones. Where would we start looking for life of a completely unknown kind?",
"All life forms we know today, has the need of water. It is used as a means of transporting other essentials to every part of an organism. Water is a simple matter, consisting of only 3 small atoms: hydrogen and oxygen. And it is also chemically neutral. It doesn't react with other matter (under normal circumstances). Yet it still has dissolving properties that allows it to contain other elements and still be a liquid. That's about the nutshell of it.",
"Water is special in many ways. What is important for life that it's a strongly polar solvent, which can dissolve almost anything (even metals when it's pure enough, tapwater is often made less pure on purpose to prevent the plumbing from dissolving). On the other hand, it doesn't mix with oils, which allows for cellular membranes that won't get dissolved in it and which may have even started life according to the lipid world hypothesis of abiogenesis.",
"For a few reasons, First, all life we know uses water, we're not 100% that life requires water, but the evidence we have suggests it does. Secondly, we actually can kinda look for it. It would be really cool if we figured out that life can exist using element X instead of water, but if we can't find element x on exoplanets without actually going there, then whats the point?"
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5wgpqk | The argument against net neutrality. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It boils down to: Private companies are allowed to serve the customers however they want, even if the service is horrible, and furthermore, internet isn't a necessity for life. The government shouldn't dictate how the company supplies the product to their customers, as the company would best know how to make their product. If a private company does badly by the customers, then the customers can just switch to another supplier on the free market. Counters that there is no \"free market\" in terms of ISPs due to monopolies and the need for vast infrastructure is met with the ideological counter argument that that is caused by flawed corporatism instead of the free market and two wrongs don't make a right. Disclaimer: I am not presenting these arguments as my own, I am answering the question.",
"I have no problem with net neutrality *in theory* but think there are some very, very concerning things about *specifically* how it was done by the FCC in the USA. The FCC pushed net neutrality by subjecting ISPs to the same 1934 Telecommunications Act restrictions that phone companies must abide by. Not only does the 1934 Act regulate how phone companies are to provide service, it also regulates how *consumers use that service.* If you read the 1934 Act, you will notice some language in [Section 223]( URL_0 ) (a) Prohibited acts generally: Whoever— (1) in interstate or foreign communications— (A) by means of a telecommunications device knowingly— (i) makes, creates, or solicits, and (ii) initiates the transmission of, any comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image, or other communication which is obscene or child pornography, with intent to abuse, threaten, or harass another person; (2) knowingly permits any telecommunications facility under his control to be used for any activity prohibited by paragraph (1) with the intent that it be used for such activity, Shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than two years, or both. I am not a lawyer, but let's just take a moment to think about how regulation that prohibits \"harassment\" or \"abuse\" or \"obscene communications\" from being disseminated on the internet would affect freedom of speech. That language - it doesn't feel right. It's off. Seems to me like a good way for the FCC to harshly or selectively regulate speech on the internet - opens the door to censorship. Will it be used that way? Maybe not. But I'd rather not go to jail for 2 years for saying something \"obscene\" to someone on the internet.",
"Another argument is that it could allow the government to institute regulations on internet content. On the weak side, there is the potential for limitations similar to those on broadcast television, like restricting usage of certain language. On the strong side, the government could *maybe* use this power to censor political opposition.",
"I'll start out by saying that I am completely for net neutrality for a whole list of reasons...however you said \"the argument against net neutrality\" - so I'll try to give a devil's advocate answer. 90% of residential network traffic is between 4-10 pm; and something like 90% of the data is now video streaming. Why should companies have to expand their infrastructure to handle a concentrated high traffic period when the rest of the time their networks are not operating at capacity? The argument is that they SHOULD be able to charge high data users more because they are hogging capacity. The only reason that is a valid argument is because there is no competition for highspeed internet in most locations in the country, A truly free market would let ISP's charge whatever they want and if they charged too much, they would lose customers. We don't have that. There are many other reasons to support net neutrality that the big companies try to shy away from, the next biggest is the steering of the public towards certain media consumption. An example that shows how insidious yet how buried this can be: TimeWarner owns 10% of Hulu. If there is a show that I want to watch (I'll use Vikings as an example cause I'm watching it now) I can watch it on Hulu or Amazon Prime. If I have TimeWarner as my cable/internet provider; they will benefit financially if they get me to chose Hulu over AmPrime because of a Hulu subscription, and Hulu has ads, AmPrime does not. To steer this they throttle my connection to AmPrime, and streamline my connection to Hulu. This also carries over to news media outlets; if an ISP wants to push a political agenda, they would throttle the ones they disagree with and streamline/redirect ones that push the narrative they want. This quickly translates to freedom of speech issues."
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5wgr50 | Why is "forbidden" sex or sex in unusual/public places so exciting? | What does it trigger within ourselves? What psychological/social/biological explanation is there? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When you're afraid, or sexually aroused, or angry, or excited, your body goes into an aroused state (aroused in the general sense being increased respiration, heart rate, and blood pressure.) They're pretty closely related physically, so it's easy to misunderstand what caused the arousal. [There's a theory that when we experience physical arousal, we look for an emotional explanation, unless we know what's causing the arousal. There were some interesting experiments done in that vein.]( URL_0 )",
"Adrenaline. Knowing you could get caught at any moment. Im not smart enough to give a psychological explanation."
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5wgy7o | Why does a normally sweet drink (let's say chocolate milk) taste bland after eating another sweet food (let's say cake)? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"My guess is that it's due to relativity. The same thing happens with heat, if you eat(or feel) something really hot, a room temperature thing will feel colder. No idea why this happens, though"
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5wh2de | Why is the US military budget usually compared as an absolute figure rather than as a percentage of GDP? | Whenever I see comparisons of the US military budget, it is usually in the context of the US spending more than the next x nations combined. As the US has the largest economy, isn't this a little disingenuous to how national budgets generally work? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Yes/No. When it comes to national spending, it's much more relevant that the next door country has 5 times as many soldiers, tanks and planes that you do, than it is that they spend 7,2% instead of 6,5% of their GDP on health, meanwhile them having \"five times as many hospitals\" has no effect on their foreign policy at all.",
"Yup; it's typically a form of obfuscation meant to take the size of the military budget out of context, particularly to help convince people that the military is inherently a waste of money (all while ignoring the fact that the past 7 decades since the end of World War II has been perhaps the most peaceful period in all of human history). Realistically, though; the US spends 16% of it's budget (and 54% of discretionary spending) on the military, amounting to about 5% of the total GDP of the United States.",
"Both are relevant. If you want to talk about the absolute power of the military, which after all is what you need to win a fight, then you want the absolute number. If you want to talk about the relative importance of the military to the government's in different countries, and get an idea of how strong different countries are for their 'size', percentage of GDP is a good figure."
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5wh33e | Are humans the only species that become aroused when viewing their own species have sex or are there other animals that experience similar things? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I saw some study a while back in which apes were given tokens to trade for food or watch \"porn\" of their species. Most chose the porn. Edit: It was macaques not apes. Juice was the currency that they were using. [Here's an article.]( URL_0 ) They also \"paid\" to see photos of high status males.",
"there is a pretty good sci-fi book about an alien invasion. it's not going well for the humans until the aliens discover we watch each other have sex and enjoy that. the aliens just leave in disgust ...",
"they showed panda porn to the pandas in a zoo in China to try and get them to reproduce. not sure if it worked or not...",
"Was curious about it and found another reddit answer. Short story: monkeys seem to enjoy it to some extent, but not a lot of studies out there to prove or disprove it. URL_0",
"I have a feeling that in the animal kingdom it's often the males who are more aroused by seeing others mate, but more as an incentive to mate with that female himself and contest the other male. With cats, where females are hurt by the barbed penis and tries to violently escape any attempt at sex, I doubt they derive any pleasure from being aroused by seeing it. More likely they're simply running away to escape rape."
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5wh6t2 | Why do quiet farts smell more than loud ones? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Because the fart energy goes to the sound in loud farts. In quiet farts the energy is used for smellz. This is science."
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5wh7w8 | Why is the government quicker to give me 100K for a student loan but not 100K to start a business? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"That is kind of quirky way to ask the question. I would phrase it as \"Why is the government more willing to help get me a 100K for a student loan than 100K loan to start a business?\" That is because the government does not provide loans to individuals, just guarantees to lender on behalf of private borrowers. 1. **Slower Escalation** A typical business is going to need most or all of that 100K upfront, while a college student will get it over time. Because it takes time, if you are not fit for the degree you are more likely to drop out before you ever get remotely close to the 100 K amount. 2. **Student Loans are Self Sorting** Racking up 100K in student loans is not easy. To get that much in debt you likely went to an excellent school, you are close to graduating from college, or you are working on a post graduate degree. You would not be in that school or graduate program unless you were already a well above average person. If youare asking for 100K in student loans, I know you have already jumped through a lot of evaluation and passed it to reach the point that you can ask for it. 3. **Business Loans Require a LOT of Customization** As someone who worked as credit analyst of small businesses at a community bank, I can tell you that a small time business loan involves a lot of custom agreements and custom evaluation. So for every business loan the lender is going to have evaluate it and assure to the government that it will be repaid for the loan to promote the economy as intended. 4. **College Education has Great Returns** On average a 4 year degree earned at age 22 has something the realm of a 12% return. That is more than enough to cover the interest on a loan. Additionally College Education has a host of non-monetary benefits to them and society. College educated people tend to have better health, better child rearing, and more stable income. That means that government has to spend less on medicare, less on crime, and less on welfare programs. So a college education pays for itself, increases taxes, and reduces government expenses. 5. **Public Assistance is not necessary to insure the creation of a market.** For a loan to be worthwhile to make it has to be repaid. And for a lender to borrow, they have to prove that they can repay a loan. If you could prove to the government you could repay your business loan, you could prove to a bank that you could repay your business loan. The government has no role in this market. But what sucks about education is that while it has great a rate of return for the recipient and society, for it to be worthwhile you have make the loan to people who have been adults for just a few months or years. These people have no way of proving that they have a good plan for how they will use the funds. Plus part of the process of going to college is figuring out what you are good at. 6. **Business Loans do not have a clear link to a better society** In general there is no guarantee of external benefits (benefits that go to someone else) from a business like with college education. This is why when the government does guarantee loans it is because it perceives a way to benefit society as whole with them. Like for example, home loans allow people to buy homes. These homes provide people with equity and more stability. This reduces their burden on welfare programs and makes them more invested in their communities (in theory). The agenda of a government loan program is make sure more loans of a beneficial type are provided more than the market would normally want to provide. -------------- EDIT 1: Some people have correctly pointed out that some government agencies do make loans directly and that is how they do it since I taught a class on this subject. But they are only technically correct (the best kind of correct). Most of these agencies will bundle the loans into a ABS or similar security and sell it in the private market. At the end of the day the government is not the ultimate lender, just a conduit that provides a guarantee. From a economic point of view, it doesn't really matter where the guarantee comes in the funding stream, just that it happens. The effect is the same. The government is guaranteeing your loan to the ultimate lender.",
"For the most part, a college education is seen as more beneficial to society in general, regardless of whether or not you end up getting a career in your field. Knowledge is good! There's also the fact that the vast majority of businesses fail within the first few years - and it takes a ton of knowledge (usually learned in school) to successfully run a business, not to mention a solid plan, good market research, a service or product people both need and want to buy, and a bit of luck. Furthermore, if you take out a 100k student loan, even if you don't get a career in your field there's a high likelihood you'll be able to pay back at least some of the loan. If you get paid 100k to start a small business and that business dies after a year, all of a sudden you have nothing to show for it at all and possibly will declare bankruptcy, costing the government even more money.",
"Student loans, by law, are extremely difficult to discharge because of financial difficulty, and generally have a positive return on investment. A buisness loan is a gamble with little guarantee, and is not under strong federal protection.",
"You cannot discharge the student loan easily. Generally only death will discharge it. Your wages will be garnished if you fail to pay off the debt for your student loans. Money for your business can be discharged through bankruptcy though, so it is more of a risk.",
"Because it's been 7 years since you borrowed $100K for your LibArts degree, you still haven't paid it back, and now you're back asking for another $100K to start your kale wrap sub shop.",
"A student loan is a double investment to government. There is interest paid back on the loan and you are more employable in the workforce and will have a greater economic benefit to the country. For the US this applies world wide as their tax laws apply to citizens anywhere. A business is riskier. The government is more likely to give money to a business than a bank, but it's more likely given as grants than loans and it's still not easy. Most businesses fail in the first few years and they need the 100k usually during start up. Student loans are given out on a per semester basis, spreading it out over years. So a student who drops out after a year will have had less investment from the gov't than a full graduate, the longer you're in school, the more employable you are. A business that fails will have a far larger debt burden due to startup costs and will no longer be contributing to the economy. Finally you have elections. You'll get far more votes from parents and newly voting students by helping them out than refusing. Which is why it's hard to declare bankruptcy from a student loan, because there needed to be more security in the programs so the election promised could be kept. Canada had a situation in 2000 where the banks used to handle student loans with gov't guaranteeing them, but they would no longer agree to that risk. Knowing that ending or substantially changing the student loan program would be political suicide, the gov't took over the program entirely which allowed them to completely eliminate the ability to discharge a student loan through bankruptcy.",
"Bankruptcy lawyer here. The answer has been stated herein by others, but it bears repeating. Federally backed student loans are an explicit exception to discharge within the Bankruptcy Code. The Brunner Test has developed to determine whether undue hardship exists that should justify the discharge of other student loans, but these are typically privately held student loans, not federally backed. On the other hand, go set up an LLC, borrow a bunch of cash, personally guarantee it, default on the note, liquidate the business and give all proceeds to the lender, then file a chapter 7 and you are off and down the road to start your next venture. The treatment in bankruptcy is where the answer lies.",
"My cynical perspective is that student loans are a safe return on investment. Now here me out: **Only death can absolve you of student loans** And even that's not a guarantee. If your parents, or some dumb spouse, co-sign the loan, then THEY are on the hook after your death. Even if your loans are forgiven, the remaining principal is considered \"income\" for tax purposes. That means you owe a percentage of whatever is forgiven to the IRS. One way or another, the government will get their money back. **It's good propaganda** \"Look at all the students we support, all the dreams we made come true!\" The messaging writes itself. On the other hand, there's no guarantee the small business will make any money and there's a multitude of ways they can avoid paying you back.",
"The government is simply an extension of our will as a society. If we collectively desire something, it will eventually happen. We care to extend loans to students to finance their education. We don't care to extend loans to entrepreneurs in the same fashion. it's not a particularly complex answer at this level. But it's a concept that people often miss because they think of government as some sort of mystical complex beast whose actions are capricious and not to be divined by the human mind. Like yeah, government is indeed complex and not a perfect reflection of society's will, but ultimately, that's all it is. Personally, i think that this answer is the best answer to the technical question of, \"why?\" Following up my answer with an additional, \"why?,\" leads you to all of these other answers (such as /u/ironbear76's great answer). While they're all valid, I don't think the econometrics or the discourse was that sophisticated when these systems were initially formed (probably ~30yrs ago). People weren't really going, \"yeah college means more healthy people and less people on welfare,\" when health insurance costs were otherwise negligible and welfare research was a shadow of what it is today. So i'm thinking that those answers are post-rationalization that have helped to keep the system in place. We initially subsidized education so heavily because we wanted kids to go to college. We've since found that to be a better bet than ever, so we're continuing on with it. But at a fundamental level, the idea of students touches our collective hearts and is something that we want to encourage.",
"1. It's not the government giving the loan. It's one of a set of approved lending institutions.(banks) 2. The loan is protected from almost every type of default(making the loan go away without paying).(bankruptcy, etc) So that it can't be wiped away. It means the owner of the loan has a claim on you forever, or until the debt is paid. This is the number one reason why it's easy to get a student loan. Not \"benefit for society\" or \"you're a good investment\". It's the lack of default options.",
"Because you can declare bankruptcy with business loans. This will get downvoted, but using your student loan money to start a business is no more immoral than other students using it to go on vacation in Cancun, live in $2000 month apartments or buying motorcycles or new cars. It is riskier for you though vs getting a regular loan or using a card, because these loans are not dischargeable in bankruptcy like business loans. And if you wind up with no education cause you were going to be some big business tycoon and a stupid amount of debt you are fucked for life. So, using $1000 to start a t shirt biz might be a good business. Siphoning off 100k over 4 years to start a restaurant is prob bad business.",
"Because 98 percent of businesss fail within a year and no means to pay the money back. At leasf with a degree there is a chance of getting the money back over the long haul. Its all a scam anyways.",
"For the same reason you can declare bankruptcy as a business owner, but not as an unemployed student.",
"Remember how you voted to support the politician that said \"college education is a right\"? Remember how you demonized the money-grubbing politician that supported evil corporations/businesses?"
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5whct1 | What's the difference between an sd card (or thumb drive) and a solid state drive? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Read and write speeds. A standard 128gb SD card will write at around 10mb/sec. An unimpressive 128gb SSD will write at at least 150-175+mb/sec. While the amount of storage might be the same, the speed at which it needs to be written and retrieved differs greatly."
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5whfk0 | How can Snoop Dogg and other rappers say that they "smoke weed everyday" and be fine, yet some people will have their house raided if there's even the slightest chance they're in possession of the stuff? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"1) It is not a confession legally. They can say whatever they want and it is not a crime. 2) It is considered a part of their performances. Particularly if done on stage, so it is protected by the first amendment and by default assumed to be false. 3) In modernity they tend to live in States where it is legal. 4) They have historically been searched for illegal substances.",
"If you were to google it, you would find that everyone from [Nelly]( URL_3 ) to [Willie Nelson]( URL_0 ) have had their tour buses and homes raided for marijuana and other drugs. But whether or not they talk about it in their music, it doesn't amount to a confession. There's a degree of artistic license involved, even if the stories they tell are anecdotally true. Think of the rappers who talk about shooting police officers or rivals on the street, or even the group Sublime who claimed in their [song about the LA riots]( URL_1 ) that the music gear they're using was stolen. Not that they can't receive some backlash for what they say, such as when Rick Ross [eluded to date rape]( URL_2 ) in one of his songs, which didn't get him arrested but he lost some endorsement deals. But I don't think that any court would take controversial lyrics endorsing criminal activity to be an admission of committing the crime.",
"Find me one example of someone's house being raided for the \"slightest chance they're in possession of the stuff\"."
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"http://www.rollingstone.com/music/videos/rick-ross-rape-lyrics-dropped-from-u-o-e-n-o-20130411",
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5whk6y | What's a pot belly filled with? | People who have a pot belly, is it just filled with fat, how come it gets such a specific distribution? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are generally two type of fat - subcutaneous and visceral. Subcutaneous is best defined as the fat that you can see, the \"inch you can pinch.\" You see it all over a person's body. In some areas it may be thicker than in others, but for the most part it's everywhere. Visceral fat (which gets its name from viscera, which refers to the internal organs in the abdomen) resides deep within the torso, wrapping itself around your heart, liver, and other major organs. In fact, it's possible to be relatively thin and still have too much visceral fat. A lot of people that appear to have a \"pot belly,\" fall under this second kind. Their stomach is large and pooched out, but can seem relatively hard because the fat is under the muscle around the organs."
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5whli6 | How does genetics prove there's no such thing as race? | A professor of genetic medicine told me that genetics has proven there's no such thing as race. I've since heard this from several different authorities, but never found a proper explanation. However, that very same professor also taught us that the CFTR gene is more common among Europeans, Sickle Cell is more common among Sub-Saharan Africans, Tay-Sachs is more common among Ashkenazi Jews etc. I've also read about Mitochondrial DNA studies being used to see what someone's racial heritage is. How can both of these things be true? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Being Black/White/Asian isn't a species. Your professor is trying get that across. Your skin color or hair type is no different then your family lineage having big ears or a beak like nose. The CFTR gene, Sickle Cell, Tay-Sachs are common in groups of people yes. But that's just a simple case of those people in that area just had sex with each other and passed on those genes to their kids. They don't have these genes because they are European/Sub-Saharan Africa but it's commonly found in those areas. Just like how you have a gene for the size of your nose. Now if we were actually separate races we would be a step away from actually being unable to procreate. There is no issue of that because we are so genetically similar. Or put it this way. Do you consider blonds to be a different race than brunettes?"
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5whncs | How do names work in sign language? | There can't exactly be a sign for every name in the world, can there? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I was taught this in high-school ASL class. Basically, they're made up, kinda like a nickname. It's not an \"official\" sign, just something that the person, and others, recognize as representing their name. They're only used when everyone involved knows the sign though, otherwise they just spell out the name.",
"There are a few common pseudo-sign areas \"reserved\" for sign names. For instance, bringing your dominant sign hand to the opposite shoulder. Your hand will be in the shape for the first letter of your given, written name, so for instance Rhyno might be given the sign name of R tapping my left shoulder. This would be for someone who already knows what your given name is, otherwise you would finger-spell it: R-H-Y-N-O [R-shoulder sign]. This is for Deaf people only, usually. Capital D Deaf meaning someone who is part of the Deaf community, usually someone who learned sign as their first language, or even a hearing person with Deaf parents. Lower case d deaf is someone who might know sign, but probably grew up with hearing parents and didn't go to a school for the Deaf, maybe lost their hearing later in life after learning to speak, etc. Those who are not Deaf, usually hearing people interacting with a local Deaf community, are usually given a local sign name that is more like a nickname. For instance, when I took ASL in high school the joke was that I was always hungry, so my Deaf friend gave me the sign HUNGRY with the hand also forming the letter for my first initial while signing HUNGRY. But that sign name is only for that group, my friend and anyone she introduced me to. If I interact with a new group, I would spell my name and wait for them to give me their own sign name for me. It's considered rude, or at least presumptuous for you to give yourself a sign name if you're not Deaf, or at least deaf. For sure, there's not a unique sign for every Deaf person. But there's not a unique name for each person. And there are elements to sign that you can keep common (location, hand shape, direction of movement, etc.) to make them, more or less, look \"namey\" just like in most spoken languages you can usually identify what sounds like a name, and many people share the same name. Also of note, this is for American Sign Language. Sign Language is not universal, just like any spoken language. Most countries have their own sign language, and there will be cultural differences to go along with that. I can only speak about what I know, and that's ASL...And I can't pretend I know that very well, either.",
"In Deaf culture, you can't choose your own name sign if you're hearing; a Deaf person gives it to you after getting to know you. Up till then you introduce yourself by signing NAME then fingerspelling the letters of your name. Once you have a name sign, you STILL introduce yourself by signing NAME then fingerspelling, then show your name sign. HI!. MY NAME J-A-N-E NAMESIGN J-SMILE As you can see, name signs are mainly useful between people who know each other or in a social circle where people know who the name signs refer to. Some corporations have commonly accepted namesigns, like Starbucks, Target, WholeFoods, others are just spelled out."
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5whqg0 | Why can't we eat the banana peal\skin? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"While it may not be pleasant, it isn't inherently toxic (assuming it has been cleaned properly).",
"Not only can you eat the skin of most fruit, the peel off a banana is relatively healthy. It provides more fiber and vitamins. The general consensus is however that the peel is pretty gross. (It is pretty nasty)"
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5whrvd | How oxygen isn't flammable and is an oxidizer | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Fire is a chemical reaction that is, by definition, when oxygen oxidizes another material, producing a lot of heat. So fire requires not only the fuel, but also oxygen. Oxygen can't be its own fuel.",
"Fire is the rapid introduction of oxygen into the chemical structure of something else. Think of fire as like rusting , but so quickly it creates heat as a byproduct"
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5whtj7 | What's happening when I'm listening to a song and I decide to "focus" on one instrument, which I suddenly hear clearly over everything else? | For instance, in [this song]( URL_0 ) at the 1:06 mark, the first time I heard it was just a mash. On repeated listens, I can "isolate" that guitar riff and it begins to literally stand out on top of the whole song. Another example is when you focus on listening to the breaths a singer takes in-between singing, and then it becomes the only thing you hear. How? Why wasn't I hearing it before? Why am I hearing it now? What's going on? Is it a physical change in my ear function, or brain chemistry? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The first time someone thought to try and answer this was sometime in the 50s and the paper was called 'the cocktail party problem' they basically posed the question 'how is it, when I'm in a room full of 100 people at a cocktail party, that I can easily ignore many other voices and focus in on my target conversation?' Since that time hundreds of studies have tried to pinpoint how it is possible for the human ear to cut through all the stimulation and information that is constantly bombarding the auditory system in order to hear the desired source of sound. If we start from Outside the ear and go in I think it will it will. Make the most sense. Ever noticed how when someone calls your name and you can immediately turn your head pretty much by reflex and be looking at the source of that sound? The way each individuals ear is shaped 'bounces' the wave made by the sound and as it enters the ear and through years of practice (perfected Thru our development as a child) our brain has essentially figured out that if a wave has hit the timpanic membrane (ear drum) in a certain way it is most likely coming from a specific location. A study I recall changed the contours of people's ears and found that they were now terrible at locating specific sound sources. So that's how we can separate a stream in space, it becomes more complex when there are competing noises, but already we have one way of separating that stream and hearing it over other noises by knowing where it's coming from. Now focussing in a bit more on the guitar stream which you can now easily separate from the bass, drums and vocalist or whatever other distractions there are. With headphones on, your unique ear shape is now taken out of the equation - so how do we do it? Luckily, many people have asked a similar question and it's mainly based upon the properties of the waveform of the sound (frequency, amplitude etc) and how loud the noise is (decibel lvl) I've just arrived at work though so will have to defer until later, if you guys want me to keep going, I'll hit it up later in the afternoon. OK, I'm back. From many many studies we have realised that humans are incredibly well adapted to hear sound in a specific range of frequency, but not very good outside of this (think dog whistle, or mosquito tones). The advantage of this for example is when you talk on the telephone, decibel levels are low and overall quality of sound is pretty terrible (especially back in the day!) but we still usually hear with ease on the phone. This is because of something called attenuation. So in the case of the telephone, the speech is battling against white noise or static. Static has a pretty specific frequency which is not really at all close to the frequency of human speech which makes it easy for our well adapted systems to essentially find the noise that has excited the finely tuned 'hair like' fibres in our inner ear that tickle our nervous system and then increase the amount of excitation of the desired stream whilst decreasing the excitement caused by the undesired or static stream of noise. Taking this Thru to the sound in your headphones, it's pretty much the exact same process. The guitar has a different frequency and amplitude compared to the bas compared to the drums etc etc. However it's not as straight forward as say human speech vs static because the frequencies are all sitting in a similar zone. So how do we differentiate similar sounds? This is where it starts to get a LOT more complicated and there is a lot of 'top down' higher processing in the brain where we combine visual cues, learned experiences and pattern recognition (just to name a few). To take it back to you being able to separate the guitar and focus in on that after listening to the song, you have essentially learned how to fine tune your top down processes through experience, concentration and pattern recognition (for example learning the melody of the riff) and combining this tune up with the basic information or cues that your ear is delivering to the brain. I think thats probably enough detail for an ELI5 haha! But for a quick addit because I do find it interesting: Were best at differentiating one voice from static. Then a little worse at differentiating a voice from a tonal noise (singular frequency - like a droning beep) A little worse again for beeping tones Worse again for differentiating a female to a male voice Worse again for differentiating same sex to same sex voice Worst at differentiating the same voice from the same voice. Extrapolate from that as you will! The cocktail party problem paper should be easy to source online in the meantime, it's a godly paper! The above only touches the surface of how complex the whole thing actually gets, this is why siri and other voice recognition programs still have absolutely NOTHING on the marvel that is our own, grown auditory system! Edit: realised I didn't answer the why can't we stop hearing the breathing noises etc once we've clued onto them. My memory on this one is hazy, nonetheless.. Most natural noises that we hear (birds, monkeys, crickets, geckos for example)are at the basic level, single tone, repetitive noises - much like the breathing in a song, or someone continually saying 'umm' during a speech. This next bit is a stretch because I can't recall studying papers that specifically looked at this, but basically, evolutionarily it has been beneficial for us to be able to hear natural noises for reasons of survival or safety. Think monkeys or birds fleeing from danger, they're noisy, the caveman wakes up because we are hard-wired to attenuate and increase the excitement of the hairs (like above) that are being hit by the repetition of nature giving us the heads up that danger is about. Try playing with your top down processing and see if you can modulate the annoying breath of the singer to make it a less dominant stream - change from focussing in on guitar to bass to drums - practice makes perfect, see musicians for evidence of the finely tuned ear. Source: majored in auditory neuroscience in my undergrad. (has been many yrs since, however) I've been waiting for an ELI5 for me to answer, as I mooch off of all you people almost daily! So pleasure to finally have some knowledge to return to the community!",
"There are a lot of incoming stimuli for our brain. If we had to process them all, then our head would explode. So our brain filters it and the ones that we pay attention to are the ones that remain. It aren't just auditive stimuli by the way.",
"It's called Selective hearing. If you have time today, look it up - it'll make you feel like a superhero. Ps. At work/lunch can't go into the whole thing right now :/"
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5whwrq | Prior to toothpaste being introduced to the world, how did humans of the past maintain oral hygiene? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They died before it mattered. Their diets had far less sugar in it, so their teeth didn't wear as fast, and they had fewer cavities to deal with. By the time they started losing teeth, they were probably already old and close to dying anyway. As modern medicine started increasing the expected lifespan, dentures were created to make up for lost teeth. As well, fluoride is a naturally occurring mineral found in pretty much all water sources. That's actually how it was discovered that fluoride helps your teeth - scientists were studying the effects of high levels of fluoride in the drinking water of people in the mountains. So most people were exposed at least to *some* fluoride to help remineralize their teeth as they were worn down.",
"Very often, people used a twig or a bundle of twigs to scrub the teeth. This is still done in lots of places. [Read more here]( URL_0 )",
"Cloth and water. They could rub salt and chalk over their teeth, or chew special twigs. They could make powder of the ashes of ox hooves and burned eggshells, or crushed oyster shells and bones.",
"As other posters mentioned, basic care with water and ash, cloth or bristles to scrub. Diets were not as full of sugar as they are today so cavities were not as much of a problem. A bigger problem would've been physical erosion of the teeth. For example, mummies in ancient Egypt are found to have extremely worn down teeth. This is because of the grains of sand consumed throughout their life- try as you might but in ancient times there was no way to effectively remove all the sand grains while milling your wheat into flour. There's been basic dentistry in regards to tooth extractions to help prevent further pain and infections."
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5whxkh | Why do we have trouble eating Foods that we got sick from or threw up even though we've had more good experiences than bad? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's called the Garcia effect. One bad experience can ruin you on a food for life. It's got the name 'Garcia' after a rancher in the US who was having a hard time keeping wolves away from his ranch. He shot them but they (or rather, new wolves) kept coming back. One day he decided to leave lightly-poisoned meat around the perimeter of his ranch. Wolves ate it and got sick but didn't die. Instead, they learned to avoid Garcia's cattle and, better yet, taught their young to also avoid it. Less effort, better results! Ever wonder why some people hate tequila? Probably the same reason. They went out, had fun, did the obligatory one-too-many tequila shot and then threw up. Well, the taste and aroma of the drink suffused the whole experience and now the smell of the drink causes all sorts of alarm bells to go off in your head. Same with bad sushi. Eat bad sushi once, get sick, and then swear up and down for the rest of your life that you \"just don't like it\".",
"It's part of your body's strategy for keeping you alive. It's very useful to have an alert system that keeps you from doing things that have previously caused you harm. It's also useful to have a system that gives you the okay on things that don't cause harm, but that's less critical to your survival, because it's better to err on the side of \"that thing is dangerous\" than \"that thing isn't dangerous\" if you're not sure. So, let's say you eat a new kind of mushroom and get really sick, then you try it again and you're fine. Your body doesn't know which was the fluke or what other factors were at play, but it does know that one time you ate that mushroom and it went really badly. So it's a lot safer to guess that it was the mushroom that made you sick than to guess there was something else going on and the mushroom is fine. You can overwrite your body's system, it just takes awhile. This isn't food-related, but a similar thing happened to me when I passed out after a blood test a few years ago. I know that it happened because my blood sugar got too low, but I still have a phobia of needles. The more times I get blood drawn and nothing bad happens, the easier it gets, but my body still weighs \"that time things went super wrong\" much more heavily than \"one of those times it was fine\" because that's how it keeps me safe. Your body does the same thing with food. It wants to make really sure that food is safe before it lets you feel okay about it again."
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5wi2xq | Why do female bodybuilders often have very masculine faces?? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They will frequently be taking steroids/testosterone in order to build the relevant muscle-mass. Testosterone is the primary hormone responsible for male dimorphism (physical differences) which includes both muscle-mass and other features. It is next to impossible for females to build the extreme bulk of bodybuilers without some sort of similar drug treatment or anatomical/hormonal abnormality to has a similar effect. It's difficult for men as well, and many (most?) Male body-builers also use similar treatments."
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5wi54w | Flashy colors when you close your eyes | When you close your eyes, optionally press them with your fingers, you see really flashy moving colors and lights, why does this happen and isn't the visual just black/dark when you close your eyes? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Not a science-barista of whatever, but the ELI5 I got from my opthomologist family friend when I asked this years ago was that our brains really want to interpret signals from our eyes as things, and especially movement. So if you stare at a flawless white wall without moving your eyes for about 30 seconds, you'll probably see things that aren't there (see : [Ganzfeld Experiment]( URL_1 ) ). Closing your eyes does this same thing, but in a way that our brains have become accustomed to, so the hallucinations are very minor and we tend to just ignore them after a few seconds/minutes. Sometimes they're also caused by an [Afterimage]( URL_2 ), or in some cases [Palinopsia]( URL_0 ) retaining a bright image even after the stimulus to our eyes is gone.",
"The rods and cones in your eyes are activated by photons entering your eyes, but they are also slightly activated by pressure on them. Pressing on your eyes presses on the ocular fluid, which presses on the rods and cones and hence causes random activation of these cells and causes you to see random dots of light."
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5wi89i | What happens to water when it goes stale? | What happens to the water to give it that tangy, metal-like taste? Is it something to do with the plastic bottles? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"After about 12 hours tap water starts to go flat as carbon dioxide in the air starts to mix with the water in the glass, lowering its pH and giving it an off taste",
"Part of it has to do with some of the gasses inside the water evaporating out, like how when you leave water out for a while it starts developing little bubbles along the walls of the glass. The rest, as you mentioned, is from the container itself reacting with the water and the minerals inside it."
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5wiaei | Why can marijuana edibles get you high (brownies, cannabis oil, etc.), but just straight up eating weed cannot? | I've always thought it was due to the fact that THC and other cannabinoids need heat to activate. But I'm curious as to why eating brownies or cannabis oil still gets you high even days or weeks after making them? What changes in the THC that "activates" it? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The brownie or what not doesn't have to be hot for it work. You are correct that the THC is activated by heat; which happens during the baking/cooking process... Once this process happens it doesn't revert back when cool.",
"Pot is actually very low in THC and high in THCA - when smoking, the flame converts much of that THCA to THC where it becomes a chemical with psychoactive effects on the human body. When making edibles, it needs to be cooked so that the THCA goes through a process of decarboxylation."
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5wiah1 | Why are brains more impressive than computers? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Let me give an example. Let's say you walk into a rose garden. You smell the roses, you notice the vibrant colors and recoil your hand when it brushes over a thorn. Your brain just processed an extremely high quality image, flipped it, fed it into your conscious mind, associated it with sensory data coming from the nose, reaching into your memory to associate roses with a certain scent, then reacted to a danger so fast that your conscious mind wasn't even let into the decision making process. In addition, your brain was keeping your heart pumping, monitoring and maintaining your internal pH and temperature, maintaining respiration and digestion, etc. Could a computer do any of these tasks? Almost certainly, but the brain is the only thing known that can do them all, at the same time, while still having \"processing power\" left over for contemplation of complex ideas and for learning.",
"Because they do stuff at a speed, efficiency, and capacity that we cannot replicate with computers... yet anyway. Here, let me show you - Stand up from your computer, walk across the room and find a small object... then throw it into your computer chair so it lands where you sit. For your brain, that is pretty easy... for a computer that is virtually impossible."
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5wig5o | how can some people function normally while needing substantially less sleep than other people? | Like how can some people who get only 5 or 6 hours of sleep every night function at the same level as someone who gets 8-10 hours of sleep a night? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"This is something that is still debated. First, some people insist they only need 5 or 6 hours of sleep a night and then survive off sugar and coffee to stay awake. Very few people can actually do this healthily, but some can. Scientists have linked a gene to most of the people who survive on extremely little sleep, but it's still unsure what exactly does. But ignoring extremes, its probably mostly a matter of efficiency. For example. Given the exact same lifestyle otherwise, some people need around 2000 calories a day while another needs 2500 for the same lifestyle. So that is a matter of how efficiently their body processes calories. The same can be true of sleep. Someone whose body falls into deeper sleep more quickly and who has fewer periods of wakefulness might need less sleep than someone whose body needs a while longer to achieve the same depth of sleep. It also could be their brain just more effectively using the sleep. Some may be caused by personal sleep habits and some genetics. It would be more strange if everyone needed identical amounts of sleep.",
"As is the simple answer for most questions pertaining to biology: genetics. Sleep has a number of hypothesized functions, but it is clearly intended as a restorative period for the body to recover from stress, injury, and exertion. Your tissues heal quicker. There is evidence that sleep literally cleans your brains of toxins accumulated during the day: URL_1 The reasons for why someone may need less sleep than someone else are myriad. Perhaps they produce *less* toxins while awake, and thus need less sleep to recover. Or perhaps they produce the same amount of toxins, but are simply *more efficient at clearing them out*. As it goes with genetics, there is likely no single \"right answer\". Two people who both only need 4 hours of sleep per night may have very different genetic reasons for only needing 4 hours of sleep. One man, Dean Karnazes ( URL_0 ) has a rare genetic mutation that essentially gives him abnormally fast healing, so fast, in fact, that he can run and his body *recovers faster that it breaks down while running*. Life is full of these little quirks."
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5wijo8 | Why are chemical weapons considered particularly heinous? | So much so that there are special treaties signed to ban their use. It seems odd that they would stand out - given the mass killing abilities of nuclear weapons that are not similarly banned. Governments don't seem to have a problem with killing tens of thousands - unless its by chemical weapons. Why? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Yup which is why nuclear weapons are detonated every week right? /s Chemical weapons generally kill in horrible ways, indiscriminately and with little regard to battle lines or combatants vs. non-combatants. They also tend to kill the environment and in general just ruin things. Simply put... they are so nasty that even humans (which are generally horrible to each other) are like \"nah... it's k... we don't need that.\" Nuclear Weapons (while not officially banned) are de facto banned which is why *nobody has used them since 1945*.",
"Nuclear weapons aren't banned because 1. There's no way current nuclear powers would give up their nukes 2. They serve the purpose of MAD without killing anybody 3. If they end up getting used, the last thing we'll need to worry about is putting sanctions on the violator - we're pretty much screwed anyways Chemical weapons tend to cause particularly painful deaths and aren't really strategic weapons unless your goal is specifically to wipe out large civilian populations.",
"Chemical weapons are objectively pretty useless weapons of war. A properly trained and equipped army will be prepared for their use, so they will be more or less ineffective. And they're dependent on the wind - if the wind changes, suddenly the gas is blowing back towards your own troops. Not a good situation. Really, the only purpose for chemical weapons is to kill civilians. They won't be trained and equipped to deal with gas - they will die in agony by the thousands. Many chemical weapons are also persistent, leaving a poisonous residue on the gassed area. Mass murder of civilians and \"area denial\" weapons are greatly frowned upon, so chemical weapons are taboo. Nuclear weapons on the other hand actually are useful on the battlefield in wartime, so they are less taboo. They are taboo in general, though - look at the international reaction to countries like Iran who even hint at developing nukes. The current nuclear powers in the world basically say \"we know they're taboo but we don't care. Buzz off.\"",
"So nuclear weapons are pretty frowned upon now as well, but they do have one major difference. They cause initial major destruction that could have tactical purpose. As far as chemical weapons go, there isn't any initial destruction. And they have limited potential as weapons against soldiers due to their protective gear and regulation to clean handles, doors, etc. So then the chemicals are on the surfaces of buildings, cars, pretty much everything and the people who are going to be affected are the civilians in the area who are going to need immediate treatment they likely wouldn't have access to. So pretty much the main are where chemical weapons would be better than conventional ones would be to force civilians out of areas and for terror. Also their effects linger and can not only cause lasting health effects for those exposed but they can go into the ground and water supply and continue harming innocents for years even if the fighting has ceased. So as they have little true purpose for fighting other than hurting civilians, lots of governments want them banned. TLDR: Chemical weapons have little effect on fighting actual mitary forces, but have a huge effect on civilian populations. (Edited to be easier to read)",
"in addition to what others have said keep in mind it is REALLY hard to make nuclear weapons (as such only a few nations have them) and even then they are hard to transport/use plus hey most of the nations who have them are strong enough that you can't really punish them (like if the ICC decided to go after the US the US can make real threats to make them back down, and yes I know the US isn't a party to the ICC but they have somewhat universal jurisdiction) this is in comparison to anyone/any nation who can throw together chemical weapons. It isn't hard to make a crude mustard gas (I won't explain how to, just know you can pick up the ingredients at pretty much any wal-mart or tesco)and then they are pretty easy to transport. Now mustard gas is actually quite 'low' on the harm caused if dispersed over an area (because it is heavier than the normal air outside) but it ends up causing mass long term harm (and again this is one that is easily 'store bought') while the less 'tame' ones are far worse, along with biological weapons. Well pretty much if it wasn't for the CDC (and similar organizations around the world) there would be little/nothing you could do to stop it before massive harm. Nuclear weapons you can leave the area (ignoring the blast) and assuming you haven't become so irradiated that you are essentially a Chernobyl diver you can be treated. Chemical weapons often do immediate irreparable harm (like completely destroying your lungs) and biological weapons actually punish the population if people run away (think of the flu, if a town is infected and everyone stays put the virus is contained and they will be cured, granted the 'cure' would be cdc intervention here but still the same idea, but if everyone immediately runs from the town it becomes hard/impossible to see how wide spread the virus has traveled very quickly)"
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[]
]
} | [
"url"
]
| [
"url"
]
|
5wikp8 | How do humans gain super natural strength while in a fight or flight situation ? | So I understand that as human we have natural fight or flight instincts, which makes sense in and of itself. But how do people gain extraordinary strength like you hear in circumstances of people lifting cars or surviving what seemed to be a humanly impossible circumstance. It can't all just be adrenaline, can it? Why can these things only happen when under extreme psychological pressure or danger? Are humans capable of a literal instantaneous adaptation ? Or was the capability always within them it just took a detrimental circumstance to bring it to the surface? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"deaffoz",
"deaekrv"
],
"text": [
"As it happens I just read about this the other day. [This is an interesting read]( URL_0 ) about this subject.",
"I think most of those stories are anecdotes that have not been proven. Physiologically, adrenaline is released into the blood stream and probably wouldn't reach the muscles quickly enough to make a difference in \"fight or flight\" situations. What *is* released, and transmitted very quickly to the muscles is [norepinephrine]( URL_0 ). (TIL it is called noradrenaline in the UK.) Norepinephrine is usually what triggers alertness and anxiety; it triggers glucose release (increased energy) and increased blood flow to the muscles (increased oxygenated red blood cells) that can be helpful in stressful situations."
],
"score": [
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[
"http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160501-how-its-possible-for-an-ordinary-person-to-lift-a-car"
],
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norepinephrine"
]
]
} | [
"url"
]
| [
"url"
]
|
5wilmr | When squirrels bury acorns, how do they remember exactly where they put them? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"deabqob"
],
"text": [
"They often don't! Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of trees are planted every year by squirrels forgetting where they buried an acorn or other tree seed."
],
"score": [
14
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
]
| [
"url"
]
|
|
5wimyu | Why do we make face when tasting something extremely sour or when smelling something disgusting? | Is it all psychological/habit? or has a good reason behind it? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"deacnfk"
],
"text": [
"The sour face is biological because the puckering and sucking squeezes the salivary glands in your mouth to produce more saliva to dilute the sourness (also protecting your teeth). Disgust is also biological and the expression is universal among human cultures. Even blind individuals can make the disgusted expression. It's suggested that it was an evolutionary feature because expressing the sign of disgust can tell other people to avoid foods or situations that would be bad for their health."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
]
| [
"url"
]
|
5winxt | Why do websites start with www? | I tried to do some research on my own but couldn't find much info out there. Is there any reason as to why websites start with www is it something to do with the coding? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"deadeg9"
],
"text": [
"Domain names conventionally follow a reverse hierarchical system. The last portion (top-level domain, or TLD) is a signifier of purpose or nationality of the site (.uk, .fr., .jp; or .com, .org, .biz, .gov). The next to last portion is the owner of the site, or the name they've chosen for the site. The next portion is called a subdomain. Often this is used to indicate a purpose within the overall website for that particular page. www. means it's part of the World Wide Web; it's intended to link to and be linked to by other websites, and to be read by a browser. ftp. means that it's for file transfer. smtp., pop., and imap. are used for email applications. A website might also use the domains to indicate which server is hosting a given website. Some administrators have used this for artistic or humorous effect: URL_0 URL_1"
],
"score": [
6
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1875s2/the_most_amazing_use_of_tracert_and_dns_records/",
"http://www.theverge.com/tldr/2015/9/25/9398889/dr-horrible-traceroute-bad-horse"
]
]
} | [
"url"
]
| [
"url"
]
|
5wj2zm | What makes honey beneficial for wound healing? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"deafxpb"
],
"text": [
"It has a wide array essential proteins that are complete enough to get a bee out of and its also naturally anti microbial so it serves to nourish, protect and defend"
],
"score": [
8
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
]
| [
"url"
]
|
|
5wjn5d | Why is the smallest subatomic particle indivisible? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"deaoqj7"
],
"text": [
"Ultimately, we don't know for certain that the current set of \"fundamental\" particles really are fundamental. Currently the issue is that the particles we have are already so small that our current generation of colliders and detectors simply can't operate in the energy ranges we need to experimentally show that there is anything more fundamental. There's also the element of quantum effects meaning that there is a limit to the amount of information you can know about relatively small particles, as well as other particle effects like quarks not being able to exist freely and a general lack of well-substantiated theoretical backing into what could make something smaller and how we might go about it. But I'm making a little assumption about your question here, and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but the major thing you need to understand is that when we start getting to the atomic level and below, you simply can't think of particles as little solid balls of stuff, because they're not that at all - in a physical perspective they start to just become indistinguishable from energy. An electron isn't a little ball of negatively-charged matter whirling around an atomic nucleus, it's more of an energy vibration which moves in a very \"fuzzy\" path around the atom. Once you get to that level, it's very tricky to think of anything which is smaller, and even harder to design an experiment which could test whether it exists."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
]
| [
"url"
]
|
|
5wjo5m | what happens when you use water to put out a grease fire? | I recently saw a gif of someone using water to put out a grease fire, and it looked like the opposite of what you would want to happen. I get that oil and water don't mix (if that's even relevant), but why does it "blow up"? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dealf6k",
"dealld1"
],
"text": [
"Remember that water is heavier than the oil so it's trying to sink under the grease. The hot oil is generally well above the boiling temperature of water (water boils at 100 C, many vegetable oils will only burn at 300+C and don't self ignite until around 400C). If you've ever splashed a small amount of water in a hot skillet and watched the droplets \"dance\", it happens because water starts to boil almost instantly and bounce around propelled by their expansion. So you have water starting to submerge under the oil, while simultaneously starting to boil (and expanding dramatically) which usually propels burning oil across a large area (or around the room if it's walls constrain the space where the fire can expand).",
"Grease fire is very hot. Hotter than the boiling point of water. What you get when you throw water to a grease fire is that it instantly vaporises (better said, your form a cloud) and you have millions and millions of water droplets with a little grease drop on top (because, as you said, they don't mix), that happens to be on fire. So, a giant ball of fire. Please, don't try this at home. Or anywhere."
],
"score": [
14,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
]
| [
"url"
]
|
5wjqqj | what are the contents of a "hot hands" pouch and how do they generate so much heat almost instantly? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"deao07m"
],
"text": [
"They oxidize iron when exposed to air to produce the heat; basically they speed up the rusting of iron which is an exothermic reaction. Powdered iron and salt seem to be the main components along with water to allow the reaction to take place, charcoal to distribute the heat, cellulose as a spacer, etc."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
]
| [
"url"
]
|
|
5wkf5g | Why do stimulants cause some people with ADHD to feel drowsy? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"deasrak"
],
"text": [
"For every drug that is supposed to do \"Y\" to someone, it does \"X\" for a small percentage of people. This is what is known as a paradoxical reaction. It is very well accepted in pharmacological study. As to *exactly what causes it*, that is a very large and broad question to tackle. But a good way to understand it is to understand that *biological states are not polar opposites*. So, you're confused because you know that \"stimulants\" are \"drugs that make you awake\". However, stimulants make some people sleepy, which you think is the *opposite* of \"awake.\" But it isn't really that simple. Biological states like arousal, hyperactivity, drowsiness, fatigue; these are complicated biological states that are often more intimately related and more complex than people understand. Paradoxical reactions usually derive from abnormal neurochemistry. Pharma companies aren't *super* thorough when putting out a drug. They come up with a compound, it does something, and they go to market. Stimulants like adderall, for example, work on the dopamine system. The work they do on the dopamine system in *most* people produces focus, energy, and altertness. But if someone's dopamine system is different than the norm - if perhaps they process it differently, or if adderall also tinkers with *another* neurotransmitter in an unexpected way - voila! Drowsiness. If you go digging down the rabbit hole deep enough, you are likely to find one or several studies of people studying paradoxical reactions in whatever drug you're thinking of specifically, and they'll offer some very technical biochemical or neurological hypothesis answering your question."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
]
| [
"url"
]
|
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