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j2saij
|
There are many instances where houses are split in half by state lines. Which state’s laws does the owner follow and which state will they cast a ballot for?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"g77djbt"
],
"text": [
"The owner has to follow the law of the country he is in at the moment, as for the house, the main door will be used to determine in which country it is."
],
"score": [
7
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
j2shcr
|
Why are there people stronger than me when they don't even build muscle/train at all?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"g77izil"
],
"text": [
"Person above had the correct answer: genetics. If strength was only determined by training, then any person could become an elite athlete, but that is not the case. Even at the highest level of physical competition, there are people that are just stronger based on their genetics."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
j2slb8
|
Why is tomato sauce especially awful in spraying everywhere when heated?
|
Chemistry
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"g77fgzg"
],
"text": [
"It's simultaneously thick and watery. Especially when you are heating it, it tends to be hot, water liquid at the bottom of the pan, and thicker, cooler liquid at the top. So when the hot stuff boils, it has to push through the thicker top layers, meaning more pressure builds up, and when the bubbles come up they are large and carry water sauce that can really fly."
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
j2srl9
|
why does chewing mint gum make whatever you’re drinking feel super cold? Even room temperature liquid?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"g77i6kc"
],
"text": [
"Mint contains menthol, which has a cooling sensation on skin/in your mouth. Look up menthol on Wikipedia for info on how, if you’re interested in more detail"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
j2su9w
|
what TF is proud boys?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"g77hotj"
],
"text": [
"Not to snipe you, but there's a massive thread on this exaxt topic at r/OutOfTheLoop today."
],
"score": [
7
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
j2sx17
|
Why does the last step in the Rubik's Cube "Beginner's Method" work?
|
At the end of the "[Beginner's Method]( URL_0 )" solution, you get to a point where every cube is exactly where it needs to be, except that some of the cubes on the corners on the yellow side are facing the wrong direction. When you get to this stage, you can complete the cube just by repeating one algorithm: right side down, bottom side left, right side up, and then bottom side up. When you do this, the entire cube gets messed up. While you're doing the algorithm, everything you've accomplished up until this point looks like it's getting completely destroyed. But then, after a certain number of times, everything just ends up exactly where it's supposed to be. Here's why that's weird: sometimes, when you get to this point, you only have to fix one cube, but other times, you have to fix two, three, or even four of them. And sometimes, you only have to do the algorithm twice to get everything where it's supposed to be -- but other times, you have to do it up to 16 times all-in-all. Somehow, whether you're doing this in 2 moves or 16, the Rubik's Cube goes from completely screwed up to 100% perfect every time, and I can't wrap my mind around that. I get how all of the other steps work, but this one baffles me.
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"g77kifz"
],
"text": [
"The simplest way to explain this is that the last step is a repetitive sequence. If you repeat the same sequence of moves enough times, eventually the cube will end up in the same state since every move is a partial rotation. The final step repeats the same sequence with **one** tiny difference where you rotate the top face after correcting the orientation of a corner. That allows you to alter which top corner is being fed into the otherwise repetitive sequence. Edit: Think about a combination lock on a briefcase with the 4 dials that go from 0-9. Imagine turning one dial 1 click, the second dial 2 clicks, the third dial 3 clicks, and the fourth dial 4 clicks. Every ten times you repeat that sequence, the first dial will go back to zero. Every 5 times, the second dial will. Each dial will have some number of repetitions that will put it back where it was. Eventually there will be some “least common multiple” where all the dials are back at zero. The cube behaves kinda like that"
],
"score": [
6
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
j2t0bm
|
why is it that Eazy- e and Magic Johnson both contracted HIV around the same time yet Easy-e died 25 years ago but Magic Johnson is still alive and well?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"g77j6rs"
],
"text": [
"Magic Johnson was a professional athlete, at the peak of condition, and still maintains great condition in his older years. Eazy-E was ... not. Eazy-E was also diagnosed only one month before his death. His illness was likely much, much farther along than when Magic's was first detected."
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
j2t7uy
|
How is urine produced in the one's kidneys?
|
Please explain. Thank you.
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"g77lh4o"
],
"text": [
"Think about how you might clean a messy closet: * dump everything out on the floor, * neatly put the good stuff back in the closet, * bag up whatever's left on the floor and take it to the garbage. That's roughly the kidneys' approach. Blood comes into a network of thin blood vessels called the glomerulus, where the pressure is really high, and that pressure forces most of the blood contents (except blood cells, platelets, most proteins, and some of the water) into a kidney-tube called a nephron. It's like you're straining the blood. (Nephrons are tiny, like around as thick as a hair. A kidney is a bundle of thousands of them.) Then, cells in the wall of the nephron collect useful stuff like water, sugar, sodium, chlorides, etc and transfer them back into the blood until its levels are (hopefully) just right. Whatever's left after that is excess, and it gets passed along into a collecting duct, which leads to the renal pelvis, which connects to a ureter, which connects to the bladder."
],
"score": [
8
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
j2tqku
|
What Would it Take for Video Games to Get Out of the Uncanny Valley, or Make Realistic Faces?
|
As the next gen consoles are getting revealed it got me thinking how many generations are we away from playing video games that look mostly indistinguishable from real life. How many years till I can play a game and the face will be able to look like a persons face?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"g77qgfv",
"g77xcx3"
],
"text": [
"Likely many years, or never if your expectation is to have that sort of experience during gameplay. It takes a TON of time and money to create photorealistic models and animation, and a ton of computing resources to render that at an acceptable framerate. The monetary restriction means, barring some revolutionary AI that automates the work, it simply won't be economical for game studios to dump millions of dollars into facial animations when a mere fraction of that can get above-average results. The computing resources required for photorealistic models and animation, in real-time really doesn't exist today, even with professional rendering equipment and software costing 5-6 figures.",
"A computer can show you a pre-rendered photo-realistic still image. The Uncanny Valley appears when you start to animate; certain things like hair and clothing physics are very (graphics) processor-intensive right now, cause thousands of individual hairs have to be \"computed\" for example, but that can theoretically be solved with \"more graphics power\". However, one big issue is that we communicate a lot with body language and facial expressions, and certain things like an NPC's eyes following *yours* (instead of a blank stare aimed into the space behind you), and an NPC's face possibly having a reaction to *how you feel* are not going to be possible without a lot more monitoring of what YOU are doing (i.e. cameras aimed at your face, so the computer can detect and interpret where you're looking AND your emotions). Right now the game developers can guess that you laughed when an NPC told a joke, so the NPC could \"laugh along with you\", but maybe you didn't find the joke funny, and you find their laughter irritating, and that's exactly what Uncanny Valley is, a mismatch like that."
],
"score": [
10,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
j2ttme
|
the Derivative market, what is it?
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"g77v22l"
],
"text": [
"It's like the stock market but everything traded has it's value based on something else. The oldest derivatives were commodity futures. To make a simple example... I am a potato farmer. You run a factory making potato chips. Now we both have a bit of a problem with risk here. I will have potatoes to sell in 3 months time. You will need more potatoes to make chips in 3 months time. But maybe the price of potatoes will go down a lot in 3 months and then when I want to sell my potatoes I won't even make a profit. Or maybe the price of potatoes will go UP a lot in 3 months and then you won't be able to buy my potatoes and still make a profit. So we do a derivative trade. We make a contract that says I will sell you 50 ton of potatoes at todays potato price in 3 months time. And to make it easier to make these contracts we standardize them and run a market with them. I don't care who buys my potatoes I just want to sell 50 tons of potatoes in 3 months time. But now what we can also do, once this market for potato contracts exist? We can make money on potatoes without ever trading potatoes! You see if Willy the banker thinks potato prices will go up in 3 months, he can buy a potato contract now and then in 3 months when the prices for potatoes have gone up sell the contract again and make a profit even though of course as a banker he doesn't grow 50 tons of potatoes, or have any use for 50 tons of potatoes. This is how you get banks trading commodities like oil, beef, rice, sugar etc etc. Through future contracts. This can then also be applied to the regular stock market where you have futures on an index for instance and you make money if the index goes up and lose money when the index goes down. And beyond futures there are more complex derivative contracts as well such as options etc."
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
j2u1d6
|
How come when you shake an uncooked egg in its shell then crack it, the yolk remains intact?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"g77s264",
"g77zqcd",
"g782yh2"
],
"text": [
"The clear fluid that surrounds the yoke is what protects it from damage, there is also a thin membrane outside of this fluid that protects the yoke from impacts with the shell wall. If you shake an egg long enough, and with enough force, it is possible to break the yoke while still inside the egg.",
"Put it in a sock and swing it around. That should give enough force to scramble it inside the shell",
"Think of the egg yolk like your brain, and the egg white is the fluid around your brain, and the shell is your skull. Shake your head around -- *gently*. Are you still alive? Yes? Then your brain has remained intact. This is because the yolk, like the brain, is suspended in fluid and other things (e.g. the [chalaza]( URL_0 )) that acts like a shock absorber. Now, just don't shake your head *too* hard... :-)"
],
"score": [
12,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalaza"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
j2u5fr
|
How can twitch prime subscriptions be lucrative for Amazon. Why are they a thing?
|
I mean twitch prime doesn't cost you any extra money and amazon prime already has to deal with any generated costs (delivery, music, etc.).
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"g77v5jp"
],
"text": [
"They get people watching Twitch, and once someone's gotten a taste of that subscriber privilege they're more likely to subscribe to more with their own money. It's like a free trial - plenty of people won't ever spend their own money, but enough people WILL that it's worth it for them."
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
j2u7gt
|
Why does heating up scented wax make the scent so much stronger?
|
Chemistry
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"g77tjox"
],
"text": [
"Wax is a solid at room temperature. As long as the wax is solid, the scent chemicals added to the candle are locked in place. They cannot move, and so they cannot evaporate, except for a very small amount at the very surface of the wax. When you light the candle, the flame begins to melt the wax and it becomes a liquid. Where the wax has melted, the scent chemicals become free to move around, and so they can easily move to the surface of the liquid wax and evaporate into the air and be smelled by you."
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
j2ue2f
|
What is the harm of giving every single hardworking/law abiding illegal immigrant citizenship(USA)
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"g77wa3q"
],
"text": [
"Immigration and citizenship is a tricky topic. With a lot of laws and variables at play. At a base level, this sounds like a grand idea. But legally, its much more murky than that. The President of the US, in this case President Trump, sets a limit on how many people are granted citizenship in a certain time frame, a quota per say. He is well within his power to do so, as its in the job. Also, the president has to pander to his current base. As for Trump, who ran an election and won on a big emphasis on cracking down on immigration, and a voting base who aren't very found of inflating the country's population with outsiders, its only logical that trump would set this number much lower than previous administrations. Than you get into the vetting part of things. When applying for US citizenship, you have to provide a crap ton of documents to prove who you are and your background. This is a very long and tedious process which includes, paperwork, interviews, and in most cases lawyers. Not to mention that the waiting list for legal citizenship is filled with millions waiting to even get considered for citizenship. This all comes together to create a process that takes years if not decades to do, so it isnt as easy as just saying \"hey youre a citizen now!\". You also have to assign them Social Security numbers, Voter IDs and all this other stuff that all naturally born US citizens have from the start on a local, state and federal level. Its a long process to get it all done and set up. So to answer your question, there are just processes in place that don't allow people already here illegally to jump in front of the \"line\". They must go through the process just like everyone else before them."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
j2updk
|
Now that most movies don't use film, how do they distribute movies to theaters?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"g77xn2n",
"g77xeuq"
],
"text": [
"> Because of security issues, proprietary portable hard drives are now the standard. They are shipped in a portable lock-box (similar to a handgun safe) from the film distributor and plugged into a custom closed digital projection system. It’s like a mini Fort Knox with multi-redundant safeguards against tampering. URL_0 Google to the rescue",
"Movies are digital even ones filmed on film. Digital distribution to theaters is quite simple over cable or satellite. This has reduced costs across the board."
],
"score": [
5,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://www.quora.com/Do-movie-theaters-still-use-traditional-reels-or-do-they-just-use-DVDs"
],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
j2upst
|
The Feynman Sprinkler - which way does it turn and why?
|
Quote form Wiki: "A Feynman sprinkler, also referred to as a Feynman inverse sprinkler or as a reverse sprinkler, is a sprinkler-like device which is submerged in a tank and made to suck in the surrounding fluid. The question of how such a device would turn was the subject of an intense and remarkably long-lived debate."
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"g78ff2x"
],
"text": [
"My dude, if it's the subject of intense and long-lived debate among actual physicists, I'm not sure why you think Reddit will have the answer."
],
"score": [
6
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
j2voi1
|
why aren't cars priced the same everywhere to make purchasing easy and remove the need for salesman?
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"g784m2o"
],
"text": [
"The ridiculous buying process makes the dealer more money, and car dealership lobbying groups lobbied Congress to make it illegal to sell cars any other way. They used their money to basically write a law that says no one can compete with them, so they have no incentive to make anything better."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
j2vx3a
|
why can't you walk on pool covers
|
I have always been told that if you walk on a mesh pool cover and it collapses you die or something why couldn't you just get out of it?
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"g785j7u",
"g785rwh"
],
"text": [
"You will be trapped in the mesh, severely prevented from moving your arms and legs, nothing to grasp on. As you sink you will be rolled up in the mesh to help you comfortably drown.",
"It turns out that people are generally poor at escaping being enveloped in large nets while underwater. Pool covers are designed to float so the material is likely to be pulled tight against the person by buoyancy from the rest of the cover. Once the trapped person starts to thrash around while attempting to escape there are many ways that they can become tangled instead of easily escaping. Is it possible you can escape? Of course. But jumping into water where you are immediately wrapped in a durable net is unwise."
],
"score": [
30,
18
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
j2wfxc
|
How do microphones record static noise? What is that noise?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"g7894ey"
],
"text": [
"To clarify are you asking about static noise you hear on recordings? Or from an open microphone in a live setting?"
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
j2wnkp
|
What is Forex trading? What do you do? How does it work?
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"g78c40y"
],
"text": [
"ForEx is trading in currency. Basically if a currency such as USD fluctuates in value relative to other currencies in the market, such as the Euro and people try to buy low and sell high ForEx traders buy and sell currency to make a profit (and there are some business reasons to trade as well). Actually trading it on the open market, like a stock, trying to make a buck, is an extremely specialized thing done by a very very small section of traders who pretty much only do this. Its a highly unusual field, and even veteran finance and traders don't know much about how its done (other than general ideas) because its so specialized. The community of ForEx traders is small. Its also has generally very low returns. Its something that is done only by places like very large banks, who will have like a single small office of people (compared to them being an enormous finance company) who just do ForEx trading For some reason this gets asked on reddit a lot, its strange because ForEx trading is more like a footnote of financial transactions that no one in finance even discusses. Note: ForEx trading is NOT the same thing as just exchanging currency. ForEx traders are more like stock traders, only that the \"stocks\" they happen to trade in are currency."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
j2wpa4
|
Why do we feel so shaky and tired after throwing up?
|
Last week I threw up in my sink from a hangover.
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"g78avvs",
"g79ch1u"
],
"text": [
"Dehydration, and it’s mildly traumatic for your body to vomit as it’s not the natural order of things, food and drink should go down, *not* come up - it can take a few minutes to a few hours to recover from this.",
"Could this be an individualistic experience? When I throw up, I usually feel an overwhelming sense of relief. I have a more sensitive stomach, so usually I ate something that didn’t agree with me. It wasn’t until much later in life did I learn what it was."
],
"score": [
13,
5
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
j2x6k8
|
What is gerrymandering and why is it still a thing?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"g78d6tj"
],
"text": [
"From time to time the districts in a state have to be redrawn to reflect changing populations. (Usually every decade following the census.) Typically that redrawing is done by the state legislature or a committee created by the legislature. In Gerrymandering, they are drawn with a political aim - using voting records, demographics, etc. they draw district lines in a way to give their party the best possible chance of winning as many districts as possible. There are some possible alternatives - bipartisan committees, algorithm-designed districts, etc. - but to make those law, you would need the party in power (who stands to gain the most from Gerrymandering) to voluntarily give up that power, which is difficult."
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ko141q
|
why is hot water often white?
|
Chemistry
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghnnh5v",
"ghnzo8f"
],
"text": [
"Bubbles in water can alter the perception of what colour it is and hot/boiling water can have more bubbles in it.",
"There is air dissolved in water and hot water isn’t able to hold as much air as cold water. When heated under pressure the air can’t get out of the water. So when you open the tap the dissolved air in the water escapes and forms bubbles in the water. It is these bubbles that make the water look white. Once settled the water will quickly go back to being clear."
],
"score": [
7,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ko2hhi
|
why adobe flash is no longer being used? For that matter what does it even do ??
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghnzgso",
"ghnwhkj",
"ghoa77o",
"gho7rwm",
"ghotv1b",
"ghois1y",
"gho76cl",
"gho9ccj",
"ghp1tqt",
"ghohhfc",
"ghos069"
],
"text": [
"TLDR: Flash is full of security holes and there are better ways to do what Flash does these days. Flash was invented in 1996 during an earlier era of the internet when browsers were much more limited. Adobe Flash allowed for video playback, interactive components of websites, and flash based animations that were revolutionary at the time. Flash resulted in a renaissance of sorts with flash based video games ( URL_0 ) and flash cartoons (Homestar Runner) becoming popular ways to waste time just as the internet was becoming common place. So why are we killing it? Because Flash is a dinosaur. The flash plugin is full of security holes and despite Adobe's hard work over the past few years to patch it the industry has moved on. Newer technologies like HTML5 have taken it' place and are honestly better at doing what Flash used to do. Continuing to use flash on your website today merely puts your website and your users at risk. Adobe meanwhile is happy to be rid of it because they have been effectively handing it out for free for years now. They made their money selling tools that made flash based websites and games, but that well has long since dried up so to them spending money to patch an obsolete protocol is nothing more than an unnecessary cost. So they have willingly killed off their own product. Basically we don't need it anymore and keeping it around is causing more problems than it's worth.",
"The flash player, years ago, was primarily used to enable rich web content, such as video playback, to be placed into web pages when it couldn't be done using web standards at the time. It also found use for online web browser games. Many of its uses, such as video playback, were later supplemented by modern web standards (such as HTML5 and it's video element). As it has fallen out of common use and is prone to security flaws, adobe has decided its no longer worth maintaining.",
"Other people have covered the what was it aspect, I’ll cover why it’s no longer being used. I worked at Apple when a lot of this was happening. When Apple was developing the iPhone, they wanted to provide the best mobile computing experience they could. At the time, something like 90% of desktop Safari crashes originated in the Flash plugin, and it was a driver for calls to AppleCare, which was costing Apple money. And because it was a buggy mess, it was a primary vector for malware and other noxious code that wanted to gain access to your computer. And it sucked power like nobody’s business, a Flash supporting browser could drain a laptop battery in a few hours; translated to a phone with a much smaller battery you’d need to plug the phone in by noon, which was something that was going to cause a PR shitstorm if the iPhone shipped that way. All this probably wasn’t helped by the fact that there were engineers on the Apple payroll whose job was basically to babysit Adobe and try to clean up their buggy mess. So the decision was made to not support Flash on iOS. It got a lot of criticism at the time, and Android actually tried to use “we support Flash” as a marketing point, but they ran hard into the battery drain issue and it got quietly shunted aside. With mobile refusing/effectively unable to support Flash, and with an increasing percentage of website views coming from mobile platforms, Flash became less viable for websites: they’d be cutting off a lucrative chunk of their potential market since Apple users are more likely to pay for other things too. They could still use it for desktop systems, but they’d need to provide a mobile version too which doubled their workload, so a lot of them just dropped Flash in favor of the new HTML 5 which was adding support for a lot of things Flash had been used for, like video. And that’s how and why Flash died.",
"Flash was a rich media plugin for the early days of the internet when browser technologies and standards were far, far more primitive than they are now. In that era, browsers were generally only good for reading text, following links, and executing extremely simple javascript instructions or server calls. To watch a video, you had to actually download the file and play it back locally on your machine with your local player. Interactive content did exist, but was incredibly obtuse to build and maintain using the HTML and JS of the era, with very limited graphics rendering capability or dynamic content. The principal thing Flash did, other than be one of the first easy-to-use in-browser video stream plugins, was make it easy to build interactive content and animations. Timeline animations and Actionscript were simple to use, easy to pick up by kids, and resulted in a huge boom of content on the internet, at a time where the only content your average person could 'add' to the internet would be a forum post on a BBS. Now you had a raft of games, videos, animations, voicework, just this huge flourishing of amateur content built by people for other people. As internet standards caught up, Flash became obsolete as a way to develop rich media, as it was slow and proprietary. After a point there was nothing Flash could do that you couldn't do yourself with a bit of work in JS, and its ubiquity resulted in it being targetted constantly for attack by hackers. There was an era where the easiest way to compromise a machine was to feed it a fake Flash plugin update and get the user to update, or sneak a malicious flash microapp into an ad delivery network that would auto-load on a user's machine and compromise it. The final nail was when Steve Jobs refused to implement flash support in the iPhone. It was never more than an intermediate stepping stone technology that helped bootstrap browsers into the multimedia delivery apps they are now, and for the time it did it's job well.",
"It’s interesting seeing all these comments on the history of Flash but I haven’t seen any mentions of Macromedia. Flash was developed by a small company and bought by Macromedia, an Adobe competitor who made multimedia authoring tools. Back in those days, multimedia meant CD-ROMs, something like a primitive modern website only static and housed on a CD. Macromedia seemed to see the writing on the wall and crafted Flash into the spiritual successor to their Director tool, which was mostly used for Cd-ROMs. They took Flash from obscurity and into ballooning popularity until Adobe bought them in 2005. Flash had become Macromedia’s crown jewel and for the most part Adobe axed all their other tools after the merger, so the general consensus was Adobe bought Macromedia to control Flash. I’ve always wondered what would have happened if Adobe hadn’t bought Flash. In don’t think they were the worst steward of Flash but I always got the impression they let many aspects of it languish. Certainly, most of their other products (looking at you, Photoshop) have not progressed much during those 15 years. Seems to me that Macromedia were Adobe’s chief rival and because they were allowed to merge, we all got many years of Adobe market dominance where they just sat on their laurels and let the profits roll in.",
"To really understand flash, you've got to understand what the internet was like before flash. Up until the late 90s, web pages consisted of formatted text, images, links and external content. That's not to say that web pages couldn't have audio, or video or interactivity or dynamic content or whatever. They could and did. But it was all achieved with external content. That is content that was downloaded by the browser but then handed off to a plugin of some sort to actually process the data and display it to the user. Setting up a browser in the late 90s was a mission. You'd start with both IE and Netscape. You'd need both because scripting worked differently on each browser and thus an interactive webpage built for one browser wouldn't work on the other browser without being ported - something many web page builders never got around to doing. Speaking of scripting, you would probably want to install a couple of extra scripting engines because web page builders could use any scripting language they liked, but neither browser supported all the common scripting language out of the box. Then, you'd want to install a runtime environment (such as JRE) to handle applets. Applets were perhaps **the** way to handle graphics heavy interactive components in your webpage before flash. Then you'd want at least four different media plugins - quicktime, real, windows media and something to handle MPEG formats. Because each plugin only played its own formats and of course, web page builders each had their own preferences.. Then, you'd want to get a bunch of codecs for each of your plugins. Because not only could web builders choose any container they liked for audio/video, they could encode the contained media with whatever codec they chose. Chances are that every new webpage you went to would have the audio / video in a container/codec combination you'd never encountered before so it would take half an hour of messing around to get the page to display correctly. There were other common plugins you'd need to, like the acrobat reader plugin (pdf was just starting to hit the mainstream), shockwave plugin (released in 1995) and so on. And after all that, every third website wouldn't work because it required some exotic plugin or codec or whatever. Trying to view interactive web content in the late 90s S U C K E D. Then, along came flash. It had actually been around for a few years already, but suddenly around 2000/2001 all the web pages were flash pages. No longer did you need to install multiple browsers and for each, several plugins and dozens of codecs. You just installed one browser and one plugin (flash) and boom! your computer could display every website, everywhere, everytime. It just worked. You can see the attraction. At it's peak, flash was installed on something like 92% of all computers. Something like 99% of all web connected computers had flash running. It was too tempting of a honeypot. If you could find a security vulnerability in flash, you could break into any computer, regardless of the operating system. Unfortunately this is what happens when a single piece of software captures a huge marketshare. And it's always an expensive nightmare to fix. Similar thing happened to windows when it first grabbed a huge share of the OS market and it took Microsoft probably 5 versions over 15 years (and heaps of money) to fully get on top of the security issue. Then came HTML5 that built a lot of the plugins into the browser. This has reintroduced the problem of unsupported codecs, which makes the step from flash to HTML5 a backward step in some respects. But the codec ecosystem is much more dominated by a few players (webm and mp4 h264) these days, so it's less of a problem than it was in the 90s. With alternatives that were kinda better and kinda not much worse, and a product that was still years away from fixing its security issues, developers started to move away from flash. And as they did, the pots of money that could be made from selling developer tools dried up. And as it did, so did Adobe's enthusiasm for the product.",
"It's used to make animation and advertisement, it's what's in the background to power the visuals, and attachments on websites",
"ELI5: Why did Adobe kill off flash and did not milk it like any other of their products? I remember they decided to decommission flash when html5 was still an infant. If they kept improving flash, it would exceed what html5 does today. They already had such a large market share.",
"So you probably use Chrome or maybe Firefox. Chances are you’ve installed an extension or two? Like an adblocker? Scary right? You don’t know whether you can trust the author to not do bad things to your computer either intentionally (malware) or unintentionally (security hole). In the 2000’s, you had to install extensions called plugins to do things you now take for granted, like watching videos, playing 2D or 3d games, or even listening to music files. Anybody could write a plug-in and they could be risky since you didn’t know if you could trust what you were installing. Sometimes plugins would also force you to install weird toolbars on your browser or make you get pop ups on every site you went to. It was also a pain in the butt to find the right plug-in for the site you were using, make sure it was up to date, etc. Flash was a very very popular and trustworthy one of these plugins that revolutionized media on the web and became a standard. But now browsers can do all the things Flash can do without plugins, which means none of the risky drawbacks that come with plugins. So it’s better and safer to just do it the browser way instead of the plug-in way.",
"They want people to move onto a faster, more secure standard, that can do the same things as flash can do.",
"Along with the many reasons mentioned by others there's something everybody seems to forget: At its peak it was being abused to serve you the most obnoxious ads possible. Animated ads with loud unmuteable sound, that would play over and over until you left the page. Flash was the reason I originally started using ad blockers. It was also being abused to serve weirdly designed websites where, since they were entirely built in a flash object, were inherently incompatible with standard navigation features like \"forward\" and \"back\" and even appearing on search engines. All in the name of having some silly animation on the menu or page transitions or something else that looked fancy but actually got in the way of usability. Websites designed as a flash object were also cumbersome, clunky, slow, most often awkward to navigate, and from the designer's standpoint, more or less a pain in the ass to maintain and update when content needed to change. In that regard I've always perceived it more as a marketing feature than a useful (in the practical way) feature. Everybody knew this but there were no practical alternatives. Eventually better alternatives appeared and the world could finally move on from that abomination and pretend it never existed. I'm thankful that it was just a phase because it was more a problem than a solution. Before Adobe it was known as Macromedia Flash, and it had a cousin whose name I forget (was it Macromedia Shockwave?) that did more or less the same things and was equally impractical. It was also eventually discontinued."
],
"score": [
16826,
645,
373,
118,
64,
59,
7,
7,
7,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[
"newgrounds.com"
],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ko31cu
|
What makes a college applicant a "civic leader"??
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gho4m5h",
"gho0dqc",
"ghod0u7"
],
"text": [
"It’s just asking what you do for the community. Examples could be long-term volunteering, leading or playing an important role in a club, student council, etc.",
"Civics is related to citizenship. At your current school, are you involved in the student government? If not, do you influence the school’s rules/culture in other ways? Are you a good citizen in your current school?",
"Hey! Former college advisor here. What they’re looking for is your ability to be a leader within some local community. That doesn’t mean you have to be president of your neighborhood watch — but you should be an active participant in matters that concern the larger society. Writing about a time you volunteered at a soup kitchen, worked on a project with your Girl Scouts troop, organized a park clean up day, served on the National Honor Society, tutored middle school students after class, or took shelter dogs on walks are all little things you can talk about in a college application essay that will help you stand out. Think about the ways the college participates in the local community and how you, as a student, might fit in their plan."
],
"score": [
5,
5,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ko39bl
|
Why does condensation and frost form in a circular pattern?
|
Can someone explain why [this circular frost pattern]( URL_0 ) appeared on my window? Searched everywhere online but can't find an answer anywhere!
|
Earth Science
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gho6t0j"
],
"text": [
"Looks like the temperature has a gradient between the center of your window and the edges. My guess is that the parts of the wall that hold your glass pane are sub-zero, while the environment is warmer. So your window is freezing starting from the parts connected to the wall/window frame. Glass is not a great conductor so the cold doesn’t get too far before it loses out to the ambient temp. The circular shape is just a blurred/softened square due to the way heat traces through the sheet of glass, similar how a perfectly cubed ice cubes will start to round into little round pebbles as they melt"
],
"score": [
12
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
ko3vbn
|
why is default bad to banks even though they will still own the house?
|
I guess I sorta understand why, but there is still some sort of mitigation.
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gho5ys9",
"gho580b"
],
"text": [
"Banks want to be banks, not realtors or landlords. They want to lend money, and get paid back *with interest.* If they have to take a defaulted house, they probably can't sell it for as much as the mortgage is worth, or the owner would have done that. So the bank is losing money.",
"The bank will probably not get the full value of the mortgage back when they sell the foreclosed property. This is why a substantial down payment or mortgage insurance is typically required when obtaining a mortgage: so that Inna default the bank doesn't end up losing a lot of money."
],
"score": [
7,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
ko3yqu
|
Why is the English language so frickin confusing?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gho7h7n",
"ghoerwu"
],
"text": [
"It takes lots of bits and pieces from a lot of other languages that don’t necessarily in turn, share a root language. If you’ve seen the meme of English actually bring three languages standing on their shoulders in a trench coat, it sort of gets the idea across. As such, a lot of the grammatical rules that make things work or not work in one language or another aren’t all necessarily carried over.",
"There are several reasons: 1. Written language changes slower than spoken language. Therefore there is a mismatch between speach and writing. Compared to many other European languages written english has had very few updates the past couple centuries, but the pronunciation of words has changed a lot. Some countries, like Norway, have a national authority that updates spelling to match the changes, but english speaking countries haven't. 2. English is a germanic language (it's related to german, dutch, scandinavian etc.), but has a lot of influence from the italic languages French and Latin. This is because after the Norman conquest the nobility mostly spoke french for a long time. Latin has also been a very important language throughout Europe. 3. English formal grammar is based on Latin because it was seen as a higher language. 4. Most languages are weird. Languages change over time and the words that are used the most generally change the most so while a language might have been initially consistent, it may *drift apart* over the years."
],
"score": [
5,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ko466a
|
How do boomerangs come back?
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghoaaw2"
],
"text": [
"A boomerang is shaped like a small wing. The side that is spinning forwards goes \"faster\" in comparison to the air it moves through than the side that is spinning backwards. The faster side generates more lift due to the faster airspeed and tries to rotate the boomerang around the axis that runs along the direction you threw it, or turn over. Because it's spinning, it also fights turning over by turning around to conserve angular momentum (this is related to the same phenomenon that helps keep you upright while your bicycle is moving even though it's hard to balance on a stationary bicycle). You could feel the same forces at work by spinning a fairly large fidget spinner in your hand, sitting in an office chair, and trying to turn it over."
],
"score": [
25
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ko4gq4
|
Why do men care about the size of women’s butt and breasts?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gho8yjm",
"gho8wmh",
"ghoah5y",
"gho90sv"
],
"text": [
"The boob thing I don't really get, but if her butt's too big it's hard to breathe while she's sitting on your face.",
"Because subconsciously the caveman inside every man identifies those features as being associates with being good babymakers.",
"Evolutionary, because a woman with larger, more supple breasts indicate to men that this woman can provide ample breast milk for our potential children. That said, a woman with a bigger butt primally indicates wide hips/birth canal for childbearing. OP, your username also pretty much answers your question.",
"One working theory is a big butt is a sign of wide hips which is ideal for child bearing and therefore we're programmed to find it attractive. Humans are also the only animals with large breasts, one of the theories behind that is that we evolved human breasts and cleavage because we stand upright making our butts more difficult to see we developed a 'front butt'."
],
"score": [
34,
21,
13,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ko4ju8
|
how do "big" numbers work?
|
I've always been baffled by things like Graham's Number and how they're so big that all the materials in the universe couldn't write them down. What even are they and how are they "discovered"? Are numbers not just linear? What's to stop someone adding a 1 to one of these "big" numbers so they can say they've "discovered" an even bigger number?
|
Mathematics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gho9v4l",
"ghoam6z",
"gholarc"
],
"text": [
"You don't \"discover\" any random big number. Numbers are infinite, you can always add 1 and get a bigger number. You haven't \"discovered\" anything, mathematicians figured all that stuff out a long time ago. What makes Graham's Number odd, and other numbers, like it, is that they have particular meanings. They're the answer to a question, not a random number. One definition is \"a specific positive integer used in a proof\". Graham's Number is an upper bound (at the time) of the possible solutions to a particular problem he was working on. It's trivially easy to compute numbers larger than Graham's Number, but it's pretty unusual to have them mean anything.",
"These numbers are famous because they are big and *interesting*. Graham's number became known because it was used in a mathematical proof, and I guess people were surprised that such a huge number could actually be useful (even if only to mathematicians). These numbers are \"discovered\", or more properly, defined, by coming up with a procedure to calculate them. If a number is so large that it can't be written down in the usual way (as a decimal number), then this is the only way to define it. A simpler example of this approach is exponential notation: a billion can be written both as 1,000,000,000 and as 10^9. So using this notation, we can easily define a number 10^1000. Written down in the normal way, this number would have a thousand digits and I'm too lazy to type that, but as 10^1000 it's easy to handle. > Are numbers not just linear? What's to stop someone adding a 1 to one of these \"big\" numbers so they can say they've \"discovered\" an even bigger number? You are right, for every number there's one that's bigger. This is another way of saying there are infinitely many numbers. So yes, there's no way to discover the biggest number, because you can always use basic math to calculate a bigger one. And Graham's Number + 1 is totally a valid big number. So is Graham's Number + 2...",
"> What even are they, how discovered? Grahams number, and several others, are basically just \"solutions\" to thought experiments. Graham's number specifically is a solution to a problem suggested by Ramsey theory; about counting vertices or edges colored a certain way on a hypercube. Without the thought experiment suggested in Ramsey Theory, Graham's number wouldn't really exist as we know it - it'd just be some other random stupidly huge number. What makes it *important* is that it *is* a valid answer to the problem given in Ramsey theory. > Are numbers not just linear? Well, sure. I could always just add 1 to a number, then add 1 to that, and keep repeating that, to end up at an incredibly big number. But it wouldn't have any meaning or value to it like Graham's number does; it wouldn't be an answer to a problem in some other set of math theory. > What's to stop someone adding a 1 to one of these big numbers? Nothing, really, but again it wouldn't really be an interesting or unique solution to anything, it'd just be Graham's Number plus 1. The argument here is basically down to the child's argument of \"infinity plus one\" and your friend counters you with \"infinity plus infinity\", so you say \"infinity times infinity\", so your friend says \"infinity to the power of infinity\". What makes any of the \"stupidly big numbers\" interesting is how they are figured out. Tree(3) for instance, is based off a thought experiment of how many unique arrangments of \"trees\" you can \"build\" using 3 seeds. If you only have 2 seeds, it's not a big or long game, but using 3 different seed types and it suddenly jumps to being a stupidly big number. If we didn't have the thought experiment of the tree game, or rules to constrain it, Tree(3) would just be another stupidly big number of no real importance. *But* because Tree(3) is a solution to that game, it has value & importance. It's not just Grahams Number +1, it's a solution to an entirely different problem."
],
"score": [
15,
5,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
ko4yqc
|
How does chicken and other meats in canned soup stay good and safe to eat even though the meat isn't refrigerated?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghoc7ru",
"ghocf1d"
],
"text": [
"Canned soup is put into a hot, very hot, autoclave. It is heated to the point where every bad thing in the can dies. Bacteria, etc. So it cannot go 'bad' because there is nothing in the can to make it go bad.",
"The heat in the canning process kills any bacteria, fungus, etc. The can is sealed. This is partly why warnings exist for seals that seem broken or tampered with."
],
"score": [
7,
5
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ko5a7g
|
How do fireworks know which color go where?
|
Chemistry
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghoe49l",
"ghojwpg"
],
"text": [
"It's arranged in patterns inside the shell. It's not just powder. It's chunks, pellets, round orbs, and various other shapes of the chemicals on top of gun powder and other accelerants. If you want a smiley face, you arrange the pieces in the shape of a smiley face.",
"Fireworks that explode in patterns are usually two-stage fireworks. The first stage is a standard gunpowder charge that propels the entire firework shell upwards, as well as starting the fuse for the second stage. Based on the weight of the shell and the gunpowder load in the first stage, the makers can approximate when the shell will be at its highest and time the fuse accordingly. When the second fuse burns up, it sets off another gunpowder charge. This second charge propels a bunch of smaller balls, made of different metals that burn with various colors, away from the shell in a certain pattern. Those are the colored sparkles you see in the typical \"flower\" pattern fireworks. If you want a design, like a letter or word, then those smaller balls have their own fuses and are very carefully placed around the second charge to be at the right position in the sky when their fuses burn up and they explode."
],
"score": [
22,
10
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ko5epb
|
Why do chilldrens' like cartoons so much ? What is the psychology and reasoning behind it.
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghof3kt"
],
"text": [
"Kids' brains are underdeveloped, so they cannot fully grasp complex storylines and subtle details. Cartoons with crisp, bright colors and simple plots are so attractive because kids find them easy to understand."
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ko6aa6
|
If an 8y.o. was in a coma for 10 years would their body have grown to be a typical 18yo body?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghojpub",
"ghojnhn",
"gholr3a"
],
"text": [
"Definitely not. Their muscles would be so small because of the atrophy and their body would grow but likely not at the same rate as someone not in a coma.",
"Yes, but not likely the same look they would have had otherwise due to bad muscle tone and possibly a little stunted from the diet they were on while being kept alive.",
"No. If you have ever broken an arm or a leg, you will know that in a few weeks of having a cast on, your muscles will waste away to almost nothing. A person in a coma for 10 years will have virtually no muscles anywhere on their body. Their bones will also waste away and become very delicate. When you combine this with the fact that someone would still be growing during the 8-18 year old time phase, it is likely that there would be a lot more skeletal problems due to the conflicts between the body growing and wasting away, possibly warped bones, or bad joints, arthritis, or countless other things."
],
"score": [
15,
6,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ko6jx2
|
If a shotgun shot it around 150 decibels and a firework is around the same close up to both, would they both drop in intensity at the same rate as each other if you moved an equal distance, the same distance from both?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"gholjsq"
],
"text": [
"Yes! Sound propagates directly through whatever medium it is transitioning through - in this case, the air. Interesting to note, that the sound of a shotgun/firework/etc... has a local point, the sound radiates in a sphere, so if you held a tube against a firework, the sound at the other end of the tube would be a lot louder."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ko7aya
|
Does wine actually makes people horny or is it a psychological effect?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghooyls"
],
"text": [
"Alcohol makes people horny.... There are a lot of intrinsic parts of living a normal life that go out the window when alcohol is involved. So, no - alcohol does not make people horny... they were horny to begin with. Alcohol just silences that part of your brain that requires you to make good decisions, regularly."
],
"score": [
9
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ko7gl4
|
Why does time move slower the higher the gravity?
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghp739v",
"ghosufy"
],
"text": [
"Think of space like a compressible jelly This \"jelly\" can be distorted in many ways Including but limited to \"squishing\" In areas of high gravity, the jelly becomes thicker and so time move slower relative to less dense jelly",
"Our current understanding (“general relativity”) is that gravity distorts spacetime. Spacetime is the composite of the 3 spatial dimensions we’re used to plus time as a “dimension”. If you distort it you impact how objects move through it. Time moves slower for the same reason objects curve more strongly in high gravity...spacetime is more distorted there."
],
"score": [
10,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ko7ww6
|
Tax Brackets
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghosjyf",
"ghosxlr"
],
"text": [
"> Income taxation makes more sense to me as a standard percentage across the board. I'm afraid you're confusing \"simpler\" with \"sensible.\" A *flat tax* (your \"standard percentage across the board\") is disproportionally harmful to people with lower income, who spend a large portion of their income on essential expenses like food and housing. it's not helpful to individuals or the economy at large to ask everyone to give the same share of their income when lower-income people need to retain a greater share of theirs just to survive.",
"5% of 20,000 dollars is 1,000 dollars, that can mean choosing between getting your kid the braces they need or putting money aside for even just community college for them. It can mean not saving any money for the whole year because you needed to spend it to live. 5% of 2,000,000 dollars is 100,000 dollars, that sounds like a lot but for the 1,900,000 remaining its not the difference of anything really. Not to mention you could make it back pretty quickly with a good portfolio with the money you had left over. Flat tax rates hurt low income people far far more than they hurt rich people. Thats why income brackets exist. Though it may make more sense to note that the lowest federal tax bracket on the US at least is 12%, so 5 is really really really low and skews those examples to seem less serious than they would be in real life."
],
"score": [
8,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ko85ik
|
how exactly did the mechanism Stephen Hawking used to communicate work? Like what did he input, and how did the machine output it into words?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghounam",
"ghouzq5"
],
"text": [
"I don't know the physical input he used, however his voice generator was an iteration of an early voice synthesis made by Dennis Klatt. It consists of three parts: the first takes english text as input and converts it into a string of phonemes. Each phoneme is a very exact classification of the sound we are able to produce with our mouth and throat. The second part converts the phonemes into a string of parameters in sets of 19 per time unit (for example 19 parameters per every 50 milliseconds) These 19 parameters are what is used by the third part, the \"voice synthesizer\", to generate a digital sound wave resembling speech. The synth is a carefully handcrafted set of oscillators, noise generators and filters that model how sound is shaped by our bodies.",
"If I remember rightly, it was all pretty cutting edge stuff. In anticipation of his impending loss of speech they held sessions where they had him catalogue as many words as possible while he could still speak clearly. They fixed him up with voice activated typing and a joystick at first so he could keep writing. Later, they devised a system that tracked his eye movement as he looked at things on his view screen. When this system was perfected it was merged with his speech library enabling him to \"talk with his eyes\". Edit: I stand corrected. The voice was synthesized based on another man's."
],
"score": [
8,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ko880n
|
Why does the chest pain when regurgitation of food happens? Is it the heart getting affected or the acid coming up that causes the pain and out of breath?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghou6sl"
],
"text": [
"“Heart burn” is actually the acid from your stomach burning your esophagus, because it doesn’t have the protective layers that the stomach has. Humans can’t tell which organ their pain is coming from, they just know the general area. The middle of your chest hurting seems like it would be your heart, right? Plus, talking about our hearts is way more common than talking about our esophagus. It got called that because that’s what people thought before they understood the science, and now that we do, it’s already the name of it. Your heart rate and breathing might increase when you’re throwing up because your body is under stress, but it shouldn’t increase to the point of a heart attack unless you have underlying conditions."
],
"score": [
12
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ko888w
|
why you risk pregnancy 3-4 months after a vasectomy and your tube has been cut
|
Have a vasectomy scheduled in 2 weeks, and doctor mentioned that I can still get my wife pregnant 3-4 months after the surgery. How is this possible?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghozppp",
"ghoyg6d",
"ghpcyh9"
],
"text": [
"My father (doctor) explained this one: you still have bullets in the chamber you have to empty before you’re shooting blanks. Blegh. Thanks, dad.",
"Left over baby gravy left in the tubes. I've been told multiple times leading up to my vasectomy that I need to \"flush the pipes\" some 20-30 times leading up to a follow up where a sample is taken to check if the procedure was successful. The follow up is some 2 months out so that anything left in the pipes can die out or be naturally flushed out",
"I know a family that the youngest was born 10 months after Dad's surgery. Take it seriously!"
],
"score": [
22,
9,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
ko88ty
|
How does sound become embedded into vinyl records?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghounrn"
],
"text": [
"A vinyl has grooves that go up and down a bit like a rocky road they make the needle vibrate , on the other side of the needle there is a magnet that when the needle vibrate it makes the magnet go up and down past a coil that generates electrical currents that are fed to an amplifier to make sound"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ko8unz
|
How do the medicines like paracetamol or ibuprofen work? Do they help the brain by making it ignore the pain (suppressing) or by actually fighting the cause of pain?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghpse7b",
"ghp4m7r"
],
"text": [
"Ibuprofen works by stopping an enzyme from creating chemicals called prostaglandins that can cause pain and inflammation. Paracetamol does that a little bit too in your brain, but we don't completely know how it works.",
"They block the pain signals from the naurons, ibuprofen specifically also has anti inflammatory effect."
],
"score": [
36,
11
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ko980y
|
What is making the sound when people are switching on lights in big rooms or hangars in movies?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghp2acd",
"ghp2uey"
],
"text": [
"The \"bull switch\" or mains breaker. The main circuit breaker handle between the mains power inlet and the downline distro connections. Has a heavy spring loaded handle that \"Thunks\" satisfyingly when pulled either on or off. - 728 union Gaffer",
"Lighting Contractors. Regular switchs cant handle all that current so they wire the switch to open & close the contactor or contactors which are designed to handle the load of all the lighs. Thats why you see them come on in sections or staggered, multiple contactors. ***Edit****contractors=contactors"
],
"score": [
20,
10
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
koa10b
|
Why do people get carsick on buses but almost never on trains?
|
I have a couple of friends who get very carsick on buses and planes, but I’ve never seen them get carsick on long train rides, why is that?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghpfmpa",
"ghpakzq"
],
"text": [
"Constant motion doesn’t have any effect on us - it is only sudden changes in acceleration which we feel. Trains are closer to a constant motion. It is usually still quite far from constant though, just much closer than a car or bus.",
"The vestibular system (the part of our sensory system that tells the brain what is up and down, and what direction we are moving) gets taxed differently in those situations. Transportation sickness comes from a sensory mismatch, eyes telling brain one thing, vestibular system telling another. That is why it is often worse to be reading in a car (eyes go “we aren’t moving”, vestibular system goes “yes we are!!”, nausea ensues). In a car, you have a lot more direction changes and accelerations/decelerations than on a train. Same thing with a plane. So basically it confuses the brain more. And the transportation sickness is the brains way of going “I don’t feel safe, get me out of this situation”."
],
"score": [
8,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
koa9sz
|
Why we can abbreviate things like "this day" and "this night" into "today" and "tonight" but can't abbreviate "this month" and "this year" into "tomonth" and "toyear"
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghpbyxz"
],
"text": [
"I mean there's no hard and fast **reason**, it's just that nobody did so nobody does. Language evolves organically, and words and phrases develop and change depending on how frequently and in what context they're used."
],
"score": [
14
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
koawlg
|
why is cranberry juice ‘dry’?
|
So I found an old post about beer and wine that explained something about the fermentation process but... I just took a swig of pomegranate juice and it gives the same dry mouth feeling as cranberry juice. What’s the deal?
|
Chemistry
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghpingm"
],
"text": [
"The natural tannins in the cranberries are what causes the dry kind of feeling in your mouth, known as astringency. Sugar can offset this slightly, hence why light cran juice is usually more dry than normal cran juice. Pomegranate seeds also contain tannins which is where this feeling comes from. Same thing with wine, red wine has far more tannins in than white wine, so the dryness of a red wine is usually a lot more pronounced."
],
"score": [
19
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
kob2zo
|
Why do we get motion sickness looking down at our phone in a car, but not on an aeroplane?
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghpk8se",
"ghq1iev"
],
"text": [
"There are a few reasons: 1. Airplanes tend to travel in a straight line, with very few turns, stops and starts. 2. You tend only to see a flat, featureless horizon from an airplane compared to a car 3. The windows in a plane are significantly smaller than those in a car, so your brain doesn’t get confused because of what your see through your peripheral vision",
"It's acceleration more than smooth movement that triggers motion sickness. A plane is usually travelling at a fairly constant speed in a straight line, unless you happen into a storm and start getting turbulence. A car is going over bumps in the road, turning corners, and so on, which means motion sickness is far more prevalent in one."
],
"score": [
16,
7
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
kocj1g
|
When an ex drug addict talks slowly and slurs their words even after been sober for years, what parts of the brain have been damaged and how are they damaged? Is it reversible?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghpy7fq",
"ghq9vd5",
"ghr5s28"
],
"text": [
"Generally, the left hemisphere (side) of the brain is involved with processing speech and language. Parts of the frontal, temporal, and parietal lobes are activated when you formulate / choose what you want to say, and the motor cortex (part of the frontal lobe) -- particularly Broca's area -- lights up (meaning that it displays the most activity during brain scans) as you speak. So it's likely that any damage caused by drug use affecting speech occurred mostly on the left side of the brain. The specific types and amount of damage would be difficult to determine without actually testing an individual in that situation, but it would be fairly safe to assume that synaptic response has been damaged, so messages to and from the neurons in those areas may only be slowed down or might be blocked in any number of places. If they've gone years without help, some degree of the damage is probably permanent, but with proper assessment and therapy they might be able to repair some of it, but there are a *lot* of factors involved in that, not the least of which being age.",
"An ELI5 answer is impossible because an “ELI am a neurologist” is also impossible. Diagnosis of brain disorder is difficult and can take months of testing and observation. It may not be the drugs, it could be alcohol, it could be an underlying degenerative condition or injury. Yes, lack of O2 due to an overdose and respiratory failure will cause injury pretty quickly. But predicting where the injury occurs is another matter.",
"Brains are really complicated. Drugs make them work in ways they don't usually, and this can hurt them. It's kind of like your brain is a car, and taking a drug might be like heating every part of it up to 120 degrees and driving at 80mph over sand. The car might be ok, or it might not. Little parts of it might be damaged all over. Maybe you notice the steering is 'off' after. It's hard to say why this is, as lots of the car's systems were out of their normal bounds and may have suffered lasting impacts. Of course if your brain is a car, it's a magical self-repairing, self-shaping one that adapts to fit your use over time. It's just a question of how much your brain can handle before you do some lasting damage (probably through cell death)."
],
"score": [
530,
72,
9
],
"text_urls": [
[],
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
kod0pm
|
why do you always feel like crap when you've eaten a lot of fat if it was a biologically advantageous to eat a lot it, since fatty foods were rare in the wild?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghq0sqk",
"ghqti72",
"ghq2lrb",
"ghqal44"
],
"text": [
"Your body is telling you to sit down and rest, so it can focus on breaking down and storing the fat. It can only do this by making you tired or uncomfortable. The incentive to eat it was how delicious it was in the moment.",
"Fat won't make you feel sleepy and heavy, carbs will. Usually by \"eating a lot of fat\" you actually mean having a burger with fries, which is full of carbs, too. Most of my calories come from fat and I have very stable energy throughout the day.",
"Not sure what you are eating, but a lot of food these days not only has a lot of fat, but also a lot of salt and sugar. That is why stuff McDonald's is so satisfying to eat. An insulin Spike and crash is also likely to make you tired.",
"Because it’s too much fat—far more than one would find in the wild, far more often and in far greater quantities."
],
"score": [
8,
5,
5,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[]
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}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
kod25j
|
Why does looking at something from very close make it go blurry? Same thing happens with a camera.
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghq15ms"
],
"text": [
"It's a thing called depth of field. Your eye (and a camera, for that matter) works by focusing the incoming picture onto a light-sensitive surface. This is done via a lens, but a lens can generally only focus sharply around a certain distance from it. The lens in your eye can adjust its profile to adjust that distance, but there's a limit to how much it can do that--eventually, objects will get so close that the lens can't focus them sharply anymore and they'll become blurred."
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
kode73
|
why is it that you can break a piece of a tooth and it doesn’t need fixing, but if you have the tiniest cavity it has to get filled ASAP?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghq63gr",
"ghrj11w",
"ghqzd8f",
"ghs98jc",
"ghr8aju",
"ghsfegs",
"ghr3oxh",
"ghsfwha"
],
"text": [
"A cavity is decay-it is dead and dying areas with bacteria, and can spread if not taken care of. A cracked broken piece of tooth, depending on how deep the break is, won't cause increasing problems over time.",
"Looking at the answers so far; they’re good answers but some still seem a little technical for ELI5. Think of it like a car. If your car gets a little dent because something hit it, it shouldn’t dent more on its own. If there is rust on the car, it’ll slowly eat away at that area until it’s taken care of properly. The rust is like a cavity and the dent is a tooth chip.",
"Dentin, the inner layer of tooth underneath the enamel,, is much softer than enamel. If a cracked or broken tooth is not broken into the dentin of the tooth, it may be stable, and in, there's not an increased chance of it developing decay. If even a small cavity reaches the dentin, the bacteria causing the decay can make the cavity grow very quickly.",
"If you slice a piece of bread, the rest of the bread is okay to eat. If bread gets apple juice on it that part becomes soggy apple juice bread that doesn’t taste good. You have to cut out the wet part or the apple juice will spread and more of the loaf will be soggy apple juice bread that you can’t eat.",
"To add to above - bacteria in the dentine induce a reaction in the pulp once they are near it (don’t have to be in it). Inflammation of pulp is painful. Infection in pulp means Root Canal Treatment or Extraction. Broken teeth, especially if only enamel, tend not to be painful, maybe just a bit jaggy or sensitive, as no inflammation/infection. Source - I am a Dentist.",
"The issue with a cavity is that it becomes a pocket that shelters bacteria from brushing and from your saliva. Saliva itself will help kill harmful bacteria, but the deeper a cavity gets, the more safe that harmful bacteria will be from any preventative measures. Additionally, a cavity means that the bacteria has worn through the enamel of your tooth (the protective layer) and into the softer material. At this point, the cavity will progress much faster, getting deeper and creating more area for the bacteria to work its way not only deeper but wider into your teeth.",
"Breaking a tooth isn’t a problem in itself, but more than likely the jagged surface of newly broken tooth is a better landscape for bacteria to nestle and grow compared to smooth enamel. That’s why a broken tooth should really be repaired. For cavities, once bacteria reaches your pulp, that’s when toothaches become unbearable. There’s two layers surrounding the pulp of the tooth: the outer hard enamel layer and the inner soft dentin layer. When cavities are only in the enamel layer, you can stop the further decay and promote re-mineralization by brushing and flossing away any ‘loose’ bacteria after a day’s worth of eating food. But once bacteria penetrates the dentin layer, it has a much higher chance of becoming its own little bubble that protects itself from your efforts to brush. This enables it to burrow deeper and eventually reach your pulp .",
"I work reception at a dental office. Ideally, you should get both fixed ASAP. With breakage, it can depend on how much of the protective enamel has broken and whether the nerve is exposed. If it’s just a slight chip, the dentist may mark it as something “to watch”- aka to be re-evaluated at your next check up. But if the bottom part of the tooth is just hanging off and the nerve is exposed, you will likely need an extraction. Cavities are active decay that have infiltrated the protective enamel surrounding your teeth. Teeth are basically bones- the protective structure on the outside does not grow back once decay has infiltrated, and once it reaches the inner nerve(s) of the tooth there is then a risk of a blood infection forming within the jaw, and that could eventually cause issues elsewhere in the body. Also, the longer you leave a cavity, the more expensive potential treatments could become. If a nerve or 2 dies inside of the tooth because the filling was put off, that could turn into a root canal AND a filling, which at the clinic I work at can be around $1200 compared to the $150 for the filling alone. And then because of the weakened state of the tooth post-root canal, most dentists will recommend a crown (think of it as a protective hat for your tooth that is cemented into place.) That can be an additional $1500. So when you look at the cost of dealing with a small cavity ASAP ($150) vs. dealing with it when the pain is no longer tolerable ($2850), the answer is a no brainer."
],
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
kodh5z
|
How do plants move?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghqkutt"
],
"text": [
"Ok wow. A blast from the past. You made me dig up my old notes. This is called phototropism. Plants reacting to light. Most plants exhibit what is called positive phototropism. I.e. they grow towards light. There's a hormone called auxin produced by the shoot tip, that causes cells to elongate and promotes plant growth. Its also affected by light. When sunlight hits a plant at an angle, only one side of the plant is exposed to direct sunlight. This causes the auxin at that side to break down/ reduced production. This means there's more auxin on the opposite side and so the opposite side turns longer and experiences more growth. This causes a tilting effect where the shoot tip bends to point to the sun until both sides gain equal light access. edit: There's another hormone called cytokinin that flows from the roots. Working in tandem and being affected by things like gravity,they're responsible for most plant 'movements' you see mentioned so much. Now, venus fly traps? Those are really special. They use ion channels and specialized sensory hairs to trigger water pumps that cause the leaves to swell up and close."
],
"score": [
30
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
koec1x
|
I’ve heard people say that a corporation is treated legally as a person, what does this mean?
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghqbrw3",
"ghqc7jx"
],
"text": [
"\"Corporate personhood\" means that a corporation is treated in some aspects like a person, but not all. For example a corporation can own property instead of a specific person owning it. Without this legal framework there would be a specific person who owned all the company assets. Similarly a corporation can be taxed as an independent entity, it can be sued as an entity, it can enter into contracts, etc. Without this concept if you wanted to make a supply agreement with a company you would be signing it with a specific person, perhaps the majority owner of the company, and if something changed with company ownership then it also impacted your contract.",
"It simply means that corporations are entitites that have different legal rights and responsibilities from their owners and workers. For example, a corporation can sign contracts (contracts which may not apply to the actual human owners), it can be sued in court, (the consequences of the court's decision may not apply to the actual human owners), it can have debt which the human owners are not responsible for. Corporate personhood is hundreds of years old. It absolutely does **not** mean that any employee can commit any crime he wants and get away with it because 'the corporation did it' and not him. Furthermore - and this is something Redditors nearly unanimously fail to understand - corporate personhood can absolutely make corporations legally **weaker**. For example, in the United States, corporations do not receive protection under the 5th Amendment. If corporations were not separate entities from humans, human beings who own or work in a corporation accused of a crime could refuse to answer certain questions, citing their right against self-incrimination. Corporations do not have that right."
],
"score": [
13,
5
],
"text_urls": [
[],
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}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
koecg7
|
How do streaming websites like Twitch can handle that much outgoing bandwidth?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghqbq0m",
"ghqalfz"
],
"text": [
"It's all about scaling and load balancing. If you're streaming to 10k people, you aren't actually sending your stream straight to those 10k people. You're sending your stream to Twitch, who distributes that stream out across dozens -- if not hundreds or thousands - of servers, which then send the content back down to your viewers. It might add up to terabytes per second overall, but that load is spread across hundreds of georedundant nodes that balance the load to avoid bottlenecks.",
"Well they are owned by Amazon, who has a large bandwidth capacity due to their cloud services"
],
"score": [
8,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
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}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
koel1q
|
If the winter solstice is the longest night of the year, why does it mark the beginning of winter, rather than the very middle of it?
|
Earth Science
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghqh0kc",
"ghqh8qs",
"ghs81en",
"ghqf2ti"
],
"text": [
"The temperature of any given day has a bit to do with the sun, and a lot to do with the temperature of the land and sea. The earth is constantly radiating heat, and the shortest day is when it will absorb the least heat from the sun - but it still has a lot of heat left over from autumn. Over the next couple of months, although the energy being absorbed from the sun is more than the day before, it is still less than is given off each day. So every day, the land and sea (and thus the climate of that hemisphere) gets colder and more wintery. The balance doesn't shift until the hemisphere is absorbing more energy each day from sunlight than it is radiating, which is around the time that day and night are equal lengths (i.e. the vernal equinox). So, the coldest months are between the winter solstice and the vernal equinox.",
"Societally it is because the seasons are things we invented, so we can decide it happens whenever we want\\*. Historically, it is because the solstices and equinoxes were easier to define astronomically than some arbitrary point halfway between them. A more physically based answer is because the temperature/weather lags behind solar radiance. This is because of a concept called 'thermal inertia', which basically means that the environment still retains some warmth from summer and autumn. A simple model of weather would have the winter solstice be the day that the most heat was lost, but that means it gets colder the day after, and the day after that, etc. Actual weather is more complicated, but it still holds that the coldest day should occur a significant time after the solstice. \\*cultures from more equatorial regions often defined the seasons differently. People in Sub Sahara Africa defined seasons by the direction of the crescent moon, which corresponded to the rainy and dry seasons. Ancient Egyptians defined their season/year by the star Sirius, which could first be seen predawn approximately 1 month before the Nile flooded.",
"It doesn't, exactly. People often talk about the seasons as if they really start and end on these specific dates, but that's only true of the astronomical seasons. The equinoxes and solstices are relatively easy to identify, so they became identified with seasons early on. And since we define a year as starting on a solstice, moving the seasons to start when the year starts makes them line up nicely to divide the year by quarters. But the \"winter _starts_ on the solstice\" thing is only one way of defining winter..and one which has more to do with conveniently dividing the year into equal parts keyed to handy astronomical events than with anything related to the actual weather. There are other ways of dividing seasons. For example, the standard meteorological definition of winter is the three coldest months of the year...usually December, January, and February in the Northern Hemisphere. Ecologically, seasons can be defined by when animals and plants start doing different seasonal behaviors. Practically, seasons are often defined by cycles of temperature and social calendars (like associating fall and the start of school fall semesters). So in one sense winter starts on the winter solstice, but on another sense it starts on Dec 1, and in another sense it starts when the trees lose their last leaves and in another sense it starts on the first good snowfall. And that's not even getting into regional seasonal definitions.",
"The temperature is changing downward the fastest on this day, since there is the least amount of sun. Until the amount of sun per day reaches the average amount of sun (basically at the spring equinox/the last day of winter), the daily temperature will tend to go down day after day."
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[
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|
koenam
|
how seedless fruits keep being grown? Like if you have a seedless clementine, or grape, what is used to plant the next generation of that fruit?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"text": [
"There are two ways to get seedless fruits. For clementines, grapes, and other things that grow on long-lived trees or vines, the plants are propagated by cuttings. This is true even for the ordinary varieties of most of these plants. All grapes of a particular variety are descended from one original grape plant, which had cuttings taken and rooted to form new grape plants, and then cuttings of those taken to form new plants, and so on. The same goes for most fruit tree varieties. So if you find a mutant grape without seeds, you just cut off a shoot, plant it in the ground (or more likely graft it to some rootstock but that's not really important for this discussion) and grow more seedless grapes. There are exceptions though, for single-season plants like watermelons, seedless plants are usually produced through hybridization. It's similar to how horses + donkeys produce sterile mules...people figured out that if you hybridize certain varieties of watermelon with certain other varieties of watermelon (in this case diploid with tetraploid varieties) you get sterile offspring. The seeds of this hybridization grow into plants which can't make developed seeds themselves. EDIT: forgot one method. Some seedless fruits are grown by simply preventing the flower from being pollinated. Not all plants will do this, but some will still form fruit even if there's no fertile seed inside. Pineapples for example will grow seeds if pollinated, but can't usually pollinate others of the same variety. So farmers grow a bunch of the same variety and avoid getting seeds in the fruit (although you occasionally still find one). Pineapples are pollinated by hummingbirds and some bats, so in Hawaii they banned the import of hummingbirds to avoid having their pineapples pollinated.",
"Plants can be asexually reproduced using [cuttings]( URL_0 ). Even if a plant makes usable seeds, commercial fruit growers generally don't use them because cuttings are more predictable and reliable.",
"Grape vines can be propagated by cuttings - cut a bit of the vine, plant it and roots will emerge. I'm curious about seedless watermelons",
"by cloning plants . you take a plants branch and cut it off and plant that branch then with a the help of rooting hormones the branch grows roots and then grows to be a seperate plant almost identical to its mother plant"
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"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutting_\\(plant\\)"
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|
[
"url"
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[
"url"
] |
|
koeq53
|
Can any animals get pregnant while already pregnant?
|
I had an interesting concept pop into my head today and since the world is a very strange place I thought I’d ask.... Normally when a woman gets pregnant the conception process is put on hold until after the baby/babies are born. Are there any creatures out there that can conceive while already growing a baby in its womb? Does this make any sense?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"text": [
"Swamp wallabies can get pregnant again whole still pregnant with another. This is because they have two uteruses. They will typically conceive one or two days before they give birth. According to this article, they are the only animal that does this. ([Source]( URL_0 )) Kangaroos can get pregnant while a joey is in her pouch, but that's still only one pregnancy at a time since the joey has been born. But the mother kangaroo can pause her pregnancy until the joey leaves her pouch, this is known as embryonic diapause, and can also occur in times of drought or other poor food conditions.",
"Fun fact you can indeed get pregnant after conception it’s called superfetation. Someone with twins got [pregnant]( URL_0 ) with another baby 10 days after. I guess conceiving another baby that develops at a different rate can have some complications in nature."
],
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6,
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[
"https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2020/02/swamp-wallaby-always-pregnant/"
],
[
"https://www.google.com/amp/s/7news.com.au/lifestyle/parenting/expecting-mum-conceives-a-third-child-while-already-pregnant-with-twins-c-1854716.amp"
]
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|
[
"url"
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[
"url"
] |
kofk8q
|
How are our bodies able to differentiate between cuts, burns, punctures, bruises, scratches etc through pain and how do they heal differently?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"This is ELI5 so I won’t get into a ton of details. Essentially, on a cellular level the damage from all of those things is similar and ends up having similar effects. Remember the powerhouse of the cell? If those injuries are severe enough it shuts down the mitochondria and then the cell dies. There are then a specific set of steps that happen after that cell death called inflammation that cause those dead cells to be cleaned up and the area repaired. Depending on the amount of initial damage the repair can be easy or hard, and scars may form.",
"Note: I am intentionally oversimplifying, per the sub. Your nervous system has different kinds of cells that sound different kinds of alarms. Some of these alarms tell your brain to experience a burning sensation (capsaicin in peppers, and alcohol in a wound trigger these), some signal sharp pain like pinches/stabs, and some signal pressure (ranging from swelling to crushing). Having either one or more of these alarms going off, how intensely, and how many are going off can help your brain understand how much trouble your body is in. The healing process isn’t qualitatively different across these different kinds of damage. As someone else commented, a cell either dies or it doesn’t, and inflammation and processes of cleaning up dead cell chunks take place. The pain signaling cells themselves can die and be regrown, but they can take a while.",
"It's a different view on the cellular level. As a structural cell, you expect to have structural connections to your neighbors, flow of intracellular fluid and stuff dissolved in it, and all sorts of material delivered through blood, even if nowhere near a major blood vessel. Cells along membranes expect some normal level of pressure and flow of various materials permitted through the membrane. Damage may mean a cell is now exposed to outside air, structural elements broken, unusual pressure or even collapse due to rupture, changes in the flow of chemicals (nutrients, hormones, all sorts of signaling molecules, etc.), neighboring cells acting differently. Many cells may perish from the abnormal conditions. Surviving structural cells will try to reattach to neighbors, or split apart to build new ones. Various cells in your bloodstream will react as necessary: platelets to mend breaks, macrophages to deal with foreign material, release of histamines to increase fluid flow and attract immune response. The cells will keep responding until the unusual conditions are no longer present, even if they can't perceive that their region of the body has been bludgeoned or seared or scraped.",
"Physical phenomena are detected by protein in cells of an organism. They signal to other proteins that leads to biological interactions which result in a cellular response. This is coordinated across multiple cells termed tissue.",
"Different types of pain - > different types of skin receptors (free nerve endings, nociceptor, pacinian,etc) Healing is generally done the same regardless of injury. Inflammation brings oxygens, nutrients, and different cells, including white blood cells, to the injury that clean up and help regenerate the site. Cells also send signals to each other to prevent from overgrowing. Cells that ignore these signals lead to tumors (cancer).",
"So this is really cool actually. As far as different feelings of pain: Our body has different receptors on nerves that tell our brain what is going on. So we have something happen to us like a cut, those nerves get stimulated and tell our brain. So for example, the way we tell temperature is through “thermoreceptors”. These nerves are activated by heat. Something really cool is that we have thermoreceptors in our tongue that can tell we are eating something hot like coffee or hot pizza. When we eat spicy foods, they actually activate those SAME thermoreceptors which then we perceive as “hot”. We have other ones like “mechanoreceptors” which detect stretching or “nociceptors” that detect pain that all give our brain a good idea of what’s going on. As for healing: As soon as there is damage, our body responds by stopping any bleeding that’s caused and getting immune cells over to the area to try and fight any dangerous microbes that could get in from the injury. This is call inflammation. Your body will also direct growth of new blood vessels into the area in order to bring in nutrients and other things that the still living cells can use to divide and replace all the cells that had died. By doing so our body is able to heal itself by replacing dead cells with new ones. That was a bit long and I hope it was at least a little helpful. I’m still just a medical student but this kind of stuff is super cool to me. If I’ve made any mistakes let me know!"
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[
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[
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|
kofkyj
|
Why does you mouth taste like trash after a night of drinking?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"text": [
"It's not the alcohol that was in your mouth that makes your breath bad in the morning, so brushing first isn't going to help that much. It's the dehydration. Alcohol stops you kidneys from capturing water, so you basically pee out all your water and electrolytes despite the fact you drank a lot. As a result of dehydration, your saliva production really halts. Normally you might have bad morning breath because you don't clean your whole mouth with saliva at night, but when dehydrated from alcohol it gets much worse. What will help somewhat is drinking as much water as possible, with some electrolytes as well. That goes for almost all symptoms of a hangover too, water beforehand and during with alleviate them to some degree. Alcohol also causes heart burn or even nausea, and if anything from your stomach is getting anywhere near your mouth or throat it's also going to smell even worse. Tums or something beforehand would help too.",
"If you know your in for a real big night out go to the chemist and pick up some rehydration sachets they work a charm. One before bed and one as soon as you wake",
"Dehydration! Drink water throughout the night, and take a multi vitamin and drink a bottle of water before you go to bed.",
"LPT: Always finish your day out with some mint liqueur (eg Minttu). Eliminates all other flavours for when you wake up and gives a fresh minty one instead.",
"Acid reflux probably doesn't help either. Alcohol relaxes that sphincter, which allows more shit to creep back up your oesophagus and throat. And reflux really has a bad taste.",
"I haven't seen anyone mention yet that you breathe out ethanol after you drink. The alcohol in you blood passes through your lungs and you breath out ethanol (also how breathalyzers work). So it's not just dehydration, you also have ethanol in your mouth.",
"When I worked in a night club when i was 19 (old person here) I had a guy explain this to me ironically. He said, \"It's called the 'Zactlys'. When you wake up, your mouth tastes 'Exactly like shit.'.\" He recommended shooting Peppermint Schnapps and a ton of water before passing out...."
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[
"url"
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[
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|
kog70r
|
Found out my boyfriend and I are distantly related by our greatx4 grandparents. Make me see why this doesn’t matter, please and thanks.
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghqrvh1"
],
"text": [
"Your boyfriend is your 3rd cousin, twice removed (I think). That means you share less than 1% DNA. The genetic risk associated with having children with a cousin this distantly related is as small as it would be for two completely unrelated individuals."
],
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5
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
kogtc7
|
How does randomly mixing ingredients together produce something that is so evenly distributed?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghqyq0m"
],
"text": [
"Apart from mixing ingredients usually being a very *deliberate* process, consider this: Mixing ingredients *randomly* would actually follow a normal distribution! Think about mixing stuff as throwing a gigantic load of dice. Sure, ending up with all ingredients A on one side and all ingredients B on the other is possible, just like it's possible to only roll ones or sixes. It's not very likely though. You'll usually end up somewhere in the middle of the bellcurve."
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|
[
"url"
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[
"url"
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|
koh0c4
|
- “bits” as in 8-bit, 16-bit art and gaming systems
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
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"ghr0lq4",
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"text": [
"A bit is a single number: 0 or 1. If you combine several bits together you can write larger numbers, like 00, 01, 10, and 11 are ways to write 0, 1, 2, and 3 respectively. A digital image is really just a series of numbers: a number for how red the upper-left part should be, a number for how green the upper-left part should be, a number for how blue the upper-left part should be, then similar triples for each other part of the image. An 8-bit image uses 8-bit numbers, which range from 0 to 127, for each of those. A 16-bit image uses 16-bit numbers. Computers (gaming systems) store everything as numbers, not just images. A 16-bit system is designed to work with 16-bit numbers easily, and needs to work harder to accommodate larger numbers and wastes space when dealing with smaller numbers. Edit to add an actual 5 year old analogy: Suppose that you are practicing writing and adding numbers at school. Your teacher gives you strips of paper with four blanks each to write numbers on. This is a 4-bit system. If you want to write down numbers like 3047 and 1382, this system is perfect. If you want to write down numbers like 12, 73, 42, and 18 you can do that too. You could even save space by writing two of these shorter numbers on the same strip, but then you need to remember that 1273 is the number 12 and the number 73, not the number 1273. If you want to write down numbers like 17345 you have to tape two strips of paper together.",
"The \"bits\" of a game system mainly represents how big an integer (whole numbers, positive or negative) can be that it can do math on at once. The NES was 8-bit, and could add two number together as long as they were 8 bits long. If you wanted to add 16 bits together you needed to use 2 CPU instructions to do it. Memory access sometimes comes into play as well especially in more modern systems, but early CPUs often had different rules about memory access and arithmetic input sizes. In terms of graphics, they weren't directly related. Older systems had more primitive graphics processors with more limits. The CPU was often a separate piece of hardware from the graphics processor. Said processor built the screen image pixel by pixel based on sprite sheets and a listing of what went where, and a grid of tiles for the background. The limits were usually of how many tiles were allowed in a given area and how many unique colours were allowed within a single tile. So saying graphics looked 8-bit is really just saying that game systems at that time tended to have these graphical limits. The next generation would have improvements across the board, for the CPU, the graphics and the audio. And repeat for each iteration.",
"A bit is basically a tiny little switch in a computer. Bits can only ever be on or off, which you'll often hear called 1 and 0. When programming computers, we like to be able to work with numbers bigger than 1, so we've invented a way of counting higher by putting bits together in a way that we call the binary number system, or just binary. In binary, each bit represents a number that's twice the last one. The first bit represents 1, the second 2, the third 4, the fourth 8, and so on and so forth. If the bit is on, you add the number it represents to the total, like so (smaller bits are on the right): 10110 - > 16 + 0 + 4 + 2 + 0 = 22 01101 - > 0 + 8 + 4 + 0 + 1 = 13 As it turns out, using this system you can represent any number if you have enough bits. But how many is \"enough\"? That's where 8-bit, 16-bit, and so on come in. With 8 bits we can store numbers up to 255. With 16 bits, up to 65,535. 32 bits gives us numbers up to 4,294,967,295. An 8-bit computer has enough switches in it that it can perform math on numbers up to 255 directly. If you want to use numbers bigger than that, you'll need to come up with a clever way of storing one number into multiple sets of 8 bits, which makes the computer slower. Obviously, 255 is not a very big number, so as soon as it became affordable to add more switches to the machines, we did. Side note: \"8-bit art\" is just a term for pixel art that looks like the kind of art you would see on an 8-bit game console. The number of bits does not directly affect the kind of graphics a computer can display, but 8-bit consoles were much slower than modern computers and could not run graphics that were very fancy. Side note 2: You may hear about a \"memory limit\" related to bits. For instance, 32-bit computers can't use more than about 4 Gigabytes of memory (4.29 billion bytes, to be exact). Why? Because 32-bit computers can't count higher than 4.29 billion! Each byte needs to be numbered (so the computer can know which one is which) and after that you run out of numbers to give them!"
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|
koh0cm
|
How does reading benefit the brain?
|
For most of my life I have been a fan of reading and I can always remember being told that it was good for me. Are there any reasons besides acquiring knowledge that it is beneficial for the brain?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"ghrndca",
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"text": [
"Using context clues to figure out words you don’t understand, helps practicing recognizing patterns, activates memory, practice empathy with the characters, learn social behaviors.",
"I would say it is the reason my *inner voice* formed, definitely my brain changed because of it because at some point I could read a good book and directly imagine the action. Googling *benefits of reading* gives some other interesting info too.",
"This is a completely personal and anecdotal answer, but I feel like reading is an active process for my brain. As opposed to watching TV or scrolling social media where my brain is passively receiving information, reading requires my engagement in order to remember things and imagine/visualize the scenarios described. It feels like I'm exercising the brain because if I spend too long being \"passive\", I actually can get pretty depressed or anxious.",
"You need to keep track of characters in a story so it trains your memory, you learn new words, new ways to use words in sentences. It's a allround workout for your brain. It uses a lot of \"parts\" of your brain."
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|
[
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[
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koh6zf
|
why is 'Kila'(Japanese way of saying 'Killer') Racist?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
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"ghr1ue9",
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],
"text": [
"i think it might be related to the pronoucation, since \"Kila\"/\"Kira\" is pronounced with a sound that is sorta halfway between an L and an R, but western pronoucations of it use just the R sound. mixing up L and R sounds on purpose has a racist history, for example saying \"egg flied lice\" or calling someone named Lukas as \"Rukas\" to make fun of a Japanese person's pronounciation when they are in earshot. personally I dont think Kira is racist, but this is the reasoning as to why someone might think it is.",
"It's not uncommon to mock someone because of their accent, especially Asian accents. Usually racists like to imply that people with accents are unintelligent because they can't pronounce english words correctly. For example, in the Star Wars prequels there are aliens with an asian accent, and they're kinda dumb and foolish characters. But in Death Note, the accent is knowingly used by the character himself as a pun, so it's not trying to mock or belittle anyone. People unfamiliar with the anime could potentially think the youtuber was being racist by mocking a japanese character with an accent.",
"To expand on what others have already said and explain *why* the sound differences are the way they are: The \"R\" sound we're familiar with in English is the alveolar approximant (meaning the tongue goes close to the middle of the roof of the mouth without touching it), /ɹ/. The \"L\" sound we're familiar with in English is the alveolar **lateral** approximant (similar, but the tongue forms a different shape), /l/. In Japanese — along with other languages like French — the \"R\" sound is the alveolar **tap** (where the tongue comes in brief contact with the middle of the roof of the mouth), /ɾ/, instead. Because it's in the same part of the mouth as but not formed in the same way as our \"R\" and \"L\", it roughly sounds like an \"in-between\" sound, close to but not exactly matching either."
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[
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|
kohb7x
|
Why when all light colours (wavelenghts) are mixed is the composite light white, but when all colours of paint, for example, are mixed the composite is brown?
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghr2bfe",
"ghr34g0"
],
"text": [
"The difference is the difference between how light and paint work. When all wavelengths are combined, your eyes register that as white light. White light is simply how your brain interprets multiple wavelengths of light combined. However paint (and pigments in general) don’t emit the light of their colour, instead they absorb every wavelength except for the few that produce the desired colour. For example blue paint doesn’t emit blue light, instead it absorbs all wavelengths of light except blue, which is reflected. When you mix paints together, you’re causing the paint to absorb more wavelengths and further restricting the light that can be reflected, this results in browns and black.",
"Mixing paint is \"subtractive.\" Mixing paint isn't adding color, it's taking it away. Red paint looks red because it reflects red and absorbs everything else. Blue paint looks blue because it reflects blue and absorbs everything else. So when you mix them, you have the red paint trying to reflect some red light, but the blue paint is getting in the way and absorbing some red light too. Same with blue light. So by mixing them you actually end up with less red light and less blue light. The more paints you add, the more they get in each others way and you end up with a muddy brown color"
],
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4
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|
[
"url"
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[
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|
kohcwm
|
- In programming, what is serialization?
|
ELI5 In programming, explain what serialization is and what purpose it serves or problem it solves. Please and thank you.
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghr3aev"
],
"text": [
"It's the act of taking some data structure - a hashtable, an employee record, a customer's order, a map in a video game - and turning it into a sequence of bytes that can be saved. Maybe to a file on disk, maybe sent out a network to another computer somewhere else in the world. In general, \"how do I save this data?\" is going to be a common question in the program you write, and the process of preparing that output is serialization. Once you have the serialized version, saving a file on disk is the easiest thing in the world. Similarly, unserialization is turning it back into the original data when loading from disk, etc."
],
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11
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|
[
"url"
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[
"url"
] |
kohram
|
Why did people in the Wild West or the colonial era bearly ever laugh on photos?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghr52s4",
"ghr728p",
"ghr52z3",
"ghr4zju",
"ghr5j53"
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"text": [
"Pictures weren't instant back then, so people had to hold still for extended lengths of time.",
"The above answers aren’t entirely accurate. Though true for the start of the 1800s when the first photos took up to eight hours to expose, when the daguerreotype was introduced in the mid-late 1800s photos could be captured in about 15-30 seconds. Still a long time to sit still but not totally unmanageable. A lot of the reason people look so stern in photos is because it was tradition. Prior to photos the only likeness that could be captured realistically was portraiture. Once photos came around, the tradition of remaining stuff continued (especially during that first era of eight hour exposure times!!). Once exposure times were reduced it just felt unnatural to smile. It’s worth mentioning that this is a _western_ tradition. A German photographer took a picture of a man in China eating rice between 1901-1904. Given that the western custom of remaining stoic was not widespread, this man posed and smiled during the photo. The photo looks modern, but was authenticated by the American Museum of Natural History. Link with photo and info below. [Article. ]( URL_0 )",
"You had to stay still for a long time for the picture to come out clear back then, so smiling the whole time was too hard. I think.",
"People were more formal, photos were an expensive - seldom ( maybe only one family pic ever if not wealthy) done, and it was frowned on to show emotions. Stoicism was highly appreciated in public and people didn’t go around with their hearts on their sleeves like they do today.",
"Regular photography works by recording light that bounces off objects (like people and chairs and the wall) onto a special film and then you have to process that film to transfer the picture into a bigger form. Well, back in the olden days, all this stuff was still being developed and improved. What we can snap in a microsecond nowadays on our cellphones took sometimes up to three minutes to capture. And fidgeting and changing facial expressions could screw up the image, since the film is constantly capturing the light until the picture has finally been taken. AND... it's just uncomfortable to smile for three minutes straight."
],
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22,
11,
8,
7,
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],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
kois4n
|
How do Apple Watch and AirPods charge so quick but last so long?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghre8ck",
"ghre8so"
],
"text": [
"They have very small batteries so they charge quickly. The watch and pods chips are custom designed for each to have extremely low power consumption, so the charge lasts a long time.",
"Think of the battery of your device as a bucket which holds water. When filling the bucket (charging) the hose used has a large diameter and a lot of water flows through into the bucket. However the outgoing hose is small in diameter and not much water is needed from the bucket, so the flow rate of the water (how much water passes a given point in a given amount of time) is low, so the water in the bucket lasts much longer."
],
"score": [
9,
5
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
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}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
koj1la
|
How the Heck Do Animals Completely Freeze Mid-Walk in Winter?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghrjrds"
],
"text": [
"I haven't seen this (got an example? Seems interesting), but if it's a cold-blooded animal, they move slower when it's cold, so I suppose they just slow down until they freeze."
],
"score": [
3
],
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
kojcd6
|
why do many games have very complicated antipiracy measures, if the game knows the the copy is fraudulent, why not stop the person from playing the game at all?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghrfd74",
"ghrg9wl",
"ghrfnye",
"ghrlljf",
"ghrfflj"
],
"text": [
"One key reason: if the developer makes it easily obvious that the game is aware it is pirated, the cracking team will quickly know they haven't fully circumvented the copy protection. If the game starts up, but the game doesn't let the player know the game is pirated until after some time playing it, the cracking team might just assumed they defeated the copy protection and release their \"broken\" crack.",
"Plus it's dead fun seeing posts saying \"Where is that big gun? Supposed to be in the second crate to the left??\" or \"Why the Boss not do second morph stage?\" followed by \"Just buy the game, hacker.\"",
"Games used to stop you from playing them if they knew the copy was fraudulent. This was done through the simple CD key method (assuming there was a proper formula used to generate CD keys, randomly generating a valid key would be *extremely* unlikely). Crackers were able to modify the main EXE to bypass this upfront CD-key check, which allowed anyone using a cracked copy to play it 100% unimpeded. Game developers realized they had to do more if they wanted their games to go uncracked for any amount of time, so in addition to the CD key methods which are still commonly in use today, they added additional verification into the game. For example, the CD key verification method may set a number of variables to true (or false, exact value doesn't matter). Now when people play the game it can check for these variables at different times. If they are set properly it will continue because it thinks you have a valid copy. If they are not set, it assumes a cracked copy that bypassed the initial checks, and starts running improperly. All these methods can *still* be defeated by crackers. However, the more there are the longer it takes people to find all instances in the code to make sure a cracked copy runs the same as a legit copy. tl;dr - Cat and mouse games. Devs started with 1 check, crackers defeated it, devs added more, crackers can still defeat them but it takes more time. More time uncracked = more potential sales because people end up not waiting for a good crack.",
"Historically, there was a kind of software called \"shareware\", that was really popular for games. You would release a certain part of the game for freedom and ask people to pay for the rest. This would let people who were interested in game try it out and if they liked it, they would purchase the full product. The original Doom and Wolfenstien 3d were sold this way. The first episodes were released as playable advertisements for the full product. These anti-piracy measures are effectively turning the pirated versions into shareware copies, allowing people to try out the games and see that they like it, hopefully to induce pirating players to purchase full copies.",
"That's what antipiracy measures do. Their complexity is in part due to the fact antipiracy measures are a digital arms race between publishers and pirates- one is always trying to stay ahead of the other. So as pirates develop different means to bypass software validation, more complex ways of defeating them while ensuring legitimate owners are able to access the product are required."
],
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19,
13,
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3
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
kojcie
|
Why do we “jump” when we see something scary?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghri30c",
"ghsr3x4"
],
"text": [
"It's an instinct ancient humans evolved to avoid ambush predators. Ambush predators always attack only once and out of the blue, to catch their prey off guard. When ancient humans encountered an ambush predator while drinking at a watering hole (say a crocodile) they would jump back to avoid the crocodile's attack. That instinct has stayed around with us ever since.",
"Fight or flight. Your body's chosen flight. And jumping back is usually the fastest way to get some distance between u and the thing. It's also why your hands will typically go up to your face as a guard while jumping back so your prepared to fight if necessary"
],
"score": [
11,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
kojgje
|
-How do seeds work???? I was just eating an apple and for some reason the unappreciated potential of the apple seeds struck me.
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghrhibd"
],
"text": [
"Fruit seeds are distributed by the animals that eat the seeds - fruit exist as an incentive to eat the seeds. Seeds are indigestible, unlike the rest of the fruit, so it passes through the digestive system and ends up in poo, where it germinates using the nutrients from the poo. Then it's the normal plant growth cycle. But if you're asking how seeds know to germinate, then there's a reason why plants (and seed banks!) know to keep their seeds dry. Seeds germinate (start growing) in the presence of water, since fertile soil is usually wet."
],
"score": [
6
],
"text_urls": [
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
kok6s0
|
How and why does beer armour work?
|
We’ve all seen people either personally or in videos taking a pretty serious tumble while drunk. Why do they seem to be able to get back up seemingly unhurt? I mean from personal experience I know that falling while drunk may not hurt at the time but it should of. What makes us seemingly impervious to pain whilst drunk? Thanks!
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghrkcyh",
"ghrlec5",
"ghrkjpy"
],
"text": [
"1) Alcohol can make you tense up less when falling so can be more flexible during the fall. 2) Alcohol can keep you from realizing you’re hurt or from feeling the pain, so you may get back up and be ‘ok’ when actually you’ve been hurt.",
"First, alcohol inhibits the sensation of pain, meaning a drunk individual just won’t feel the pain as sharply as someone sober. Second, alcohol relaxes the muscles slightly, meaning that barring landing on something sharp, odds are a drunken individual will not tense up before the impact like a sober person might; in fact, this is part of why learning to fall properly is a large part of martial arts - uncontrolled muscle tension is liable to leave worse damage than relaxed muscles when hitting the ground. Also, a drunk person may look as though they have a nasty fall, but chances are they more like roll softly to the ground like a towel than topple over like a log. That distributes the energy from the impact over time as well as surface, as opposed to hitting the ground with every body part at once. Obviously, this is a simplification, if not an oversimplification, and I feel compelled to point out that a drunk person is vastly more likely to actually suffer those tumbles than someone sober. ;)",
"Alcohol is a pain killer. This is one of the ways that alcohol effects the nerve system as it inhibits nerve activity."
],
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11,
5
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|
[
"url"
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[
"url"
] |
koki26
|
why do erasers remove graphite so well?
|
Chemistry
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghrqmz4",
"ghrrf2g"
],
"text": [
"Graphite is attached to paper relatively loosely, because paper isn’t sticky. When you rub an eraser, the friction heats it up and causes it to melt slightly, becoming sticky. The graphite ditches the paper to be on the sticky eraser, then this part of the eraser falls off.",
"The eraser is a mix of rubber (or some other polymer with similar properties), and abrasives (think of really small grains of sand). When you rub the eraser, those abrasives scratch the surface of the paper, and loosen the particles of graphite on its surface. Also, the friction heats the rubber in contact with the paper, it gets sticky, and is separated from the eraser. Then you end up with those remains of the eraser, that you need to clean. That is basically the rubber + graphite + paper fiber."
],
"score": [
10,
4
],
"text_urls": [
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}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
kokr81
|
Why are oranges the preferred way to get your blood sugar up?
|
I’ve seen it in movies (yes, Steel Magnolias is one of them). It’s also used when giving blood. What makes them the preferred choice over any other fruit? Berries, apples, pears, bananas, etc?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghro5q4",
"ghsekb0"
],
"text": [
"> Why are oranges the preferred way to get your blood sugar up? Sugar is the preferred way to get your blood sugar up. (Orange) juice happens to be cheap, ubiquitous and full of sugar.",
"It's not. If you have low blood sugar in the hospital, we'll typically give you whatever juice or soda is available with a snack. If it's very low or you can't eat/drink for some reason, we might give it IV. There is nothing special about orange juice."
],
"score": [
7,
3
],
"text_urls": [
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
kokzg1
|
Why is the color Prussian Blue unable to be accurately displayed on screens?
|
On Prussian Blue’s Wikipedia page it says: “Like most high-chroma pigments, Prussian blue cannot be accurately displayed on a computer display.” What exactly does this mean, and what is it specifically about the pigment that causes this
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghrrg28",
"ghrunip",
"ghtafjq",
"ghrpcfr",
"ghrx7vc",
"ghsbjrd"
],
"text": [
"The way computer screens, our eyes and colour work are all very complicated. Essentially, computer screens emit light at 3 wavelengths (red, green, blue, rgb) and mix them to simulate other colours. This works fairly well for most things, but there are limitations. Since a computer screen only emits light, other phenomena arent accurately captured. One of these is absorption, which is what prussian blue does. When a pigment does one of these effects, we can simulate its colour with a computer screen, but not the way it interacts with light around it (which actually dictates a lot of how we perceive our vision). Another (simpler) example is something like vantablack. Since there is no way to simulate black on a computer screen other than turning off the pixels, you cant really tell the difference between something like vantablack or specifically lit black felt. ([ URL_0 ]( URL_0 ) is a good 20 minute video if you have the time).",
"You can think of it this way, the color of Prussian Blue is a more saturated ('high-chroma') blue than the blue that is displayed in your monitors blue pixels. Therefore, the blue pixels alone don't display the color well. But you also can't get any help by adding in light from the red and green pixels, since (color-wise) they are pulling you in the opposite direction! The result is that you cannot display the color well on a monitor. To think about this more completely, it is helpful to look at a chromaticity diagram: URL_0 If you look at the above chart, you can see that the colors you can make by averaging red, green, and blue, lights are just the ones inside the triangle. Outside the triangle, the color is not represented well. And these outside colors are generally ones that are high in \"saturation\" or \"chroma\", which is defined as a color's distance from the center of the diagram. Pure wavelengths of light are also \"maximum saturation\" which is why it is also hard to capture a rainbow's colors accurately on a monitor.",
"If you painted a card with regular blue ink and put it in the sun, it would absorb the red-orange-yellow light and reflect back the blue. Prussian Blue is so intense because it actually takes some of that red-orange-yellow light, then converts it to blue and reflects it back. It appears to be glowing blue. If you took a photo of the two cards, the Prussian blue wouldn’t look special, because the photo isn’t made with Prussian blue. It’s a similar deal with your monitor, though in that case they’re both glowing. Even the ink card is giving off light, because it’s really a glowing image on a monitor, rather than absorbing light as it does in the real world. It’s a bit like laundry detergent with optical brighteners. They contain a fluorescent agent which converts some invisible ultraviolet light to visible light. This is why so many laundry detergents glow like crazy under a black light. Much of the light given off by a UV black light is in the invisible spectrum; a fancy one will emit very little visible light. A white towel that has never been washed with optical brighteners will be hard to see. Wash it with optical brighteners and it will glow blue. In the sun, it will look brighter too. why fluorescent-died stuff seems brighter than it should.",
"Screens emit too much light to properly showcase the texture and depth of Prussian blue. Unfortunately, your computer screen is not coated with the special pigment. This means that it cannot correctly display fluorescent colors, because it outputs in RGB (Red, Green, Blue) which cannot clearly represent the hue and brightness that the human eye perceives when examining a fluorescent material.And that's why fluorescent colors do not appear accurately on computer screens. URL_0 . Tbf all I did was google why it can't be done",
"I wonder if this holds true for \"hdr\" monitors. They have a larger gamut (\"gamut\" is the description of what colors a monitor can display).",
"It's not really something special about the pigment, as much as it's about the limitations of your monitor. Most computer monitors are lcds with a white backlight, and some of that light bleeds through even when a pixel or subpixel is supposed to be displaying black, so with something like prussian blue, there will be more red light coming out of the monitor than would be reflected off the pigment in reality. There's also the issue of which wavelengths are the most selective in which type of cones they stimulate, and how tightly your monitor's color filters select for that one specific wavelength. Basically, you can display yellow by combining red and green, but you can't make your red more red by mixing in other colors."
],
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54,
16,
12,
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[
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xr1AiExSAnU"
],
[
"https://www.researchgate.net/figure/CIE-1931-xy-chromaticity-diagram_fig4_248392467"
],
[],
[
"https://www.labelvalue.com/blog/label-design/why-fluorescent-colors-dont-work-on-computer-screens/#:~:text=Unfortunately%2C%20your%20computer%20screen%20is,when%20examining%20a%20fluorescent%20material"
],
[],
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}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
kolryt
|
?If jelly fish can't die of old age and reproduce why haven't just taken everything over
|
A question my girlfriend asked and she's not happy with any of my answers
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghrufno",
"ghrud5d",
"ghrufkl",
"ghrx6es",
"ghrzwnz"
],
"text": [
"They may not die of old age, but they still die (being eaten by predators, for example). Their population growth is also limited by the resources in their environment—they still need to eat and they’ll starve to death if there isn’t enough food to go around. As long as the rate of jellyfish surviving to maturity is roughly equal to the rate of jellyfish deaths, their population will remain stable.",
"They have no brains so they can't do much. They're also good food for predators and easy to pick off.",
"Just because you can’t die of old age doesn’t mean you can’t be eaten. There’s always a bigger fish, and jellyfish are no exception to that rule.",
"It's only particular species of jellyfish, and it seems like in the wild, most of those _can_ die of old age. It's only under particular conditions that they revert to the juvenile form and reset the clock. Edit: most are probably eaten or killed, as others said, but they can still die of old age.",
"It seems everyone here has failed to bring-up the fact that it's only *one* species that's \"immortal\" (so to speak): Turritopsis Dohrnii. *Not* all jellyfish. Also, that particular species, apart from being able to be killed, reverts to a very primitive form. It's not exactly the same thing as being immortal in the sense you and I would think of."
],
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9,
4,
3,
3
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|
[
"url"
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[
"url"
] |
kon1n1
|
Trickle up economy
|
Economics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghs29mn",
"ghs1tsl",
"ghs4g6c",
"ghsftb2"
],
"text": [
"\"Trickle down\" economics was theorized to work by giving wealthy individuals tax breaks, who would then invest their wealth into new businesses and companies, creating new jobs and more wealth. In this method, wealth would be given to the top and would \"trickle down\" to the average person. \"Trickle up\" economics, as a reversal of that mindset, proposed focusing tax breaks and benefits on the average person. The average person would then spend more money on goods and services. The businesses that provided these goods and services would then earn more money for their owners. Therefore, wealth being provided to the bottom would \"trickle upwards\" through various businesses to the pockets of the wealthy. Both ideas propose that their methodology is the best way to improve everyone's lives, only differing in the method.",
"It's simple. So \"Trickle down\"--the common conservative tactic since Reagan, want to end up giving money to the working class. To do that, they say give the money to the wealthy. They will in turn spend money to generate economic activity. Slowly, pennies out of every dollar will go to the working class. It has never once worked out like that in human history. \"Trickle up\" says if you want to get money to the working class, just, you know...*give it to them directly*. This increased spending power across hundreds of millions of citizens should increase economic activity across the board, and generate a strong economy.",
"Trickle up/down economics is really easy to understand if you take a look at how people spend money. The traditional idea of trickle down economics was that if you gave rich people money they would use it on big investments and projects that would make lots of jobs and spread the money around. Instead what they tend to do is put it in their bank account, because rich people never spend money if they can possibly avoid it. That's WHY they're rich. Rich people don't make businesses to create jobs. They create businesses to make money. If you just give them money, they don't make more businesses - they just keep the money, or find ways to exploit the system to turn that money into more money while bypassing normal business altogether. Trickle up economics is the opposite. You take the poorest people in your society, the unemployed, disabled, and poor working class, and you try giving them money instead, through social security or a universal basic income. And what happens is they spend it - because they have no choice. They have unfulfilled needs - food, housing, clothing, education, healthcare, all kinds of things that they need - and the problem isn't that they're just not spending money, the problem is that they don't have the money to spend. So if you give them money they don't hoard it, they spend it immediately. This has a double effect. Firstly, it helps them directly, reducing their economic cost. A great example of why is to think of someone who has gotten a moderate wound that needs treatment. If they have no money they'll just suffer at home, and maybe it gets infected, maybe it gets very bad, maybe they end up in hospital, taking up a bed, using expensive medicine, maybe they lose a limb, maybe they die. Or if they can just have it properly treated early with a simple bandage then none of that happens, and the net cost to the economy is much lower. By reducing the level of poverty in your country you don't just remove needless suffering, you also reduce expenses in the long term, you make people more productive and you reduce unrest - those same people might be out there protesting, rioting, even rebelling if things get bad enough. But now they've got their basic needs met they're happy enough and won't do any of those things, because most people want a full belly and a secure roof and a peaceful life more than anything else. Secondly, the money they spend doesn't vaporise, it is given upwards. They spend it at stores, on goods and services provided by people higher in the socioeconomic heirarchy, which means essentially that business owners get more money, they hire more workers, they buy more products, so their suppliers make more money, they hire more people, they expand, and all that extra money eventually comes back around in taxation which then gets sent back down to the poor people at the bottom, like rain watering a tree, and the whole system cycles and self-perpetuates.",
"Those at the bottom economically have the most pent up demand for goods and services and the most debt preventing them from spending more, so they’re going to spend any additional dollars they receive. That means more demand and revenue for businesses, meaning more money to expand and more profits."
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7,
7,
3
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
kon6w0
|
How are ocean waves created?
|
I don't quite understand their movement and why they crash against the shores.
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghs2gcr"
],
"text": [
"I’m sure somebody will be here soon with a great answer. Until then, here’s my limited knowledge on it: The gravitational pull of the moon has a big part to play in the tidal movements. Also, wind blowing across the water pushes it causing waves to form. Undersea currents play some type of role in the process too but I’m not sure how they work. Source: Earth science in jr. high lol"
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
konbju
|
How do internet cookies work? Example: How is youtube able to know I visit disc golf sites and then give me ads for the sport?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghs3wqn"
],
"text": [
"The cookies themselves tend to be teeny tiny little text files. They almost never store much data. They usually are a couple configurations for some visual settings then the real important thing is an ID number. Like a site will say \"this guy is #214412\" then all the other sites they partner with can say \"ah here is that #214412 guy\" and then can look up in whatever database all the partner sites share all the other stuff they know about you. Like basically cookies have very little actually stored in them, but they store enough so the site knows who you are, then they can look it up on their end in whatever database they have made."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
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}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
kone3o
|
why every video- and musicplayer seems to have difficulties loading videos or audio from any point but the very start?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghs9a16"
],
"text": [
"* Most videos use inter-frame compression. To save space, only some frames (called I-frames) are properly stored. For frames in-between (P-frames and B-frames), there is only description on how to move and change chunks of I-frames. So if person who encoded the video wanted to save a lot of space, maybe even half-second or more goes without proper I-frame. If you want to seek to random place, you might have to load I-frame and all the changes that happened since, then apply all those motions and changes. Bonus points if you use mechanical hard drive which makes loading even slower. You can see how this type of compression works when in TV or live-stream some frames get lost. I've seen some players to deal with missing I-frames by assuming they are completely colored middle gray, then you see ghosting for few moments. Some players do similar things when you do seeking, you just get glitchy video for few moments. But most players just wait a second while everything needed is loaded. * If you are watching online video or music, the beginning usually gets loaded immediately when you open page. When you seek to point that's not loaded, you'll have to wait while your computer sends request to the web server and receives response. For example, YouTube doesn't load whole video if it's long, it loads only next few seconds. Even bigger problem is if the video (or audio) you watch is not split into nice small chunks, but published as a whole and played by built-in player into your browser. What happens when you play such file is that browser starts to download it as any other file (from the beginning) and play it at the same time. When you want to seek into middle, you need to wait, while everything before that gets downloaded, you can't download file from middle. * Variable bitrate in videos and especially sound might cause problems. In modern audio or video compression, different amount of data is used to compress different parts. For example, when there is lot's of motion in the video, you might want to use more data to properly capture it. This poses some challenge. When you want to skip 50s forward, how should the player know where is this part located. It can't just skip 50MB forward if your average bitrate is 1MB/s, because that's only average. There has to be some index that say how the time relates to data. But you probably don't want to store index of each frame. So, as an example, if you have index every 10s and you want jump to 59s, you need to jump to frame at the beginning of the 50th second and read every frame to get to 59th second."
],
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6
],
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
koodmi
|
what the Mandelbrot set is?
|
Mathematics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghsbym0"
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"text": [
"The Wikipedia article gives the definition of the Mandelbrot set: > The Mandelbrot set is the set of complex numbers c for which the function f(z) = z^2 + c does not diverge when iterated from z=0. To put this in slightly simpler terms: We want to know if a point called `c` is in the Mandelbrot set or not. To find out, we're going to \"iterate\" the operation of squaring the number and then adding another `c`. So the first few terms in the sequence are * c * c^2 + c * (c^2 + c)^2 + c = c^4 + 2c^3 + c^2 + c * (c^4 + 2c^3 + c^2 + c)^2 + c = c^8 + 4c^7 + 6c^6 + 6c^5 + 5c^4 + 2c^3 + c^2 + c * etc For some starting values of c, this will \"diverge\", meaning grow larger and larger and larger. For example, if c=1.5, the sequence starts * 1.5 * 1.5^2 + 1.5 = 3.75 * 3.75^2 + 1.5 = 15.5625 * 15.5625^2 + 1.5 = 243.69140625 * etc (keeps getting larger and larger) Values like 1.5, which diverge, are _not_ part of the Mandelbrot set. For some starting values of c, this will not diverge, meaning it stays small. For example, if c=-0.5, the sequence starts * -0.5 * (-0.5)^2 - 0.5 = 0.25 * 0.25^2 - 0.5 = -0.4375 * (-0.4375)^2 - 0.5 = -0.30859375 * (-0.30859375)^2 - 0.5 = -0.40476989746 * (-0.40476989746)^2 - 0.5 = -0.33616133011 * etc * while this process will keep \"jumping around\", it will always stay small, never getting larger than about 1. Values like -0.5, which do not diverge, _are_ part of the Mandelbrot set. You can see this iterative process visualized in [this gif]( URL_0 ) on the Wikipedia article. Each frame, another iteration of the z ↦ z^2 + c formula is performed. All the numbers that stay small are black in that frame. The colors represent how many frames it takes to for the number to no longer be small. The actual set is defined for _complex numbers_ which have a so-called \"imaginary\" part, and are often written x + yi. x is the \"real\" (horizontal) components, and y is the \"imaginary\" (vertical) component. \"Regular\" (real) numbers are also complex numbers (with y = 0); but the Mandelbrot set isn't very interesting for real numbers (it's just the numbers between -2 and 0.25. The \"formula\" for adding two complex numbers is * (a + bi) + (c + di) = (a + c) + (b + d)i The \"formula\" for multiplying two complex numbers is * (a + bi) \\* (c + di) = (a\\*c - b\\*d) + (a\\*d + b\\*c)i Just use those definitions when iterating the formula. For example, * -0.1 + 0.1i * (-0.1 + 0.1i)^2 + (-0.1 + 0.1i) = -0.1 + 0.08i * (-0.1 + 0.08i)^2 + (-0.1 + 0.1i) = -0.0964 + 0.084i * (-0.0964 + 0.084i)^2 + (-0.1 + 0.1i) ≈ -0.0978 + 0.0838i * (-0.0978 + 0.0838i)^2 + (-0.1 + 0.1i) ≈ -0.0975 + 0.0836i * etc (this number does not diverge, so -0.1 + 0.1i is a member of the Mandelbrot set) You can sorta coax Wolfram|Alpha into plotting one of the above formulas like this: URL_1 You can see the rough outline of the Mandelbrot set starting to appear. This is only four iterations in, so it isn't very well-defined. (I had to use `log(1 + ...)` so that the scale isn't too funky)"
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"https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Plot%5B+log+%281+%2B+%7Cc%5E8+%2B+4c%5E7+%2B+6c%5E6+%2B+6c%5E5+%2B+5c%5E4+%2B+2c%5E3+%2B+c%5E2+%2B+c%7C%29%2C+%7Bc%2C+-2+-+2i%2C+2+%2B+2i%7D+%5D"
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[
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[
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|
kooyw5
|
Why is porn bad for you?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"Porn has lots of distorted shit going on. From the way they fuck, to some of the body image fuckery they pull off. If you aren't careful or have body image issues already, porn can really push you that way. Men might not see the damage happening. One of the worst things that it does is perpetuate really fucked up views on what average penises look like. Especially the part about black guys being bigger and all of the fetishization of racial penis stereotypes; there are no true racial stereotypes about some races being big and some small. If you have concerns about being small or about how much it actually matters, you can go here NSFW URL_0 NSFW for some science-based explanations of how porn distorts things.",
"Too much consumption can re-wire your brain and how you're aroused. It's commonly discussed in men, but as a woman I've noticed the effects as well. Not to the point of addiction, but sometimes if I notice I have trouble masturbating without visual aids, I'll know it's time to taper off for a bit. Usually, if you have a busy work and social life, you won't have enough time for porn to become a major issue though.",
"It becomes addictive. In moderation there isn't an issue, but going down the addiction wormhole can have some really negative effects such as porn induced erectile dysfunction, loss of trust within a partnership or anger issues etc.",
"\"**Why is porn bad for you?\"** It isn't. At least, not in the way some groups are saying. There are a lots of disgusting problems with current pornography industry, but none of them have something to do with porn itself. Here are some common claims: 1. **Watching porn can cause erectile dysfunction, and is addictive.** 1. There's no study that concludes any of this. This started with those nofap movements, and some guy collected the personal anecdotes of people from /r/nofap, and with his wife published a book and started a movement against pornography claiming that it worked as addictive drugs to the brain, he even appeared on T-ed talk, etc. Long story short: There's no science backing up his claims, he will often use published papers are his sources, but if the person takes some time to go after, will see that the studies that he links have nothing to do with the point that he is trying to make, or were non-reviewed articles (it is the same stuff that antivaxx \"specialists\" do to \"proof\" that vaccines are harmful). 2. Porn \"addiction\" is real, but those cases are linked to OCD, and not that porn causes addiction. 2. **There are studies that proof that porn has bad effects for society.** 1. There are a lot of studies on this. Many countries after the 60s started to fund studies to proof that porn caused harm to society (backed up by conservative sectors of society). The ones that I see linked more often is the one done during Nixon government, and one done by Australia. You'll be surprised to see that both couldn't find those harmful effects they were searching for. 2. To be honest, there are a LOT of studies, some claim they find some relation between porn consumption, and sex violence, others stay that there's no relation, and point to confirmation bias on the former studies, etc. (here is a recent article, from the same guy that pointed mistakes on studies that linked violence in video games with violence in real life: [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 )) 3. Many of the harmful effects are basically people learning about sex with porn instead of having proper sex education. But let's be honest, the problem here isn't porn, is the lack of sexual education. It is like learning history with history channel, or physics with Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner.",
"It could probably become an affiction, and possible make your standards a bit off compared to real life. But other than that i cant see any problems with it. As Thanos say all things in life it is important to have balance \",",
"The majority would consider it problematic when watching porn can be so often, that it negatively affects motivation and it can be disruptive to intimate relationships.",
"Lots of reasons, but its not realistic and so people train themselves to get turned on by shit that doesn't happen IRL, and I'm not talking about kinks (perfect positioning, theatrical performances, perfect bodies, etc). Also, IRL sex is a creative and intimate process, and porn is very impersonal and formulaic. If that's all the experience you've had, you're gonna have a hard time adjusting to real sex.",
"A lot of people use porn to relieve themselves. Maybe they had a bad day or they're mad and they want to masturbate as a way to get rid of those negative emotions. The thing is, studies show that instead of fully getting rid of those negative emotions, porn just amplifies them and makes them more likely to return. The same goes for aggressive behavior, porn just amplifies it in the long run, especially when you watch more aggressive/unrealistic porn.",
"No one is sure that it is. So there are a multitude of answers. Surely it has downsides and can have cons, especially in excess, like anything."
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[
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[
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|
kop5de
|
Neuroplasticity and what are the potential applications for artificial neuroplasticity ?
|
Is neuroplasticity the ability for brain to form new connections ? Is it the ability to alter psychological makeup ? Or both ?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"text": [
"oooooooh i like this question. i got into a conversation about neuroplasticity in regards to mental health on an ask reddit a couple of months ago. its super interesting. & #x200B; in general, neuroplasticty is the brain's ability to form neural pathways. these pathways are your personality in a way. if you think a certain way, if you like a certain color, if you always hold your pencil a certain way, any kind of habit your brain forms, neuroplasticity is how your brain retains that information. the more you do these things, the stronger that bond gets. the more you do new things, the more pathways your brain forms. & #x200B; now, in people with mental disorders, especially mood disorders, neuroplasticity is shown to be incredibly limited. thats why its hard to just \"stop being depressed\" or \"stop acting a certain way.\" your brain has a harder time forming those new neural pathways, and it sticks to the few it already has. & #x200B; so, artificial neuroplasticity, or even just therapeutically /medically enhanced neuroplasticity, could help people form new neural pathways. which could have much more benefit than just helping those with mental disorders. especially with people with brain damage, as it could allow them to essentially fix their brain. & #x200B; at some point in time, we may be able to design and implant neural pathways that would make people smarter, or teach them a new skill, or possibly implant outside memories into people's brains. nobody really knows what the limits of neuroplasticity are yet. we dont even really know how the brain works. & #x200B; this was a bit more like \"explain like im in a high school psych class,\" so let me try for a real \"explain like im five.\" & #x200B; when you are born, your brain is essentially a big empty field. as you get older, stuff starts to grow in that field. everything you do is shown by you walking across the field. the more you walk across the same spot, by doing the same thing, the more worn down that path is. that makes it easier to walk across. when youre much older, that field is now full of plants, vines and trees and flowers. the things you do most have given you paths that are very easy to walk across. you might have a few paths that arent as easy, but are still able to be crossed. trying something new, however, or trying to learn something new, means you have to walk where there is no path. if you have high neuroplasticity, your field is probably mainly grass, and its pretty easy to form a new path. if you have low neuroplasticity however, your field might be full of thorns and brambles, and its a lot harder to form a new path. and thats where we're hoping to be able to stimulate neuroplasticity. in minor cases, it would be like giving you a weed whacker and letting you cut down the stuff in your way to make a new path. still a bit of effort, but a lot easier. in major cases, like brain damage, it would be like getting a bulldozer and rebuilding a path that had a landslide and was previously inaccessible, and it completely artificial neuroplasticity, you would get a pre-built path and just lay it in your field, no work required. i hope that helps!"
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[
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koqqkn
|
The "observe" part of the double slit experiment
|
I consider myself at least... Minorly able to read a newspaper digest about physics. And I've read about the double slit experiment. You have two slits in a piece of paper, fire electrons at them and they form wave patterns. "Observe" them and they act like particles and form particle patterns. Here's the the thing. Every single class, teacher, physicist I have known has said the same word. "Observe". But.... What does that *mean*? If I look at it? If I have a detector? What does the detector do? How do we know that isn't interfering with the particle? Why does this never seem to be extrapolated on and just that one fucking word pops up everywhere? Is it just a thought experiment? This had been driving me nuts, can someone explain?
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
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"The act of observation is *anything* that turns “possible” into “actual”. Any comparison between quantum scale and common human scales is littered with absurdity, but here goes. Say I've got one perfectly weighted dice in a black box, that I vigorously shake the box and wonder what number faces up on the dice. *Anything* that turns possibilities (a number from 1 to 6) into something actual (a 3 and nothing else) *is* an observation. Could be someone peeking inside the box. Could be a camera inside the box. Could be X-rays. From the moment it happens, it's not a possibility anymore, it's actual; even if it's someone else looking, and I don't know the value yet, it's a definite 3. As mentioned, this sounds like a trivial and pointless philosophical discussion (just like “If a tree falls in the forest and no one's around, does it make a sound?”), but in quantum physics (such as the double-slit experiment) this has important implications; the [Quantum Zeno effect]( URL_0 ) is a good illustration of observation greatly influencing an experiment.",
"'Observe' means having the particle interact with something (and hopefully detecting the interaction). In the double slit experiment, the detector may be as simple as a screen that the particle hits, leaving a mark. When the particle interacts with (hits) the screen, the wavefunction collapses, and the particle \"chooses\" a spot to hit. Tl;dr: observation = interaction with something external",
"> How do we know that isn't interfering with the particle? You answered your own question. It is interfering with the particle, that's why it changed. It's impossible to observe a particle without interfering with it. On a macroscopic scale \"observe\" could be go up and touch it, which will interfere. Or stand back and watch, which will not. However, this luxury doesn't exist if you want to be really accurate at the small scale. \"sight\" is bouncing photons off something. Observering a monkey in biology, sight is just fine. Observering an electron, bouncing a single photon off it is going to be an issue. With the double split experiment, you are always observing the electron at some point. You have two options though. Observe it at the screen, and see a nice interference pattern. Or observe it at the slit, and ruin the pattern later at the screen. It's not some voodoo magic about human consciousness and the electrons knowing if we're looking at then or not. It's just by checking where the electron was as the slit (observing) is synonymous with altering the electron. You tighten it's wave function down, to the point it's not going to give you the pattern."
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|
[
"url"
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[
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kor5c2
|
What does Honey get out of being a free extension and giving me discounts?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"text": [
"Consider like an exclusive sale. The businesses pay honey to offer their users discounts and in return honey brings in more likely buyers to the business' website.",
"In addition to the reciprocal nature of the plugin [sending you to sites that pay to have you sent their way]( URL_1 ), Honey also aggregates and monetizes big data about all of its users (the standard [name, email, computer specs, shopping habits]( URL_0 )) and likely makes the lion's share of its income from selling that data. It gets sold on to advertisers who build profiles on you to determine how to best sell future products to you, much like Google, Facebook, and other large \"free\" sites will do with their collected data. EDIT: To address a point made by another poster, I was apparently unnecessarily reductive in saying that they \"sell\" your data, as I was trying to keep the post ELI5 friendly. For those interested: Honey, like many other websites, uses a variety of techniques involving the scraping of data from its users to make money, including ways that they are legally allowed to declare as not being a form of monetization. The easiest way to put it would be to say that while they are not literally writing down your details in a giant Excel spreadsheet to sell for hard cash on the information market to advertising companies, they are nonetheless collecting data, processing it either internally or through an external contracted ad agency, and then determining the best way to tailor their service to get you to buy the majority of products at stores for which they have deals and coupons. This is done with the explicitly stated purpose of sending you to stores they have deals with, making new deals with other stores, and in general producing monetary gains for their company. So, in spirit, but maybe not in law, they are \"selling your data\". The data, as their privacy policy makes clear, does indeed make its way into the hands of external businesses and advertisers from time to time, which then means it can be passed on many more times without you knowing. One company can have many policies which dictate how strict their data sales to advertisers and other third party agencies are, but that third party may not have quite so strict policies, and then the next person they sell it to may have even more lax policies... until you start getting spam Nigerian Email Scams on the new email you just used to sign up to Facebook with. The first company, or even the third or fourth in the chain may have taken \"good care\" of your data, but the farther you go down the chain, the more lax they are with your data. It's also worth mentioning that the \"anonymization\" of data for aggregate sharing and sales is rarely as anonymous as people are led to believe by the language included in these deliberately vague and occluded terms of service. [Browser fingerprinting]( URL_2 ) is a well known tactic by many advertising agencies on the web, requiring little else other than the specifics of your computer specs (which are often fairly unique) and a couple of websites you've visited in the past to be able to identify exactly who you are. I don't say all of this to poo-poo sites on the internet or even Honey itself. The app is probably a good exchange if you use it frequently. And, frankly, we live in a world now where if you're going to be monetized, you might as well work the system and get what deals you can get out of it in exchange. I just think it's worth being informed about how these sites really function so that you aren't caught off-guard if something ends up spilling down the line from the nth corporate merger Honey's owners do which ends up with the personal shopping habits of you and the other millions of users in the hands of someone who has far fewer scruples about how to take advantage of that information.",
"Amongst other things, it's probably collecting a horrifying amount of information about your shopping habits that they can sell to the highest bidder. To be honest, I don't know entirely how Honey works, because my suspicions about how they use your data makes me not want to go anywhere near it Never forget the mantra that if you're getting a service for free, you are not the customer, you are the product being sold",
"To anyone saying they sell your info, while that is common nowadays, a [30 sec search shows this is not the case]( URL_1 ). From their website: > We know how important your personal data is to you, so we will never sell it. We’ll only share it with your consent or in ways you’d expect (as we explain here). That means we will share your data if needed to complete your purchase, with businesses who help us operate Honey, or if we are legally required to do so. They go on to say, > Please know that when we share information with our service providers, it’s for the purposes outlined in this Privacy Policy and not for their independent use. [A different ( and just as easy) search will reveal]( URL_0 ): > Honey makes commissions from our merchant partners when a member uses Honey to find the best available coupons or to activate our Honey Gold rewards program. We work with affiliates to help confirm your purchase so we can get a commission from the merchant. They then mention Honey Gold, a free rewards program they describe as > This is a win-win for our members and for us and it’s what allows us to provide a free service (and without selling anyone’s data). I'm generally very cynical of free programs selling information, but this sub is not for wrong information, if you are going to comment take the time to make sure you are right. So, TL;DR, Honey does not sell your information but rather makes commissions with included thirds parties to draw additional traffic to them."
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"https://panopticlick.eff.org/static/browser-uniqueness.pdf"
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|
[
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[
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|
kor6rn
|
Indian Govt proposes to buy bulk subscriptions of all scientific journals, provide free access to all. Why are they doing this and how is it going to be beneficial ?
|
I was just reading this article. I do not know the world of scientific research. So wondering why is the Indian Govt spending money to do this and how is it going to be beneficial ?
|
Other
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"text": [
"Because your govt wants citizens with high skill/demand jobs. This ends up having citizens who can pay more taxes and ability to spend more. More taxes and economic activity means a more wealthy society.",
"You’d be surprised how much subscriptions to scientific journals are. The goal is essentially the same as expanding a public library, the Indian government want everybody to have equal access to scientific research, whether they are lay people or researchers. It makes sure that established researchers have access to all of the same information, as well as making sure that independent researchers have access to the research that people who work at universities or companies already do"
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4
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[
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kor9cd
|
What makes certain car paint appear as different colors depending on the angle of lighting?
|
Chemistry
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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],
"text": [
"\"Pearlescent paints incorporate shiny ceramic crystals (known as mica crystals) into the paint mixture. These crystals give the paint its namesake pearl-like effect. Like pearls, vehicles with pearlescent paint tend to ‘glow’ and shift colours under different types of light and the angle at which the car is viewed. Pearlescent paint contains approximately 1 teaspoon of mica crystals per litre of paint. These mica crystals not only reflect light, but bend (refract) it as well. This refraction works on a similar principle to light passing through a glass prism, or the creation of rainbows. The mica crystals in the paint act as tiny prisms. White light is composed of all of the different colours of light, such as red, orange and green. Each of these colours of light, in turn, has a different wavelength. This means that when white light hits the mica crystal at an angle, not only is it bent, but also dispersed as each colour slows down at a different rate depending on its wavelength. Thus, these mica crystals cause the base paint colour to change depending on the type of light striking the vehicle and the perspective of the observer.\" URL_0"
],
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"text_urls": [
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|
[
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[
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|
kordtk
|
How is it that sometimes you can have a conversation with yourself and have yourself make sense of something you didn’t previously understand?
|
Chemistry
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
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"text": [
"In the Socratic method of instruction, the teacher doesn't tell you anything but rather seeks to draw out of you things you already know, often by having you realize connections between different facts you already know. Perhaps you are doing this with yourself?",
"This isn’t going to have an exact answer. We just kind of barely understand how our brains work, having general ideas of what sections handle which actions. How certain pathways get used more often and grow and become more robust. But how exactly that mix of electrical and chemical signals turns into our thoughts, feelings, emotions, we have no idea. That step is still a mystery to us. How the brain stores thoughts in information we can’t exactly explain, except that it does. So the best answer that we can really give and that your brain is a giant complex and confounding library, and sometimes you just need to research that library or walk yourself back down that mental/neural pathway that leads to the information you couldn’t consciously recall Until you remembered it again.",
"One of the best ways to learn how to teach - record yourself and watch yourself back. There are also things called learning styles, which most modern teachers are aware of and try to cater for. Children can learn in different ways, depending on all kinds of factors, e.g. by doing something themselves, by watching someone else do it, by reading about it, etc.. It's a bit contrived and simplified, and most kids learn in lots of those ways, and it's not a complete description. Some of those ways include: listening to someone give instructions on what to do, and by actually trying to teach someone else themselves. If you try to teach, you have to break it down and give an explanation as you go, a kind of narration. If you do that in your head, subconsciously, when giving instruction to yourself at the same time (i.e. being the audience), there are two ways to \"learn\" right there. There's a literal theory in software development: When you're stuck on a problem, explain your problem to a rubber duck. It employs the same technique - while learning how to express the problem in a way you can teach, you also break down the problem, AND feed that broken down problem back into your own mind. (P.S. My brother and I - both work in schools, he's a professional teacher and I dabble - once did a learning styles \"quiz\". Very in-depth, professional looking, spoken about on courses, etc. etc. Turns out we both learn in ALL the ways equally. We literally maxed out their web graph. And, in its contrived way, it's true. I don't care how I learn something, I will learn it. And similarly, we can then \\*both\\* teach it in, say, a visual way, a practical way, an audio-only way, a theoretical way, etc. etc. etc. I was given a bunch of kids one year who were borderline on their SATS in maths and needed help. I was asked if I could run a remedial class in lunchtime, just to push the borderline kids over the edge into whatever their next level would be. Instead of other paid work, they wanted me to do that, and I agreed. During that class, over a period of about 10 weeks, 10 hours total, they were astounded how I could flick between 20 kids, explain a bunch of random problems I'd never seen before, i.e. the homework for a bunch of mixed-age children from a whole range of year-groups and abilities, and literally switch how I taught the problem depending on what the child was able to understand. Sometimes really simple stuff... \\[i.e. subtraction for counting change... you can imagine that in your head, you can do it into your hand in about ten different ways, you can do it on paper etc. etc. Hell, some of the kids did better just by closing their eyes and seeing the \"coins\" that were actually sitting in front of them in their head\\], often far more complex. Every. Single. Child. Went. Up. In the class where the teachers had done all they could possibly do for months and months on end and it was a desperation measure for when the test neared. Education is just as much about learning how to learn as it is learning how to do a particular thing. And explaining to yourself will teach you how you learn best. And a good teacher will know how to teach YOU best, different to all the other kids. My teachers, before all this learning style stuff was popular, knew that they didn't need to bother with me, they would focus on others instead. If I was asked to learn something, I learned it. Hell, as a child for two entire years I was asked to TEACH my own classes - the classes I was taking, I taught them to my peers while my teacher sat back and watched. And what you learn when pressed into doing that is... that giving the class \"to yourself\" is the best way to learn the material yourself, and make the class understand it. I know lots of teachers now. Many of them literally learn a subject just one or two lessons ahead of their class. That's how the really good teachers can do it, with no prior experience in the subject even. Because they do that by breaking it down as they would to teach their class, and on the way learn the material themselves)"
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|
[
"url"
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[
"url"
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|
korf8p
|
Why is Pluto not considered a planet because it's too small, but some planets are made entirely of gas and considered planets?
|
Edit: I know I sound like an idiot in the replies, but I'm really asking genuine questions so thank you all for being patient and answering
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghsudxr",
"ghsujfm",
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],
"text": [
"So, the three criteria of the IAU for a full-sized planet are: 1. It is in orbit around The Sun. 2. It has sufficient mass to assume hydrostatic equilibrium (a nearly round shape). 3. It has “cleared the neighborhood” around its orbit. Pluto is in orbit around the Sun, and it is round. However there are still asteroids in Pluto's orbit, disqualifying it from being a planet.",
"Because even tho those planets are made of gas, they’re still absolutely massive. Literally, full of mass, full of stuff. If you put Uranus/Neptune on a giant hypothetical balance scale, it would take 15-20 earths to equal one of those planets, Jupiter and saturn would take 100+ earths. They may be mostly gas, but there’s A LOT of gas, they’re just absolutely huge and massive. Pluto on the other hand is smaller than our own moon. So, for the clarity of classifications, Pluto was reclassified as a Dwarf Planet, because is still a big object, hundreds of miles across, but it really doesn’t fit into the same group as a planet and instead is more similar to other dwarf planets like Ceres or Eris.",
"They are large, and size matters. If you are big enough to clear your orbit, you are a planet. If not, you're not.",
"Because it being small isn't itself disqualifying it from being a planet. All planets also have to have a clear orbit, where other large bodies do not regularly pass. Pluto doesn't have that, and so in 2006, it got redesignated as a dwarf planet. It's okay for it not to be a planet. If we allowed it to be one, we'd also have to add Eris, Haumea, Makemake, Gonggong, and Quaoar, as well as many others. It's much better to make a different classification for these other objects, aka, dwarf planets"
],
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[
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[
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korz11
|
Why do alcoholic drinks high in sugar give you really bad hangovers compared to alcoholic drinks that have less sugar?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghsxg45"
],
"text": [
"because both dehydrate your body. Drink a lot of water (during the night) and you should be mostly fine Breaking down big sugars is necessary for absorption through your small intestine. This process of breaking down sugar uses water and is called hydrolysis. That's why sugary drinks can make you more thirsty. Also, having a lot of sugar in your blood means that your blood is very concentrated, which will lead to you needing to take in more water to compensate. The latter doesn't contribute to the hangover though I believe. Alcohol inhibits the production of the antidiuretic hormone, or vasopressin, which helps your kidneys to concentrate the urine by giving back some water to your blood. If you have less of this hormone because of alcohol, you'll lose more water while urinating, resulting in less water available for the body. This leads to a hangover. Tldr; basically, alcohol is the one doing the really bad stuff concerning hangovers, but drinking sugary drinks stimulates the effect even further."
],
"score": [
24
],
"text_urls": [
[]
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
kos1ya
|
what is the whirling wind noise heard when putting your ear to a glass?
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ght4b6u"
],
"text": [
"It is **not** the blood flowing through your ear or head. You can prove this yourself simply by pressing the cup to your head such that it seals completely; if it was the blood flow in your ear/head then the sound should continue, but you will find it almost entirely is cut off. Instead the sound you hear is ambient noise reflecting off the interior of the cup (or shell) and jumbling together into unrecognizable white noise. Some people think this sounds similar to crashing ocean waves, a similar jumble of uncountable individual noise from millions of water droplets."
],
"score": [
7
],
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
kos4py
|
how do the standby lights on electronics last so long?
|
I was looking at my TV and PlayStation 3 And realized that the red standby light has been on a majority of the time for the past so many years. How is this possible? Why wouldn't the light burn out?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghsypmk"
],
"text": [
"LEDs last a very long time and usually burn out from power spikes that would mess up the rest of the system"
],
"score": [
11
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
kosffh
|
How much of the new Apple Silicon chips did Apple actually design, given that the chips' ARM architecture is developed by another company?
|
Per [Wikipedia]( URL_0 ) the ARM architecture is developed by Arm Holdings, a British company. Given that the Apple M1 chip is an ARM-based chip, did Apple simply do minor customization on work mostly done by Arm Holdings or did it actually design substantial elements of the new chip?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghtfbl5",
"ghtwwno",
"ghtrckt"
],
"text": [
"My understanding is that the particular ARM license being utilized by Apple leaves the actual implementation entirely up to them. An analogy might be as if you licensed the internal combustion engine. This allows you the right to produce your own engine that consists of the basic elements and principals patented by the licensor, while the decisions of materials, optimizations, and the engineering of individual elements are up to you. You are permitted to simply copy the original design in it's entirety, or you can choose to develop bigger or lighter pistons. In this way, every or nearly every element of the end design may be further developed by Apple. There's really no way of knowing how much they actually chose to re-use or re-develop.",
"The license is needed for the instruction set architecture, not necessarily for the implementation. Ex. if the ISA states that when the multiplication instruction (which is encoded in such and such a manner) is executed, register C should contain A*B, it doesn't really matter how the multiplication itself is calculated. You can have a complex multiplier circuit. This would produce the correct result. or the processor could internally do a loop for A times, adding B each time. This would also produce the correct result, albeit extremely inefficiently. The program cannot tell the difference, because as far as it's concerned, an instruction is one whole indivisible thing. As long as whatever it expects to happen, happens, the program will execute correctly. As long as the processor can understand the ARM instruction set and produce the correct result for each instruction, then Apple is free to design their own implementation completely from scratch (which they probably did) and call it an ARM processor.",
"It’s a completely in house designed chipset. Architecture is more a specification on how things are laid out and how to use them. But it doesn’t say anything about how those things that are being laid out work or how they’re being made."
],
"score": [
23,
6,
3
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|
[
"url"
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[
"url"
] |
kosm9a
|
What is the Wigner's Friend thought experiment?
|
Physics
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghu2mpl"
],
"text": [
"In standard quantum mechanics we have **systems** that can be in various **states**. For example, we might have a \"system\" which is a \"cat-in-a-box\" and the \"states it can be in are \"state where the cat is alive\" and \"state were the cat is dead.\" Quantum mechanics tells us that quantum systems don't exist in specific states. Instead, they exist as a combination of all possible states (including contradictory ones - this is called **superposition**) until something outside the system **interacts** with (or \"observes\") them. When that interaction occurs, the system **collapses** down into one of the individual states (with a certain probability). For example, from the outside, our cat-in-a-box system will be in a combination of the cat-is-alive state and cat-is-dead state until we interact with it, at which point we find out which one is true. Crucially, this isn't just a mathematical model. The double-slit experiment (among others) shows that this is a \"real\" effect; in that experiment we get our system into a combination of contradictory states, and those states interfere with each other (we throw an electron at a wall with two slits in it - the electron-wall system gets into a superposition of the state where the electron went through one slit, and the state where it went through the other slit, and those two \"bits of electron\" interfere with each other on the other side of the wall - kind of like if they had hit each other). ---------------------- So what Wigner's Friend does is take this a step further. We set up our quantum system as normal, and get it into what is called a \"cat state\" - where it is in a combination of two contradictory states (call them \"1\" and \"0\"). We then get a friend to sit in the lab, interact with the system to measure which state it is in, which collapses the system into only one of the two states (either 1 or 0). But we sit outside the lab. So from our point of view, the lab is itself a quantum system (with both the experiment and our friend), which means it will be in a cat state until we interact with it; it will be in a combination of the \"friend measured 1, experiment was in 1\" state and \"friend measured 0, experiment was in 0\" state until then. When we interact with the lab-system (by asking our friend what they measured) it will collapse down into just one of those states. The question Wigner's Friend thought experiment asks is \"when did the original experiment system collapse out of a cat-state?\" Did it collapse when our friend measured it, or did it collapse when we asked our friend?"
],
"score": [
3
],
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[]
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|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
kotzsp
|
What causes muscle cells to die, and what happens to them after they die?
|
Biology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ght8jzf"
],
"text": [
"Our muscles die for a variety of reasons, though the most common reasons are age and lack of use. When not used, they are not supplied the necessary blood and nutrients and are simply consumed by the body, this however leaves a gap in the muscular structure which is in turn filled by its neighbors. So when you lose muscle youre effectively seeing the muscle proteins be consumed, and the remaining muscles spread to compensate for the loss, eventually getting to the point where there is a noticible visual difference. Vice versa when you gain muscles, the fibers develop and push other fibers out of the way or simply grow attop them"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
kouj28
|
How do we know what the level of gravity is on other planets without having been there and/or landed rovers.
|
Earth Science
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghtio9v",
"ghtb122",
"ghtbapn",
"ghtn2un"
],
"text": [
"For planets that have moons, the distance of a moon from the planet and the time it takes the moon to orbit give us a very accurate measure of the planets' mass and gravity. If you want to know the acceleration due to gravity on a planet's surface, you also need to know the size of the planet. Mercury and Venus have no moons so their gravity was harder to work out. Initially their mass estimates were based on guessing their density based on what we though they were made of, and also knowing their size. Later we could do better by measuring the slight gravitational effect they had on each other and on the earth. Really good measurements did have to wait until we sent spacecraft there.",
"Gravity is a function of mass, and we can work out the mass of a distant star using the laws of relativity - by measuring the deflection of light passing by it. The bigger the mass, the more light (well, spacetime, in fact) will be \"bent\" by it.",
"Although gravity is classed as a _weak force_, its effects can be felt in a very large area. Simply by observing how said planets affect their moons, meteors, comets etc, we can estimate the gravitational pull of said planets This estimation may not be 100% accurate, but with continued observations we can get very close For distant stars and black holes etc, we are too far away to observe how they are affecting planets and other astronomical objects in their vicinity. Here we rely on observations of how these distant stars and black holes bend light - gravity bends light, and the more the bend, the higher the gravity",
"Gravity is a force two massive objects exert on each other (yes you also pull the earth towards you it's just that the earth is roughly 10²³ times, read a 1 with 23 zeros, heavier and thus it's pull is A LOT stronger than yours). This is true for large and small objects though it's a rather weak force if you consider how massive the earth is and how you could still jump. As a formula gravity is given by F = - gamma \\* m\\*M /r² F is the force (gravity), gamma is a constant value that you can calculate once and that stays the same no matter the objects you're comparing. Small m is the mass of the small object, and large M the mass of the bigger object and r is the distance between the two, it's called r for radius, because the force works in all directions hence points on a circle with the same distance towards the center of mass experience an equal amount of force, but as we just look at one object it's basically the distance between the two centers of mass. Oh and the minus sign is just there as a direction, in that case it's an attractive force that pulls towards instead of pushing away (positive sign). So what you could do is just look at the trajectory of the planet compared to other huge objects of known mass and distance, like the sun or one of it's moons and so on. If you know one of these masses and the force you can calculate the other mass. And so if you have the mass of that planet you essentially assume the center of mass if at the core of the planet (sounds reasonable for a ball shaped object), making r the distance between the core and it's surface or the radius of that ball. The mass of your object (in that case the rover can be measured on earth). And so you got all you need. Now as the rover is mostly staying on the surface and as the planet is likely not gaining or losing mass, you can also do what we do with the formula on earth and simplify it by putting gamma, M/r² all in one new constant called **g** and simply say F = m\\*g. And then you compare g\\_earth to g\\_mars for example and you can say how bigger or smaller it is."
],
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3,
3
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|
[
"url"
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[
"url"
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|
koup20
|
What does it mean when kids on video games say “Yeah it’s the new meta”?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"ghtbvxh",
"ghtbqf5"
],
"text": [
"In this context they're referring to the \"metagame\". When playing a video game, there's playing *the game*, the way it was originally intended to be played in a vacuum, using only knowledge about how the game works and devising strategies around that knowledge. But then, separately, there is also the \"metagame\". Where you start looking specifically about how other players right now play the game, and devising your strategies specifically to beat those players. That could mean coming up with some kind of strategy that, when looking at the game for what it is, may seem pointless or ineffective, but it turns out to be massively disruptive to another play style that is currently very popular, meaning you'd likely succeed if playing against people who are employing that popular strategy. So that makes it a sort of \"game within a game\". You're not just playing the video game itself, you're also playing mind games with other players and trying to outplay their tactics. The \"meta\" game. Commenting offhand about something being \"the new meta\" is someone who is looking at a new potential strategy and predicting that it may become a widely popular play tactic soon.",
"The \"metagame\" is the game between games. I.E. deciding wich strategy you play based on what you expect others to play Usually when a new strategy comes to be good and popular the rest of the metagame wraps around it. Play it, or have a plan to play against it. Announcing something \"new meta\" is usually an exaggeration to claim something is so good soon everyone will play it."
],
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14,
8
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[
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